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| The Investigation |
| US intel is unprepared... |
| 2001-09-23 |
Our spies can't speak their languages. Our satellites don't track their movements. Our intelligence chiefs, in many cases, have never set foot in the Middle East. Put it all together, and you get an outdated, fragmented U.S. intelligence system--one that opened the floodgates for the worst terrorist attacks in American history. "Because of our ineffective response, now 6,000 Americans have been killed," said U.S. Rep. Mark Steven Kirk (R-Ill.), who is an intelligence officer in the naval reserves. Many of Kirk's fellow congressmen, political scientists and even former CIA agents agree with him. The consensus is that America's spy network is caught in a time warp, designed to eavesdrop on the Russians and Chinese but lacking the manpower and street smarts to track terrorists such as Osama bin Laden. Bin Laden is the United States' No. 1 suspect in the coordinated airline hijackings that leveled the World Trade Center towers and part of the Pentagon. Our government has been trying to catch him for years. We have failed time and again. "Senior U.S. officials boldly claim . . . that the Central Intelligence Agency and Federal Bureau of Investigation are clandestinely picking apart [bin Laden's] organization 'limb by limb,' " former CIA operative Reuel Marc Gerecht wrote in the July-August edition of the Atlantic Monthly. "But having worked for the CIA for nearly nine years on Middle Eastern matters . . . I would argue that America's counterterrorism program in the Middle East and its environs is a myth." |
| Posted by:Fred Pruitt |