August 23, 2007 (LPAC)--The release of a two-year-old CIA Inspector General's Report from June 2005, commissioned by the Senate and House Intelligence Committees, and forced out into the open this week by Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV), who now chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, has raised a renewed furor over who was asleep at the switch prior to 9/11--the White House or the CIA.
The New York Times lead editorial, called "The C.I.A. Report," charges that the report "was devastating - but not because it showed that Americas spies missed the rise of Al Qaeda. George Tenet, then the director of central intelligence, rang the Qaeda alarm. He sent a memo to the entire intelligence community saying that he wanted no effort spared in the war with Osama bin Laden. He took on the president's closest advisers to agitate for a strike on a Qaeda base in Afghanistan." But, "this all happened under President Bill Clinton. When George W. Bush won the White House, Mr. Tenet seems to have shifted his priorities. The C.I.A. chief suddenly seemed consumed with hanging on to his job."
The full report has not been released--only an Executive Summary, which states definitively that CIA Director Tenet was "ultimately responsible" for not devising a full strategic plan to eliminate Al Qaeda, and for not using all the possible resources of the Intelligence Community to accomplish this.
But, the report says that in 1998, under President Clinton, Tenet wrote a memo that declared, "We are at war," in the fight with Osama Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, but did not pursue this outlook under Bush.
EIR has in the past explained what happened to the fight against terrorism -- Dick Cheney quashed it, and was party to a special relationship with Saudi Ambassador to the U.S., Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, whose payments to Al Qaeda linked operatives were covered up in FBI and other investigations of 9/11. Cheney was put in charge -- by President Bush -- of Counter-Terrorism, but essentially closed down vital inter-agency coordination in the Spring of 2001.
