Hey, Mrs. Peel -- OOPS! 'Mullholland,' rather... you'll LIKE THIS!!!
Read below:
July 16 — Congress is
expected to issue a new
report Wednesday on the
nation’s intelligence
agencies, explaining how
and why they weren’t
prepared for the Sept. 11
attacks. NBC’s Pete
Williams reports.
THE HOUSE SUBCOMMITTEE report, titled “Counter
Terror Intelligence Capabilities and Performance prior to 9/11,”
will not be made public.
WASTED RESOURCES
The Intelligence Committee will release a summary of the
report on Wednesday, but NBC News has learned that it says the
spy agencies spent too much money to feed bureaucracies,
sapping the agencies’ ability to collect and analyze raw data.
The report concerns itself only with the agencies’ pre-Sept.
11 performance, not with their current operations.
The document is the result of nine months of investigation by a
special House Intelligence subcommittee, headed by Rep. Saxby
Chambliss, R-Ga., and created by House Speaker Dennis Hastert
just after the Sept. 11 attacks.
The report cites notes from
a meeting of “senior intelligence
managers” that took place three
years to the day before the
terrorist attacks on New York
and the Pentagon, on Sept. 11,
1998, in which the events of
Sept. 11 were more or less
predicted.
These unidentified
intelligence officials concluded in
1998 that if they did not improve
the way in which data was
collected and analyzed, the likely
result would be a catastrophic intelligence failure, which is what the
Sept. 11 attacks were.
WHAT’S WRONG WITH NSA?
The report takes aim at the failings of the National Security
Agency, the government’s largest spy agency, which translates and
analyzes global telecommunications and radio traffic.
The report found that the NSA’s counterterrorism mission
was not given a high enough priority prior to Sept. 11. It also said
the NSA must reform the way it runs its programs and uses its
budget.
The agency has been chronically short of linguists for reading
and assessing foreign intelligence intercepts and lacks enough
analysts to make sense of the “needles in a haystack” collected
every day by electronic eavesdropping, the report summary says.
The summary also says that lack of staff, lack of funding and
risk aversion are only part of the malaise in the U.S. intelligence
agencies.
TOP-HEAVY BUREAUCRACIES
There are many cases “where available counterterror
resources were misallocated by these agencies,” the summary said.
“The classified record of past years is replete with stern warnings”
to the spy agencies that they were diverting badly needed
resources meant for intelligence collection and analysis in order “to
feed growing headquarters bureaucracies.”
With the Central Intelligence Agency, as with the NSA, the
House report found that too many agents and too much money
were allocated to headquarters bureaucracy, which hurt the
agency’s counterterrorism capability prior to the Sept. 11 attacks.
The CIA’s internal human rights guidelines issued in 1995 also
had a “chilling effect” on counterterrorism operations, and these
guidelines remain in place despite congressional directions that they
be repealed, the report said.
The report says the FBI was afflicted with problems similar to
those of the CIA and NSA, including “insufficient linguistic and
analytical capability.”
The bureau also paid little attention to tracking the financial
transactions of terrorist groups and was “culturally incapable” of
sharing information.
msnbc.com
Pre-ann on the esteemed Congress doing even MORE to seal records from, well, those of us who haven't QUITE 'made ours' yet ...
Like, 'f*ck us,' eh?
You'll be pleased, I'm sure ...
;)
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