'We Could Have Stopped Bin Laden'
commondreams.org
<<...Scheuer says that nearly three years after the September 11 attacks the US intelligence team dedicated to tracking down Bin Laden is still less than 30 strong - the size it was when he left in 1999. The CIA claims that the Bin Laden team is hundreds strong, but Scheuer is insistent that the apparent expansion is skin-deep. "The numbers are big, but it's a shell game. It's people they move in for four or five months at a time and then bring in a new bunch. But the hard core of expertise, of experience, of savvy really hasn't expanded at all since 9/11."
The morass in Iraq, meanwhile, is a "big factor in not allowing us to develop much expertise" on Bin Laden. "I think [director of central intelligence George Tenet] said we had enough people to do two wars at once, and clearly that was a fantasy."
The conclusion of the September 11 Commission - that the al-Qaida plot might have been broken up if the intelligence agencies had cooperated better and shared more information - was accompanied by recommendations for the creation of a national counter-terrorist centre and a national director of intelligence to coordinate the CIA, FBI and other agencies. Scheuer believes this is a classic bureaucratic fix. "I've never known a dysfunctional bureaucracy made better by being made bigger." His answer to the al-Qaida threat, unsurprisingly, is to give his old unit at the CIA, the Bin Laden station, more resources and more firepower.
It is a solution forged by the accumulated bitterness of missed opportunities. In one year under his watch, from May 1998 to May 1999, Scheuer reckons the US had up to a dozen serious chances to kill or capture Bin Laden. Only one was taken - a missile attack on an Afghan training camp in August 1998 - but either the al-Qaida leader was not there, or he had left before the missiles landed...>> |
