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Politics : The Donkey's Inn -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: bonnuss_in_austin who wrote (252)	9/30/2001 11:22:37 PM
From: FastC6	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 15516

While we fight to preserve the freedoms of all Americans you assholes are using the freedoms in an irresponsible way to rip us apart: Senator Who Helped Tie CIA’s Hands Now Castigating Agency for Intelligence Failures New Jersey Senator Robert Torricelli, who is calling for an investigation of the CIA to pinpoint the responsibility for the agency's failure to predict the Sept. 11 disasters, was one of those directly responsible for that failure. In an arrogant display of unmitigated gall, Torricelli told CNN that he wants to set up a special committee to learn just what went wrong with the CIA, when it was his own actions that helped emasculate the agency and thus guarantee future intelligence failures. "It's not clear to me that unless we take a look at what went wrong and how our systems failed, we're going to succeed in preventing any future attacks," he told CNN. What went wrong was the gutting of the CIA's ability to recruit reliable undercover agents in the field, and that inability was partly the result of Torricelli's meddling in the CIA's affairs. As Newsmax.com's Washington correspondent Wes Vernon has reported, Torricelli led congressional efforts in the mid-1990s that handcuffed the CIA's abilities to recruit spies - a key policy that helped allow the attacks of Sept. 11 to take place with no intelligence warnings. Vernon wrote that current and former CIA operatives say Clinton administration policies which forbade the CIA from recruiting known terrorists and other criminals left the U.S. government bereft of all intelligence about such terrorist groups. In 1995 Robert Torricelli, D-N.J., then a member of the House of Representatives, made secrets public at the behest of left-wing activist Bianca Jagger, his girlfriend at the time, according to Newark Star-Ledger columnist Paul Mulshine in the January/February issue of Heterodoxy. Mulshine's article showed how Torricelli's action in giving away the name of a CIA source in Guatemala was based not on fact, but on a conspiracy theory of "the loony left," as Heterodoxy later characterized it. In its 1997 report, the House Intelligence Committee had this to say about the antics of Torricelli, by then a senator: "None of the allegations raised by Rep. Torricelli in the March 22, 1995 letter to the president [Clinton] or subsequent public statements concerning the involvement of the CIA in the DeVine and Bamaca deaths in Guatemala have proved true." Still, Torricelli's efforts paid off with the Clinton administration, which moved to ban the use of spies or the recruitment of spies that had any involvement with criminals or terrorists. It was about the time of this well-publicized incident that the CIA's slide into a deteriorated human intelligence capability accelerated. Torricelli effectively blinded the CIA. If the senator, now under investigation for alleged bribery schemes, wants to know what caused the intelligence lapses he has only to look in the mirror to find one of the prime culprits. . .