FAILINGS - Clinton and intelligence services

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andrewsullivan.com

THE BEGINNINGS OF A RECKONING I: I'm surprised more people haven't picked up on Joe Klein's excellent piece in the New Yorker this week. Klein doesn't quite draw the lines between the dots (I've just tried to do that in my upcoming piece for the Sunday Times in London), but the piece stands as a damning indictment of the Clinton administration's anti-terrorism negligence nonetheless. The warnings about bin Laden were copious throughout the 1990s. The recommendations for tackling the Islamic fundamentalist threat were all made repeatedly and with increasing urgency. It's not fair to say that nothing was done by the Clintonites; and I appreciate that hindsight is easy. But it's equally clear that not enough was done. Sooner rather than later, historians will need to go back and piece together the pieces that were ignored, undone, or simply denied as the Clinton administration concentrated on more important matters like avoiding impeachment. Klein concludes that "there seems to be near-unanimous agreement among experts: in the ten years since the collapse of the Soviet Union, almost every aspect of American national-security policy-from military operations to intelligence gathering, from border control to political leadership-has been marked by … institutional lassitude and bureaucratic arrogance." And who was responsible for eight of those ten years? Yes, many of us are to blame for not taking this more seriously. But only one man is ultimately supposed to take responsibility for this. There is no greater duty for a government than the maintenance of national security, and the physical protection of its own citizens from harm. When a senior Clinton official can tell Klein that Clinton "spent less concentrated attention on national defense than any other President in recent memory," and when this presidency is followed by the most grievous breach of domestic security in American history, it is not unreasonable to demand some accounting. With each passing day, the Clinton legacy gets darker and darker.

THE BEGINNINGS OF A RECKONING II: Alongside Klein's piece, check out a truly prescient and damning account of the failure of our counter-intelligence services to deal with the Islamo-fascist threat. Reuel Marc Gerecht deserves some sort of medal for prescience in this affair, penning superb pieces for the Atlantic and the Weekly Standard over the past few years. Here's his most insightful essay from the July/August issue of the Atlantic, a piece that reflects the great work Mike Kelly has been doing with that magazine. In it, he emphasized the extreme need for trained spies to go underground in the Muslim world of Afghanistan and Pakistan if the West were ever to get adequate intelligence on bin Laden's operation. But as late as 1999, not a single such "non-official-cover" spy had been trained or used for such a purpose. A former senior Near East Division operative tells Gerecht, "The CIA probably doesn't have a single truly qualified Arabic-speaking officer of Middle Eastern background who can play a believable Muslim fundamentalist who would volunteer to spend years of his life with shitty food and no women in the mountains of Afghanistan. For Christ's sake, most case officers live in the suburbs of Virginia. We don't do that kind of thing." A younger case officer summed up the policy to Gerecht thus: "Operations that include diarrhea as a way of life don't happen." Meanwhile, the man who presided over this catastrophe, George Tenet, is still sitting pretty. Wouldn't anyone with a sense of responsibility after this intelligence debacle have resigned by now? I agree with the Washington Times on this one. - 9/28/2001 02:04:33 AM

-- Anonymous, September 28, 2001


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