To Tenet’s shame he failed to prepare this country, the President--Clinton--for the terrorist threat. This fact, long before Bush, was clear from the 9/11 Commission report.
The recently released C.I.A. report merely, but importantly, confirms how not surprising Bush was ill informed regarding the terrorist threat upon becoming president. Clinton vacillates according to my reading of the 9/11 testimony. Therefore, it is not surprising that Bush inherited a vague policy against largely unknown actors.
According to the internal report, Tenet recognized the danger posed by Al Qaeda long before 11 September 2001, but he failed to adequately prepare the C.I.A. to meet the threat.
The document was completed in June 2005 but was kept classified until now.
Still, the report is old news and reminds me of the 9/11 Commission findings. That body concluded that “a failure of imagination” had made intelligence agencies unable to fully discern the growing peril of Al Qaeda, and that communication lapses within the C.I.A. and the Federal Bureau of Investigation and between those agencies had hobbled efforts to “connect the dots” of intelligence data and effectively pursue Al Qaeda terrorists, even after some of them had entered the United States.
The inspector general’s report stated that “it reaches the same overall conclusions on most of the important issues” as the Commission.
Clinton will not take the fall for this, as Bush has been pilloried over the issue, but Tenet was once in charge of all federal intelligence agencies and the report noted that he said as far back as 1998 that “we are at war” with Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden.
However, Tenet failed to create “a documented, comprehensive plan to guide the counterterrorism effort at the intelligence community level.”
Clinton failed to grasp the urgency of the threat in 1998 since Tenet failed to follow up his understanding that terrorism was a critical threat. Not surprising, Bush never got this type of word as he entered the presidency.
Bush will continue to take the heat for the failings of others but he was not president in 1998 when the threat by America's leading intelligence authority grasped the critical nature of Osama's efforts.
Only a Summary of the report has been released in the de-classification.
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