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9/11 commission cites failures of both Bush and Clinton adminstrations:
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/23/politics/23findings.html?ex=1158033600&en=7d7d7212251d9834&...
Excerpts from the above:
WASHINGTON, July 22 - The Clinton and Bush administrations failed to grasp the gravity of the threat from Al Qaeda before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and left counterterrorism efforts to a disparate collection of uncoordinated, underfinanced and dysfunctional government agencies, the commission on the attacks said in its final report published on Thursday.
"Across the government, there were failures of imagination, policy, capabilities and management," the panel said in its report, which was harshly critical of how the intelligence, law enforcement and military branches performed before the attacks.
In a series of findings that were searing in tone, sweeping in judgment and backed by voluminous reporting, the report said senior officials were repeatedly warned about Osama bin Laden's intentions, but failed to respond with an aggressive sense of national purpose.
"Terrorism was not the overriding national security concern for the U.S. government under either the Clinton or the pre 9/11 Bush administration," the report said.
In contrast to most government reports, the findings were presented in a dramatic, often gripping narrative style with chapter headings like "We Have Some Planes" and the "The System Was Blinking Red."
In a tone that sometimes resembled a paperback thriller, the report chronicled Mr. bin Laden's rise as a global terrorist leader and the agonizingly slow recognition by the Clinton and Bush administrations of the danger that his network represented.
The account described in authoritative detail how the plot, despite setbacks, gathered shape and direction and how it finally struck with four nearly simultaneous hijackings even as the national security experts here continued to ponder a counterterrorism strategy and the agencies responsible for protecting the country were completely blindsided.
Many findings were foreshadowed in the 17 staff reports previously made public, but the new report had new information about the Sept. 11 attacks, including a detailed account of how passengers on Flight 93 tried to gain control of their hijacked plane.
The report did not address directly whether the attacks might have been prevented.
"Since the plotters were flexible and resourceful, we cannot know whether any single step or series of steps would have defeated them," the commissioners wrote in the executive summary. "What we can say with confidence is that none of the measures adopted by the U.S. government, from 1998 to 2001, disturbed or even delayed the progress of the Al Qaeda plot."
.....
Different sections give contrasting accounts of responses by national security advisers under Mr. Clinton and Mr. Bush. It describes how Mr. Berger, under Mr. Clinton, took the lead in December 1999 in mobilizing the F.B.I. and other domestic agencies to address the so-called millennium plot, in which attacks planned in Jordan and Los Angeles were disrupted. By contrast, the report describes Condoleezza Rice and her deputy, Stephen Hadley, as not having regarded the coordination of domestic agencies as part of their responsibility after they took office in 2001, even as warnings of a possible attack continued to grow.
The report said of the Bush White House before Sept. 11: "The domestic agencies never mobilized in response to the threat. They did not have direction, and did not have a plan to institute."
The report found no evidence that Iraq, Iran or Saudi Arabia provided operational or financial support to Al Qaeda as part of the Sept. 11 attacks. In contrast to the Bush administration, the panel singled out as most worthy of further investigation not Al Qaeda's pre-Sept. 11 ties to Iraq, but its links to Iran.
......
"Our failures took place over many years and many administrations," the panel chairman, Thomas H. Kean, said at a news conference. "There's no single individual who is responsible for our failures. Yet individuals and institutions cannot be absolved of responsibility. Any person in a senior position within our government during this time bears some element of responsibility for our government's actions."
........
The report singled out the Central Intelligence Agency for serving at the forefront of counterterrorism, saying no agency did more to attack Al Qaeda before Sept. 11. But the report also described its response and those of other intelligence agencies as insufficient and hamstrung by a lack of resources, competing priorities and internal rivalries.
At no point after 1995, the report noted, did the intelligence agencies produce a new formal National Intelligence Estimate to sum up in a fully developed assessment the Qaeda threat. Even in summer 2001, it said, counterterrorism analysts were slow to perceive a broader threat. Before Sept. 11, the report said, the Clinton and Bush administrations limited the C.I.A. primarily to disrupt terrorism abroad and efforts via proxies. The operations tried to capture Mr. bin Laden and his aides in Afghanistan rather than kill him. Officials of the Counterterrorist Center at the intelligence agency and the National Security Council staff, the report notes, grew more frustrated.
At a briefing for reporters on Wednesday, senior C.I.A. officials acknowledged that its performance before Sept. 11 had flaws. But they also said the panel had underestimated the degree to which the agency had warned senior policy makers and shared information with other agencies about the terrorist threat.
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Personal comment - nothing is to be gained by making national security a partisan issue.
This article only came up in cached form after a google search so I am archiving it here.
With the release of the interrogation manual, it is now the CIA's turn to answer a few questions.
The Terror Trade
The CIA was loath to release its manuals to the American public, but the agency has readily shared its expert opinions on interrogation with military and intelligence forces around the world. In numerous cases both the CIA and the Defense Department have been implicated in the international dissemination of torture and other political terror tactics. The tricks of the trade were often exported to governments who turned the brutal methods against their own civilians. There are too many cases on record to recount them all here, but a review of some frequently cited examples suggests that U.S. involvement in this terror trade has been so widespread that its effects can accurately be described as global in scope.
Most recently the CIA has come under scrutiny for its training of abusive officers in Guatemala and Honduras. These cases are but a sampling of the agency's experience in promoting the use of political terror in Central America. During the 1980s one of the agency's major covert operations, the contra war against Nicaragua, was repeatedly plunged into scandal due to its reliance on tactics that blatantly contradicted President Reagan's public praise of the contra guerrillas, whom he described as a force of "freedom fighters." A CIA-produced manual, Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare, schooled the contras on the use of "implicit terror," kidnapping and assassinations. (21)
U.S. Army instruction programs that spread similar methods in the region are also attracting criticism. According to declassified documents and recently issued Defense Department reports, the Army's "Project X," a set of intelligence courses taught since the 1960s in countries throughout Central and South America, included instruction on how to surveil, infiltrate, and undermine dissident groups. The training covered the use of kidnapping, blackmail, and executions. The materials were later consulted in the preparation of manuals used at the Army's School of the Americas (SOA), a Ft. Benning, Georgia, facility that trains Latin American military officers. Among the objectionable tactics later found in the SOA manuals were instructions on the use of hypnotism and "truth serum" drugs in interrogation. (22)
Representative Joseph Kennedy, a longtime congressional critic of the SOA, remarked that the manuals "taught tactics that come right out of a Soviet gulag and have no place in civilized society -- they certainly have no place in any course taught with taxpayer dollars on U.S. soil by the members of our own military." (23) Amnesty International issued a statement calling for full disclosure of the history of Project X and commenting that "it seems highly unlikely that it is merely a coincidence that some of the most widespread and systematic human rights violations have taken place in precisely those countries, Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, and Peru, where these materials were most widely used." (24)
By virtue of their proximity to the United States, these countries bore the brunt of the abuses that accompanied U.S. counterinsurgency aid -- but the manuals and lesson plans that shared such tactics were extensively distributed outside this hemisphere as well. In March 1997 the Washington Post reported that according to Army documents and former Pentagon officials, the Project X materials "were used much more widely, by U.S. personnel working in a variety of countries," including Vietnam, Japan and Iran. (25)
CIA ties to torturers have likewise reached to every corner of the globe. The agency created and guided oppressive security programs in several Southeast Asian countries, most notably Vietnam, where the United States ran its most intensive counterinsurgency campaign. During the late 1960s, in South Vietnam the CIA set up the infamous Phoenix Program, an effort to eradicate the Viet Cong infrastructure. Phoenix is largely remembered as an assassination program (at least 20,000 suspects were murdered), but the operation also established a network of "Provincial Interrogation Centers" that often served as torture chambers. (26)
In the years that followed, the advanced counterinsurgency tactics of Phoenix were shared with thousands of foreign police officers trained by CIA instructors in various programs run by the State Department's Agency for International Development, including the Office of Public Safety and the International Police Academy. (27)
The CIA has also been directly linked to torture training in the Middle East, where the agency for two and a half decades reinforced the repressive state of Shah Mohammed Pahlevi, the dictator of Iran. Shortly before the Shah's overthrow in 1979, New York Times journalist Seymour Hersh reported that "a senior CIA official was involved in instructing officials in the Savak [the Iranian secret police] on torture techniques." Jesse J. Leaf, a former head Iran analyst for the CIA, told Hersh, "I do remember seeing and being told of [CIA personnel] who were there seeing the rooms and being told of torture. And I know that the torture rooms were toured and it was all paid for by the U.S.A." (28)
The human rights abuses promoted by the Pentagon and CIA are compounded by the abuses of government secrecy that continue to conceal many important records on these operations from public scrutiny. In the case of the Project X program, the Defense Department says it has destroyed almost all of the original documentation, purportedly to prevent further dissemination of such unacceptable tactics.
When such crucial records are wiped out of existence, our ability to document the history of U.S. military assistance and training programs is seriously impaired. Fragmentary media reports based on the recollections of former Pentagon officials are no substitute for a complete accounting of Project X. Likewise, neither the CIA's declassification of a couple incriminating manuals nor its "scrub" of its motley band of foreign assets is a substitute for a comprehensive congressional investigation of CIA cooperation with regimes that regularly employed terror tactics.
Currently there is little determination on Capitol Hill to unearth this disturbing history. For the time being, if the facts on the U.S. role in developing and exporting these tactics are to be established, they will be extracted from documents such as this interrogation manual. The document joins the steadily growing stack of declassified records that offer clues on the nature and extent of the CIA's complicity with state terror in other countries. Though much of the documentary evidence on the terror trade remains shielded by official secrecy, a close reading of this manual reveals the value of the pieces of the paper trail that we can currently examine.
Sources
(1) Intelligence Oversight Board, "Report on the Guatemala Review," June 28, 1996, p. 3.
(2) Associated Press, "Report Says CIA Guatemala Contacts Violated Human Rights," March 18, 1997.
(3) Tim Weiner, "For the U.S., a Bad Bedfellow in Guatemala," New York Times, May 12, 1996, p. E4.
(4) Frank Smyth, "The Nun Who Knew Too Much," Washington Post, May 12, 1996, p. C1.
(5) Allan Nairn, "CIA Death Squad," The Nation, April 17, 1995, p. 511. In another article two months later, Nairn identified the names and years of service for the CIA's station chiefs in Guatemala from 1977 to 1995. See "The Country Team," The Nation, June 5, 1995, p. 780.
(6) George Gedda, "Official Says CIA Hounds Him," Associated Press, November 16, 1996.
(7) George Gedda, "Ex-Clinton Aide Quits, Reams CIA," Associated Press, February 25, 1997.
(8) R. Jeffrey Smith, "CIA Drops Over 100 Informants," Washington Post, March 2, 1997, p. A1.
(9) The Baltimore Sun's four-part series on Honduras, which ran in the newspaper from June 11 to 18, 1995, is available on the Internet at http://www.sunspot.net/sunspot/crabhouse/channel/cia/honduras1.html. A reprint of the series can be purchased for $6.95 from the Baltimore Sun, 501 N. Calvert St., Baltimore, MD, 21278.
(10) Telephone interview with Gary Cohn, February 28, 1997.
(11) Daniel Schorr, National Public Radio, February 16, 1997, transcript #97021609-215.
(12) For a detailed account of Nosenko's detention, including his remarks on the interrogations and druggings, see Tom Mangold, Cold Warrior: James Jesus Angleton, the CIA's Master Spy Hunter (Simon & Schuster, 1991), pp. 160-207.
(13) Ellen Herman, "The Career of Cold War Psychology," Radical History Review, Fall 1995, pp. 53-85. This article is drawn from Herman's book The Romance of American Psychology: Political Culture in the Age of Experts (University of California Press, 1995).
(14) For numerous examples, see Christopher Simpson, Science of Coercion: Communication Research & Psychological Warfare 1945-1960 (Oxford University Press, 1994). Further insights and arguments about government attempts to harness social science expertise for national security purposes can be found in Irving Louis Horowitz, ed., The Rise and Fall of Project Camelot (M.I.T. Press, 1967).
(15) In one of his last acts as Director of Central Intelligence, in early 1973 Richard Helms ordered the destruction of the MKULTRA files (though some records survived, some of which were later declassified). See Thomas Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets: Richard Helms and the CIA (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979), p. 272. Concerning still-classified records, Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists' Project on Government Secrecy recently noted: "In 1995, the Presidential Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments called for the expeditious declassification of all surviving classified records from MKULTRA and more than half a dozen related CIA human experimentation programs from the late 1940s to the early 1970s. To date, the CIA has not complied with this recommendation." See Steven Aftergood, "Secrecy and Accountability in U.S. Intelligence," paper presented at Center for International Policy seminar on intelligence reform, October 9, 1996, note 2. (Available on the Internet at http://www.fas.org/sgp/cipsecr.html).
(16) John Marks, The Search for the "Manchurian Candidate": The CIA and Mind Control (Times Books, 1979), p. 128.
(17) Ibid., p. 161.
(18) Simpson, p. 186 n117.
(19) Marks, p. 143.
(20) Ibid., pp. 164-181; pp. Orrin DeForest and David Chanoff, Slow Burn: The Rise and Bitter Fall of American Intelligence in Vietnam (Simon & Schuster, 1990), 63-66.
(21) Peter Kornbluh, Nicaragua: The Price of Intervention (Institute for Policy Studies, 1987), pp. 43-45.
(22) Dana Priest, "Army's Project X Had Wider Audience," Washington Post, March 6, 1997, p. A1.
(23) Office of Representative Joseph P. Kennedy, Press Release, "Kennedy Responds to Pentagon Report on 'Torture' Manuals," February 21, 1997.
(24) Amnesty International USA, Statement on United States Army Training Manuals Containing Materials Inconsistent With U.S. Policy, October 4, 1996.
(25) Priest, "Army's Project X Had Wider Audience."
(26) See Douglas Valentine, The Phoenix Program (William Morrow and Company, 1990), pp. 73-88.
(27) See Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counterinsurgency, and Counterterrorism, 1940-1990 (Pantheon Books, 1992), pp. 188-196.
(28) Seymour M. Hersh, "Ex-Analyst Says CIA Rejected Warning on Shah," New York Times, January 7, 1979, p. A3.
Thanks for the new board. Fer Christ’s' sake those people sure do get pissy over there...
<<<Those tales you refer to are the cultural history of the Hebrew people.>>>
Burning bushes that talk, great floods (why didn’t the ancient Egyptians get their feet wet I wonder?), angels of death... no truth in that junk. Sorry. They are fables. People need to accept that our origins do not come from the will of an all powerful being.
<<<The Bible is a tool, and I have found it to be a very useful tool. >>>
Science is a tool. The human mind is a tool. The bible is a hate book.
<<<Yeshua said that we need to be willing to give up everything to follow Christ (Christ is the annointed of God according to Hebrew tradition, not an aspect of a mythical trinity). I beieve that the first thing you have to be willing to give up is the dogma of religion and seek the Truth within.>>>
No offense but ... F Yeshua. Christ is nothing more than the David Koresh or Charles Manson of his time...
Religion kills, religion oppresses, religion has worn out it's welcome. Thousands of years ago religion gave uncivilized man a reason to work for the greater common good but it only serves as a cancer for modern man.
Mr Quint's post from Geron board:
http://www.investorshub.com/boards/read_msg.asp?message_id=12827310
<<<There are some nasty things in the O.T. too.>>>
Absolutely. The Book of Deuteronomy is almost a "How to Rape and Get Away with It" manual
<<<If your religion is the starting place for a personal search for Truth, it is a good thing.>>>
Not really... there is no truth in the tales written by bronze aged gypsies.
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My comment - yes really. As Yeshua (Jesus) taught, the Truth is within. Those tales you refer to are the cultural history of the Hebrew people. Many of those people loved God and advanced civilization. There are things that can be learned from the Bible and any religious book but we learn by asking the questions that mankind has already asked again and again.
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<<<If it becomes your excuse for thinking you are better or holier than your neighbor and your justification for hating and abusing your neighbor it is a bad thing.>>>
That's all religion does... it causes people to think that they understand the mind of an All Powerful Cosmos Creating Deity (a deity that also happens to care about our sex lives).
So when a person thinks they understand the mind of this creature, they get delusions of grandeur.
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I can assure you that that is not all religion does. The Bible can be read in an attitude of prayer and with the interpretation of the Holy Spirit. When you do this you begin to discern Truth. The Bible is a tool, and I have found it to be a very useful tool.
Yeshua said that we need to be willing to give up everything to follow Christ (Christ is the annointed of God according to Hebrew tradition, not an aspect of a mythical trinity). I beieve that the first thing you have to be willing to give up is the dogma of religion and seek the Truth within.
Peace,
Paula
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