CIA And The War On Terror
Why didn't the CIA stop the attacks on September 11, 2001?
Why didn't the CIA stop the attacks on September 11, 2001.First of all the attacks were very secretive Bin Laudin in a video tape said that very few people within his own organization knew about these attacks. And in fact the hijackers were not told about them until just before they carried out their mission so that's how secret it was. And then secondly the U.S. government in general was not really deployed to go after terrorism the way it's doing today. There were a number of impediments ranging from what's called the wall where the FBI and CIA wouldn't share information to tools that we have today that did not exist then such as the NSA intercepts and the Patriot Act. So in general the government simply was not prepared to really tackle this.
How did the CIA respond to the September 11 attacks?
The CIA actually understood, years earlier, that Bin Ladin was the greatest threat. In fact, George Tenet, the CIA director, said publicly that he is the greatest threat to the United States. But there was not enough focus, or enough funds. The Clinton administration had cut back the CIA's clandestine service by 25 percent. But after 9/11, that all changed. President Bush put billions of dollars more into the intelligence budget, came up with these tools, such as the PATRIOT Act and NSA intercepts, to graft at terrorists, and said that any country that harbors a terrorist will be considered a terrorist country. This meant that countries like Saudi Arabia and Jordan started really cooperating in the War on Terror by turning over terrorists. 5,000 terrorists have been rolled up since 9/11. This is a headline you'll never see in the "Washington Post" or "The New York Times." Bush told the FBI director Mueller to start uncovering the next plot. Instead of focusing on what would happen during the hijackings, he wanted it to be a prevention-oriented agency, and that's what's happened. So all these things have changed to become a more effective force against terrorists. And the bottom line is that we have not been attacked in almost six years. Every few months, we see arrests by the FBI of terrorists. Those are the results of these efforts.
What steps has the CIA taken to prevent attacks on US soil?
The CIA has worked with foreign intelligence services, such as Jordan and Great Britain to share information, get leads on terrorists, and to go after them. Sometimes our military goes after them, kills them. We've used the Predator drone aircraft to kill terrorists. We've put them in Guantanamo. We've gotten them to cooperate, in some cases. All these efforts have been made by the CIA to protect us.
What changes have been made in the CIA since 9-11?
Certainly, the size of the force arrayed against terrorists has been increased; something like tenfold. There have been much more sophisticated efforts to penetrate Al-Qaeda and other terrorist organizations. The way they do that is mainly through human intelligence. CIA officers will pay off people in these terrorist organizations to give information, to plant bugs, to say what's going on. And this has actually uncovered plots. The CIA has been involved in rolling up key terrorists, such as Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, pinpointing where these people are using intercepts of communications to find out where they're emailing from, going in with the help of foreign countries, like Pakistan, to capture these terrorists, and then in turn getting information from them about future terrorist plots. And that's what's happened over and over again, and that's why we have been so successful in the War on Terror.
What types of scrutiny did the CIA receive following 9-11?
After 9/11, the press and politicians went after the FBI and the CIA for not stopping the plot, and some of that was legitimate. Some of that was helpful because it did create more pressure to have changes that would stop the next attack. A lot of it was unfair as well, but ironically now the press has gone the other way and they try to expose any kind of secret about the CIA as if they're doing something terrible, and now your ideas don't connect the dots. "Lets not find out things. Lets not have these tools that we need like the Patriot Act and NSA Intercepts." So, it's a back and forth situation and the people in the CIA just have to grin and bear it and do their jobs, and try to ignore some of this unfair criticism.
