Washington Post Series Overlooks Intel Success
President Bush had to rebuild the intel community after Clinton’s neglect. Clinton had so downsized and discarded the Central Intelligence Agency, and 15 other intelligence agencies, that his first CIA director quit. George Tenet, the longest-running CIA chief under Clinton, later wrote that his agency was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy as Clinton was leaving the presidency. The National Intelligence Agency, the nation’s listening post, was going deaf, Tenet wrote.
by Rowan Scarborough at Human Events
President George W. Bush’s rebuilding of an intelligence community broken and demoralized under Bill Clinton should be embraced by conservatives as the U.S.’s best response to the September 11 attacks.
Clinton had so downsized and discarded the Central Intelligence Agency, and 15 other intelligence agencies, that his first CIA director quit. George Tenet, the longest-running CIA chief under Clinton, later wrote that his agency was in Chapter 11 bankruptcy as Clinton was leaving the presidency. The National Intelligence Agency, the nation’s listening post, was going deaf, Tenet wrote. It had not kept up with basic technology to penetrate cyberspace.
As I wrote in Sabotage: America’s Enemies Within the CIA, under Clinton the CIA rolled up operating bases around the world and all but shut down larger stations. It was in Hamburg, Germany, that leaders among the 9-11 hijackers were radicalized in a mosque and dispatched to Afghanistan for training. The CIA’s base in Hamburg where officers could track radicals had been closed by that time. It reopened after 9-11.
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