Withering failure at the CIA

Rich Lowry:

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Congressional Democrats pushed for the release of the scathing IG report, completed back in June 2005, to embarrass the Bush administration. But most of the failures identified in the report took place during the Clinton administration, which set the CIA's skewed priorities and selected Tenet in the first place. President Bush should be embarrassed only because he didn't fire Tenet upon taking office or after 9/11, while Bush also has failed to undertake a serious retooling of the sclerotic bureaucracy that is the CIA.

Tenet took terrorism seriously, "sounding the alarm about the threat to many different audiences," in the words of the report. Maybe he should have gone on a lecture tour. Where Tenet fell down was in managing his agency. The thought may be father to the deed, but without the actual deed, the thought is only political cover in after-the-fact memoirs.

Tenet insists that he had a "robust plan" against al-Qaida. In reality, he only thought he had. He directed that such a plan be formulated, but according to the IG report, it never happened. Worse, Tenet did not "work with the National Security Council to elevate the relative standing of counterterrorism in the formal ranking of intelligence priorities."

In Tenet's defense, he operated within the context of a Clinton administration that basically was uninterested in intelligence. Tenet notes that the intelligence community lost 25 percent of its personnel in the 1990s and "tens of billions of dollars in investment compared with the 1990 baseline." He implored the administration for funding increases in 1998 and 1999, but had to go "outside established channels to work with then-Speaker Gingrich to obtain a $1.2 billion budgetary supplemental."

Even with more resources, his managers repeatedly moved funds from counterterrorism programs to other needs, without ever raiding other programs to fund counterterrorism, according to the IG report. What could be more important than counterterrorism? Analytic resources were poured into addressing more pressing matters like the Balkans and the environment.

After 9/11, Clinton officials and Tenet argued whether the CIA had been granted the authority to kill Osama bin Laden, with the Clintonites, in a bout of retrospective bloodlust, insisting that it had. The IG report finds that restrictions on the CIA killing bin Laden had been "arguably, although ambiguously, relaxed" for a brief period in late 1998 and early 1999 (how Clintonian). But CIA managers refused "to take advantage of the ambiguities," and even if they had, the agency didn't have the covert-action capability to kill bin Laden. Such was life during history's holiday.

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The CIA remains a rogue agency that has tried to undermine the current operations against al Qaeda with leaks to the media and operatives like the Wilsons. It is still amazing that the groups at the CIA responsible for intelligence on WMD is able to leak data undercutting the administrations after we are already at war and when we are about to discover that most of their assumptions could not be proved. They then make their operative married to the leaker look like a victim rather than a co conspirator. It had to be their most successful disinformation operation.