Bill Clinton Bankrupted CIA In Run Up To 9/11 Attacks

by JASmius



Remember the so-called 9/11 Commission back in 2004?  Remember how Democrats hijacked it to deflect the secondary blame for al Qaeda's spectacular and devastating attacks on New York City and Washington, D.C. from Bill Clinton and onto George W. Bush?  Remember how I said at the time....okay, that was on the old Compuserve Republican Forum where I served as Deputy WizOp at the time, but trust me, I said it - that "eight years trumps eight months"?

A freshly declassified memo from then-CIA Director George Tenet sounds like we were singing a duet:

The CIA was stretched too thin in the years before 9/11, its coffers bankrupted by a Clinton administration that refused to let the agency prioritize its anti-terror work, former director George Tenet argued in a startling 2005 memo declassified Friday.

According to the document – a response to an inspector general's damning draft report accusing Tenet of not giving al Qaeda enough attention ahead of the terror attacks – the former CIA chief, who served from 1996-2004, gave a full-throated defense of the agency's attention to anti-terror concerns and other global problem spots, the Washington Times reports.

Tenet argued, for example, the agency had been pushing to penetrate al Qaeda since as far back as 1998, and took the threat of Osama bin Laden very seriously, the Washington Times reports....

Tenet....painstakingly details the number of times he asked for more money for counterterrorism – and the nine occasions he said he sent memos to senior officials in both the executive branch and Congress warning of terrorist plots.

"Even though senior policy makers were intimately familiar with the threat posed by terrorism, particularly those in the previous administration who had responded to major attacks, they never provided us the luxury of either downgrading other high priority requirements we were expected to perform against, or the resource base to build counterterrorism programs with the consistency that we needed before September 11th," Tenet wrote.

You could, I suppose, trace this starving of U.S. intelligence all the way back to the Church Committee star chamber of the 1970s.  But certainly the Clintonoids, legendarily infamous for their contempt and hatred for every aspect of the national defense apparatus, exacerbated that resource deficiency and unquestionably did not take Osama bin Laden or al Qaeda seriously, having had opportunities to capture OBL on three different occasions in the late '90s and passed on all of them on the usual "lawfare" grounds.  And, in the mean time, the 9/11 plot, five years in the making, was building, building, building, moving towards its horrific endgame even as they were attacking U.S. embassies in Africa and blowing holes in our warships in Yemen.

What the lesson of this story?  Never go out of your way to create a whistle-blower.

Exit questions: (1) Might the Tenet memo have been declassified to provide more distraction from Obama's "Still no ISIS strategy" debacle?  And (2) how much of an additional headache is its revelations for Hillary, who would be most unlikely to pursue any remotely different national security course?


UPDATE: Maybe the distraction is meant to be from this:

Key lawmakers have moved to slash funding of a secret CIA operation to train and arm rebels in Syria, a move that U.S. officials said reflects rising skepticism of the effectiveness of the agency program and the Obama administration’s strategy in the Middle East.

The House Intelligence Committee recently voted unanimously to cut as much as 20 percent of the classified funds flowing into a CIA program that U.S. officials said has become one the agency’s largest covert operations, with a budget approaching $1 billion a year.

“There is a great deal of concern on a very bipartisan basis with our strategy in Syria,” said Representative Adam B. Schiff (CA-28), the ranking Democrat on the intelligence panel. He declined to comment on specific provisions of the committee’s bill but cited growing pessimism that the United States will be in a position “to help shape the aftermath” of Syria’s civil war.

Given that the "Syrian rebels" are either ISIS-allied, ISIS-affiliated, or ISIS themselves, funneling a billion dollars in military aid to them through the CIA actually doesn't sound like such a hot idea after all.  And now even some Democrats are starting to either figure it out or admit what they knew all along now that O's demidivine star finally seems to be waning.

Or, in other words, it's "SQUIRREL!" time.