This is indeed another in the ongoing "who knew what when" series of threads. However, in the process of this thread I hope to get a little farther along in the <i>what has to change</i> category, let alone with the <i>who are we really up against?</i> subjects.
One perspective on this very complicated set of subjects is presented quite ably in the series of three Debka articles, posted into Front Page by Jer48N10 into the thread <a href="http://pub16.ezboard.com/fthedailyfrm1.showMessage?topicID=208.topic">What Bush and Clinton Could Have Known</a> and into TB into the <a href="http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=30569">moles</a> thread. Those are must-reads, in my opinion also.
Of note is that the kind of intelligence service penetrations enumerated and hinted at by Debka were <u>not done</u> by Al Quaeda. Those penetration operations bear the hallmarks of major intelligence services.
It is also of note that certain of the intelligence leaks bear unmistakable evidence of complicity by certain high-level U.N. officials.
There is one more continuing facet of note of the war on terror that merits consideration: there are no reports of at all recent successful interception of non-tactical Al Quaeda electronic communications.
<b>I would ask this of you:</b> if you have a substantive contribution, <i>please</i> feel free to weigh in.
I am however <u>not interested</u> in rants on this thread. Not in the least. Thank you.
This thread is parallel to the <a href="http://pub16.ezboard.com/fthedailyfrm1.showMessage?topicID=242.topic">Front Page thread</a> of the same name.
Fair Use is invoked as and where appropriate.
R
From <a href="http://www.stratfor.com/fib/topStory_view.php?ID=204520">Stratfor</a> under Fair Use
R
<center><h4>Sept. 11: What Did Bush Know and When Did He Know It?</h4></center>
<b>20 May 2002
Summary</b>
Reports last week that the U.S. government received warnings about possible airline hijackings before Sept. 11 put the White House on the defensive. Despite the obvious desire by his opponents to use the issue against him, President George W. Bush cannot be blamed for not reacting to a few vague reports. However, he can be blamed for not yet making fundamental changes to a U.S. intelligence system whose divisions and emphasis on information collection over analysis led to Sept. 11.
<b>Analysis</b>
Nothing was more predictable than the crisis that blew up in Washington last week when it was revealed that the CIA had warned President George W. Bush prior to Sept. 11 that members of al Qaeda appeared to be plotting a series of airline hijackings. At the same time it was revealed that an FBI agent in Phoenix, Arizona, had written a memo stating that members of al Qaeda were receiving flying instructions in the United States.
Then, to show that such information was available during the Clinton years as well, a 1999 study was released asserting that al Qaeda might try suicide attacks on U.S. installations. Washington, which had grown torpid over the war, was suddenly galvanized. The question was, as Sen. Hillary Clinton put it: What did Bush know and when did he know it?
On Sept. 16, shortly after the attacks, STRATFOR wrote: "We have no doubt that, after the databases have been searched, it will be found that U.S. intelligence had plenty of information in some highly secure computer. The newspapers will trumpet, 'CIA knew identity of attackers.' That will be only technically true. Buried in the huge mounds of information perhaps once having passed across an overworked analyst's desk, some bit of information might have made its circuit of the agencies. But saying that U.S. intelligence actually "knew" about the attackers' plots would be overstating it. Owning a book and knowing what's in it are two vastly different things."
We expect that, over time, it will be discovered that far more was "known" about al Qaeda and its intentions than what has been released so far. It will be discovered that agents in obscure places had in fact discovered parts of the plot; that National Security Agency intercepts contained clear indications of al Qaeda's plans; that even more memos had gone to various federal agencies, including the White House, with bits and pieces of the puzzle.
Then someone will claim that the U.S. government "knew" all about the plot and that it either willfully disregarded the facts or deliberately refused to prevent it, for reasons not altogether clear. All such charges will be true and at the same time utterly unreasonable.
It is difficult to blame Bush for not noticing a vague report on potential hijackings amid the almost limitless stream of other warnings. He cannot be blamed for not seeing the Phoenix FBI field report that never left the FBI. Nor can Clinton be blamed for not reacting to the highly speculative report on the possibility of suicide bombers. Bush has taken a great deal of flak about issuing vague alerts against which no practical action can be taken. What could he possibly have done with the CIA warning?
What Bush can be blamed for is that, over the eight months following one of the worst intelligence failures in U.S. history, fundamental changes in how the United States carries out its intelligence mission have not even begun. Certainly some senior officials in the counterterrorism area have been dismissed, but the failure that led to Sept. 11 was not personal; it was systemic. It flowed directly from the fundamental architecture of American intelligence.
The Central Intelligence Agency, as the name suggests, was founded to centralize the intelligence function of the United States. It was a good idea then and it is a good idea now. Unfortunately, it is an idea that has never been truly implemented and from which, over time, the government has moved intractably away. A centralized intelligence capability is essential if the United States is to have a single, integrated, coherent picture of what is happening in the world. A bureaucratically fragmented intelligence community will generate a fragmented picture of the world. That is currently what we have.
The problem begins with the division between the CIA's Directorate of Operations (which carries out espionage and covert missions) and the Directorate of Intelligence (which is charged with analyzing the information provided). Perhaps this is good for security -- although the case of convicted spy Aldrich Ames indicates otherwise -- but it is not very good for integrated thinking. A wall between the collectors of information and the analysts of information is like a wall between the senses and the brain. It leads to stumbles.
The problem does not end there. The CIA is an intelligence organization, and its counter-intelligence frequently is given to another agency -- the FBI -- to keep them both honest. The FBI is primarily a police force. It deals with law enforcement on issues from kidnapping to narcotics to embezzlement.
The mindset of counter-intelligence and the mindset of law enforcement are very different. Getting these two cultures to coexist under a single umbrella does not necessarily increase the efficiency of either. One can imagine how, in a field office dealing with drug smuggling and interstate car theft, a report on al Qaeda might have gotten lost in the shuffle.
But such divisions are just the tip of the iceberg. The CIA is tasked with human intelligence. Signal intelligence -- intercepting electronic messages -- is the purview of the National Security Agency, which is not only huge but now is developing its own analytic cadre to make sense of the messages it intercepts.
Image intelligence -- from satellites to U-2s -- is handled by the National Reconnaissance Office (which operates the satellites) and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (which interprets images and also now makes maps). The latter organization is the result of a merger between the National Photographic Interpretation Center and the Defense Mapping Agency, which were integrated into a single structure because … well the reasons aren't clear, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
And still the list goes on. The Defense Department has its own intelligence service, the Defense Intelligence Agency, which focuses primarily on military matters. Of course, the CIA also has a unit focused on military intelligence, but that's fair enough since the DIA also runs Defense Human Services -- which is a human intelligence organization doing what the CIA is supposed to be doing. On top of this, each of the armed services maintains their own intelligence services, replete with signal, image and human intelligence.
Given this incredible tangle of capabilities, jurisdictions and competencies, it is a marvel that a finished intelligence product is ever delivered to decision makers. It is unclear whether any of these agencies completely understand their own internal vision, let alone that they are able to transmit a comprehensive picture to the CIA (which is supposed to integrate all this into a coherent world view and serve it up to the president and other senior officials for action).
Which brings us to the deepest and most intractable problem. As STRATFOR has said before, the U.S. intelligence community is obsessed with the collection of data. Apart from the Directorate of Intelligence at the CIA and sections of the DIA, the rest of the U.S. intelligence system is overwhelmingly geared toward the collection, rather than the analysis, of information. The result is inevitable: a huge amount of information is gathered, but it is never turned into intelligence.
To turn information into intelligence, it must be collated with other information, integrated into a coherent picture, interpreted and used to forecast actions. The current architecture of the intelligence community makes collation and integration structurally impossible. It is not merely a matter of sharing but also a matter of culture.
The FBI collects huge amounts of human intelligence. It has an extremely small analytical staff. Its administrators evaluate the significance of intelligence. Some administrator in the FBI decided that the Phoenix report was not worth pursuing. The facts are not in on this, but it is highly likely that no one provided him with any guidance as to what was significant and what was not, and it is almost certain that he did not have an appropriate context for drawing judgments himself.
Between the labyrinthine structure of the intelligence community and its obsession with collection over analysis, it is inevitable that vast amounts of information never coalesce into intelligence. The collection capacity of the United States, both technical and human, is vast. But it is deliberately and institutionally compartmentalized in such a way that prevents a coherent perspective from emerging.
Even more important, the analytic capability is dwarfed by the collection efforts. Information collected but not analyzed is the same as information that never existed. Continued increases in spending on collection is wasted money unless the analytic program grows faster to make up for tragically lost time.
The CIA failed to bring critical information to the president because it did not know that information. We remain certain that if we searched all of the databases and memos we would find that the U.S. government had collected much of the information that would have been necessary to prevent Sept. 11. It was there. But it wasn't collated, integrated, or analyzed and therefore could not be disseminated.
Bush cannot therefore be faulted for not reacting to reports he never saw nor for failing to react to vague threats. He is, however, entirely responsible for not having taken dramatic and decisive steps toward reorganizing the intelligence community after Sept. 11. He has permitted business to go on as usual, in spite of the manifest failure -- not of the individuals in the community, but of the architecture in which they worked.
The current proliferation of intelligence agencies wasn't the intention of those who conceived of a CIA. There is no reason the United States must endure the proliferation of agencies that leads, regardless of intent, to non-cooperation and non-communication.
Most important, there is no reason at all why the obsession with extraordinarily expensive collection technologies and methods should not be shifted to a more balanced approach between collection and analysis. Intercepting all cell phone conversations out of Afghanistan is great -- but only if someone who understands the Pushtun language is available to translate them and someone with knowledge and imagination is standing by to try and understand what the phone calls meant. Having every phone call in the world sitting in a database isn't worth the price of the computer.
One perspective on this very complicated set of subjects is presented quite ably in the series of three Debka articles, posted into Front Page by Jer48N10 into the thread <a href="http://pub16.ezboard.com/fthedailyfrm1.showMessage?topicID=208.topic">What Bush and Clinton Could Have Known</a> and into TB into the <a href="http://www.timebomb2000.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=30569">moles</a> thread. Those are must-reads, in my opinion also.
Of note is that the kind of intelligence service penetrations enumerated and hinted at by Debka were <u>not done</u> by Al Quaeda. Those penetration operations bear the hallmarks of major intelligence services.
It is also of note that certain of the intelligence leaks bear unmistakable evidence of complicity by certain high-level U.N. officials.
There is one more continuing facet of note of the war on terror that merits consideration: there are no reports of at all recent successful interception of non-tactical Al Quaeda electronic communications.
<b>I would ask this of you:</b> if you have a substantive contribution, <i>please</i> feel free to weigh in.
I am however <u>not interested</u> in rants on this thread. Not in the least. Thank you.
This thread is parallel to the <a href="http://pub16.ezboard.com/fthedailyfrm1.showMessage?topicID=242.topic">Front Page thread</a> of the same name.
Fair Use is invoked as and where appropriate.
R
From <a href="http://www.stratfor.com/fib/topStory_view.php?ID=204520">Stratfor</a> under Fair Use
R
<center><h4>Sept. 11: What Did Bush Know and When Did He Know It?</h4></center>
<b>20 May 2002
Summary</b>
Reports last week that the U.S. government received warnings about possible airline hijackings before Sept. 11 put the White House on the defensive. Despite the obvious desire by his opponents to use the issue against him, President George W. Bush cannot be blamed for not reacting to a few vague reports. However, he can be blamed for not yet making fundamental changes to a U.S. intelligence system whose divisions and emphasis on information collection over analysis led to Sept. 11.
<b>Analysis</b>
Nothing was more predictable than the crisis that blew up in Washington last week when it was revealed that the CIA had warned President George W. Bush prior to Sept. 11 that members of al Qaeda appeared to be plotting a series of airline hijackings. At the same time it was revealed that an FBI agent in Phoenix, Arizona, had written a memo stating that members of al Qaeda were receiving flying instructions in the United States.
Then, to show that such information was available during the Clinton years as well, a 1999 study was released asserting that al Qaeda might try suicide attacks on U.S. installations. Washington, which had grown torpid over the war, was suddenly galvanized. The question was, as Sen. Hillary Clinton put it: What did Bush know and when did he know it?
On Sept. 16, shortly after the attacks, STRATFOR wrote: "We have no doubt that, after the databases have been searched, it will be found that U.S. intelligence had plenty of information in some highly secure computer. The newspapers will trumpet, 'CIA knew identity of attackers.' That will be only technically true. Buried in the huge mounds of information perhaps once having passed across an overworked analyst's desk, some bit of information might have made its circuit of the agencies. But saying that U.S. intelligence actually "knew" about the attackers' plots would be overstating it. Owning a book and knowing what's in it are two vastly different things."
We expect that, over time, it will be discovered that far more was "known" about al Qaeda and its intentions than what has been released so far. It will be discovered that agents in obscure places had in fact discovered parts of the plot; that National Security Agency intercepts contained clear indications of al Qaeda's plans; that even more memos had gone to various federal agencies, including the White House, with bits and pieces of the puzzle.
Then someone will claim that the U.S. government "knew" all about the plot and that it either willfully disregarded the facts or deliberately refused to prevent it, for reasons not altogether clear. All such charges will be true and at the same time utterly unreasonable.
It is difficult to blame Bush for not noticing a vague report on potential hijackings amid the almost limitless stream of other warnings. He cannot be blamed for not seeing the Phoenix FBI field report that never left the FBI. Nor can Clinton be blamed for not reacting to the highly speculative report on the possibility of suicide bombers. Bush has taken a great deal of flak about issuing vague alerts against which no practical action can be taken. What could he possibly have done with the CIA warning?
What Bush can be blamed for is that, over the eight months following one of the worst intelligence failures in U.S. history, fundamental changes in how the United States carries out its intelligence mission have not even begun. Certainly some senior officials in the counterterrorism area have been dismissed, but the failure that led to Sept. 11 was not personal; it was systemic. It flowed directly from the fundamental architecture of American intelligence.
The Central Intelligence Agency, as the name suggests, was founded to centralize the intelligence function of the United States. It was a good idea then and it is a good idea now. Unfortunately, it is an idea that has never been truly implemented and from which, over time, the government has moved intractably away. A centralized intelligence capability is essential if the United States is to have a single, integrated, coherent picture of what is happening in the world. A bureaucratically fragmented intelligence community will generate a fragmented picture of the world. That is currently what we have.
The problem begins with the division between the CIA's Directorate of Operations (which carries out espionage and covert missions) and the Directorate of Intelligence (which is charged with analyzing the information provided). Perhaps this is good for security -- although the case of convicted spy Aldrich Ames indicates otherwise -- but it is not very good for integrated thinking. A wall between the collectors of information and the analysts of information is like a wall between the senses and the brain. It leads to stumbles.
The problem does not end there. The CIA is an intelligence organization, and its counter-intelligence frequently is given to another agency -- the FBI -- to keep them both honest. The FBI is primarily a police force. It deals with law enforcement on issues from kidnapping to narcotics to embezzlement.
The mindset of counter-intelligence and the mindset of law enforcement are very different. Getting these two cultures to coexist under a single umbrella does not necessarily increase the efficiency of either. One can imagine how, in a field office dealing with drug smuggling and interstate car theft, a report on al Qaeda might have gotten lost in the shuffle.
But such divisions are just the tip of the iceberg. The CIA is tasked with human intelligence. Signal intelligence -- intercepting electronic messages -- is the purview of the National Security Agency, which is not only huge but now is developing its own analytic cadre to make sense of the messages it intercepts.
Image intelligence -- from satellites to U-2s -- is handled by the National Reconnaissance Office (which operates the satellites) and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency (which interprets images and also now makes maps). The latter organization is the result of a merger between the National Photographic Interpretation Center and the Defense Mapping Agency, which were integrated into a single structure because … well the reasons aren't clear, but it seemed like a good idea at the time.
And still the list goes on. The Defense Department has its own intelligence service, the Defense Intelligence Agency, which focuses primarily on military matters. Of course, the CIA also has a unit focused on military intelligence, but that's fair enough since the DIA also runs Defense Human Services -- which is a human intelligence organization doing what the CIA is supposed to be doing. On top of this, each of the armed services maintains their own intelligence services, replete with signal, image and human intelligence.
Given this incredible tangle of capabilities, jurisdictions and competencies, it is a marvel that a finished intelligence product is ever delivered to decision makers. It is unclear whether any of these agencies completely understand their own internal vision, let alone that they are able to transmit a comprehensive picture to the CIA (which is supposed to integrate all this into a coherent world view and serve it up to the president and other senior officials for action).
Which brings us to the deepest and most intractable problem. As STRATFOR has said before, the U.S. intelligence community is obsessed with the collection of data. Apart from the Directorate of Intelligence at the CIA and sections of the DIA, the rest of the U.S. intelligence system is overwhelmingly geared toward the collection, rather than the analysis, of information. The result is inevitable: a huge amount of information is gathered, but it is never turned into intelligence.
To turn information into intelligence, it must be collated with other information, integrated into a coherent picture, interpreted and used to forecast actions. The current architecture of the intelligence community makes collation and integration structurally impossible. It is not merely a matter of sharing but also a matter of culture.
The FBI collects huge amounts of human intelligence. It has an extremely small analytical staff. Its administrators evaluate the significance of intelligence. Some administrator in the FBI decided that the Phoenix report was not worth pursuing. The facts are not in on this, but it is highly likely that no one provided him with any guidance as to what was significant and what was not, and it is almost certain that he did not have an appropriate context for drawing judgments himself.
Between the labyrinthine structure of the intelligence community and its obsession with collection over analysis, it is inevitable that vast amounts of information never coalesce into intelligence. The collection capacity of the United States, both technical and human, is vast. But it is deliberately and institutionally compartmentalized in such a way that prevents a coherent perspective from emerging.
Even more important, the analytic capability is dwarfed by the collection efforts. Information collected but not analyzed is the same as information that never existed. Continued increases in spending on collection is wasted money unless the analytic program grows faster to make up for tragically lost time.
The CIA failed to bring critical information to the president because it did not know that information. We remain certain that if we searched all of the databases and memos we would find that the U.S. government had collected much of the information that would have been necessary to prevent Sept. 11. It was there. But it wasn't collated, integrated, or analyzed and therefore could not be disseminated.
Bush cannot therefore be faulted for not reacting to reports he never saw nor for failing to react to vague threats. He is, however, entirely responsible for not having taken dramatic and decisive steps toward reorganizing the intelligence community after Sept. 11. He has permitted business to go on as usual, in spite of the manifest failure -- not of the individuals in the community, but of the architecture in which they worked.
The current proliferation of intelligence agencies wasn't the intention of those who conceived of a CIA. There is no reason the United States must endure the proliferation of agencies that leads, regardless of intent, to non-cooperation and non-communication.
Most important, there is no reason at all why the obsession with extraordinarily expensive collection technologies and methods should not be shifted to a more balanced approach between collection and analysis. Intercepting all cell phone conversations out of Afghanistan is great -- but only if someone who understands the Pushtun language is available to translate them and someone with knowledge and imagination is standing by to try and understand what the phone calls meant. Having every phone call in the world sitting in a database isn't worth the price of the computer.