[OT] Gullible Bush was suckered over bio warfare trucks

Vince Brannigan wrote:
Bush: 'We Found' Banned Weapons
President Cites Trailers in Iraq as Proof

So we have problems with our intelligence being spotty. Oh really?

We have had every since the US Congress Church Commission in the
mid-1970s exposed so many CIA employees and their local agents and spies
and gutted the US' HUMINT capability worldwide. Every since very few
people would hazard working with us because they never knew when
Congress might betray them. And Congress passing asinine regulations
that the CIA could never, ever deal with anyone who had possibly done
anything wrong. The US Congress has placed such restrictions on the CIA
over the past 3 decades it's a miracle they ever got anything.

So the CIA concentrated on "national technical means" because they
couldn't concentrate on HUMINT. When you're counting USSR missiles &
tanks, you're OK. When you're trying to find and stop terrorists, you
need HUMINT.

As an example, read the following article:

Washingtonpost.com

Flawed Ally Was Hunt's Best Hope
Afghan Guerrilla, U.S. Shared Enemy

By Steve Coll
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 23, 2004; Page A01

Second of two articles.

A team of CIA operators from the agency's Counterterrorist Center flew
to Dushanbe, Tajikistan, in October 1999. Code-named JAWBREAKER-5, the
group was led by the chief of the center's Osama bin Laden unit, known
to his colleagues as Rich, a veteran of CIA postings in Algiers and
elsewhere in the developing world.

They went to a secluded airfield, boarded an old Soviet-made Mi-17
transport helicopter, and swooped toward the jagged, snow-draped peaks
of northern Afghanistan.

Their aim was to revive secret intelligence and combat operations
against bin Laden in partnership with guerrilla commander Ahmed Shah
Massoud, leader of the Northern Alliance, a ragged coalition of Afghan
fighters, many of them veterans of the war against the Soviets.
Massoud's hardened militiamen clung to their positions in the stark
Panjshir Valley.

"We have a common enemy," the CIA team leader told Massoud, according to
participants, referring to bin Laden. "Let's work together."

Massoud remained Afghanistan's most formidable military commander. A
sinewy man with penetrating dark eyes, he had become a charismatic,
popular leader, especially in northeastern Afghanistan. There he had
fought and negotiated with equal imagination during the 1980s, punishing
and frustrating Soviet occupation forces. He was an impressive
tactician, an attentive student of Mao and other guerrilla leaders.

He was above all an independent man. He surrounded himself with books.
He prayed piously, read Persian poetry and studied Islamic theology.
During the mid-1990s his militia forces had at times engaged in
horrendous massacres, however. American and British drug enforcement
officials continued to accuse his men of opium and heroin smuggling.

By 1999, Massoud was seen by some at the Pentagon and inside the Clinton
Cabinet as a spent force commanding bands of thugs. An inner circle of
the Cabinet with access to the most closely guarded secrets was sharply
divided over whether the United States should deepen its partnership
with him. Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright and the chairman of
the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Henry H. "Hugh" Shelton -- reflecting the
views of professional analysts in their departments -- argued that
Massoud's alliance was tainted and in decline.

But at the CIA, especially inside the Counterterrorist Center, career
officers passionately described Massoud by 1999 as the United States'
last, best hope to capture or kill bin Laden in Afghanistan before his
al Qaeda network claimed more American lives. Massoud might be a flawed
ally, they declared, but bin Laden was by far the greater danger.

This article, detailing the CIA's pursuit of bin Laden from 1999 to
2001, is based on several dozen interviews with participants and
officials in the United States, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia,
as well as documents, private records and memoirs about the CIA covert
action program in Afghanistan.

A Deal Is Made

Frightened by swelling intelligence reports warning that al Qaeda
planned new terrorist strikes, President Bill Clinton's national
security adviser, Samuel R. "Sandy" Berger, and his counterterrorism
director, Richard Clarke, approved the JAWBREAKER-5 mission. They were
uneasy about Massoud but said they were ready to try anything within
reason that might lead to bin Laden's capture or death.

Massoud was at war across northern Afghanistan against the Taliban,
whose puritan mullahs had allied themselves with bin Laden's al Qaeda
fighters in a drive to control all Afghan territory and destroy
Massoud's coalition. Massoud's men often maneuvered in battle against
bin Laden's brigade of Arab volunteers, as well as al Qaeda-sponsored
Pakistani volunteers and Chechen fighters. Ultimately, Cofer Black, then
director of the CIA's Counterterrorist Center, hoped Massoud would
capture bin Laden during one of these engagements and either kill him or
hand him over for trial.

In dimly lit Panjshir Valley safe houses in October 1999, Massoud told
the JAWBREAKER-5 team that he was willing to deepen his partnership with
the CIA, but he was explicit about his limitations. Bin Laden spent most
of his time near the southern city of Kandahar, in the eastern Afghan
mountains, far from where Massoud's forces operated. Occasionally bin
Laden visited Jalalabad or Kabul, closer to the Northern Alliance's
lines. In these areas Massoud's intelligence service had active agents,
and perhaps they could develop more sources.

Massoud also told the CIA delegation that U.S. policy toward bin Laden
and Afghanistan was doomed to fail. The Americans directed all of their
efforts against bin Laden and a handful of his senior aides, but they
failed to see the larger context in which al Qaeda thrived. What about
the Taliban? What about the Taliban's supporters in Pakistani
intelligence? What about its financiers in Saudi Arabia and the United
Arab Emirates?

"Even if we succeed in what you are asking for," Massoud told the CIA
delegation, his aide and interpreter Abdullah recalled, "that will not
solve the bigger problem that is growing."

The CIA officers told Massoud they agreed with his critique, but they
had their orders. The U.S. government rejected a military confrontation
with the Taliban or direct support for any armed factions in the broader
Afghan war. Instead, U.S. policy focused on capturing bin Laden and his
lieutenants for criminal trial or killing them in the course of an
arrest attempt. If Massoud helped with this narrow mission, the CIA
officers argued, perhaps it would lead to wider political support or
development aid in the future.

"What was irritating was that in this whole tragedy, in this whole
chaotic situation," recalled one of Massoud's intelligence aides who
worked closely with the CIA during this period, "they were talking about
this very small piece of it: bin Laden. And if you were on our side, it
would have been very difficult for you to accept that this was the
problem. For us it was an element of the problem but not the problem."

Still, Massoud and his aides agreed they had nothing to lose by helping
the CIA. "First of all, it was an effort against a common enemy,"
recalled Abdullah. "Second, we had the hope that it would get the U.S.
to know better about the situation in Afghanistan."

Cautioned by History

Massoud had a long and checkered history with the CIA. Among those with
the proper security clearances, the accusations and stories of perfidy
had become legend.

The CIA first sent Massoud aid in 1984. But their relations were
undermined by the CIA's heavy dependence on Pakistan during the war
against the Soviets. The Pakistani intelligence service despised Massoud
because he had waged a long and brutal campaign against Pakistan's main
Islamic radical client, the warlord Gulbuddin Hekmatyar. As the war
against the Soviets ended, Pakistani intelligence sought to exclude
Massoud from the victory, and the CIA mainly went along. But under
pressure from the State Department and members of Congress, the agency
eventually reopened its private channels to Massoud.

In 1990 the CIA's secret relationship with Massoud soured because of a
dispute over a $500,000 payment. Gary Schroen, a CIA officer then
working from Islamabad, Pakistan, had delivered the cash to Massoud's
brother in exchange for assurances that Massoud would attack Afghan
communist forces along a key artery, the Salang Highway. But Massoud's
forces never moved, so far as the CIA could tell. Schroen and other
officers believed they had been ripped off for half a million dollars.

Schroen, who has now agreed to be publicly identified, renewed contact
with Massoud during a solo visit to Kabul in September 1996. By then bin
Laden had found sanctuary in Afghanistan, and the CIA sought allies to
watch and disrupt al Qaeda. Schroen and Massoud settled their old
dispute. (Massoud claimed he had never received the $500,000.) The
guerrilla leader agreed to cooperate on a secret CIA program to
repurchase Stinger antiaircraft missiles. He sold the agency eight
missiles he still possessed and began to talk sporadically with Langley
about intelligence operations against bin Laden.

Schroen met Massoud again in the spring of 1997 at his new headquarters
in Taloqan, in Afghanistan's far north. By then, the Taliban had stormed
into Kabul and seized the capital as Massoud withdrew. Looking to win
American favor for his prolonged war against the Taliban and its foreign
Islamic militant allies, Massoud began to buy up Stingers across the
north for the CIA. He also agreed to notify the agency if he got a line
on bin Laden's whereabouts.

A series of clandestine CIA teams carrying electronic intercept
equipment and relatively small amounts of cash -- up to $250,000 per
visit -- began to visit Massoud in the Panjshir Valley. The first formal
group, code-named NALT-1, flew on one of Massoud's helicopters from
Dushanbe to the Panjshir Valley late in 1997.

Three other teams had gone in by the summer of 1999. The electronic
intercept equipment they delivered allowed Massoud to monitor Taliban
battlefield radio transmissions. In exchange the CIA officers asked
Massoud to let them know immediately if his men ever heard accounts on
the Taliban radios indicating that bin Laden or his top lieutenants were
on the move in a particular sector.

Given the doubts about Massoud inside the Clinton administration, the
CIA's push to deepen its partnership with him faced close scrutiny at
the White House. The National Security Council's intelligence policy and
legal offices drafted formal, binding guidance.

Massoud was at war with the Taliban. The United States had declared a
policy of official neutrality toward that war as a co-sponsor of
all-party peace talks, which dragged on inconclusively. Clinton enacted
economic sanctions against the Taliban but was unwilling to fund or arm
Massoud. The White House sought to ensure that the CIA's
counterterrorism mission in the Panjshir Valley concentrated only on bin
Laden. The administration did not want the CIA to use its
intelligence-collection and counterterrorism partnership with Massoud
for a secret, undeclared war against the Taliban.

Clinton told his top national security aides that he was prepared to
work with Massoud on intelligence operations, despite what he saw as a
record of brutality, but he was not ready to arm the Northern Alliance,
participants recalled. The Pentagon and the intelligence community both
provided secret analysis to Clinton arguing that Massoud had all the
weapons he needed from other suppliers, the president recounted later to
colleagues. In any event, Clinton recalled, Massoud would never be able
to defeat the Taliban or govern Afghanistan from Kabul.

At the White House, some national security aides briefed on the CIA's
missions feared that, as with the Salang Highway operation in 1990,
Massoud would just take the CIA's cash and sit on his hands.

In the end, the National Security Council approved written guidance to
authorize intelligence cooperation with Massoud. But the highly
classified documents made clear that the CIA could provide no equipment
or assistance that would, as several officials recalled its thrust,
"fundamentally alter the Afghan battlefield."

Afghans Seize the Moment

A few months after the JAWBREAKER-5 team choppered out, the CIA's
Counterterrorist Center picked up intelligence that bin Laden had
arrived in Derunta Camp, in a jagged valley near the eastern Afghan city
of Jalalabad.

It was a typical bin Laden facility: crude, mainly dirt and rocks, with
a few modest buildings protected by ridges. Massoud's sources reported
that no Afghans were permitted in Derunta, only Arabs. Testimony from al
Qaeda defectors and interrogation of Arab jihadists showed that Derunta
was a graduate school for elite recruits. The Defense Intelligence
Agency had relayed reports that bin Laden's aides might be developing
chemical weapons or poisons there. The White House's Counterterrorism
Security Group, led by Richard Clarke, routed satellites above the camps
for surveillance.

The CIA recruited Afghan agents who traveled or lived in the region, an
area of heavy smuggling and trade and relatively weak Taliban control.
Through their liaison in the Panjshir, CIA officers pushed
intelligence-collection equipment to Massoud's southern lines, near
Jalalabad. Besides radio intercepts, the technology included an optical
device, derived from technology used by offshore spy planes, that could
produce photographic images from a distance of more than 10 miles.
Massoud's men, with help from CIA officers, set up an overlook above
Derunta and tried to watch the place.

The Counterterrorist Center's bin Laden unit relayed a report to Massoud
that bin Laden had arrived in Derunta. Massoud ordered a mission. He
rounded up "a bunch of mules," as a U.S. official who was involved later
put it, and loaded them up with Soviet-designed Katyusha rockets. He
dispatched this small commando team toward the hills above Derunta.

After the team was on its way, Massoud reported his plan to Langley: He
was going to batter bin Laden's camp with rocket fire.

The CIA's lawyers convulsed in alarm. The White House legal rules for
liaison with Massoud had not addressed such pure military operations
against bin Laden. The Massoud partnership was supposed to be about
intelligence collection. Now the CIA had, in effect, provided
intelligence for a rocket attack on Derunta. The CIA was legally
complicit in Massoud's operation, the lawyers feared, and the agency had
no authority to be involved.

The bin Laden unit shot a message to the Panjshir: You've got to recall
the mission.

Massoud's aides replied, in effect, as a U.S. official involved recalled
it: "What do you think this is, the 82nd Airborne? We're on mules.
They're gone." Massoud's team had no radios. They were walking to the
launch site. They would fire their rockets, turn around and walk back.

Langley's officers waited nervously. Some of them muttered sarcastically
about the absurd intersections of U.S. law and secret war they were
expected to manage. Massoud's aides eventually reported back that they
had, in fact, shelled Derunta. But the CIA could pick up no independent
confirmation of the attack or its consequences. The lawyers relaxed and
the incident passed, unpublicized.

Taking On the Taliban

During 2000 Massoud planned an expanding military campaign against the
Taliban and al Qaeda. His strategy was to recruit allies such as the
guerrilla leaders Ismail Khan and Abdurrashid Dostum and seed them as
pockets of rebellion against Taliban rule in northern and western
Afghanistan, where the Taliban was weakest. As these rebel pockets
emerged and stabilized, Massoud explained, he would drive toward them
with his more formal armored militia, trying to link up on roadways,
choking off Taliban-ruled cities and towns.

Once he had more solid footing in the north, Massoud planned to pursue
the same strategy in the Taliban heartland in the south. He hoped to aid
ethnic Pashtun rebels such as Hamid Karzai, a former Afghan deputy
foreign minister from a prominent royal tribal family who had been
forced into exile in Pakistan. By 1999 Karzai had turned against the
Taliban and wanted to lead a rebellion against the militia in its
southern homeland around Kandahar. Massoud dispatched aides to meet with
Karzai and develop these ideas.

In private talks in person and by satellite telephone, Karzai told
Massoud he was ready to slip inside Afghanistan and fight. "Don't move
into Kandahar," Massoud told him, Karzai later recalled. "You must go to
a place where you can hold your base." Massoud invited Karzai to the
north. "He was very wise," Karzai recalled. "I was sort of pushy and
reckless."

A Flying Miracle

To pursue his plans in a serious way, Massoud needed helicopters, trucks
and other vehicles. Some CIA officers working with Massoud wanted to
help him by supplying the mobile equipment, cash, training and weapons
he would need to expand his war against the Taliban and al Qaeda. Yet as
2000 passed, the CIA struggled to maintain the basics of its
intelligence liaison with Massoud.

It was difficult and risky for the agency's officers to reach the
Panjshir Valley. The only practical route was through Tajikistan. From
there CIA teams usually took one of the few rusting, patched-together
Mi-17 transport helicopters the Northern Alliance managed to keep in the
air. On one trip, the Taliban scrambled MiG-21 jets in an effort to
shoot down Massoud's helicopter. If successful, the militia would have
discovered American corpses in the wreckage.

Even on the best days, the choppers would shake and rattle and the cabin
would fill with the smell of fuel. The overland routes were no better.
When a CIA team drove in from Dushanbe, one of its vehicles flipped over
and a veteran officer dislocated his shoulder.

These reports accumulated on the desk of Deputy Director of Operations
James Pavitt, who had overall responsibility for CIA espionage. Pavitt
was a blue-eyed, white-haired former case officer and station chief who
had served in Europe during the Cold War. Like Director George J. Tenet,
who had appointed him, he was a spy manager with a feel for politics.
Pavitt began to ask why CIA officers were taking such huge physical
risks to work with Massoud. Were they getting enough to justify the
possibility of death or injury?

Those opposed to the Panjshir missions argued, as one official recalled
it, "You're sending people to their deaths."

The agency sent out a team of mechanics knowledgeable about Russian
helicopters. When Massoud's men opened up one of the Mi-17s, the
mechanics were stunned: They had patched an engine originally made for a
Hind attack helicopter into the bay of the Mi-17 transport. It was a
flying miracle.

Afterward Tenet signed off on a compromise: The CIA would secretly buy
its own airworthy Mi-17 helicopter, maintain it properly in Tashkent,
Uzbekistan, and use CIA pilots to fly clandestine teams into the Panjshir.

But the helicopter issue was a symptom of a larger problem. By the late
summer of 2000, the CIA's liaison with Massoud was fraying on both sides.

Frustrated by daunting geography and unable to win support for Massoud
in Cabinet debates, the CIA's officers felt stifled. For their part,
Massoud's aides had hoped their work with the agency would lead to
clearer recognition of Afghanistan's plight in Washington and perhaps
covert military aid. They could see no evidence that this was happening.

Instead they were badgered repeatedly about mounting a "Hollywood
operation," as one of Massoud's intelligence aides put it, to capture
bin Laden alive. The aide likened the mission urged on them by the CIA
to a game of chess in which they would have to capture the king without
touching any other piece on the board.

Massoud's men asked their CIA counterparts, as this intelligence aide
recalled it: "Is there any policy in the government of the American
states to help Afghanistan if the people of Afghanistan help you get rid
of your most wanted man?"

Disappointments for Massoud

After the terrorist bombing of the USS Cole in October 2000, in which 17
sailors were killed at Aden, Yemen, the CIA's Panjshir teams tried to
revive their plan to supply Massoud with more extensive and more lethal
aid. CIA officers sat down at Langley in November and drew up a specific
list of what Massoud needed. In addition to more cash -- to bribe
commanders and to counteract a Taliban treasury swollen with Arab money
-- Massoud needed trucks, helicopters, light arms, ammunition, uniforms,
food and maybe some mortars and artillery. He did not need combat
aircraft. Tanks were not a priority.

The list of covert supplies they proposed for Massoud would cost between
$50 million and $150 million, depending on how aggressive the White
House wanted to be.

Under the plan, the CIA would establish a permanent base with Massoud in
the Panjshir Valley. Rich, the bin Laden unit chief at the
Counterterrorist Center, argued that the agency's officers had to be
down around the campfire constantly with Massoud's men.

The CIA wanted to overcome the confusion and mutual mistrust that had
developed with Massoud over operations designed to capture or kill bin
Laden. The plan envisioned that CIA officers would go directly into
action alongside the Northern Alliance if they developed strong
intelligence about bin Laden's whereabouts. There would be no more
embarrassments like the mission against Derunta.

In the late autumn, Clarke sent a memo outlining the CIA's proposal to
Berger, Clinton's national security adviser. But they were worse than
lame ducks now at the White House. The November presidential election
had deadlocked; White House aides were enduring the strangest
post-election transition in a century just as the CIA's paper landed on
their desks.

The word went back to the Counterterrorist Center: There would be no new
covert action program for Massoud.

As the Bush administration took office early in 2001, Massoud retained a
Washington lobbyist. He wrote a letter to Vice President Cheney urging
the new administration to reexamine its policy toward Afghanistan. He
told his advisers he knew he could not defeat the Taliban on the
battlefield as long as the ruling militia was funded by bin Laden and
reinforced from Pakistan. He sought to build up a new political and
military coalition within Afghanistan to squeeze the Taliban and break
its grip on ordinary Afghans. For this, sooner or later, he told
visitors, he would require the support of the United States.

His CIA liaison had slackened, but his intelligence aides still spoke
and exchanged messages frequently with Langley. That spring they passed
word that Massoud had been invited to France to address the European
Parliament.

Gary Schroen and Rich flew to Paris to meet with Massoud. They wanted to
reassure him that even though the pace of their visits had slowed
because of the policy gridlock in Washington, the CIA still intended to
keep up its regular installment payments of several hundred thousand
dollars as part of their intelligence-sharing arrangements. They also
wanted to know how Massoud felt about his military position.

Massoud told them that he thought he could defend his lines in the
northeast of Afghanistan, but that was about all. The United States had
to do something, Massoud told the CIA officers quietly, or eventually he
was going to crumble.

"If President Bush doesn't help us," Massoud told reporters in
Strasbourg a few days later, "then these terrorists will damage the
United States and Europe very soon{ndash}and it will be too late."

A Fatal Blow

Early in September 2001, Massoud's intelligence service transmitted a
routine classified report to the CIA's Counterterrorist Center about two
Arab television journalists who had crossed Northern Alliance lines from
Kabul.

The intelligence-sharing between Massoud and the CIA concentrated mainly
on Arabs and foreigners in Afghanistan. In this case officers in the bin
Laden unit at the Counterterrorist Center took note of the movement of
the two Arab journalists. It did not seem of exceptional interest.

Members of the Bush Cabinet met at the White House on Sept. 4. Before
them was a draft copy of a National Security Presidential Directive, a
classified memo outlining a new U.S. policy toward al Qaeda, Afghanistan
and Massoud.

It had been many months in the drafting. The Bush administration's
senior national security team had not begun to focus on al Qaeda until
April, about three months after taking office. They did not forge a
policy approach until July. Then they took still more weeks to schedule
a meeting to ratify their plans.

Among other things, the draft document revived almost in its entirety
the CIA plan to aid Massoud that had been forwarded to the lame-duck
Clinton White House -- and rejected -- nine months earlier. The stated
goal of the draft was to eliminate bin Laden and his organization. The
plan called for the CIA to supply Massoud with a large but undetermined
sum for covert action to support his war against the Taliban, as well as
trucks, uniforms, ammunition, mortars, helicopters and other equipment.
The Bush Cabinet approved this part of the draft document.

Other aspects of the Bush administration's al Qaeda policy, such as its
approach to the use of armed Predator surveillance drones for the hunt,
remained unresolved after the Sept. 4 debate. But on Massoud, the CIA
was told that it could at least start the paperwork for a new covert
policy -- the first in a decade that sought to influence the course of
the Afghan war.

In the Panjshir Valley, unaware of these developments, Massoud read
Persian poetry in his bungalow in the early hours of Sept. 9. Later that
morning he finally decided to grant an interview to the two Arab
journalists visiting from Kabul.

As one of them set up a television camera, the other read aloud a list
of questions he intended to ask. About half of them concerned bin Laden.

A bomb secretly packed in the television equipment ripped the
cameraman's body apart. It shattered the room's windows, seared the
walls in flame and tore Massoud's chest with shrapnel.

Hours later, after Massoud had been evacuated to Tajikistan, his
intelligence aide Amrullah Saleh called the CIA's Counterterrorist
Center. He spoke to Rich, the bin Laden unit chief. Saleh was sobbing
and heaving between sentences as he explained what had happened.

"Where's Massoud?" the CIA officer asked.

"He's in the refrigerator," said Saleh, searching for the English word
for morgue.

Massoud was dead, but members of his inner circle had barely absorbed
the news. They were all in shock. They were also trying to strategize in
a hurry. They had already put out a false story claiming that Massoud
had only been wounded. Meanwhile, Saleh told the Counterterrorist
Center, the suddenly leaderless Northern Alliance needed the CIA's help
as it prepared to confront al Qaeda and the Taliban.

On the morning of Sept. 10, the CIA's daily classified briefings to
Bush, his Cabinet and other policymakers reported on Massoud's death and
analyzed the consequences for the United States' covert war against al
Qaeda.

Officers in the Counterterrorist Center, still hopeful that they could
maintain a foothold in northern Afghanistan to attack bin Laden, called
frantically around Washington to find a way to aid the rump Northern
Alliance before it was eliminated.

Massoud's advisers and lobbyists, playing for time, tried to promote
speculation that Massoud might still be alive. But privately, as Sept.
10 wore on, phone call by phone call, many of the Afghans closest to the
commander began to learn that he was gone.

Karzai, who was in Pakistan when his brother reached him, had spoken to
Massoud a few days earlier. He was considering a plan to fly into
Massoud's territory, work his way south and open an armed rebellion
against the Taliban -- with or without U.S. support.

Karzai's brother said it was confirmed: Ahmed Shah Massoud was dead.

Karzai reacted in a single, brief sentence, as his brother recalled it:
"What an unlucky country."

Staff writer Griff Witte contributed to this report.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp...nguage=printer

No SPAM wrote:
Vince Brannigan wrote:

Bush: 'We Found' Banned Weapons
President Cites Trailers in Iraq as Proof


So we have problems with our intelligence being spotty. Oh really?


its not a question of being "spotty"

We have had every since the US Congress Church Commission in the
mid-1970s exposed so many CIA employees and their local agents and spies
and gutted the US' HUMINT capability worldwide. Every since very few
people would hazard working with us because they never knew when
Congress might betray them. And Congress passing asinine regulations
that the CIA could never, ever deal with anyone who had possibly done
anything wrong. The US Congress has placed such restrictions on the CIA
over the past 3 decades it's a miracle they ever got anything.

So the CIA concentrated on "national technical means" because they
couldn't concentrate on HUMINT. When you're counting USSR missiles &
tanks, you're OK. When you're trying to find and stop terrorists, you
need HUMINT.

Excellent article snipped


The CIA's lawyers convulsed in alarm. The White House legal rules for
liaison with Massoud had not addressed such pure military operations
against bin Laden. The Massoud partnership was supposed to be about
intelligence collection. Now the CIA had, in effect, provided
intelligence for a rocket attack on Derunta. The CIA was legally
complicit in Massoud's operation, the lawyers feared, and the agency had
no authority to be involved.


the issue here is not intelligence, but an unauthorized cia backed
military operation which is a different matter. Maasoud was killed
becasue his "intelligence" was not very good either.

Vince