Clinton Lied, Bin Laden Didn't Die

[Ishmael]

You are correct. I am sorry President Clinton. I know you've never tried harder at anything than you did to keep us safe.



And to this day, he keeps pointing out the wrong trail. Jimmy. Not every broken twig leads to a trail. Please get your ear off the ground...

You'll feel the heavy (healthy) horse long before you ever see it.

*chuckle* I'm not excusing Clinton for his fuck ups. I'm just not going to blame him for the emasculation of the CIA.

Ishmael

 

[Cap’n AMatrixca]

Really?

He built a much more effective wall than out last two Congresses have been capable of...

 

[Ishmael]

Really?

He built a much more effective wall than out last two Congresses have been capable of...

You mean Gorelick? That was evolutionary. Yeah, her little 'reading' didn't help. But I'm in no way convinced that anything would have happened to stop 9-11 even if that wall wasn't there. There is just no hard evidence to support that notion.

Ishmael

 

[Cap’n AMatrixca]

You cannot arrest a criminal until he has committed a crime.

If hating America is a crime, our military bases would be re-education camps.

Nothing was going to stop that attack; nothing will stop the next one. The more people involved in any endeavor, the dumber the endeavor gets...

 

[Lost Cause]

The worst thing we did was give OBL celebrity status making him think he was the most important facet to the movement for his new crusades.

If we treated him in a minimal role from the start we could have taken him whenever we wanted.

That action has come and gone so we should secure the areas we're in, and begin low level SOG ops to kill the chain of command anywhere it's found irregardless of civilian supporter casualties.

You have to meet the enemy on terms they understand and have no doubt of your resolve.

Exhibit A: 1985 Lebanon- Soviet embassy had several of its personnel taken hostage by terrorists. they demanded that Syria stop its efforts to push Palestinians that gave Yasser Arafat support out of Lebanon. The demands were initially agreed by the Soviets who were trying to prevent hostage casualties. The terrorists however, later broke several of their agreements.

Spetsnaz operatives moved in and kidnapped four of the terrorists. They then delivered one of the terrorists decapitated heads in a plastic bag back to the terrorists at the embassy, with a note telling them that soon another head would follow. In effect the Spetsnaz had reversed the tables.
Very soon after this, all of the hostages were released, and the terrorists surrendered.

 

[Cap’n AMatrixca]

Hey, the Muslim Brotherhood had already taken over a Syrian town...

Assad simply surrounded the town and made like Ghengis Khan...






Senator Kerry has no clue.

 

[busybody..]

But I do want to take issue with on thought that you're throwing out. It wasn't Clinton that gutted the CIA. It was Sen Frank Church and the Carter administration. Every president since then has been saddled with that albatross.

Ishmael

You forgot

'Torricelli Principle' ties CIA agents' hands
Star-Ledger ^ | 9/13/01 | Paul Mulshine


Posted on 09/13/2001 3:09:04 PM PDT by Liz


A lot of people are blaming the CIA for failing to penetrate whatever terrorist group coordinated Tuesday's attacks. But how can the CIA penetrate terrorist groups when its agents are prohibited from employing terrorists as sources?

That may sound absurd, but it's the current CIA policy. It was implemented in 1996 by the Clinton administration thanks to the urgings of our own Bob Torricelli, then a representative and then a senator.(WHO RESIGNED DUE TO MASSIVE CORRUPTION) The so-called "Torricelli Principle" was implemented by John Deutch, then the CIA director, after Torricelli got involved with a conspiracy theory regarding the CIA's activities in Guatemala.

The conspiracy theory concerned the CIA's supposed illegal funding of the Guatemalan army in its fight against guerrilla groups. As it turned out, the CIA wasn't funding the Guatemalans. It was simply paying a Guatemalan officer for information on drug smuggling. But the conspiracy buffs managed to convince Torricelli to buy their theory about the back-channel funding and the informant's role in killing an American citizen.

Torricelli released the colonel's name, though it was highly classified, and held a press conference at which he said the CIA "continued financial payments to him and did nothing to bring him to justice, although they knew he killed an American."

In fact, he hadn't killed an American. The killers had already been caught and sentenced long before Torricelli got involved. And there was no illegal effort to fund the Guatemalan army, as a later report by a congressional panel showed.

But that didn't stop the Clinton people from implementing a rule banning CIA agents from employing any sources who may have done anything illegal. This is like telling FBI agents they must infiltrate the Mafia without talking to any mafiosos.

The restriction had a negative effect on CIA morale and on spy operations, according to James Woolsey, the CIA director who preceded Deutch. Just last week Woolsey blasted the Torricelli Principle before a Senate panel on bio-terrorism.

"These rules make absolutely no sense with respect to terrorist groups because the only people who are in terrorist groups are people who want to be terrorists," Woolsey testified. "That means they have a background in violence and human rights violations.

"If you make it difficult for a CIA case officer in, say, Beirut, to recruit spies with this sort of background, he'll be able to do a dandy job for you, telling you what's going on inside, for example, the churches and the chambers of commerce of Beirut, but we don't really care what's going on there. He'll have no idea, however, what's going on inside Hezbollah."

Woolsey has also noted that no other country restricts its intelligence services to what has been lampooned as "politically correct spying."

Gary Richter, a physicist who works on anti-terrorism strategies for Sandia National Laboratories in Livermore, Calif., notes that in many cases virtually every member of a terrorist group will be guilty of some sort of illicit activity that would preclude him from being recruited as a CIA source.

"Members of these organizations are by their very nature unsavory characters," Richter told me. "We have known for some time there was a risk of this, but now that the shock has hit us, we may be willing to put up with more unsavory types."

Richter said most CIA agents are patriotic people who have taken low-paying jobs. Many agents feel that the principle could get them fined or jailed for pursuing terrorists too zealously.

"Look at it from the point of view of the people who are involved in these types of operations," he said. "It has a chilling effect on your work if you feel you are going to be prosecuted for doing your job. It's hard to describe from an insider's perspective just how chilling an effect it can have on you. What if the source is someone who was involved in something you didn't know about? Should you have known of it?"

Richter noted that U.S. intelligence has headed off many terrorist attacks -- "more than you're aware of" -- but that the Bush administration needs to get rid of the Torricelli Principle if it intends to get serious about terrorism. That's likely to happen.

The National Commission on Terrorism last year proposed scrapping the Torricelli principle. The rule had its basis in a left-wing conspiracy theory picked up by an ambitious congressman. Conspiracy theories may be fun, but some conspiracies are real.

 

[unregistered]

 

[busybody..]

I'd look to Carter and Stansfield Turner, they fired thousands of humit assets in favor of emerging technology, we've felt it ever since.

the you have to blame RR and the first Bush as well for NOT restoring them

 

[unregistered]

 

[busybody..]

I dont see the current Bush making the CIA better and stronger

Do you?

I dont even know if the CIA is worth saving, seeing as how they have

1- Screwed up virtually everything

2- Been wrong the past 2 decades or so on almost everything

3- Just seem to be in the business of

a) leaking stories

b) CYA!

 

[Lord Jupiter]

yes he is

and

she is as well

a great couple

yet

so many love em

And it's THAT I do not understand - are we blind to the Clintons?

 

[busybody..]

60% are not

40% are

 

[Lord Jupiter]

I dont see the current Bush making the CIA better and stronger

Do you?

I dont even know if the CIA is worth saving, seeing as how they have

1- Screwed up virtually everything

2- Been wrong the past 2 decades or so on almost everything

3- Just seem to be in the business of

a) leaking stories

b) CYA!

Is it possible that this is all we hear about? I often wonder what the "Rest of the story" is.

 

[busybody..]

I dont see the current Bush making the CIA better and stronger

Do you?

I dont even know if the CIA is worth saving, seeing as how they have

1- Screwed up virtually everything

2- Been wrong the past 2 decades or so on almost everything

3- Just seem to be in the business of

a) leaking stories

b) CYA!

By now you all know that an internal investigation at the CIA has decided that the Agency under George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence during the rise and full expression of al Qaeda, failed to develop and execute a strategy for dealing with Islamist terrorism. Stratfor attributes this failing more to the institution than to any individual, and fingers, in particular, the CIA's fetish for process:


The most important criticism, of course, is the lack of a CIA strategy for combating terrorism. Over the years, the CIA had become driven by process. Obviously process is an important aid in achieving goals -- but in some organizations, and it would appear in the CIA, process stops being a tool and becomes an end in itself. What that means, in practical terms, is that getting the wrong answer became tolerable at the CIA, so long as the process was followed. Getting the right answer was unacceptable if it did not follow the process. One obvious problem is that gut insights do not map well to processes, but it is frequently those insights that get you where you need to go in intelligence.

The problem being raised here is the tension between process and strategy. Process is designed to serve as a template for recurring events -- so the same thing is done the same way each time. You can't generate a strategy via a process. Strategy, the broad approach to a problem, doesn't turn into a process because -- at least in intelligence -- every case is so different. Using the same process to mount an intelligence operation against the Soviet Union and to deal with al Qaeda makes little sense.

The CIA under George Tenet didn't search for a strategy for defeating al Qaeda. It didn't take apart al Qaeda, identify its weak point and systematically attack it. Rather it tried to create a process for dealing with terrorism. In trying to build a replicable, definable process, it failed to understand its enemy and therefore never created a strategy.

Strategy is to process as Clausewitz is to a PowerPoint. It is not clear whether the U.S. intelligence community or the military has learned this lesson. Understanding the nature of strategy is difficult, disorderly and can't be reduced to three bullet points. Process is easier, orderly and can be briefed in 15-minute sessions. Tenet rejected the charges in the inspector general's report. He had built sophisticated processes. But as the report said, he never built a strategy.

That sounds right to me, in part because it precisely reflects my experience in business. The Sarbanes-Oxley law and other contemporary influences have essentially required American business to elevate the importance of process in virtually everything it does. While the smart people who promote the rule of process say that it ought not interfere with creativity or the taking of risk, the ugly truth is that very few employees are capable of slavish devotion to process, on the one hand, and inspired creativity within the process, on the other. The result is that our large companies are losing the benefit of ineffable intuition and sheer gut judgment at any level below the very top. While I therefore passionately believe that the obsession with process is more costly for businesses than most people yet admit or even understand, I can see how it would be devestating to the development and exploitation of counterterrorism assets.

 

[unregistered]

 

[landslider2000]

Bill Clinton told a lie?

Wow, there's a shocker.

 

[busybody..]

what is more shocking is that EVERYONE KNOWS he lies

virtually about EVERYTHING

yet he remains in many circles a GO TO GUY!

says alot about values of the DemonDumz

 

[Younginlondon]

Whats even more shocking is that even though this is the 'General Board', this is LITEROTICA.COM and this is a thread about Clinton and Bin Laden. Now take 5, think about it....