9/11: THE SPY AGENCY THAT HAD NO SPIES | 2004-09-11
There was another funny little thing that happened on the way to 9/11. The CIA pointed out that in the Middle East where the 9/11 attack came from and where American troops were sent to fight, they didn't have any spies.
Having accomplished this feat, they got promotions.
You see, Senator Torricelli of New Jersey had gotten legislation passed restricting American intelligence agents from using any contacts that weren't squeaky clean. That is exactly like saying policemen can't use any informants who have a police record.
I have no idea what Yuppie, Old Hippy, Politically Correct fad Torricelli's insanity came out of, but it crippled any attempts to get informer networks going. Any agent who wanted to deal with anybody who wasn't squeaky clean had to give his informant's name and all the particulars to bureaucrats in Washington, DC and get permission.
Since nobody out in the field was certifiably insane, no one did that.
The fact that we had no intelligence at all on the ground was largely the personal responsibility of Senator Torricelli and his Yuppie fad. This was mentioned once or twice and then totally forgotten.
I haven't forgotten. It helped get three thousand Americans killed in the Twin Towers and many more in the field later on.
This assault on the CIA hit its peak in the 1970s with the hearings held by Senator Church of Idaho. So Jimmy Carter's CIA Director, Stansfield Turner, decided to move from dirty old informants to high tech.
Turner had been an admiral, so Reagan and Bush and Clinton and the second Bush and all the guys who later let 9/11 happen thought he was great. So this business of going from grubby old informants to high tech went right on.
After 9/11, everybody suddenly discovered that the CIA, America's spy agency, had no spies on the ground.
Isn't that cute?
If you don't think that's cute, then you may get mad about it.
And getting mad about it would be "playing the blame game," right?