Word: bin
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...frightening days after Sept. 11 the nation didn't know what was in the CIA's files about terrorist plots to hijack a plane and fly it into the Eiffel Tower. Or about the secret memos that had been rocketing back and forth between intelligence agencies with titles like "Bin Laden Planning High-Profile Attacks" and "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly." Or that CIA chief George Tenet looked around in the summer of 2001 and saw that "the system was blinking red." Or that the FBI's chief of counterterrorism said he wished he had 500 analysts tracking the army...
...slow to report, if not detect, the jihadist army that was forming on the horizon in the 1990s. The commission reported that though al-Qaeda was formed in 1988, the CIA "did not describe" the organization comprehensively on paper until 1999. For years the agency believed that bin Laden was a financier rather than an engineer of terrorism--even after it received what a commission report called "new information revealing that bin Laden headed his own terrorist organization, with its own targeting agenda and operational commanders." And though the CIA drafted "thousands" of reports on aspects of al-Qaeda...
...agency was told that hijacker Khalid al-Midhar had obtained a U.S. visa and the time the CIA put his name and that of his traveling companion, also a hijacker, on a government watch list. Tenet told his top managers in 1998 that the CIA was "at war" with bin Laden, but the word never really filtered down through the agency, much less to other arms of the intelligence community. The CIA had follow-through problems. The German government gave Langley's Counter Terror Center a tip in 1999 about a terrorist suspect named Marwan, along with a phone number...
...come out swinging. Tenet acknowledged that the CIA "made mistakes" and warned that it would take an additional five years to rebuild the clandestine service. In what is perhaps the closest anyone in the Bush Administration has come to a formal acknowledgment of responsibility, Tenet said, "We all understood bin Laden's attempt to strike the homeland, but we never translated this knowledge into an effective defense of the country." But Cofer Black, head of the CIA's clandestine service who holds the storied title of director for operations, was unbowed. "I've heard people say this country wasn...
Earlier this month, Bill Clinton returned to Washington to try to convince the 9/11 commission that as President he did what he could to stop Osama bin Laden. Others who have testified before the commission--particularly National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and former counterterrorism official Richard Clarke--did so before a phalanx of reporters and opponents hoping to see them eviscerated on live TV. But like George W. Bush, who will meet with the commission (together with Dick Cheney) at an undisclosed time, Clinton was allowed to appear in private--in a secret, bugproof room called, in a typical Washington...