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more on Goss out
From: David Farber <dave () farber net>
Date: Mon, 8 May 2006 11:19:04 -0400
Begin forwarded message: From: "Hitchens, Ralph" <Ralph.Hitchens () hq doe gov> Date: May 8, 2006 9:42:33 AM EDT To: dave () farber net Subject: RE: [IP] more on Goss out Tom Fairlie wrote:
When exactly did the CIA have this "failure"?Was it on 9/11? No, [...] Everyone in the intelligence community seemed
to know
that such an attack was possible, and perhaps even probable. I don't
see any failure here. I was in the intelligence community at the time, and (as I stated on IP last year) it's not true that "everyone in the intelligence community seemed to know that such an attack was possible, even probable." There was no hint of this in the declassified PDB of August 6th, and after 9/11 nobody -- nobody! -- in the IC stepped forward to take credit for warning policymakers that something like this might happen. Gordon Thomassen informed me last year about an airliner hijacking suicide threat to the 2001 G-8 summit meeting in Italy, and also about al-Qaeda having considered suicide hijackings back in the 1990s, but if these indicators were taken seriously within the IC and related to Bin Laden's threats to carry out attacks in the US, nothing has come out about it in the aftermath of 9/11. So yes, it was an "intelligence failure." Concerning Goss's potential replacement, let me state my belief that while Gen. Hayden did indeed famously misconstrue the Fourth Amendment recently, he is nevertheless respected within the intelligence community as a very competent, honest and forthright military intelligence technocrat. Whether he's the right man to head up the CIA is certainly debatable, but it's worth noting that one of his NSA predecessors, Admiral William Studeman, served as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence back in the 1990s, and was well-regarded in that job. Ralph Hitchens ------------------------------------- You are subscribed as lists-ip () insecure org To manage your subscription, go to http://v2.listbox.com/member/?listname=ip Archives at: http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/
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