Breakdown: How America's Intellience Failures Led to September 11

Human Events, Nov 18, 2002 by Roberts, James C

Breakdown: How America's Intelligence Failures Led to September 11

By Bill Gertz

Regnery

273 pages, $27.95

Whereas Reagan's War describes how Ronald Reagan correctly assessed the nature of the Soviet menace and put in place comprehensive plan to eliminate it, Breakdown spells out how U.S. authorities-- from the White House, to Congress, to the CIA and FBI-failed to understand the' gravity of the terrorist threat posed by Osama bin Laden and to take steps to counter that threat.

Written by Bill Gertz, the Washington Times' widely respected Pentagon correspondent, Breakdown is a devastating expose of ineptitude and willful ignorance on a massive scale.

Still hobbled by "reform-fist" restrictions imposed by a runaway liberal Congress in the 1970s, the FBI, CIA and National Security Agency (NSA) lost the ability to conduct effective surveillance of enemy forces, either inside or outside the United States. Moreover, the CIA, under a Clinton-appointed director, became ensnared in hiring quotas and other politically correct agendas instead of trying to recruit the best experts available to build a professional intelligence agency.

Gertz describes in compelling fashion the Clinton Administration's obstinate refusal to respond to terrorist acts of the early 1990s by improving our intelligence agencies and ordering effective countermeasures. The consequences of this neglect were seen on September 11. As Gertz makes clear, Bill Clinton is most culpable for this catastrophe, but there is plenty of blame to go around.