The American Pundit

The report comes from the CIA itself, admitting that George Tenet, CIA director appointed by President Clinton, had no plan to deal with 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden. Some conclusions by the report:

# U.S. spy agencies, which were overseen by Tenet, lacked a comprehensive strategic plan to counter Osama bin Laden prior to 9/11. The inspector general concluded that Tenet “by virtue of his position, bears ultimate responsibility for the fact that no such strategic plan was ever created.”

# The CIA’s analysis of al-Qaida before Sept. 2001 was lacking. No comprehensive report focusing on bin Laden was written after 1993, and no comprehensive report laying out the threats of 2001 was assembled. “A number of important issues were covered insufficiently or not at all,” the report found.

As Bryan points out, that contradicts what Clinton Secretary of State Madeline Albright testified in front of the 9/11 Commission.

Albright told the 9/11 commission the Clinton administration did everything it could to defeat al-Qaeda and would have killed Osama bin Laden if officials had better intelligence.

“President Clinton and his team did everything we could, everything we could think of, based on the knowledge we had, to protect our people and disrupt and defeat al-Qaeda,” Albright said.

Tenet, having been appointed by Clinton himself, was part of the Clinton team. Now, according to the CIA itself, there was no plan to deal with bin Laden. Albright claims Clinton’s team did “everything (they) could think of” to deal with bin Laden. Apparently, actually having the CIA do a comprehensive report and have a an actual plan to deal with him, wasn’t among the things Clinton’s team thought of doing.

As Bryan points out, the Clinton Administration did succeed in building a wall between law enforcement and intelligence gathering. The CIA concludes:

The summary concludes: “Informing the FBI and good operational followthrough by CIA and FBI might have resulted in surveillance of [the “UBL associates”]. Surveillance, in turn, would have had the potential to yield information on flight training, financing, and links to others who were complicit in the 9/11 attacks.”