These Five Would be Heroes in the US if They Had Worked for the CIA

The New York Times published an article on Thursday, July 17th 2003 that goes to the very core of Cubas defense of necessity in seeking information on planned attacks against the island.

In describing the lack of intelligence in discovering the September 11th atrocities before the attacks took place, the article bemoans the fact that intelligence within al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan was almost nil.

An aggressive intelligence gathering operation was in progress, we are told by CIA Director George Tenet. So the United States has ongoing intelligence operations to defend itself? Of course it has. And so does Cuba. Five Cubans who defended their country by infiltrating terrorist groups that constantly attack it from Florida are imprisoned by Washington for doing just this.

The United States was doing exactly the same by attempting to infiltrate terrorist groups in Afghanistan. So the US can use its intelligence network to prevent attacks but Cuba cannot? The double standard relating to Cuba is once again glaringly apparent.

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NY TIMES


July 17, 2003



Lack of Pre-9/11 Sources to Be Cited as Intelligence Failure



By DAVID JOHNSTON





WASHINGTON, July 16 — American intelligence agencies failed to obtain reliable human sources inside the Afghanistan training camps run by Al Qaeda before the September 2001 attacks, according to government officials who have read an unreleased Congressional report on intelligence lapses in the months before the hijackings.



The absence of such sources left counterterrorism officials largely blind to Osama bin Laden's specific intentions before the attacks and contributed to what the joint intelligence committees concluded in their report was a lack of knowledge about Al Qaeda even as the agencies for years collected information that showed the terror network hoped to strike inside United States.



The failure of human intelligence is a new finding from a report that, according to some people who have read it, will provide many important new insights into the activities of American intelligence agencies before the attacks. Other officials, including some from intelligence agencies criticized in the report, said it would shed little new light on the events leading up to the attacks.



The Central Intelligence Agency has long disputed having had problems obtaining high quality human intelligence in Afghanistan. Asked to comment on the report's findings, a C.I.A. spokesman referred to testimony by George J. Tenet, the agency's director, last Oct. 17. Mr. Tenet said the agency put in place in 1999 an intelligence collection program against Mr. bin Laden. The operation included "a blend of aggressive human source collection — both unilateral and with foreign partners — and technical collection." The result, Mr. Tenet said, was "a large stable of assets."



The nearly 900-page joint committee report is scheduled to be made public on July 24 after months of delays caused by disagreements over how much of it could be declassified. The report is based on a lengthy inquiry that included nine public hearings and 13 closed sessions conducted last year by a joint panel of the House and Senate intelligence committees.



The report, which has been sent to the government's printing office, is the product of months of sometimes rancorous negotiations between the committee's staff, the Bush administration and intelligence agencies cited in the reports, among them the C.I.A., the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the National Security Agency.



FULL TEXT: http://www.nytimes.com