Originally posted by EternalOne:

Quote:

the abysmal way that intel was gathered and handled by the Clinton Administration



The intel gathering was going on just fine during that period -- unfortunately the War on Terror was as popular then as it is now.



I'm going to have to bite back on that one. The CIA budget was strapped, head-count was gutted, HumInt was at an all-time low, etc., etc....the list is practically endless in the '90s. I'm not saying that our intelligence agencies were asleep at the wheel, but that the Executive Branch was of the absolutely mistaken perception that a bank of computers were more valuable than a field agent developing assets and gathering firsthand intel in the back-alleys of Baghdad, Beirut, Kabul, etc. They tried putting things on "autopilot" to a degree...

The Cold War was over so why keep the headcount, right? This was the stated reason of chopping so many warm bodies out of the intelligence community at that time and thinking that satellite feeds mixed in with threat assesment programs and other technical wizardry would counter that loss and it proved to be a complete mess when trying to adjust to the events in the Middle-East and elsewhere.

I also have some marked issues on the attention that OBL in conjunction with Pakistani and Afgani events warranted with Clinton's staff. You guys may have been shooting some top-notch briefs towards the Oval office given the limited resources you had at your disposal, but they were rarely acted on due to "political" reasons...

I'll never knock the rank and file intel folks that bust their asses on a daily basis for this country, but I think that it was a case of too much work and too few hands to properly handle and effectively disseminate it all. Couple that with the way the Clinton administration hobbled intel gathering efforts in terms of resource allocation, funding and ultimately proper attention...and we have the mess that presented itself to the Bush administration early on.

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