Senior intel officer: Al Qaeda will attack US to ensure Bush

posted June 21, 2004
Senior intel officer: Al Qaeda will attack US to ensure Bush win

His new book, others, also highlight intelligence, administration failures in war on terror.

by Tom Regan | csmonitor.com

In the past few months several books have been published that attack the US intelligence community, and the White House, for their alleged mistakes and misstatements about Iraq and the war on terror. Most of these books, the Guardian reports, have been written by "embittered" former officials.

But now, the newspaper reports, a senior US intelligence official is "about to publish a bitter condemnation of America's counter-terrorism policy, arguing that the West is losing the war against Al Qaeda and that an 'avaricious, premeditated, unprovoked' war in Iraq has played into Osama bin Laden's hands." This senior intelligence official, who writes as "Anonymous," also says that "Osama bin Laden may attack the US before the November election to ensure the re-election of President George Bush."

Anonymous, who published an analysis of Al Qaeda last year, called Through Our Enemies' Eyes, thinks it quite possible that another devastating strike against the US could come during the election campaign, not with the intention of changing the administration, as was the case in the Madrid bombing, but of keeping the same one in place. "I'm very sure they can't have a better administration for them than the one they have now," he said. "One way to keep the Republicans in power is to mount an attack that would rally the country around the president."

"Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror" will be released in July. The Guardian notes that the fact that this author has been allowed to publish this work, and yet still remain a senior member of the US intelligence community, may "reflect the increasing frustration of senior intelligence officials at the course the administration has taken."
-----------------------------------

"Anonymous" is not the only writer to put the intelligence community and the administration under a microsope. The New York Times reports that James Bamford, the author of two respected books on American intelligence (The Puzzle Palace and Body of Secrets, both about the National Security Agency), has written a new book called "Pretext for War." (The San Jose Mercury News calls him "one of the most talented but unsung investigative reporters of the past 25 years.")

His book is a "damning portrait" of the intelligence community (which he alleges was not ready to deal with the end of the cold war), as well as a "scathing picture" of neoconservatives in the Bush administration, according to the Times. Mr. Bamford also has harsh words for both President Bill Clinton and President Bush. He alleges that neither man did a very good job at dealing with terrorism before 9/11.

In addition Bamford suggests that the CIA caved to pressure from administration hard-liners. He quotes a CIA case officer who says that in January of 2003, one of the agency's higher-ups called a meeting and said, "You know what - if Bush wants to go to war, it's your job to give him a reason to do so."

Last week, in an oped article for the New York Times, Bamford wrote about the practice of "rent-a-spy," which costs the American taxpayers millions of dollars.

Desperate to fill their contracts, the [private] companies frequently offer to double a federal employee's salary. Because the recruiters have security clearances, they often make their recruiting pitches at the CIA's headquarters in Langley, Virginia. And many of those who do sign on end up going right back to their old office - only now working for a private company. Thus, after spending millions of dollars training people to be clandestine officers, taxpayers are having to pay them twice as much to return as rent-a-spies.

But Bamford's most controversial charges in his new book, according to a review in The Houston Chronicle, involve certain individuals in the US administration, and an idea they once pitched to the government of Israel.

According to Bamford, the basic blueprint for the administration's Middle East policy had been drawn up in the mid-1990s by Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser, three neoconservatives who would be named to influential positions in the Bush administration. Described as a kind of "American privy council" to former Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the three proposed what they called a "Clean Break" plan, which involved getting the United States to pull out of the peace negotiations in order to let "Israel take care of the Palestinians as it saw fit." Under the "Clean Break" plan, Israel would launch preemptive attacks against its major Arab enemies and replace Saddam Hussein with a puppet leader friendly to Israel. Bamford records that Netanyahu wisely rejected the plan but that the Perle group found a more receptive audience for their recommendations inside the Bush administration. The fact that several of the key players most aggressively pushing the Iraqi war had originally outlined it for the benefit of another country raises "the most troubling conflict of interest questions," he writes.
Bamford, however, has also come in for criticism about his decision to divulge the "secret location" used by Vice President Dick Cheney in his new book.

The Los Angeles Times reported last Thursday on more alleged intelligence failures. The paper cites current and former US intelligence officials as saying that two British-recruited Iraqi spies who had tales-to-tell about Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction (their reports were rushed to the White House just before the war) were "never interviewed by the CIA and are now viewed as unreliable."

The Times also says that US intelligence erred in its analysis of high-altitude satellite photos before the war, often mistaking chicken coops for Scud missle silos. The UN team then in Iraq grew so tired of running down these false reports, according to one former UN inspector, that they started to wear T-shirts that read "Ballistic Chicken Farm Inspection Team."

The 9/11 commission is preparing to release a report that many experts say will be a severe indictment of the US intelligence community and the way it operated under the Clinton and Bush administrations before 9/11. The New York Times reports that John F. Lehman, a Republican commission member, said the intelligence community was "dysfunctional" and that the commission would make recommendations for improvements. "They could not distinguish between a bicycle crash and a train wreck," he said.