FORMER SPY AND INTELLIGENCE REFORM AUTHOR COMMENTS ON THE 9-11 REPORT: CONGRESS STILL DOESN’T GET IT—ANOTHER 5,000 BODY BAGS AWAIT
Washington, D.C., July 25/PRNEWSWIRE/ -- Robert David Steele, a 25-year veteran of the U.S. national security community, founder of OSS.NET, and author or editor of three seminal works on intelligence reform, commented today on the 9-11 report finally released to the public: “Congress still doesn’t get it—another 5,000 body bags await.”
Steele, who together with another dozen of experienced intelligence officers has written books and been a strong advocate for intelligence reform since long before 9-11, had this to say about the public report: “It’s a good effort, with good staff direction, but it barely scratches the surface. The report does not address the total failure of both the Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency in the arena of open source intelligence (OSINT, an acronym that is not in the Report Glossary); and the report fails to provide a road-map for substantive intelligence reform and inter-agency operations reform.”
“The report neglects continuing failures in the aftermath of 9-11. The fact is that neither Congress nor the White House are taking terrorism—or any other global threat issue including infectious disease—seriously. The American people need to understand that every neighborhood in America is threatened by what takes place overseas, and they need to elect Senators and Representatives and Governors that ‘get it’.”
“The U.S. is over-invested in a heavy metal military that cannot make peace in Afghanistan or Iraq, and it is over-invested in secret technical satellites that cannot collect the ground truth that we need, and whose collected noise in hundreds of languages cannot even be processed. This Administration has also neglected the intelligence and counterintelligence shortfalls that exist at the state and local level—nothing in the current budget makes America any safe within the homeland.”
“If Congress and the President fail to establish a multi-jurisdictional approach to national security reform—special legislation with a special committee that brings together the ranking members for Appropriations, Armed Services, Commerce, Foreign Affairs, Government Operations, Judiciary, and—in a supporting role—Intelligence—then America will continue to be undefendable and we will see several more catastrophic attacks within the homeland—easily thousands of dead, but this time in California, Illinois, and Kansas.”
SOURCE: OSS.NET
-0- 07/25/2003
/CONTACT: Robert Steele
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