CIA fails in a time of crisis

The war has ended, yet soldiers are dying. Peace has been negotiated, yet violence continues. Terrorism is being fought, yet terrorists still wield their worst weapon: fear. And through this time of crisis, the CIA and other intelligence agencies have generated too much static that muddles their findings regarding national security.

Many of the CIA's beliefs about how al-Qaeda obtained the necessary funding for attacks turned out to be groundless. The 9/11 Commission rejected a common falsehood that Saudi Arabian government officials provided the terrorist group with funding. They dismissed the CIA's claim that al-Qaeda garnered funding by trafficking diamonds from African states engaged in civil wars. Most importantly, the Commission concluded that Iraq and al-Qaeda did not join forces in attacks against the United States. In one of the Commission's interim staff reports, investigators wrote that Osama bin Laden had not even directly funded al-Qaeda, which instead "relied primarily on a fundraising network developed over time," according to the Commission report.

Since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Department of Homeland Security has issued numerous warnings of imminent attacks based on alleged intelligence, none of which actually happened. It was not indefinite, evasive CIA-issued statements that deterred al-Qaeda from implementing any plans. When police think a robbery is about to happen, but don't offer community members details of where or when, the likelihood is that increased generalized security will not stop the crime. Similarly, the administration's duty is to reveal the specifics of any threats to the public, not just general warnings that will do nothing to stop specific attacks.

Contrary to warning Americans, repeated warnings of terror attacks do scant more than scare them, especially considering the ominous lack of details provided. Following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the administration and the Department of Homeland Security established a five-color-coded terror alert system. Since the system's establishment, the Department has raised the alert to orange, the second-highest level, five times, but each time, the warnings proved pointless. While it is important to stay alert for possible threats, constantly frightening the public only means that Americans could be indifferent when there really is a terrorist threat. The situation has become an unfortunate recurrence of the classic "boy who cried wolf" scenario, with infinitely more dire consequences.

President Bush justified going to war in Iraq based on intelligence provided to him by the CIA – intelligence that has recently been revealed as faulty. The supposedly best intelligence-gathering force in the international community managed to dream up hordes of weapons of mass destruction (WMDs) in Iraq that didn't actually exist. The CIA has had a history of failures in detection of WMDs. In the past, the CIA underestimated the progress of nuclear weapons programs in the Soviet Union, Communist China, India and Pakistan.

In fact, according to the U.S. Senate's Select Committee on Intelligence, the CIA based its assessment of Iraq's biological weapons almost exclusively on information provided by one individual, code-named "Curve Ball," and the only American to meet him thought he was an alcoholic. According to The Washington Post, information in a 2002 assessment claiming that there was a 50 percent chance that Iraq possessed the smallpox virus came entirely from a single defector in 2000. The Senate panel also revealed that the CIA wasted months examining documents related to Iraq's attempts to procure uranium in Niger that turned out to be forgeries. Iraq has not boosted the CIA's sorry record.

While CIA officials may assert that they did not assume a connection between Iraq and al-Qaeda-sponsored attacks, the agency never took a step towards discounting such rumors either. Officials allowed the administration to parade the myth around indefinitely. Vice President Dick Cheney continued to endorse such statements long after the Commission denounced the possibility of a working relationship between Iraq and the terrorist organization, and neither the CIA nor FBI nor any other intelligence agency did anything to stop him. Instead, they allowed the public to continue to believe the war in Iraq was justified by such false allegations.

Rather than provide intelligence to help the American people, the CIA has repeatedly provided faulty intelligence that helps only the Bush administration. During and before President Bush's "war on terror," United States intelligence missed out on countless pieces of evidence that could have saved thousands of American lives in Iraq and on 9/11. Although the 9/11 Commission has suggested appointing a Cabinet-level intelligence czar to overlook operations of all 15 U.S. intelligence agencies, a move in that direction will just add another level of bureaucracy to an already dysfunctional system. The government is currently spending more than $35 billion on the CIA, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency and other secret intelligence agencies. The intelligence community should start stepping up its performance and delivering on its promises.