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Declassified 9/11 Commission report says Clinton 'wall' did not cause intelligence failures
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Declassified 9/11 Commission report says Clinton “wall” did not cause intelligence failures
A 9/11 Commission report on intelligence sharing—declassified this week—concluded “there was no legal reason why the [9/11 terrorist] information could not have been shared.”
Different parts of the US Government—CIA, NSA, FBI, State Department—had important clues about the 9/11 attacks well in advance, but didn’t share them with intelligence or law enforcement units that could have acted on them.
But Federal agencies didn’t share critical information—and the 9/11 plot became the 9/11 attack.
Nonetheless, bureaucratic confusion and ignorance did keep information on the impending attacks out of the hands of those who could have acted to prevent the attacks.
The 9/11 Commission report details how, for example, NSA’s over-classification of signals intelligence reports and poor understanding of intelligence sharing rules twice prevented CIA and FBI counterterrorism analysts from sharing key intelligence information with FBI agents investigating Khalid al-Mihdhar, a hijacker on the flight that struck the Pentagon.
The report puts the lie to the conservative media canard that Clinton-era neglect of national security help facilitate the 9/11 attacks, specifically, that the “Gorelick Memo,” a 1995 policy notice that spelled out FBI rules on the use of intelligence information during criminal investigations.
After exhaustive study, the 9/11 Commission concluded that the Gorelick Memo did not play a role in 9/11 intelligence lapses--but bureaucratic culture did.
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