Customer Reviews

Intelligence Failure: How Clinton's National Security Policy Set the Stage for 9/11

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

Bossie has written a well documented, well organized inclusive chronology of events of massive intelligence/national security emasculation by Clinton. A this is a 'what happened' book, not analysis, opinion or qualitative verbiage. Example: Marvin Cetron, professional futurists, wrote scenarios for Dep of State in 1992 forecasting crashing planes into buildings naming World Trade Center...multiple simultaneous attacks. Marvin is not in 9/11 report. Why listen to Marvin? He is the guy who forecast that Saddam would invade Kuwait...three years before the fact. Thank you Bossie for a complete record. Would be better if jacket cover did NOT have pejorative picture of Clinton on it...Bossie's book is not a personal attack on Clinton...just the facts, Mam, the sad murderous facts.

Rene

This is such an important book, and you should ignore the previous ad hominem reviews in which the writer is attacked rather than his assertions.

Clinton cannot escape blame for endless carelessness in tending to our national security. As President, he never once took the bully pulpit to convince Americans of the danger; had he done so he could have declared war on our enemies, and taken the problem out of the hands of the Justice Department. He could have insisted upon implementation of the CIPRIS project to track foreign students (which would have flagged Mohamed Atta), he would have fully implemented the recommendations of the White House Commission on Airline Safety. He would not have cut the budget of the Department of Defense in order to balance the budget. He would have strenthened the intelligence forces rather than ignoring and weakening them! Reducing the Deficit became such a compulsion with him that he did this on the backs of our military.

He will suffer in history for these mistakes; and if we had a fairer press the details outlined in this book would be known by all.

Thanks to the spineless strategy of the Clinton Administration and its indecisiveness, America was ambushed. September 11 was a wake up call and so is David N. Bossie's new book.

--Major Bob Bevelacqua, FOX News Military Analyst and former U.S. Green Beret

1. This is *not* at all a "conspiracy book." It is an evaluation of Clinton's policies and practices. There is no conspiracy suggested. Just utter mismanagement and blindness.

2. What if Bush Sr. would have beat Clinton in 1992, and then Bush Jr. run four years earlier before getting a second term in 2000? Would anyone simply concentrate on the policies of the previous eight months and forget about the rest? Would anyone claim worrying about the previous eight years was a distraction? How fast was it reasonable for Bush to reverse the previous eight years?

3. It is true that we now all have hindsight, but were Clinton's blindnesses limited to that? Or was there egregious mishandling? It's worth asking. Bossie is unquestionably a partisan, but even mathematicians can name some true benefits from math. Being partisan doesn't rule out the possibility he is right.

4. What pushes this book above and beyond the others is Bossie's insight into the opportunity we lost in 2000 when we intercepted the explosives coming from Canada into Washington state. The material about the millennium bomber is worth the price of the book.

5. I think there is a more threatening question raised by Bossie's research--is the real power in this country in the elected officials, or are they simply scapegoats for ensconced bureacrats who are never held accountable? Bossie didn't say this but I get the feeling the FBI and CIA are largely empires of their own.

A thorough and powerful indictment and a chronicle of all the ways that national secruty policy in the 1990s helped lead to 9/11.

-R. James Woolsey, Director of Central Intelligence, 1993-1995

In response to the previous, many-paragraphed review of the Bossie's book.....which is not a review at all. It is, from beginning, to the very last word, a discrediting and attack on the writer, Bossie. As usual a liberal responds to charges against Clinton with an attack on the charge-leveler....and NOT by responding to the charges themselves. Just answer and rebut the CHARGEs or at least some of the charges made by Bossie with facts and you may earn some respect. Simply smearing someone doesn't really rebut what they say......especially when smearing is the over-used (indeed ONLY-used) strategy of the left. That is, they don't answer the charges - they simply tomahawk the message-bringer. Well, let me, in the spirit of non-hypocrisy, rebut at least one or so of the reviewer's chages. First of all, Citizen's United nor the RNC nor ANY Republican "invented" Willie Horton. Willie Horton was the "invention" of one Al Gore. Yes, it's true - do the research, the first time Wille Horton was ever used in any public political ad was against Dukakis in an ad constructed by Gore.
True that BUSH I used the Willie Horton ad at a later time when running against Dukakis. Truth be known, I fault neither Bush nor Gore for using Willie Horton. Why should I or any American fault a Dukakis opponent for bringing such a HUGE mistake by a political official to light. That mistake, of course being, Dukakis released Horton, a convicted killer, on the furlough program, and Horton then proceeded to commit murder when he was released. This is a huge mistake and shows extremely faulty judgement by Dukakis and it SHOULD have been trumpeted to the public so they would know what kind of liberal-minded politician was running. No, I don't fault Bush or Gore for using Horton. IT was good he was used in ads......I do, however, fault people, like the reviewer, and many others , who have incorrecty claimed Horton was first used by Bush.....or 'invented' by Bossie.
As for the book itself; it is rather well written. Most importantly, it seems to be very well researched. The author provides tedious footnoting and referening to his many references. Moreover, the references are from a wide spectrum of sources - from what could be considered 'left-leaning' to 'right-leaning' sources. Examples are 60 minutes, CBS news and Time to name a few. The book brings many important documented occurences to light and is an important contribution detailing domestic federal intelligence throughout the last decade or so.

Never has a corrective book been as badly needed as Intelligence Failure. This is must reading. It's also a shocker. David N. Bossie tells a story that cannot be found in mainstream newspapers, magazines, or books, but is all too true. It penetrates the cover-up of President Clinton's abysmal neglect of the terrorist menace, the blame for which is now transferred to President Bush.

--Robert D. Novak, Journalist

The reviews submitted clearly show who actually read the book. Take the negative reviews with a grain of salt. This is a book that focuses on the "mismanagement" and shortcomings, all presented with facts without the conspiracy theory hubris you find in other works. It is interesting to note how many times America was actually attacked before 911. An unheeded wake-up call?

In addition to this book you might want to check out the DVD- BLOCKING THE PATH TO 911 & if you can find the original version overseas as I did-purchase the DVD- THE PATH TO 911. The PATH TO 911 was banned in the USA.

"One of the many great ironies of this saga is that the news media portrayed the controversy as evidence of a "right-wing conspiracy" taking over "The Path to 9/11." The reality is that almost the entire management structure of the film was made up of people who were very far left and who were concerned only about the Bush administration objecting to the film. Instead, the Clintonites, the Democrats in congress, the left-wing blogs and the liberal mainstream news media all conspired to perpetrate a fraud on the American people, which resulted in the film being severely edited, censored and banned from public dissemination. Some of the tactics the Left used to destroy this film are beyond hypocritical; they were down-right scary."

"It is very obvious that Disney has taken a dive on their own film because they preferred losing $40 million and throwing their own people (as well as free speech, the truth and the legacy of 9/11) under the bus to the scenario of upsetting the Clintons and the Democratic Party which has threatened ABC's broadcast licences. I urge people (especially Disney shareholders) to contact Disney and ask that the original version of "The Path to 9/11" be released." Excerpts from Ziegler interview: freerepublic. com/focus/ f-news/ 2079842/ posts

1) The book is worth buying for the half that is truthful. Yes, Clinton was responsible for nurturing not only Al Qaeda, but an incompetent intelligence community as well. Woolsey could not get in to see him, Deutch was a raving ego-maniac disdainful of security, and Tenet was first a pandering sychophant and later (under Bush) a world-class intelligence prostitute. Madeline Albright and Tony Lake, however, bear most of the blame--the Department of State has long abdicated its respopnsibility for being the *primary* collector, evaluator, translator, and disseminator of real-world unclassified information in all languages bearing on our national security and foreign policy. On Madeline Albright's watch, not only did State not pay attention to reality, they also actively repressed classified reports from the intelligence community on terrorism emergent. Tony Lake is something else--a well-intentioned individual with no clue about the complexities of the real world (Google for our "ten threats, twelves policies, and eight challengers")--it was only as he was leaving office that he "discovered" the "six fears."

2) The book is also half distortions and mis-representations. This is a hatchet job in advance of the 2006 elections. I am a moderate Republican (and the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction). The dirty little secret of the Bush Administration is that Dick Cheney was given both the terrorism and the intelligence portfolios from day one, and in his arrogance chose to ignore them both despite the fact that the Clinton Administration "woke up" at the end of its term and issues strong warnings. George Bush is also arrogant and ignorant--CIA tried desperately to warn him in person on 6 August 2001 and he dismissed them with a cavalier "OK, you've covered your ass now." Between a mendacious Vice President and an ignorant little bully of a President, America was completely unprotected in the months when intelligence actually had good cause for alarm and tried desperately--as did Richard Clark--to sound the alarm. Cheney chose instead to focus on secret meetings with Enron and Exxon, and to plan the invasion of Iraq, for which he welcomed a terrorism attack as a "pretext for war".

The reality is that the truth can be known, but one needs to search for it. There is no better way to scan the literature than to spend a couple of hours with all my reviews (sadly, Amazon allows us to make lists, but not to sort our reviews, so either use the lists or be patient in going through my reviews. They cover information society, intelligence, emerging threats, strategy and force structure, anti-Americanism, and the negative impact on national security of domestic U.S. politcs).

A few specifics:

1) any book endorsed by Woolsey and Novak, for divergent reasons, cannot be trusted to be objective.

2) The author is oblivious to the many books on intelligence from Allen, Baeur, Berkowitz, Codevilla, Gentry, Goodman, Gerecht, Fialka, Godson, Johnson, Levine, Odom, Riebling, Steele, Treverton, Wiebes, Zegart and more. This is a hatchet job with some nuggets, not a balanced piece of research with a historical perspective. Not a single one of these authors is in the bibliography.

3) The author's most grevious error is to confuse reduced presidential attention with incompetence. Clinton was very competent, it was the U.S. Intelligence Community, like the lightbulb in the psychologists joke ("how many to change a bulb? Irrelevant, the bulb has to want to change"), that chose to ignore General Al Gray, myself, and many others who from 1988 were agitating for improved coverage of terrorism and instability, and improved attention to open sources of information.

4) The author makes the usual mistake of failing to note that CIA and FBI failures were not from lack of funding, but from internal myopia and mis-direction. FBI, for example, redirected money appropriated by Congress for information technology, to pay for more travel by chiefs; CIA cut back on its clandestine service, and relied more heavily of foreign liaison lies, and completely failed to heed the 1999 NIMA Commission Report that demanded attention to sense-making and analytic desktop toolkits.

5) The author provides an unbalanced but useful review of the embassy bombings, Khobar Towers (which was sponsored by Iran), and the USS Cole, but in his epilogue, he appears brain-dead in thinking that Bush-Cheney's redirection of the military from Afghanistan to Iraq was brilliant. It was not. It was the most expensive catastrophic, corrupt, ignorant, and mendacious abuse of presidential power in modern history.

This leads to my final general comment: as unethical and incompetent as some individuals might have been in both the Clinton and the Bush Administrations, it is the "system" not the individuals that is broken. Congress is out of the game--incumbents shake down lobbyists for cash, not the other way around; both parties demand "party line" votes instead of conscience votes on behalf of specific constituencies; and the extremist Republican leadership of the House and Senate have abdicated their Constitutional responsibility to be the FIRST (Article 1) Branch of government, and instead chosen to serve as foot-soldiers for the President. This is treason and impeachable mis-behavior. The Executive is no better--Dick Cheney has swept aside the policy process, and it is now documented (see my review of "One Percent Doctrine") that he has experimented with isolating the President since President Ford, and under Bush, directed policies that were neither cleared by the bureaucracy, nor reported to and approved by the President. Cheney, not necessarily Bush, is clearly impeachable.

So buy and read this book, but do not stop there. We the People now have a digital memory, and we are being aroused from our slumber. Justice will be done, eventually. Both Administrations failed America, but only because the public failed to stem the corporate take-over of Washington, D.C., and failed to exercise its ultimate right to hold everyone accountable day to day, not just on election day.

I've read several books about the Clinton years, and was still shocked by the information in "Intelligence Failure". How could our country be so stupid about what went on during the Clinton Administration. How dare the media, and the deceived public blam President Bush for 9/11 when he had only been in office for 8 months. "Intelligence Failure" is yet another expose as to the goings-on of the Clinton Administration, and what that legacy is going to leave us...and what is yet to come from that legacy. It's a must read if you are interrested in what happened in the 90's and what is yet to result from the 90's leadership.