CIA Report Names Names on 9/11

by CA Pol Junkie

The much-praised 9/11 Commission Report was very thorough but still very politically correct. As a bipartisan document, it avoided inflaming political tensions by not saying who was at fault for the massive failures which occurred at multiple high levels before 9/11. Robert Scheer's column today in the L.A. Times says there is a CIA report which does lay blame:

It is shocking: The Bush administration is suppressing a CIA report on 9/11 until after the election, and this one names names. Although the report by the inspector general's office of the CIA was completed in June, it has not been made available to the congressional intelligence committees that mandated the study almost two years ago.

Actually, it's not the least bit shocking. This is the Bush administration, after all. If it is embarrassing or threatens to derail their agenda, stuff like this is buried in the hope that nobody will find it, or at least not before the election. We know it is embarrassing because it wasn't released, and Sheer's contact in the CIA is hopping mad:

"It is infuriating that a report which shows that high-level people were not doing their jobs in a satisfactory manner before 9/11 is being suppressed," an intelligence official who has read the report told me, adding that "the report is potentially very embarrassing for the administration, because it makes it look like they weren't interested in terrorism before 9/11, or in holding people in the government responsible afterward."

Again, anybody paying attention knows that the Bush administration wasn't interested in terrorism before 9/11, in spite of urgent and catastrophic warnings. Nobody has been fired for incompetence, although there was plenty to go around. What is worse is that the incompetent people still have their jobs since nobody has been blamed.

Many at the CIA should have quite the axe to grind with an administration which has ignored them and then blamed them for the 9/11 and Iraq debacles. A leak of information such as this report could put the last nail in Bush's political coffin. Will someone squeal? It would be a pleasant October surprise if they did...