Breakdown: How America's Intelligence Failures Led to September 11

Rating:
Summary: Let's get serious please...
Review: Does anyone really doubt that there wasn't a huge intelligence failure that led up to 9/11? All of these terrorist killers just materialized out of thin air? Political correctness, bureaucratic infighting and just miscellaneous stupidity couldn't have come into play as well? Our government was preoccupied with Clinton and Monica, the false War on Drugs, anything, anything, anything except those that bombed our embassies in Africa, blew up the USS Cole, killed our soldiers in the Saudi Arabian Khobar towers, etc. Lots of great wishful thinking (maybe the Taliban will hand Bin Laden over) too... It's a crying shame and let me tell you this dear readers, author/journalist Bill Gertz is a major patriotic American to tell the truth to us like this. You know, the people that failed us are still running the system! And as Coleen Rowley so bravely said, and I paraphrase, should we put the counterterrorism unit chief and his supervisor (the fools Maltbie and Frasca that messed up the Moussaoui matter) in charge now? Tenet stills runs the CIA. This is American accountability? What have we really learned since 9/11? Thank God for this book, I hope it causes a real storm and makes people upset, upset enough to demand change!

Rating:
Summary: RIght-wing polemics served hot but with little insight
Review: Gertz has written a loosely drawn polemic about a portion of the intelligence community. He recycles known problems with the clandestine service that date to the Vietnam War. He artfully overlooks the failure of Republican and Democratic administrations to manage the clandestine service and special operations in general.

Gertz concentrates on weaknesses in the Clinton administration's management of the CIA and the FBI (some of which are very real) to make repeated ... political points. If you need a fix of anti-Clintonism and you don't know much about the US intelligence community, this is your book. You will not gain much insight into the problems of Human Intelligence (HUMINT) and clandestine operations but you will have that frisson of excitement of hating Clinton all over again.

For the rest of us this book is a disappointment. It is clearly rushed, only modestly integrated and lacks any significant insight into US problems with HUMINT in specific or terrorism more generally. Gertz's best points are politically barbed in preference to creating insight into the role of HUMINT and special operations in a democracy. Furthermore Gertz is captured by his sources that to the insider eye clearly lean institutionally to the technical side of the intelligence business. The result is a series of sweeping generalizations about the analytic and HUMINT side of the intelligence business and relatively benign acceptance of the basic health of the technical side.

Gertz's conclusions are an enduring theme in muckracking and academic literature on US intelligence. They are not novel and implicitly accept the basic distribution of resources that run heavily to the technical intelligence. I would agree with Gertz that radical organizational reform is required in the intelligence community but I don't think he goes far enough. Radical reform focused on producing an intelligence community oriented on the new post-Cold War security environment must extend to the technical side as well and needs to be accompanied with major shifts in the allocation of money.

"Breakdown" does have some useful tidbits about the events prior to Sep 11. But the bulk of the material is already known and well explored in the press....


Rating:
Summary: Worth reading this point of view - Decide for yourself
Review: Good book with some solid information (or it appears to be) Credible and factual I think it is an objective look at what happened. Gertz takes you through some frightening facts about our security (or lack thereof) and what got us where we are. Good read if youre interested in this stuff

Rating:
Summary: Too Slanted
Review: Having read Mr. Gertz's book, I found it to be informative but overly biased politically. Mr. Gertz dwells at length over the intelligence and bureaucratic failures of Presidents Carter and Clinton but glosses over those of Presidents Reagan, Bush and Bush. The word "liberal" is overly employed to negatively portray any person or politician Mr. Gertz disagrees with - while the word "conservative" is a badge of honor.

Mr. Gertz derides the restrictions placed on intelligence agencies employment of unsavory characters in the pursuit of information. Understandably, this intelligence gathering tactic has its uses but as Americans we must also weigh the advantages and disadvantages of employing murderers, rapists and torturers versus the information gained and paid for by taxpayers' dollars.

All in all, but for Mr. Gertz's obvious political bias - which taints the overall presentation of the material - the book is an interesting read so long as it is read with a grain of salt given the author's most obvious political agenda.

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Summary: Depressing and not very hopeful
Review: I thought this book was actually more readable that some of the others on this subject. The organization is different being more agency oriented than chronological and in some ways that is more helpful and certainly provides a different and useful perspective.

There is little doubt that mature bureaucracies in general live to preserve the bureaucracy rather than serve the original purpose for which they were created. Gertz does a good job of illustrating this point as it relates to the various intelligence agencies. As with most other books I've read on the subject the CIA seems to be the best at this game while dismayingly ineffective in gathering intelligence about enemies.

Gertz also does a good job discussing the politics of intelligence and tracing the impact on the various agencies over the last 40 years. I thought his criticism of republicans in particular was interesting and compelling.

At the end Gertz discusses potential improvements. But by that time I was left pretty much convinced that there is probably little hope for these agencies to ever be effective in their missions without complete overhaul and that is unlikely. There is not much favorable about the new homeland security department either.

If the United States and the American way of life must depend on the Intelligence agencies as convincingly portrayed by Gertz in this book then there is little chance of the oldest democracy surviving another millennium.

Rating:
Summary: The best of the genre about 9/11
Review: If you are looking for the best run-down on what went wrong on 9/11, the is the book to get. Unlike some other books which repeat rumors and draw dots between events which do not connect, this book is based on lots of interviews, and even includes redacted copies of secret memos which document the failures of our intelligence agencies. While the Clinton and Bush administrations get their fair share of the blame, the real story is the decades-long decay and decline of the CIA and other agencies, going all the way back to the Church days when the liberals assumed that the world would be safer without a vibrant and healthy intelligence network protecting the US from the kind of savages who killed thousands of innocent Americans on 9/11.

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Summary: Interesting, Instantly Engrossing, and Well Researched
Review: If you need a Washington journalist with access to CIA and intelligence officials and documents, you need Bill Gertz. He has the access and the knowledge, and the trust of the intelligence community.

The book reads a lot like a Tom Clancy novel, transporting the reader instantly to the rocky hills of Afghanistan, and to the dusty cities of the Middle East, and then back to the paper covered desks of CIA intelligence analysts, and so forth. It names names, and tells stories of all intelligence agencies and intelligence gathering communities. Not just the CIA and the FBI, but the top secret NSA and other bureaus. It talks about the long term degradation of the CIA in particular, intensified by the political machinations of the Clinton administration.

You find out that thanks to Clinton, the last and best of CIA intelligence agents (that's spies) in Iraq, Robert Baer, was yanked back to the US and his cover shattered because it was brought to Clinton's attention that the NSA intercepted a memo within Iran saying they suspected that America was trying to assassinate Saddam Hussein, and they would rather stop Baer in his tracks than trust the CIA. Of course, Baer was simply staying alive and abreast of events in Iraq, doing a job no one else can do right now, nor will anyone be able to do it.

That is, of course, just the tip of the iceberg.

Perhaps we would be able to avoid war in Iraq if our espionage forces were supported these past 12 years. But we have zero "HUMINT" in Iraq and many other places we need it.

When you are done with this book, you'll be sad to know that George W. Bush, despite his sincere efforts in the war on terror, has not fired Clinton appointee George Tenet, figurehead of the CIA and one of its chief problems, and that no one in the CIA has been held accountable for the gross negligence of September 11th, nevermind Coleen Rowley's attempts to bring the issue to light to the tonedeaf liberal media. However, perhaps reform can be accomplished by Tom Ridge, the new Homeland Security Cabinet officer. Perhaps then, as vigilance has been returned to those affected by 9/11, vigilance and an effective organization will be returned to America's FBI, CIA, INS, and NSA.

Rating:
Summary: James Bond Was No Bureaucrat
Review: In "Breakdown: How America's Intelligence Failures Led to September 11", Bill Gertz chronicles the downward spiral that America's intelligence gathering and analysis operations have been in since the 1970s and how their lapses allowed the tragedy of September 11. Mr Gertz's argument can be boiled down into one word: bureaucratization. He says that a combination of anti-intelligence overseers, an orientation toward multilateral intelligence gathering, and an agency-first attitude have conspired to weaken America's once effectual intelligence community.

Mr Gertz aims most of his scorn at the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). These two agencies are, in effect, the primary domestic and foreign intelligence services. Mr Gertz claims that the FBI has been scared off from collecting intelligence on American citizens or even on visiting foreign nationals and has too long treated terrorism as if it were a crime to prosecute after the fact instead of as an act of war to be prevented. The CIA he says has been taken over by people who would rather co-ordinate intelligence operations with foreign intelligence services than run their own missions. Because of this, human intelligence operations at the CIA have withered on the vine and become almost non-existent.

All of Mr Gertz's critiques of the agencies he mentions may be true; but, the question is "would a better functioning intelligence community have been able to prevent the attacks of Septemebr 11?". The answer to that is an unsatisfying perhaps. Having read through Mr Gertz's book, I see no definitive proof that, had the current changes enacted in the intelligence community been put in place prior to September 11, we would have been able to prevent it.

The nature of our current enemy is such that traditional intelligence gathering operations have almost no chance of success. These groups function in such small units with the key information held by so few people that unraveling every plot before it unfolds is nigh on impossible. It is far more likely that these plots will be foiled through ineptitude on the terrorists' part than by our intelligence agencies uncovering and stopping it.

Of course, that doesn't mean we shouldn't try. Mr Gertz gives several recommendations that probably would have a positive impact on America's intelligence operations. His best suggestion is a renewed emphasis on counterintelligence. Had the CIA been mounting an effective counterintellignece operation prior to September 11 we may have known about many of the hijackers who were living here before they even had a chance to step on the plane. That's not to say that we could have prevented all of the hijackings from occurring; but, who knows, we may have prevented at least one of those planes from being hijacked.

Ultimately though, Mr Gertz's book lacks the cogency of his previous efforts. He offers a lot of commensense suggestions to better our intelligence services but offers little in the way of an argument on how our intelligence outfits of even the 1960s could have stopped the attacks of September 11.

Rating:
Summary: "Breakdown" not the right word.
Review: It's been said before, in places as disparate as the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and ... that the real failure which led to 9/11 is the failure of the intelligence brass to not care about appearing politically incorrect. All the facts were there, what was missing was the will to say okay, we're going to go out and round up a lot of Muslim males between the ages of 17 and 40, we're going to get negative press for profiling but to hell with it, we've got a job to do.

Rating:
Summary: Bush wouldn't get rid of Osama Bin Laden
Review: More than 3 years after Osama Bin Laden and his gang attacked us we still are having to deal with his threats. We need a president who will not lose sight of our true enemies. After losing so many of our young men and women and spending so much money we are no safer than we were on 9/11!

What was the point?

Please vote for John Kerry.