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

Rating:
Summary: A Stunning Indictment of America's Intelligence Community
Review: September 11th came as a great shock to most Americans. Probably the greatest shock, of course, came from the sheer unexpectedness of the attack; who would dream of such things? Yet Bill Gertz points out how our intelligence community consistently dropped the ball in the years leading up to September 11th, in part by ignoring the signs that would have led them to the al Qaeda plot.

Any intelligence agency will inevitably make errors and miss some things. The best anyone can hope for is an agency that will do the best it can with the information it has. Breakdown conclusively demonstrates that America's intelligence services failed to meet even this standard. Clues were consistently missed or misinterpreted, near-breakthroughs were quashed, and the intelligence community seemed generally to be more interested in feathering their own nests than in protecting the United States. The results were, as Gertz points out, inevitable.

Worse, Gertz follows the agencies after September 11th, and his work indicates we haven't made much progress in improving things since then. While the failures prior to September 11th could be laid at the feet of multiple administrations, the Bush administration's failure to take the lessons of September 11th to heart and resolve at least some of the problems of our intelligence services is all the more damnning in light of Gertz' book. Heads should roll over this, as another reviewer noted, but it doesn't seem that many will.

Breakdown is well-written and backed with excellent research. Readers will be horrified by much of what Gertz details in the book, but at least they can read about it in cleanly written prose. Gertz work is a tour de force and should be required reader for America's leadership.

Rating:
Summary: Needs to focus the blame
Review: Since the blurb on this book has glowing endorsements from such people on the right as Jeane Kirkpatrick and Edwin Meese, and furthermore, since Washington Times (that's Times not Post) reporter Bill Gertz spends a lot of ink going after the Clinton administration and Janet Reno, one might be led to believe that the now universally acknowledged failure by the spook culture in the United States was caused by liberal restrictions on the FBI, the CIA, etc. However, a careful reading of Gertz's (frankly pedestrian, I am sorry to say) effort will reveal that he knows the failure lies exactly where the title of the book says it lies, that is, within the intelligence institutions themselves.

Consider just this little tidbit from page 28, "the FBI, as late as 1998, had only two Arabic speakers who could translate documents written in Arabic." Imagine that: billions of dollars spent for high tech equipment, "Chevy suburbans," international travel for all those Ivy League grads to talk to other button-down guys in other countries, and all those hours fighting turf wars and playing cops and robbers to keep the price of street drugs high, and guess what? there's virtually nobody who can read the reports from the Middle East! Gertz emphasizes the point in the next paragraph by quoting former director of Central Intelligence R. James Woolsey: "Obviously, both the FBI and the CIA would have been very well advised MUCH EARLIER to have trained, or retrained, or hired a much larger group of people who spoke Arabic, Farsi, and some of these languages of the Mideast." (My emphasis.)

That's a "duh, dude" and it goes back well before the Clinton administration. Indeed, Gertz likes to remind us of the intelligence failures pre-Pearl Harbor. (See, e.g., page 36.) I would like to remind everybody of two other points, one that the premier intelligence agency director of Spook Culture and part-time architect of how to spy and be spied upon is none other than the former director of the CIA, our past president and father of the present president, George H.W. Bush. His mentality and legacy is partly responsible for an intelligence community mentality that is insular, and intellectually and educationally incestuous to the point of something close to sterility. Thanks to a long over reliance on high tech and white male conservative operatives our intelligence institutions are without the means to penetrate cultures other than our own.

My second point is, the failures continue! Where is Osama bin Laden? Where is Saddam Hussein? Where are the perpetrator(s) of the anthrax mailings? Clinton's excuse for not getting Osama bin Laden, as reported by Gertz, was fear of civilian casualties. After 9/11 we gave up a lot of the niceties about collateral damage and let it fly. But again we missed him and we missed Saddam Hussein. And with the number of possible perps that could have had the knowledge, the opportunity and the motive for mailing weapons grade anthrax to select domestic targets countable by, say, the Easter Bunny, one would think, one would readily imagine that the FBI knows darn good and well who mailed the pathogens, leaving many of us to speculate (especially considering the deadening silence coming from the White House) that somebody, somewhere has already blown that case.

The sad and frustrating truth that almost everyone now knows about American intelligence, and something that Gertz should have emphasized, is that we will have no effective intelligence, no effective counterintelligence, and no effective way to prevent terror until the cultures in the FBI, the CIA and the other intelligence communities enjoy a fresh and massive infusion of more cosmopolitan, more sophisticated, more multi-ethnic and more diversified personnel. And that, my friends, will take decades. We are offering $25-million for the cold, dead body of Saddam Hussein, and we are getting no takers. You want to know why? Because there is not an American spook in the entire Middle East who can convey convincingly that kind of message to the people on the ground, the street and village people of the Middle East who might have some inkling. Our intelligence community has been so high and mighty and divorced from any effect of criticism for so long that it actually has no idea of what a lousy job it has been doing. It lets criticism run off his back like so much political dishwater not realizing for a moment that it has failed.

One hopes now, that with the right and the left in agreement on those failures, effective change is taking place and we will be spared the horror of another 9/11 in the form of a suitcase nuke blowing up in one of our harbors. One hopes.

Rating:
Summary: A Book Not Worth Paying For
Review: Thank goodness a friend passed this book on to me, for I don't buy books written by anyone who has spent his/her life in the depths of Rev. Moon's psuedo-religious/political cult. But one has to wonder why it is that Gertz is acknowledged by numerous experts in the Intelligence Community to have inordinate access to inside sources. Could it be due to his Master's vast, unexplained wealth and the impact that such wealth has upon the Republican Party and religious conservatives?

Rating:
Summary: WE SHOULD'VE SEEN IT COMING
Review: That good old-fashioned saying "hindsight is 20-20" comes to mind after reading this book by Bill Gertz. We could have stopped the terrorists if.....If only......we could've....we should've..... I am still left asking the question what difference does it make now? We didn't. So all we can do is learn from our mistakes and make sure something like this doesn't happen again. Unfortunately, instead of spending his time centering on the question of 9/11, Gertz goes on a crusade about how Bill Clinton and Jimmy Carter essentially caused it.

Without really explaining their functions, Gertz begins by running down all the shortcomings of the US intelligence community. He believes that our government relies too much on the latest technological gimmicks to get information instead of using old-fashioned spies. Terrorists and the like sometimes have just as much access to technology as the CIA and so can neutralize eavsdropping. Arguing against the difficulty that some officials say we have in infiltrating terrorist groups, Gertz asks how then could John Walked Lindh have had contact with figures such as Osama Bin Laden?

Gertz also believes that intel has also become an entrenched bureaucracy that is just as political as any other branch of government. Instead of thinking of the whole of US security, they are more interested in themselves and whether they look good or bad. Also, the different branches, such as the CIA and the FBI do not like to share their information with each other.

Most of the book, unfortunately, has to do with blaming the Clinton adminstration almost exclusively for the lead-up to 9/11. Blaming the supposed "liberal" slant of his presidency, the 1990's, according to Gertz, was a decade where government agencies were reined in and held back from infringing on civil liberties, to a fault. It was also a decade where lawyers increasingly had more say in the intel community and the CIA and others were afraid of taking actions that could bring them legal troubles. He also blames our lack of significant punishment of terrorist activities as a catalyst that emboldened Osama to attack us so blatantly. After moaning and complaining the whole book, Gertz does offer about a page and a half of reform ideas that will make the world a paradise.

This book was written in a very dull style. It was like reading a cereal box or a memo. There is not even the slightest attempts at making it engaging or of inspring the outrage that the emotional title of "breakdown" conveys. It does not seemed researched at all even though there's about 80-odd pages of internal government documents from the US and England which seem thrown in there for looks sake. None of the "quotes" in the book are cited, but seem more like overheard conversations or a "I heard it from a friend of a friend" type gossip-mongering.

Gertz never does really accept the fact that the supposed sapping of the will of the intelligence community by Congress and Democratic presidents directly stemmed from Vietnam and Watergate. It was because of these events that the American people stopped trusting our government. When you feel betrayed by your government and you don't believe it is looking out for your interests, you are going to try to limit it. To Gertz, it was as if the presidencies of Ford, Reagan, and both Bushes didn't even exist. They had no hand in neglecting our intelligence services, even though 9/11 happened on Bush Jr.'s watch.

Ironically, in the past week I have been reading this book, George W. Bush has been having to deal with another breakdown in intelligence. Not only did he rely on a forged document in his State of the Union address, it was a forged document from a foreign intelligence agency. Now, how on the earth has our intel community improved under George W when we can't even find our own justification for going to war. Even to this day, England has not revealed their "supposed" evidence. Not to mention, there have been allegations that the Bush adminstration, and especially Dick Cheney, push the intel community to back up their sometimes wrong conclusions about the state of the world. This is exactly the thing Gertz is complaining about. That intel should be about finding the truth, not currying political favor, and that our intel agencies don't have the energy or will to invigorate themselves to doing their job. The consequence could be another 9/11.

Rating:
Summary: The Cost of Bureaucracy
Review: The author presents considerable evidence that the September 11 attacks might have been prevented. He also has recommendations for changes in our intelligence gathering and analysis that he believes might prevent future terrorist attacks. My main impression of the message of "Breakdown" was that the principal problem was the bureaucracy. I view such things as inability of lower level personnel being able to communicate concerns to levels higher than their immediate supervisor and the tendency of an agency to protect its own turf at the expense of not sharing information with other agencies to be to be bureaucratic failures. These are situations the author illustrated within the agencies such as CIA and FBI prior to the September 11 tragedy.

Although the Clinton administration comes in for particular blame in neglecting to give proper attention to matters of intelligence, the Congress and Bush Administration were not left free of blame.

Some problems presented by the author as causes of "Breakdown" were the failure of the agencies to adjust to changing circumstances. There was too much dependence on electronic intelligence gathering and not enough emphasis on the need for human involvement. There was also too much dependence on obtaining intelligence from foreign governments.

Many pages of appendices were provided. Some were of little use due to lack of information or being unreadable. One appendix of particular interest, however, was the detailed well-written letter from a Minneapolis FBI agent to the FBI Director in which she is very frank about the shortcomings of the agency in dealing with information about the so called twentieth hijacker of September 11.

I found the book to be both interesting and informative.

Rating:
Summary: The Cost of Bureaucracy
Review: The author presents considerable evidence that the September 11 attacks might have been prevented. He also has recommendations for changes in our intelligence gathering and analysis that he believes might prevent future terrorist attacks. My main impression of the message of "Breakdown" was that the principal problem was the bureaucracy. I view such things as inability of lower level personnel being able to communicate concerns to levels higher than their immediate supervisor and the tendency of an agency to protect its own turf at the expense of not sharing information with other agencies to be to be bureaucratic failures. These are situations the author illustrated within the agencies such as CIA and FBI prior to the September 11 tragedy.

Although the Clinton administration comes in for particular blame in neglecting to give proper attention to matters of intelligence, the Congress and Bush Administration were not left free of blame.

Some problems presented by the author as causes of "Breakdown" were the failure of the agencies to adjust to changing circumstances. There was too much dependence on electronic intelligence gathering and not enough emphasis on the need for human involvement. There was also too much dependence on obtaining intelligence from foreign governments.

Many pages of appendices were provided. Some were of little use due to lack of information or being unreadable. One appendix of particular interest, however, was the detailed well-written letter from a Minneapolis FBI agent to the FBI Director in which she is very frank about the shortcomings of the agency in dealing with information about the so called twentieth hijacker of September 11.

I found the book to be both interesting and informative.

Rating:
Summary: Was America's Intelligence Community To Blame for Sept 11?
Review: The principal premise of best selling author Bill Gertz's book Breakdown: How America's Intelligence Failures Led to September 11, is that there was a monumental screw up of the intelligence community in Washington.

There are certainly many revelations of the book that are nothing more than a rehashing of various news stories presented over the past year by the media. Nevertheless, the synthesizing of this information definitely helps the reader to better understand the root causes of the breakdown.

Gertz provides the reader with impressive evidence to support his contention that Sept 11th could have been prevented, if the intelligence community had worked together in harmony. In order to defend his case, the author relies heavily on information gleaned from congressional hearings, court documents, classified memos, foreign governmental reports and letters, speeches and personal interviews with some of the former employees of the intelligence services.

Each chapter examines a different branch of the US intelligence apparatus and how they were all guilty of incompetence. He further adds that even Congress was a partner and should likewise share the blame, and its oversight of intelligence-or lack of it, or wrong use of it- is a prime cause of the intelligence breakdown that led to September 11.

No doubt the reader will find some of Gertz's findings lethal. For example, he refers to the Phoenix Memo, where special agent Kenneth Williams from his Phoenix office wrote to FBI headquarters on July 10, 2001 that they should accumulate a listing of civil aviation universities/colleges around the world. More than a year before Williams was involved in investigating some of the students attending this civil aviation universities and colleges. The FBI never took his warning seriously, and as mentioned in the book, "it did not get analyzed, and it was not shared with other intelligence agencies or even other FBI field offices, except New York."

Although at times the wealth of information may be difficult to immediately digest, there is no doubt a bitter aftertaste left in one's mouth once you ponder over some of the author's findings. This information packed book is nevertheless a welcome and discussion-provoking addition to the growing body of literature on this important subject matter.

Norm Goldman Editor of Bookpleasures.com

Rating:
Summary: Gertz' Polemic
Review: There is nothing new in this book. It basically is a polemic about how "liberals" undermined America's intelligence community using affirmative action to hire underqualified personnel and political correctness to stop promising leads dead in their tracks. The style is rambling and makes your head spin. This book sheds absolutely no insight about the relationship between specific intelligence failures and the events of September 11. Gertz just blames everybody: the INS, the CIA and all CIA directors appointed by a Democratic president, the FBI, the NSA, Bill Clinton, and Democratic senators who have ever dared to question the legality and appropriateness of CIA tactics.

This is not even a partisan book. This is a book that uses the tragedy of September 11 to make ideological points. The authour gives policy recommendations in the last chapter of the book. The basis of these recommendations is unclear. He proposes to reorganize virtually every part of the intelligence community. How does Gertz think this will come to pass? Whoever will support these sweeping changes? An unbiased reader can hardly take this book seriously, since it is an ideologically inspired Monday morning quarterbacking, a polemic against liberals, Democrats, and affirmative action, and not a balanced investigation of the weaknesses of our intelligence community.

Rating:
Summary: Mad Lib?
Review: This book reads like a Mad Lib of the style "The entire problem with the ____ (FBI, CIA, NSA, ...) is ____ (the Democrats, Bill Clinton)."

He had me going for a while, but I think this book could have been much shorter given the single point he spends so much time trying to make.

Rating:
Summary: This book scratches the surface of 9-11,but avoids the heart
Review: This book takes the 9-11 issue from the Bush Admin perspective of truth. Which would be fine if we didn't now all know that the Bush Admin. has been hiding and covering up the truth about 9-11. Even Republican, Shelby from Alabama, is outraged over Bush's unwillingness to tell America what he'd been.

To understand what led up to 9-11, and Bush's suspicious behaviour regarding 9-11 investigations, you must read "The War on Freedom" and "Forbidden Truth" both available on [website].

To only read this book leaves gaping dangerous holes in your understanding of possible Bush Admin. complicity in what occurred on 9-11, and their continuing stonewalling of a full independent 9-11 inquiry.