Mansour: If You Think U.S. Intelligence Is Never Wrong, I Have Some Yellowcake for You
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We later learned that the destroyed site was actually an aspirin factory. Oops.
As we know, the threat from Al Qaeda was deadly real, and this wasn’t the last bad call we’d make in regard to Bin Laden’s terrorists.
September 11, 2001 — The “Shock” That “Should Not Have Come as a Surprise”
Hundreds of books, reports, and monographs have been published about the failure to prevent the 9/11 attacks. In the words of the 9/11 Commission, “The 9/11 attacks were a shock, but they should not have come as a surprise.”
The Commission painted a scenario reminiscent of the challenges confronting the U.S. prior to Pearl Harbor: “The combination of an overwhelming number of priorities, flat budgets, an outmoded structure, and bureaucratic rivalries resulted in an insufficient response to this new challenge.” In other words, they had more noise than signal.
And yet even so, despite these difficulties, the Intel Community managed to get this extremely direct warning into the President’s Daily Brief on August 6, 2001: “Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US.” The briefing even included a warning about “suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York.”
As we know, the Bush administration wasn’t ready on 9/11. As the 9/11 Commission Report showed, we had all the pieces to the puzzle before us, including warnings that Bin Laden’s followers might be training at U.S. flight schools and that Al Qaeda was fixated on bringing down the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers.
Thus another harsh lesson: We can have good intelligence reports, but if we have bad intelligence in our leaders, it’s all for naught.
2003 — The Difference Between Yellowcake and a Cakewalk
We’re all familiar with the multiple intelligence failures of Iraq, but we can pause over three.
First, the wrong-headed idea that Saddam Hussein had WMD. Yes, for sure, he was an evil man, but he was no threat to the U.S. And so, for example, the allegations that Iraq had sought to buy uranium oxide, aka, yellowcake, proved to be bogus.
Second, we were told by the Bush-Cheney administration that U.S. forces would be “greeted as liberators.” The invasion would be, as one giddy neocon put it, a “cakewalk.” Yeah, not quite. In fact, U.S. fatalities in that conflict have totaled nearly 4,500, with another 32,000 injured.
Third, we were told by President Bush, backed up by his neocon brainiacs, that Operation Iraqi Freedom would touch off a wave of democratization across the Middle East. Instead, it’s touched off a wave of civil wars and genocidal ethnic cleansing of ancient Christian communities, such that it’s likely that soon there won’t be any Christians in the region that gave birth to Christianity.
I could go on. I could wrote ten volumes on the intelligence mistakes of Hillary Clinton alone—she, who voted for the Iraq War, was eager to “liberate” Libya, and left our ambassador defenseless in Benghazi.
Or I could write about Senator John McCain—who also voted for the Iraq War, cheer-led every dumb move in Libya, and has supported every other vainglorious exercise, from the former Soviet republic of Georgia to Syria. He never met a foreign conflict he didn’t want to send Americans to die in.
But as we can see, even after all these blunders, there are plenty of Hillary and McCain wannabes in Washington, and they just can’t wait to make the exact same mistakes all over again.
https://www.breitbart.com/big-government/2018/07/18/mansour-if-you-think-u-s-intelligence-is-never-wrong-i-have-some-yellowcake-for-you/