people, not agencies, failed to stop 9/11 (CIA Top Terrorist Hunter)

[The Straight Story]

The CIA's top terrorist hunter says people, not agencies, failed to stop 9/11.

In November, 22-year CIA employee Michael Scheuer, who led the hunt for Osama bin Laden, resigned after the agency, he says, barred him from talking to the media. Scheuer wrote two books on bin Laden and terrorism, but he never revealed his true identity, speaking to journalists as "Mike" or "Anonymous," his pen name.

Those days are over. Scheuer believes that U.S. intelligence agencies still don't comprehend Islamic terrorism - that it's a global insurgency obsessed with killing Americans. He wants the public to know that.

"There's a feeling in the intelligence community . . . that the 9/11 thing was a one-off attack," Scheuer says. Intelligence leaders say they're singularly focused on independent terrorist networks such as bin Laden's al Qaeda. But Scheuer insists a Cold War notion that state-sponsored groups are the biggest threats dominates the agencies' thinking.

The CIA, Scheuer says, isn't training enough new terrorism experts and hasn't expanded the stable of officers in the U.S.-based Counterterrorist Center, which supports overseas spying. CIA officials say its counterterrorism staff has "doubled" since 9/11, but Scheuer says that this doubling consists of new employees who come to the CTC for their primer on terrorism. They stay no more than 90 days, then move on to other assignments. A new crop replaces them. So, while the number of people working in the CTC has increased, Scheuer calls it a "shell game" to say that this applies to the full-time staff.

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