Bill Gertz joins Alex Jones to discuss his new book, "Breakdown: How American Intelligence Failed" and the failures of both the Clinton and George W. Bush administration. The book details the breakdown in U.S. intelligence in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.
00:00:32.000As we blast out nationwide, I'm Alex Jones, your host.
00:00:36.000The websites are InfoWars.com and Net.
00:00:40.000We're joined by, well, a great writer who's done a lot of great work exposing Bill Clinton and the missile secrets and the bomb parts to who uh... some of the most dangerous nation on the face of
00:00:52.000this earth real threats to national security like communist china now he's
00:02:17.000Basically, the problem there was that the Clinton people approached terrorism as a law enforcement problem.
00:02:25.000And if you do that, you're giving every terrorist one free attack because it means that you're not going to be able to Get inside their group and disrupt their activities and operations before they carry him out.
00:02:37.000That was the case in 95 when Bin Laden was still somewhat shadowy.
00:03:36.000But the intelligence people claim that they were forced to say that this plant was a chemical weapons factory for Bin Laden.
00:03:47.000And, you know, that's again, it's a failure, though.
00:03:51.000They felt that they were forced to do that.
00:03:53.000You know, somebody should have walked instead of doing it.
00:03:57.000All right, when we get back, I want to go through some of the chapters of the book and some of the big intelligence breakdowns, as you say, in the name of the book, when we return after this break.
00:04:07.000How is the book being received by people in the intelligence community, Bill?
00:04:12.000I'm very surprised that, well, not at the top levels, but at the middle levels, there's a lot of really positive feedback that I've received.
00:04:23.000So you would say the breakdown was in both administrations?
00:06:12.000In the last segment, you were talking about how the CIA didn't have a clear picture of Bin Laden in the 90s.
00:06:21.000I mean, the Republicans put out a report in 99 about how al-Qaeda was involved in attacking the Serbs and even working with these intelligence agencies.
00:07:08.000intelligence had a clue that Al-Qaeda was going to use airliners in the commission of terrorist attacks.
00:07:15.000How can the White House then say, oh, we never heard of plans to fly planes into buildings when I've got the Pentagon's own website where in November of 2000, they did a mass casualty drill with a jetliner flying in there?
00:07:27.000Yeah, well, it's, you know, they dropped the ball.
00:07:43.000It's the story of a DIA analyst named Kai Fallas.
00:07:48.000He's really one of the heroes of my book.
00:07:50.000Basically, he was a specialist on Iranian terrorism and was also working the Al Qaeda account.
00:07:59.000He had a unique software system that he put together.
00:08:02.000It was basically stuff you could buy at a software store and then into that, it was called Analyst Notebook, and into that software he plugged in top secret intelligence information.
00:08:14.000And he kept seeing certain patterns related to Al Qaeda attacks.
00:08:19.000One of which was that before every major attack, bin Laden or one of his top deputies would surface uh... in some type of videotape and we've seen this recently we saw that before the recent Bali attack uh... but in uh... before the USS Cole was bombed in October of two thousand a month before that this happened this uh... bin laden came up and uh... gave a uh... a radical speech about uh... americans and uh... he recognized that this was the tip-off and he went to his supervisors in the D.I.A.
00:08:52.000and said look we gotta put out a warning here we gotta warn Our military and diplomatic and other Americans around the world that there's an attack coming.
00:09:00.000Especially, he didn't know exactly where it was, but he knew something was coming.
00:09:07.000The supervisor said, no, we're not going to put out a warning.
00:09:10.000He said, you know, he asked around the office and found out that the reason was because a woman analyst, also in DIA, had put out a somewhat contrary assessment saying that it was Not likely there was going to be any attack, and also that there was not likely to be any kind of a small boat attack, which is exactly what happened.
00:09:34.000Because he had dated her, the supervisors doubted his sincerity and thought that he was just trying to contradict his former girlfriend's analysis.
00:09:45.000I mean, he told me, he said, look, this had nothing to do with who I dated.
00:09:48.000It had everything to do with American National Security.
00:09:51.000And when Nicole was bombed on October 12, 2000, he quit in protest.
00:09:55.000And he was disgusted and as well he should have been.
00:10:00.000Now, we see other developments inside this whole thing.
00:10:04.000We find out that the CIA on September 11, Was running a drill, according to the Associated Press, of flying planes into buildings, but they had never heard of a plan to fly planes into buildings.
00:10:16.000How can Clinton and then Bush, because they all were out there saying it, say they never had heard of any plan to fly planes into buildings when there were Tom Clancy books out, news articles.
00:10:26.000There was articles in 96 about plans with Yosef, Ramsey Yosef, to do this.
00:10:32.000How do they claim that, and how does your book tackle that?
00:10:36.000Well, the fact of the matter is that in 1995, in Manila, Philippines, two Al-Qaeda terrorists were hooking up some bomb-making materials in their apartment, and when they raided that apartment, they found out that information.
00:10:56.000It was passed to both the FBI and the CIA, but no one focused on it.
00:11:02.000It's an institutional and cultural problem.
00:11:07.000You know, there's a real lack of creative thinking in the U.S.
00:11:12.000It's become so bureaucratic that people are chastised.
00:11:16.000They're not just afraid, but they're chastised if they think outside the box.
00:11:21.000And the thinking in the box, right up until September 11th, was nobody would do that.
00:11:27.000Well, that's because if people think outside the box, they'll see all the criminal stuff the intelligence community's involved in.
00:11:33.000Well, I don't think they're involved in a lot of criminal stuff, although, you know, spying is probably illegal everywhere around the world.
00:11:40.000Well, I mean, look, I mean, we all know that the intelligence agencies work, this is their own admitted, you know, a hundred books written on it, History Channel, work with organized crime around the world, do a lot of different things, that's why they need that.
00:11:51.000My point is, is that inside-the-box thinking keeps people compartmentalized and they won't notice what's going on in other divisions.
00:12:02.000The problem of Compartmentalization is really, and that leads to the lack of information sharing and that was another key failure in 9-11.
00:12:11.000They weren't sharing information between agencies and within agencies.
00:12:16.000And the problem there was, this was really the result of a string of counterintelligence failures.
00:12:24.000I'm talking about the big Extremely damaging spy cases, beginning with Aldrich Ames in 1993 in the CIA.
00:12:31.000I mean, he devastated the CIA's operations directorate, gave away the crown jewels of their secrets to the Russians.
00:12:40.000Then you had the case of Robert Hansen, did the same thing to the FBI.
00:12:45.000And then last, and little noticed, is the case of Anna Montez, who was arrested shortly after September 11th, who'd been under suspicion Uh, for about a year, and, uh, she did the same thing to the Defense Intelligence Agency.
00:13:00.000Okay, well what about our... The result of this is, the result was that they compartmented all the information.
00:13:06.000It made it harder to get security clearances, and it made it very difficult to share information.
00:13:11.000Alright, Bill Gertz, Washington Times writer, bestselling author.
00:13:14.000He wrote a story last week about our government We've got Mr. Perl, the Deputy Defense Secretary, Richard Perl up there, saying brace for another attack at the military bases, domestically, that when we attack Iraq, they're sure to attack us.
00:13:33.000Now it's all over the nightly news, we need troops and all the critical infrastructure, you know, in the shopping malls, in the factories.
00:14:56.000So, what are they doing now to fix this so there's not more breakdowns?
00:15:00.000Because we've given them all this new funding, they've done this restructuring of Homeland Security, well, the Patriot Act.
00:15:06.000They're saying, oh, we still can't protect you.
00:15:08.000Have you seen the new Council on Foreign Relations report they put out last week where they say that if we don't follow their recommendations, 80-plus percent in major cities will die.
00:15:21.000I've been focusing on a lot of stories here lately, but that hasn't been one of them.
00:15:26.000What are some of the stories you've been focusing on?
00:15:29.000Well, I've been working on the Iraq issue pretty much, and I had a story the other day that Saddam was firmly in power, which is kind of a blow to the Bush administration's effort to hope that somebody's going to put a bullet in him at some point from within Iraq.
00:15:48.000This was based on some intelligence that was released to the Senate Intelligence Committee.
00:15:56.000Well, they've got one of his children to defect and then come back and get taken out.
00:16:00.000Do you see the war with Iraq beginning, as a lot of generals have said, in January?
00:16:06.000Yeah, I would say the January or February timeframe.
00:16:12.000I think my honest assessment is that I think they're trying to I meant some kind of an internal coup against them, but
00:16:20.000again, as I said in that story last week, I don't think that's likely.
00:16:24.000So an attempt at destabilization, and you're saying that isn't working?
00:16:27.000Yeah, this guy has got some internal security mechanism, very strong special Republican
00:16:34.000guard units, various layers of security.
00:16:43.000We'll try to take some calls here and talk about the book, Breakdown, your new bestseller book on the New York Times bestseller list for five weeks and counting.
00:17:27.000I thought So maybe that you knew more than you did.
00:17:30.000I'm not sure if you're just compartmentalized.
00:17:33.000I don't see how you get out of all that you've learned that they dropped the ball and that there's no criminal activity going on.
00:17:39.000And just with your little story that you told here about the, it was amazing, the guy wanted to put out a warning, and it comes to shield girlfriend, supposedly, and was anybody ever held accountable for that error in judgment?
00:18:12.000You know, I'll tell you who's being held accountable is the American people.
00:18:15.000They're putting more restrictions on us.
00:18:16.000You know, they want to go through our garbage, but the judge who passed or denied 180-some warrants for Zacharias Massali, You know, let's go through her trash.
00:18:27.000You know, I just don't understand how you cannot see the criminal activity that's going on.
00:18:32.000This is all theater, this whole Iraqi thing.
00:18:34.000I say it's not the Republican Guard, I say it's the New World Order Guard.
00:18:38.000Bill, can't you at least say that it's criminal negligence all over the place, bare minimum?
00:18:42.000Well, I haven't seen criminal negligence.
00:21:06.000I know you've done a lot of good work, but can you understand how some of us, realizing that the CFR is in the business of promoting a global police state, can you appreciate how some of us are a little bit skeptical and that there might be another interpretation of these events of 9-11, that it was not simply an intelligence failure, but Yeah, I don't buy into conspiracies.
00:21:31.000Yeah, they're certainly getting more funding, more power over our lives, kind of like allowing