US Intelligence Failure - Research Paper Example

ver did not carry out any immediate action such as keeping the terrorist by the name Khalid al-Mihdhar from entering the US even though they even had his passport number. They took that action too when he was already in the country and even registered as well as taking flying lessons (Zegart 96). There were several reasons that cause this failure in intelligence as will be discussed below in detail. The CIA is a very bureaucratic agency and had been so since the era of the cold war. The policies that had been formulated then were never changed even after the cold war was over.

This therefore meant that they had no policies and directives of how to handle the terrorism situation if it arose or what mandate they had in the whole issue. Even though Clinton had formed an Al Qaida taskforce, it only handled issues to do with Osama bin Laden and it was still not an active group and would not have known how to handle the terrorist intelligence information about the 9/11 attacks. The bureaucracy in the federal government also led to delay in intelligence decisions and legislations and hence the reason there was delay in taking action in regards to the Khalid situation.

Other than bureaucracy, the budgetary allocation for the CIA was limited hence leading to a flat budget. They could not therefore afford to start investigations on the terrorism planning meeting or even follow up on the situation in Afghanistan because they had limited agents in the field. The airport surveillance would also require a lot of money and manpower resources which they had a shortage of considering the number of work they had to tackle in the whole nation. Majority of the funds was dedicated to the defense and the wars ongoing in other parts of the Middle East and hence little remaining for intelligence purposes.

The CIA and other intelligence organizations had their own fair share of other internal intelligence issues to deal with that demanded immediate attention. Since they had not