CIA Counterterrorism Expert: Obama and Holder 'At War' with Agency

Monday, August 31, 2009 7:59 PM

By: Kent Clizbe

In the early days and weeks after Sept. 11, 2001, a small cadre of men (and a few women) with vast amounts of intelligence experience reported to the Langley, Va., headquarters of the CIA. These unsung heroes then were dispatched across the globe to run operations against the al-Qaida conspirators who leveled the World Trade Center and struck the nerve center of the U.S. military.

The FBI, a domestic law enforcement agency, did not have the ability or skills needed to track down and strike the attackers overseas. The Pentagon, with F22s, nuclear aircraft carriers, intercontinental ballistic missiles, and battalions of the best armor in the history of mankind, was like an elephant attacked by a mouse — mighty, but helpless in its mammoth rage.

Our best hope was in the hands of the gray-bearded intelligence professionals who fanned out across the world. Supplementing the skeleton crew of staff officers left in the wake of President Clinton's anti-intelligence scourging of the CIA, the volunteers went to the Middle East, Asia, Europe, Africa, South America, to the most remote and isolated outposts in the world. Sometimes they worked with friendly forces, and sometimes they worked alone. They focused like a laser beam on one thing: Stop the next attack.

Their mission: Seek and destroy the terrorist planners, facilitators, trainers, financiers, and their infrastructure wherever they were.

Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, CIA officers, both the contractors and the overextended staff officers, launched dozens of initiatives. The CIA Counterterrorism Center’s motto, “Deny, Disrupt, Destroy,â€