OSS.Net Posts CIA Report on Global Coverage from July 1997 – George Tenet Blew It Off, Giving Bin Laden Free Rein to Attack
WASHINGTON, Nov. 22 /PRNewswire/ — Robert David Steele Vivas, CEO of OSS.Net, a global open source intelligence (OSINT) provider, has posted to http://tinyurl.com/bzl4f a copy of the unclassified report written for then Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet, on “The Challenge of Global Coverage.” Delivered in July 1997, the report represents a consensus view across all Assistant Secretaries of Defense and State, and U.S. Intelligence Community agency heads, that the U.S. Intelligence Community was failing to cover the “rest of the world” beyond seven denied area countries, and this was a serious mistake.
The report calls for $1.5 billion a year for open sources of information, roughly $10 million a year for each of the 150 “lower-tier” (CIA code for “we can ignore”) issues such as terrorism, poverty, disease, and crime, as well as lower-tier countries such as Yemen, Somalia, and Indonesia, where terrorism is spawned.
Tenet blew off this report, saying that he was in the business of producing secrets for the President. With that one decision, he gave Bin Laden free rein to attack America and sentenced America to ignorance.
America may not be interested in reality, but reality is most definitely interested in America. Terrorism is the least of our worries. The end of cheap oil, the end of free water, the rise of pandemic disease and the proliferation of corruption among failed states and U.S. corporations, are, in the aggregate a clear and present threat to the Republic.
There is one solution: the establishment of a national Open Source Agency that is outside the U.S. Intelligence Community, under the auspices of the Department of State, with a director appointed for life as are the Supreme Court Justices.
This report spells out, in clear and precise terms, why America needs such an organization, one committed to the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, as it can be known from all information, in all languages, all the time.
This report will be distributed in hard-copy at IOP '06 in January 2006, where the author of the report will speak about his findings. See http://www.oss.net/IOP for information about this international conference.
Phi Beta Iota: It took nine years for the “fact of” Tenet's 1997 decision, and the unclassified version of the report, to reach the public domain. Nine years during which open source information across all languages could have made a difference, not only in detecting foreign threats, but in detecting lies from within the US Government. Tenet will never be held accountable for this decision, or his “slam dunk” support of Vice President Dick Cheney's elective war on Iraq. We are long over-due for a mature intelligence profession that works in real time with M4IS2, relying almost exclusively on open sources of information in 183 languages, leveraging the distributed intelligence of the global collective, and welcoming–demanding–transparency as a foundation for creating trust where now there is none, and rightly so.
Omar bin Laden, bin Laden’s fourth eldest son, has allegedly issued a statement that calls the killing of his father as a “criminal” act and a humiliation for his family. Notably, he indicated the possibility of a lawsuit against the United States.