ABSTRACT
Three aspects of our security woes In his Congressional testimony on 17 October 2002, a year after the devastating attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, George Tenet, the Director of Central Intelligence, stated that, ‘The threat environment we find ourselves in today is as bad as it was . . . in the summer before 9/11.’ This view was echoed by the report of a panel sponsored by the US Council of Foreign Relations (CFR), released a week later on 25 October 2002, the central conclusion of which was that, ‘A year after 9/11, America remains dangerously unprepared to prevent and respond to a catastrophic terrorist attack on US soil.’ This being so, we have to ask ourselves some urgent questions as to how we are organised and conditioned to conduct intelligence in the twenty-first century. This chapter highlights three aspects of the US security problem.
