From the NY Sun:
The problem is cultural, and that cannot be fixed overnight….Put simply, there are things the CIA does not want to know, and it acts to ensure that it will not know them. Of these important things, the most important is Iran. For 25 years now, we have had bad intelligence on Iran….
[I]n the last few years, the CIA has repeatedly missed the vital Iranian role at the heart of the terror network, typically chanting the false mantra that “Sunnis and Shi’ites don’t work together.” That nonsense prevented them from seeing that, as the Washington Post wrote on Wednesday… Iran was in cahoots with Al Qaeda.
…The CIA does not seem to have accepted this intimate relationship. If they did, it would be impossible for the State Department to believe, as it clearly does, that we can enlist Iran in the war against terrorism, or that Iran would ever deliver to us top Al Qaeda leaders.
Yet that information was not hard to obtain. Much of it was on the public record, including official court transcripts from Germany and Italy. Other pieces came from European intelligence services, with whom the CIA’s relationship is surely better than mine or the Washington Post’s. Over the past two years, the CIA has repeatedly refused to take seriously information about Iran’s financing of international terrorism, Iran’s close working relationship (often brokered by the royal family of Dubai) with Saddam Hussein, and, as the Associated Press has just reported, the claim that there is a cache of enriched uranium in Iraq, a portion of which was transported to Iran several years ago…