Intelligence Matters, Senator Bob Graham
Intelligence Matters, Senator Bob Graham
1 Rating(s)
List: $20.00 | Sale: $14.00
Club: $10.00

Intelligence Matters
The CIA, the FBI, Saudi Arabia, and the Failure of America's War on Terror

Author: Senator Bob Graham, Jay Nussbaum

Narrator: Jonathan Marosz

Unabridged: 11 hr 26 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 09/07/2004


Synopsis

In this explosive, controversial, and profoundly alarming insider’s report, Senator Bob Graham reveals faults in America’s national security network severe enough to raise fundamental questions about the competence and honesty of public officials in the CIA, the FBI, and the White House.

For ten years, Senator Graham served on the Senate Intelligence Committee, where he had access to some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets. Following the attacks of September 11, 2001, Graham co-chaired a historic joint House-Senate inquiry into the intelligence community’s failures. From that investigation and his own personal fact-finding, Graham discovered disturbing evidence of terrorist activity and a web of complicity:

• At one point, a terrorist support network conducted some of its operations through Saudi Arabia’s U.S. embassy–and a funding chain for terrorism led to the Saudi royal family.
• In February 2002, only four months after combat began in Afghanistan, the Bush administration ordered General Tommy Franks to move vital military resources out of Afghanistan for an operation against Iraq–despite Franks’s privately stated belief that there was a job to finish in Afghanistan, and that the war on terrorism should focus next on terrorist targets in Somalia and Yemen.
• Throughout 2002, President Bush directed the FBI to limit its investigations of Saudi Arabia, which supported some and possibly all of the September 11 hijackers.
• The White House was so uncooperative with the bipartisan inquiry that its behavior bore all the hallmarks of a cover-up.
• The FBI had an informant who was extremely close to two of the September 11 hijackers, and actually housed one of them, yet the existence of this informant and the scope of his contacts with the hijackers were covered up.
• There were twelve instances when the September 11 plot could have been discovered and potentially foiled.
• Days after 9/11, U.S. authorities allowed some Saudis to fly, despite a complete civil aviation ban, after which the government expedited the departure of more than one hundred Saudis from the United States.
• Foreign leaders throughout the Middle East warned President Bush of exactly what would happen in a postwar Iraq, and those warnings went either ignored or unheeded.

As a result of his Senate work, Graham has become convinced that the attacks of September 11 could have been avoided, and that the Bush administration’s war on terrorism has failed to address the immediate danger posed by al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas in Afghanistan, Syria, Yemen, and Somalia. His book is a disturbing reminder that at the highest levels of national security, now more than ever, intelligence matters.

Reviews

A scathing indictment This is a scathing indictment of not only the intelligence community which failed to prevent the very preventable 9/11 attacks, but more incisively the Bush administration itself which is losing the war on terror through stupidity and incompetence. Written by Senator Bob Graham w......more

Goodreads review by Jake

My threshold for books about the Trump era has risen in the last year, perhaps because I’m taking anti-depressants. My threshold for books about the Bush era and 9/11 remains low (nineteen years ago tomorrow). The effects of it are still felt today and call back to that awful day and the awfulness m......more

Goodreads review by Steven

Senator Bob Graham in this book highlights a lot of the intelligence failures that have been reviewed from the 9/11 commission report but he adds some other pieces to the mix that I did not know a lot of which was no released to the public for fear of embarrassing the respective interested parties.......more

Goodreads review by Jim

This book is phenomenal. I would say it was extremely important in the ultimate declassification and release of 23 pages of the 9/11 report which criticized the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the 9/11 operatives connection to Saudi agents.......more


Quotes

Advance praise for Intelligence Matters

Intelligence Matters is a work of great patriotism, a searing insider’s account of the government’s ineptitude, and at times deceit, both on 9/11 and in the war in Iraq. Senator Graham is unflinching in a damning and persuasive indictment of President Bush, the FBI and the CIA. This is no liberal, conspiratorial, antiwar polemic, but rather a convincing argument by a hawk in the war on terror as to why the country is less safe today because of blunders made by President Bush. Intelligence Matters also makes a meticulous–and at times startling–case for official Saudi Arabian complicity in the 9/11 plot. This is an important book and a must read for anyone concerned with the war on terror and the future of America.”
–GERALD POSNER, New York Times bestselling author of Why America Slept