May 4, 2015 | Quote

Former CIA Chief: We Totally Dropped the Ball on Al Qaeda’s Rebound

A former CIA chief has admitted in a new tell-all book that the intelligence organization badly misjudged Qaeda's rebound during the Arab Spring, Greg Miller of The Washington Post reports.

In “The Great War of Our Time,” former CIA chief Michael Morell recounts his three-decade career in the agency. He reportedly places special focus on counter-terrorism and the resurgence of al Qaeda and later ISIS.

Particularly noteworthy is Morell's admission that the US intelligence community believed that the Arab Spring would undermine al Qaeda's message and help to shift the Middle East away from terrorism, especially after the May 2011 death of Osama bin Laden.

… 

Daveed Gartenstein-Ross, a senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, described Morell's statement as “a pretty big admission.”

The Arab Spring triggered the collapse of long-serving secular autocratic regimes in Egypt, Libya, Yemen, and Tunisia, and was arguably one of the sparks for the still-ongoing civil war in Syria. The chaos unleashed during the Arab Spring also led to conservative retrenchment in Egypt and the Persian Gulf states.

… 

Read the full article here

 

Issues:

Al Qaeda