BY: Larry O'Connor
August 21, 2014 12:57 pm
Lt. Col. Tony Shaffer (Ret.) is a CIA-trained former senior intelligence officer who wrote the book Operation Dark Heart about the Special Operations successes in the early stages of the Afghanistan war.
He also famously reported to Congress that part of the intelligence breakdown prior to the 9/11 attacks was due to communications failures between the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency’s “Able Danger” project which had identified Mohamed Attah’s terror cell in Brooklyn in 2000.
Thursday morning, Shaffer appeared on WMAL radio in Washington, D.C., to discuss the ISIS execution of American journalist James Foley earlier this week. He told me and co-host Brian Wilson that the recently revealed rescue attempt led by Special Forces earlier this summer failed because President Obama was slow to give the go-ahead:
I’m hearing from my friends in the Pentagon, they are giving him every single option way ahead of time. And let me give you a little secret here: The reason that raid into Syria failed to get Foley and those guys was because the president drug his feet. He waited too long, the intel got stale, and by the time we actually gave the “go” word it failed because we just didn’t react quick enough.
