5/5/2003

“They [the FBI] were slow to allocate resources to study and combat Sunni Islamic radicalism in general. They saw Shiite Iran as the primary fountainhead of religiously motivated terrorism. ‘Did we screw up, in retrospect?’ asked [President] Clinton’s national security adviser, Tony Lake, years later [in a May 5, 2003 interview], speaking of this broad array of problems. ‘Of course.’ Poorly understood and lightly challenged, the Afghanistan-spawned Islamist cells began to spread.”

 – Steve Coll, Ghost Wars, Page 256