CIA didn't predict 9/11 because it was "too white".

[TheRealSkeptic5000]

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-49582852

When the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) failed to prevent the September 11, 2001 attacks, many asked whether more could have been done. But the true reason why the agency was blind to the signs may be a diversity problem, writes Matthew Syed.

At one level, these were state of the art. Potential analysts were put through a battery of psychological, medical and other exams. And there is no doubt they hired exceptional people.

And yet most of these recruits also happened to look very similar - white, male, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant Americans.

In their study of the CIA, the intelligence experts Milo Jones and Phillipe Silberzahn write: "The first consistent attribute of the CIA's identity and culture from 1947 to 2001 is homogeneity of its personnel in terms of race, sex, ethnicity and class background (relative both to the rest of America and to the world as a whole)."

An inspector general's study on recruitment found that in 1964, one branch of the CIA, the Office of National Estimates, "had no black, Jewish, or women professionals, and only a few Catholics".

By 1967, the report said, there were fewer than 20 African Americans out of some 12,000 non-clerical CIA employees, and the agency maintained the practice of not hiring minorities from the 1960s through the 1980s. And until 1975, the US intelligence community "openly barred the employment of homosexuals".

Talking of his experience of the CIA in the 1980s, one insider wrote that the recruitment process "led to new officers who looked very much like the people who recruited them - white, mostly Anglo-Saxon; middle and upper class; liberal arts college graduates". There were few women and "few ethnics, even of recent European background".

"In other words, not even as much diversity as there was among those who had helped create the CIA."