Jeff Stein of Congressional Quarterly has a great recap of what former Pentagon spy-master Pat Lang and former State Department Chief of Staff Lawrence Wilkerson had to say at a University of District of Columbia forum on May 7th.
Here's some Feith fun from Pat Lang:
Patrick Lang told a hilarious story the other night, for example, about a job interview he had with Douglas Feith, a key architect of the invasion of Iraq.
It was at the beginning of the first Bush term. Lang had been in charge of the Middle East, South Asia and terrorism for the Defense Intelligence Agency in the 1990s. Later he ran the Pentagon's worldwide spying operations.
In early 2001, his name was put forward as somebody who would be good at running the Pentagon's office of special operations and low-intensity warfare, i.e., counterinsurgency. Lang had also been a Green Beret, with three tours in South Vietnam.
One of the people he had to impress was Feith, the Defense Department's number three official and a leading player in the clique of neoconservatives who had taken over the government's national security apparatus.
Lang went to see him, he recalled during a May 7 panel discussion at the University of the District of Columbia.
"He was sitting there munching a sandwich while he was talking to me," Lang recalled, "which I thought was remarkable in itself, but he also had these briefing papers -- they always had briefing papers, you know -- about me.
"He's looking at this stuff, and he says, 'I've heard of you. I heard of you.'
"He says, 'Is it really true that you really know the Arabs this well, and that you speak Arabic this well? Is that really true? Is that really true?'
"And I said, 'Yeah, that's really true.'
"That's too bad," Feith said.
The audience howled.
"That was the end of the interview," Lang said. "I'm not quite sure what he meant, but you can work it out."
Feith, of course, like the administration's other Israel-connected hawks, didn't want "Arabists" like Lang muddying the road to Baghdad, from where -- according to the Bush administration theory -- overthrowing Saddam Hussein would ignite mass demands for Western-style, pro-U.S. democracies across the entire Middle East.
And some Lang on Wolfowitz:
"I remember talking to [Paul] Wolfowitz, in his office, in the Pentagon, and telling him -- this was after the propaganda build up had started, before the war. I said, 'You know, these guys are not going to welcome you.'
"He said, 'Why?'
I said, 'For one thing, these guys detest foreigners, and the few who really like you are the least representative of the various breeds of people there. They're going to fight you, then, if you occupy the place there's going to be a massive insurgency.'"
"He said, 'No, no, they'll be glad to see us,'"
Lang continued. "This will start the process of revolution around the Middle East that will transform everything.'
No, Lang told Wolfowitz, "that's not gonna happen. It's just an impossibility. They're not like that. They don't want to be us."
Not everyone agrees with all of Lang's views about the Arab world, but on this issue he was prescient, of course, as were almost all experts on the region outside of the neocon faithful.
How come we learned so much of this dispute only after the war?
And Lawrence Wilkerson on Tenet and "Curveball":
Wilkerson provides a damning clue.
In February 2003, Powell's top aide relates, he "spent five of the most intimate days of my life, and five nights, without sleeping, as did my team, staring into . . . the face" of George Tenet, Tenet's deputy John McLaughlin, and other top CIA officials working on Iraq, at the agency's headquarters at Langley.
It was the eve of Powell's now infamous speech at the United Nations detailing Iraq's alleged biological, chemical and nuclear programs.
"One of the things Secretary Powell and I told Mr. Tenet and Mr. McLaughlin at the outset of our frenetic five or six days, trying to get ready for the U.N., was 'multiple sources.' We will not take anything and put it in this presentation, unless there are multiple, independently corroborated sources for the items we're putting in the testimony," Wilkerson said.
"That was the going-in position."
Subsequently, he learned that there was but "a single source for the mobile biological laboratories; that his code name was Curveball; and that there were several very key dissents as to this individual's testimony, during or before the preparation of the secretary of State."
Curveball, an Iraqi refugee, turned out to be a liar.
"None of that, ladies and gentlemen, none of that was revealed to the secretary of State, or to me, or to any member of my team, by either John McLaughlin or George Tenet," Wilkerson said.
Tenet says in his memoir that he never heard of any serious questions about Curveball.
As readers of this column know , however, Tenet's chief of European operations, Tyler Drumheller, insists he sent a flurry of warnings about Curveball to Tenet's deputies.
Both can't be right.
"Either George Tenet is lying through his teeth, or Tyler Drumheller is lying through his teeth," Wilkerson says, "with regard to one of the most important pillars of Secretary Powell's presentation at the United Nations: the mobile biological laboratories."
We're waiting now for a third CIA official to come forth with an answer.
Lots of people are dying because of the errors and idiocy perpetrated by Feith, Wolfowitz and yes, Tenet too.
-- Steve Clemons
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
Showing posts with label George Tenet. Show all posts
Showing posts with label George Tenet. Show all posts
Monday, May 28, 2007
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
BushCo Psychotics or BPPs
Bush alums reap their reward 'Psychotic personalities' get comeuppance after leaving administration
Robert Scheer
Editor: http://truthdig.com
As Paul Wolfowitz twists in the wind after being found guilty in a World Bank investigation of public payola to his girlfriend, it does seem that his career might finally be coming to an end.
Pity that the Iraq debacle, which Wolfowitz promoted, was not sufficient reason for removing him from public office. Instead, President Bush rewarded "Wolfie" with a promotion to head the World Bank. Add him to the rapidly growing list of Bush alums whose career trajectory suddenly plummets upon the disclosure of a pattern of lying obvious to most observers but not to the president himself.
To understand why scum consistently rises to the surface of the Bush administration, it is best to refer to the wisdom contained in the final memoir of the late, great Kurt Vonnegut. In an excerpt published in 2006, Vonnegut observed that "George W. Bush has gathered around him... most frighteningly, psychotic personalities, or PPs, the medical term for smart, personable people who have no consciences."
How better to explain the unwavering arrogance of people -- certainly Wolfowitz, but clearly he is not alone in this administration -- who consistently get it wrong yet plow on undeterred by the inconvenience of fact or logic?
Most of us, once associated with the grievous distortions of evidence and outright lies justifying the invasion of Iraq, not to mention the horrid waste and death attendant upon the subsequent occupation that Wolfowitz oversaw, would feel the need to pause for a spell of critical self-reflection. Not so Wolfowitz, who, unmoved by the death and destruction he wrought, sailed on to the World Bank and announced that he would fight what he claimed was that venerable institution's penchant for, yes, he used the word, "corruption."
Toward that end, he would bring with him a score of Pentagon underlings whose hands were almost as bloody as his from the Iraq disaster. One of them, Kevin Kellems, former spokesman for Vice President Dick Cheney, suddenly resigned his $250,000-a-year job at the World Bank on Monday.
Another veteran from the Iraq buildup to be rewarded was Wolfowitz's lover, Shaha Riza, his resident Muslim expert, who was promoted to a State Department position paying more than Secretary Condoleezza Rice earns. Not quite the $400,000 that Wolfowitz would be raking in at the World Bank, but Riza's salary had the advantage of being tax-free.
Such rich rewards for folks ostensibly fighting world poverty would not seem troubling to the PPs Vonnegut referred to, as they are suffering from a malady that renders them morally tone-deaf. Citing what he calls the classic medical text on PPs, "The Mask of Sanity," Vonnegut noted in his "Custodians of Chaos" piece: "Some people are born deaf, some are born blind or whatever, and this book is about congenitally defective human beings of a sort that is making this whole country and many other parts of the planet go completely haywire nowadays. These are people born without consciences, and suddenly they are taking charge of everything.
"PPs are presentable," Vonnegut reminds us, lest we be fooled by their equanimity on talk shows, "they know full well the suffering their actions may cause others, but they do not care.
They cannot care because they are nuts. They have a screw loose!"
Vonnegut includes the executives who gave us the Enron and WorldCom scandals with the neoconservatives to indicate the malady's extent. This could be dismissed as the standard liberal claptrap -- turning the culprits into victims whose illness made them do it. But I offer his observations as the most plausible explanation of the headlong pursuit of disaster, for themselves and the planet, on the part of these otherwise canny overachievers.
Yes, their mendacity does often catch up with them, and folks like Wolfowitz do not tend to be well regarded after they have lost the perks of power. The problem is that the truth arrives too late to prevent considerable suffering. Indeed, Wolfowitz's embarrassment at the World Bank is a minor inconvenience compared with the opprobrium he should be receiving after each day's dose of disaster news from Iraq disproves the cakewalk of a regime change that he had so assuredly promised.
Then, too, this lying lout will no doubt be rewarded with something similar to the $4 million contract that former CIA Director George Tenet recently received to share a few details of how he went about betraying us.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
Monday, May 14, 2007
Tenet Will Testify Regarding Niger Forgeries
I'm a little suspicious of Mr. Tenet, for obvious reasons.
In addition to the obvious ones, there is this: I doubt seriously that Tenet knows the whole story on the Niger forgeries. I doubt that anyone outside the White House, who was in government at the time, knows the whole story.
If Tenet knew where the bodies are buried on this, he would still be at the CIA, just like Gonzales is still at the DOJ.
Much like the anthrax attacks, the Bush government has shown no interest in getting to the bottom of it: The say they were fooled by the Niger documents. Given that those documents were crudely forged, one would think they would be livid.
Memo to Mr. Tenet: You had better be prepared to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Nothing less will do now.
Tenet Agrees to Cooperate With Congressional Investigation Into Niger Fraud
ThinkProgress.org
Monday 14 May 2007
Former CIA Director George Tenet has agreed to cooperate with a House investigation into the White House's fraudulent pre-war claim that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger for a nuclear weapon. That assertion - the infamous "16 words" in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address - was a critical part of the administration's case for war.
In a new statement, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) announced that Tenet will provide a deposition on the issue and testify before the committee on June 19:
Today Chairman Henry A. Waxman announced that the Oversight Committee will postpone the hearing with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from May 15, 2007, to June 19, 2007. The hearing is being postponed to allow former CIA Director George Tenet to testify with Secretary Rice and to accommodate Secretary Rice's travel schedule.
Mr. Tenet has agreed to cooperate with the Committee's inquiry into whether the White House overstated Iraq's efforts to obtain uranium from Africa and its nuclear threat in making the case for war. Mr. Tenet has agreed to provide a deposition to the Committee prior to the hearing.
Under Tenet, the CIA had debunked the claims about uranium and Niger months before the '03 State of the Union. The CIA "even demanded it be taken out of two previous presidential speeches." Tenet now says the 16 words made it into the State of the Union because he delegated the review of that speech to his deputies.
Tenet has been far more willing to discuss the Niger claims than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Waxman has been forced to subpoena Rice to appear at the hearing along with Tenet, and thus far Rice maintains she will not comply, claiming she has already answered Waxman's questions "in full."
Also, last month, the State Department refused to allow intelligence analyst Simon Dodge to be interviewed by House investigators; weeks before the '03 State of the Union, Simon examined the documents supposedly from Niger and determined they were "probably a hoax" and "clearly a forgery."
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
In addition to the obvious ones, there is this: I doubt seriously that Tenet knows the whole story on the Niger forgeries. I doubt that anyone outside the White House, who was in government at the time, knows the whole story.
If Tenet knew where the bodies are buried on this, he would still be at the CIA, just like Gonzales is still at the DOJ.
Much like the anthrax attacks, the Bush government has shown no interest in getting to the bottom of it: The say they were fooled by the Niger documents. Given that those documents were crudely forged, one would think they would be livid.
Memo to Mr. Tenet: You had better be prepared to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Nothing less will do now.
Tenet Agrees to Cooperate With Congressional Investigation Into Niger Fraud
ThinkProgress.org
Monday 14 May 2007
Former CIA Director George Tenet has agreed to cooperate with a House investigation into the White House's fraudulent pre-war claim that Iraq had sought uranium from Niger for a nuclear weapon. That assertion - the infamous "16 words" in President Bush's 2003 State of the Union address - was a critical part of the administration's case for war.
In a new statement, House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman Henry Waxman (D-CA) announced that Tenet will provide a deposition on the issue and testify before the committee on June 19:
Today Chairman Henry A. Waxman announced that the Oversight Committee will postpone the hearing with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from May 15, 2007, to June 19, 2007. The hearing is being postponed to allow former CIA Director George Tenet to testify with Secretary Rice and to accommodate Secretary Rice's travel schedule.
Mr. Tenet has agreed to cooperate with the Committee's inquiry into whether the White House overstated Iraq's efforts to obtain uranium from Africa and its nuclear threat in making the case for war. Mr. Tenet has agreed to provide a deposition to the Committee prior to the hearing.
Under Tenet, the CIA had debunked the claims about uranium and Niger months before the '03 State of the Union. The CIA "even demanded it be taken out of two previous presidential speeches." Tenet now says the 16 words made it into the State of the Union because he delegated the review of that speech to his deputies.
Tenet has been far more willing to discuss the Niger claims than Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice. Waxman has been forced to subpoena Rice to appear at the hearing along with Tenet, and thus far Rice maintains she will not comply, claiming she has already answered Waxman's questions "in full."
Also, last month, the State Department refused to allow intelligence analyst Simon Dodge to be interviewed by House investigators; weeks before the '03 State of the Union, Simon examined the documents supposedly from Niger and determined they were "probably a hoax" and "clearly a forgery."
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
Coleen Rowley Goes After Tenet
How Will You Look Yourself In The Mirror, Mr. Tenet?
AP
And what will you see?
A gleaming presidential medal, the $4 million from your lucrative book deal or just 30 pieces of dirty silver? Your soul is worth more than these things so please stop selling it. Your original mistakes and weaknesses could be forgiven so much easier if you would just honestly admit them instead of continuing these deceptive cat and mouse interviews on TV that, in the end, do nothing but compound your original errors.
Yesterday on Meet the Press you told Tim Russert that there was no "texture" to the pre 9-11 threat reporting despite the "system blinking red" and despite your "hair (being) on fire" which resulted in your emergency meeting with Condoleeza Rice in mid July and the CIA's Presidential Daily Brief given to President George W. Bush on August 6, 2001 entitled, "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." Then, even more disingenuously, you added that "everything went silent" in August 2001.
How could you forget, former DCI Tenet, that on August 23, 2001, you were briefed about the Moussaoui case in a power point briefing titled, "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly." You were told among other things: that Moussaoui wanted to learn to fly a 747, paid for his training in cash, was interested to learn the doors do not open in flight, and wanted to fly a simulated flight from London to New York. You were also told that the FBI had arrested Moussaoui because of a visa overstay and that the CIA was working the case with the FBI. One of the documents given to you even had Bin Laden's picture on it! And the CIA held successive briefings about Moussaoui: August 27th, 2001, with the deputy director of operations; August 28th, 2001, with the executive director of the CIA; August 30, 2001 with the director of Central Intelligence; September 4th, with the executive director of the CIA; and September 10th, with the deputy director of operations (see Moussaoui defense exhibits 660, 670, 671,672,673, and 674). So how can you say "everything went silent" in August?!
Certainly your lack of pre 9-11 action after all this is hard to explain and something you'd like to forget. Your excuses that "the president is not the action officer" or "all I can tell you is, it wasn't the appropriate place. I just can't take you any farther than that" (for why you did not alert others during an early September 2001 Cabinet-level meeting on terrorism) are pretty weak. A lot could have been done in those remaining 18 days had you taken some action. Bolting our airline cockpit doors, for example, something Israeli airlines already did and which would have cost only an estimated $900 per door, would have been logical and could have foiled the suicide hijackers.
But when this information about the August 23rd power point briefing was dragged out of you by the 9-11 Commission, you claimed, oddly enough, that you made no connection between Moussaoui's presence in the United States and the earlier threat reporting. You did, however, according to news reports, make the connection very quickly on the morning of 9-11. In fact it was reported to be the first thing out of your mouth that morning upon learning of planes flying into the World Trade Center.
Why was it that the information about the August 23rd briefing--about the only Al Qaeda terrorist to be thus far prosecuted and convicted of the 9-11 conspiracy in the United States--had to be practically dragged out of you by the 9-11 Commission?
Sadly, Mr. Tenet, this inconsistency is just the beginning of your larger, tragic sellout in attempting to defend the indefensible, helping the Bush administration make its public case to go to war against Iraq. You still obviously mistake a "marketing campaign" for the truth and ego-defense mechanisms for conscience.
Even more sadly, you are not the first who has left the Bush Administration who feels compelled to cover up everything to continue to make money. Full page, several thousand dollar ads of Zig Ziglar next to a smiling "Legendary Soldier-Statesman" General Colin Powell as part of Ziglar's "Get Motivated" Seminar have begun appearing almost daily in our Twin City newspapers. For $225 per person, the Ziglar-Powell seminar promises "Motivation! Inspiration! Career Skills! (and) Wealth Building!" but alas no truth.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
AP
And what will you see?
A gleaming presidential medal, the $4 million from your lucrative book deal or just 30 pieces of dirty silver? Your soul is worth more than these things so please stop selling it. Your original mistakes and weaknesses could be forgiven so much easier if you would just honestly admit them instead of continuing these deceptive cat and mouse interviews on TV that, in the end, do nothing but compound your original errors.
Yesterday on Meet the Press you told Tim Russert that there was no "texture" to the pre 9-11 threat reporting despite the "system blinking red" and despite your "hair (being) on fire" which resulted in your emergency meeting with Condoleeza Rice in mid July and the CIA's Presidential Daily Brief given to President George W. Bush on August 6, 2001 entitled, "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US." Then, even more disingenuously, you added that "everything went silent" in August 2001.
How could you forget, former DCI Tenet, that on August 23, 2001, you were briefed about the Moussaoui case in a power point briefing titled, "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly." You were told among other things: that Moussaoui wanted to learn to fly a 747, paid for his training in cash, was interested to learn the doors do not open in flight, and wanted to fly a simulated flight from London to New York. You were also told that the FBI had arrested Moussaoui because of a visa overstay and that the CIA was working the case with the FBI. One of the documents given to you even had Bin Laden's picture on it! And the CIA held successive briefings about Moussaoui: August 27th, 2001, with the deputy director of operations; August 28th, 2001, with the executive director of the CIA; August 30, 2001 with the director of Central Intelligence; September 4th, with the executive director of the CIA; and September 10th, with the deputy director of operations (see Moussaoui defense exhibits 660, 670, 671,672,673, and 674). So how can you say "everything went silent" in August?!
Certainly your lack of pre 9-11 action after all this is hard to explain and something you'd like to forget. Your excuses that "the president is not the action officer" or "all I can tell you is, it wasn't the appropriate place. I just can't take you any farther than that" (for why you did not alert others during an early September 2001 Cabinet-level meeting on terrorism) are pretty weak. A lot could have been done in those remaining 18 days had you taken some action. Bolting our airline cockpit doors, for example, something Israeli airlines already did and which would have cost only an estimated $900 per door, would have been logical and could have foiled the suicide hijackers.
But when this information about the August 23rd power point briefing was dragged out of you by the 9-11 Commission, you claimed, oddly enough, that you made no connection between Moussaoui's presence in the United States and the earlier threat reporting. You did, however, according to news reports, make the connection very quickly on the morning of 9-11. In fact it was reported to be the first thing out of your mouth that morning upon learning of planes flying into the World Trade Center.
Why was it that the information about the August 23rd briefing--about the only Al Qaeda terrorist to be thus far prosecuted and convicted of the 9-11 conspiracy in the United States--had to be practically dragged out of you by the 9-11 Commission?
Sadly, Mr. Tenet, this inconsistency is just the beginning of your larger, tragic sellout in attempting to defend the indefensible, helping the Bush administration make its public case to go to war against Iraq. You still obviously mistake a "marketing campaign" for the truth and ego-defense mechanisms for conscience.
Even more sadly, you are not the first who has left the Bush Administration who feels compelled to cover up everything to continue to make money. Full page, several thousand dollar ads of Zig Ziglar next to a smiling "Legendary Soldier-Statesman" General Colin Powell as part of Ziglar's "Get Motivated" Seminar have begun appearing almost daily in our Twin City newspapers. For $225 per person, the Ziglar-Powell seminar promises "Motivation! Inspiration! Career Skills! (and) Wealth Building!" but alas no truth.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
Tenet: Thy Name Is Greedy Scuzz-Bucket
AKA, Slam Dunk.
Charlie Rangel is right, Tenet should be investigated, inside-out and upside-down!
Tenet Receives Millions From Corporations Profiting Off Iraq
Salon Tim Shorrock Posted May 7, 2007 05:50 PM
If you go by the book jacket of his new memoir, "At the Center of the Storm," George Tenet is enjoying the life of a retired government servant teaching at Georgetown University, where he was appointed to the faculty in 2004. The former CIA director played up the academic image when he kicked off the recent media blitz for his new book by doing an interview for CBS's "60 Minutes" from his spacious, book-lined office at the university. His academic salary, and the reported $4 million advance he received from publisher HarperCollins, should provide the former CIA director with more than enough money to live comfortably for the rest of his days and leave a substantial fortune to his children.
But those monies are hardly Tenet's entire income. While the swirl of publicity around his book has focused on his long debated role in allowing flawed intelligence to launch the war in Iraq, nobody is talking about his lucrative connection to that conflict ever since he resigned from the CIA in June 2004. In fact, Tenet has been earning substantial income by working for corporations that provide the U.S. government with technology, equipment and personnel used for the war in Iraq as well as the broader war on terror.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
Rangel Wants Tenet Investigated
Rave On, Charlie!
We want to see every last one of the lying war criminals investigated and tried, at the Hague.
According to Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), despite former CIA director George Tenet's belated criticism of the Bush Administration's rush to invade Iraq, which included reliance on "faulty intelligence," Tenet doesn't have any "credibility" and should be investigated.
On CBS's Face The Nation Sunday morning, after a discussion of the impasse between the Democratic-controlled Congress and the president over the war funding bill, host Bob Schieffer asked the House Ways and Means Committee chairman if he could "switch to George Tenet, the former CIA director whose book came out this week."
"Sometime back, he got the Medal of Freedom," Schieffer continued. "I believe you were quoted somewhere along the way as saying that rather than the Medal of Freedom, he should be looked at by the Justice Department. What do you think about these allegations that he's making now that he was misunderstood when he said it was a slam dunk, that the administration had already made up its mind to go to war? Does he have credibility with you, Mr. Chairman?"
"No," Rangel responded, "I don't think he has credibility with anyone in the United States."
Rangel continued, "For him to have had the information that he had and to tell the president that it was a slam dunk. For the president to mislead the people in the United States in believing that there was weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam Hussein was involved in the attack in 9/11, that he was part of al Qaeda. And for him to have done what he did to my friend, Colin Powell, to have him sitting in the United Nations proclaiming the connection between the two, knowing in his heart that the evidence did not go in that direction. And to accept a medal and then to put out a book -- God knows what he got in terms of an advance -- to me, this warrants an investigation."
"It is unfair to do something like that to the American people," Rangel added.
Over a week ago, as RAW STORY reported, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) invited Tenet to testify on May 10 before the House Committee on Oversight and Government reform.
"The purpose of the hearing is to learn your views about one of the claims used to justify the war in Iraq – the assertion that Iraq sought to import uranium from Niger – and related issues," Waxman wrote in a letter to Tenet.
In his book At the Center of the Storm, Tenet slams the White House for its deliberations over the intelligence used to build the case for the invasion of Iraq.
"There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat," he writes.
Tenet also claims that Vice President Dick Cheney intended to lay the blame for the faulty evidence of Iraq's WMD threat on the ex-CIA head: "Rather than acknowledge responsibility, the administration's message was: Don't blame us. George Tenet got us into this mess."
Six former CIA officials, including Larry Johnson, recently wrote Tenet, "By your silence you helped build the case for war. You betrayed the CIA officers who collected the intelligence that made it clear that Saddam did not pose an imminent threat. You betrayed the analysts who tried to withstand the pressure applied by Cheney and Rumsfeld."
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
We want to see every last one of the lying war criminals investigated and tried, at the Hague.
According to Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), despite former CIA director George Tenet's belated criticism of the Bush Administration's rush to invade Iraq, which included reliance on "faulty intelligence," Tenet doesn't have any "credibility" and should be investigated.
On CBS's Face The Nation Sunday morning, after a discussion of the impasse between the Democratic-controlled Congress and the president over the war funding bill, host Bob Schieffer asked the House Ways and Means Committee chairman if he could "switch to George Tenet, the former CIA director whose book came out this week."
"Sometime back, he got the Medal of Freedom," Schieffer continued. "I believe you were quoted somewhere along the way as saying that rather than the Medal of Freedom, he should be looked at by the Justice Department. What do you think about these allegations that he's making now that he was misunderstood when he said it was a slam dunk, that the administration had already made up its mind to go to war? Does he have credibility with you, Mr. Chairman?"
"No," Rangel responded, "I don't think he has credibility with anyone in the United States."
Rangel continued, "For him to have had the information that he had and to tell the president that it was a slam dunk. For the president to mislead the people in the United States in believing that there was weapons of mass destruction, that Saddam Hussein was involved in the attack in 9/11, that he was part of al Qaeda. And for him to have done what he did to my friend, Colin Powell, to have him sitting in the United Nations proclaiming the connection between the two, knowing in his heart that the evidence did not go in that direction. And to accept a medal and then to put out a book -- God knows what he got in terms of an advance -- to me, this warrants an investigation."
"It is unfair to do something like that to the American people," Rangel added.
Over a week ago, as RAW STORY reported, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-CA) invited Tenet to testify on May 10 before the House Committee on Oversight and Government reform.
"The purpose of the hearing is to learn your views about one of the claims used to justify the war in Iraq – the assertion that Iraq sought to import uranium from Niger – and related issues," Waxman wrote in a letter to Tenet.
In his book At the Center of the Storm, Tenet slams the White House for its deliberations over the intelligence used to build the case for the invasion of Iraq.
"There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat," he writes.
Tenet also claims that Vice President Dick Cheney intended to lay the blame for the faulty evidence of Iraq's WMD threat on the ex-CIA head: "Rather than acknowledge responsibility, the administration's message was: Don't blame us. George Tenet got us into this mess."
Six former CIA officials, including Larry Johnson, recently wrote Tenet, "By your silence you helped build the case for war. You betrayed the CIA officers who collected the intelligence that made it clear that Saddam did not pose an imminent threat. You betrayed the analysts who tried to withstand the pressure applied by Cheney and Rumsfeld."
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
Monday, May 07, 2007
9/11 Could and Should Have Been Prevented....
But where would the NeoCon "Plan For The New American Century" be without it?
No where, and that would be a good thing for all of us.
Tenet-Bush Pre-9/11 'Small Talk'
By Robert Parry May 6, 2007
In late August 2001, when aggressive presidential action might have changed the course of U.S. history, CIA Director George Tenet made a special trip to Crawford, Texas, to get George W. Bush to focus on an imminent threat of a spectacular al-Qaeda attack only to have the conversation descend into meaningless small talk.
Alarmed CIA officials already had held an extraordinary meeting with then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on July 10 to lay out the accumulating evidence of an impending attack and had delivered on Aug. 6 a special “Presidential Daily Brief” to Bush entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”
“A few weeks after the Aug. 6 PDB was delivered, I followed it to Crawford to make sure the President stayed current on events,” Tenet wrote in his memoir, At the Center of the Storm.
“This was my first visit to the ranch. I remember the President graciously driving me around the spread in his pickup and my trying to make small talk about the flora and the fauna, none of which were native to Queens,” where Tenet had grown up.
Tenet’s trip to Crawford – like the July 10 meeting with Rice and the Aug. 6 briefing paper for Bush – failed to shock the administration out of its lethargy nor elicit the emergency steps that the CIA and other counterterrorism specialists wanted.
While Tenet and Bush made small talk about “the flora and the fauna,” al-Qaeda operatives put the finishing touches on their plans.
It wasn’t until Sept. 4 – a week before 9/11 – when senior Bush administration officials, including Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “finally reconvened in the White House Situation Room” to discuss counter-terrorism plans “that had been lingering unresolved all summer long,” Tenet wrote.
Tenet’s memoir also provided new details about the emergency July 10 meeting that Tenet had demanded with Rice to lay out the startling new evidence of an impending al-Qaeda attack.
By July 10, senior CIA counterterrorism officials, including Cofer Black, had collected a body of intelligence that they first presented to Tenet.
“The briefing [Black] gave me literally made my hair stand on end,” Tenet wrote. “When he was through, I picked up the big white secure phone on the left side of my desk – the one with a direct line to Condi Rice – and told her that I needed to see her immediately to provide an update on the al-Qa’ida threat.”
‘Significant Terrorist Attack’
After reaching the White House, a CIA briefer, identified in the book only as Rich B., started his presentation by saying: “There will be a significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months!”
Rich B. then displayed a chart showing “seven specific pieces of intelligence gathered over the past 24 hours, all of them predicting an imminent attack,” Tenet wrote. The briefer presented another chart with “the more chilling statements we had in our possession through intelligence.”
These comments included a mid-June statement by Osama bin Laden to trainees about an attack in the near future; talk about decisive acts and a “big event”; and fresh intelligence about predictions of “a stunning turn of events in the weeks ahead,” Tenet wrote.
Rich B. told Rice that the attack will be “spectacular” and designed to inflict heavy casualties against U.S. targets, Tenet wrote.
“Attack preparations have been made,” Rich B. said about al-Qaeda’s plans. “Multiple and simultaneous attacks are possible, and they will occur with little or no warning.”
When Rice asked what needed to be done, the CIA’s Black responded, “This country needs to go on a war footing now.” The CIA officials sought approval for broad covert-action authority that had been languishing since March, Tenet wrote.
Despite the July 10 briefing, other senior Bush administration officials continued to pooh-pooh the seriousness of the al-Qaeda threat. Two leading neoconservatives at the Pentagon – Stephen Cambone and Paul Wolfowitz – suggested that the CIA might be falling for a disinformation campaign, Tenet wrote.
But the evidence of an impending attack continued to pour in. At one CIA meeting in late July, Tenet wrote that Rich B. told senior officials bluntly, “they’re coming here,” a declaration that was followed by stunned silence.
The intelligence community’s evidence was summarized in the special PDB that was delivered to Bush while he was vacationing at his ranch in Crawford.
The PDB ended by noting that “FBI information … indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York. The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.”
Bush apparently was not pleased by the CIA’s intrusion on his vacation nor with the report’s lack of specific targets and dates. He glared at the CIA briefer and snapped, “All right, you’ve covered your ass,” according to an account in author Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine., which relied heavily on senior CIA officials.
Ordering no special response, Bush returned to his month-long vacation of fishing, clearing brush and working on a speech about stem-cell research.
Averting 9/11
While it will never be known whether a different reaction by Bush and his national security team might have disrupted the 9/11 attacks, a variety of options – both short- and long-term – were available.
Inside the FBI in August, there were other warnings that went unheeded. FBI agents in Minneapolis arrested Zacarias Moussaoui because of his suspicious behavior in trying to learn to fly commercial jetliners when he lacked even rudimentary skills.
FBI agent Harry Samit, who interrogated Moussaoui, sent 70 warnings to his superiors about suspicions that the Islamic extremist had been taking flight training in Minnesota because he was planning to hijack a plane for a terrorist operation.
FBI officials in Washington showed “criminal negligence” in blocking requests for a search warrant on Moussaoui’s computer or taking other preventive action, Samit testified more than four years later at Moussaoui’s criminal trial.
Samit’s futile warnings matched the frustrations of other federal agents in Minnesota and Arizona who had gotten wind of al-Qaeda’s audacious scheme to train pilots for operations in the United States. The agents couldn’t get their warnings addressed by senior officials at FBI headquarters.
But another big part of the problem was the lack of urgency at the top. Bush and his top aides shrugged off the growing alarm within the U.S. intelligence community.
Counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke said the 9/11 attacks might have been averted if Bush had shown some initiative in “shaking the trees” by having high-level officials from the FBI, CIA, Customs and other federal agencies go back to their bureaucracies and demand any information about the terrorist threat.
If they had, they might well have found the memos from the FBI agents in Arizona and Minnesota. They also might have exploited the information that two known al-Qaeda operatives, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawar al-Hazmi, had entered the United States. On Sept. 11, they boarded American Airlines Flight 77 and helped fly it into the Pentagon.
In his book, Against All Enemies, Clarke contrasted President Bill Clinton’s urgency over the intelligence warnings that preceded the Millennium events with the lackadaisical approach of Bush and his national security team.
“In December 1999, we received intelligence reports that there were going to be major al-Qaeda attacks,” Clarke said in an interview about his book. “President Clinton asked his national security adviser Sandy Berger to hold daily meetings with the attorney general, the FBI director, the CIA director and stop the attacks.
“Every day they went back from the White House to the FBI, to the Justice Department, to the CIA and they shook the trees to find out if there was any information. You know, when you know the United States is going to be attacked, the top people in the United States government ought to be working hands-on to prevent it and working together.
”Now, contrast that with what happened in the summer of 2001, when we even had more clear indications that there was going to be an attack. Did the President ask for daily meetings of his team to try to stop the attack? Did Condi Rice hold meetings of her counterparts to try to stop the attack? No.” [CNN’s “Larry King Live,” March 24, 2004]
Other Priorities
In his book, Clarke offered other examples of pre-9/11 mistakes by the Bush administration, including a downgrading in importance of the counterterrorism office, a shifting of budget priorities, an obsession with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and an emphasis on conservative ideological issues, such as Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars missile defense program.
A more hierarchical White House structure also insulated Bush from direct contact with mid-level national security officials who had specialized on the al-Qaeda issue.
The chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission – New Jersey’s former Republican Gov. Thomas Kean and former Democratic Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton – agreed that the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented.
“The whole story might have been different,” Kean said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on April 4, 2004. Kean cited a string of law-enforcement blunders including the “lack of coordination within the FBI” and the FBI’s failure to understand the significance of Moussaoui’s arrest in August while training to fly passenger jets.
Yet, as the clock ticked down to 9/11, the Bush administration continued to have other priorities.
On Aug. 9, 2001, Bush gave a nationally televised speech on stem cells, delivering his judgment permitting federal funding for research on 60 preexisting stem-cell lines, but barring government support for work on any other lines of stem cells derived from human embryos.
On side trips from his August vacation, Bush also made forays to Middle American cities that Bush said represented “heartland values” and the basic decency of Americans. Some residents living near the Atlantic and Pacific oceans viewed the hype about “heartland values” as a not-so-subtle snub at the so-called “blue” coastal states that favored Al Gore.
Bush kept drawing distinctions, too, between his presidency and Bill Clinton’s. Bush and his senior advisers continued their hostility toward what they viewed as the old Clinton phobia about terrorism and this little-known group called al-Qaeda.
Tenet’s late August trip to Crawford seeking to underscore the urgency of the terrorist threat may have been viewed in that light, helping to explain why it devolved into a meaningless discussion of the ranch’s “flora and fauna.”
Despite the Sept. 4, 2001, meeting of senior Bush aides to review the counterterrorism initiatives that had been languishing since March, the administration still didn’t seem moved by the urgency of the moment.
On Sept. 6, 2001, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld threatened a presidential veto of a proposal by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, seeking to transfer money from strategic missile defense to counterterrorism.
Also on Sept. 6, former Sen. Gary Hart, who had co-chaired a commission on terrorism, was again trying to galvanize the Bush administration into showing some urgency about the threat. Hart met with Rice and urged the White House to move faster. Rice agreed to pass on Hart’s concerns to higher-ups.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
No where, and that would be a good thing for all of us.
Tenet-Bush Pre-9/11 'Small Talk'
By Robert Parry May 6, 2007
In late August 2001, when aggressive presidential action might have changed the course of U.S. history, CIA Director George Tenet made a special trip to Crawford, Texas, to get George W. Bush to focus on an imminent threat of a spectacular al-Qaeda attack only to have the conversation descend into meaningless small talk.
Alarmed CIA officials already had held an extraordinary meeting with then-national security adviser Condoleezza Rice on July 10 to lay out the accumulating evidence of an impending attack and had delivered on Aug. 6 a special “Presidential Daily Brief” to Bush entitled “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in US.”
“A few weeks after the Aug. 6 PDB was delivered, I followed it to Crawford to make sure the President stayed current on events,” Tenet wrote in his memoir, At the Center of the Storm.
“This was my first visit to the ranch. I remember the President graciously driving me around the spread in his pickup and my trying to make small talk about the flora and the fauna, none of which were native to Queens,” where Tenet had grown up.
Tenet’s trip to Crawford – like the July 10 meeting with Rice and the Aug. 6 briefing paper for Bush – failed to shock the administration out of its lethargy nor elicit the emergency steps that the CIA and other counterterrorism specialists wanted.
While Tenet and Bush made small talk about “the flora and the fauna,” al-Qaeda operatives put the finishing touches on their plans.
It wasn’t until Sept. 4 – a week before 9/11 – when senior Bush administration officials, including Rice and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, “finally reconvened in the White House Situation Room” to discuss counter-terrorism plans “that had been lingering unresolved all summer long,” Tenet wrote.
Tenet’s memoir also provided new details about the emergency July 10 meeting that Tenet had demanded with Rice to lay out the startling new evidence of an impending al-Qaeda attack.
By July 10, senior CIA counterterrorism officials, including Cofer Black, had collected a body of intelligence that they first presented to Tenet.
“The briefing [Black] gave me literally made my hair stand on end,” Tenet wrote. “When he was through, I picked up the big white secure phone on the left side of my desk – the one with a direct line to Condi Rice – and told her that I needed to see her immediately to provide an update on the al-Qa’ida threat.”
‘Significant Terrorist Attack’
After reaching the White House, a CIA briefer, identified in the book only as Rich B., started his presentation by saying: “There will be a significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months!”
Rich B. then displayed a chart showing “seven specific pieces of intelligence gathered over the past 24 hours, all of them predicting an imminent attack,” Tenet wrote. The briefer presented another chart with “the more chilling statements we had in our possession through intelligence.”
These comments included a mid-June statement by Osama bin Laden to trainees about an attack in the near future; talk about decisive acts and a “big event”; and fresh intelligence about predictions of “a stunning turn of events in the weeks ahead,” Tenet wrote.
Rich B. told Rice that the attack will be “spectacular” and designed to inflict heavy casualties against U.S. targets, Tenet wrote.
“Attack preparations have been made,” Rich B. said about al-Qaeda’s plans. “Multiple and simultaneous attacks are possible, and they will occur with little or no warning.”
When Rice asked what needed to be done, the CIA’s Black responded, “This country needs to go on a war footing now.” The CIA officials sought approval for broad covert-action authority that had been languishing since March, Tenet wrote.
Despite the July 10 briefing, other senior Bush administration officials continued to pooh-pooh the seriousness of the al-Qaeda threat. Two leading neoconservatives at the Pentagon – Stephen Cambone and Paul Wolfowitz – suggested that the CIA might be falling for a disinformation campaign, Tenet wrote.
But the evidence of an impending attack continued to pour in. At one CIA meeting in late July, Tenet wrote that Rich B. told senior officials bluntly, “they’re coming here,” a declaration that was followed by stunned silence.
The intelligence community’s evidence was summarized in the special PDB that was delivered to Bush while he was vacationing at his ranch in Crawford.
The PDB ended by noting that “FBI information … indicates patterns of suspicious activity in this country consistent with preparations for hijackings or other types of attacks, including recent surveillance of federal buildings in New York. The FBI is conducting approximately 70 full field investigations throughout the US that it considers Bin Ladin-related. CIA and the FBI are investigating a call to our Embassy in the UAE in May saying that a group of Bin Ladin supporters was in the US planning attacks with explosives.”
Bush apparently was not pleased by the CIA’s intrusion on his vacation nor with the report’s lack of specific targets and dates. He glared at the CIA briefer and snapped, “All right, you’ve covered your ass,” according to an account in author Ron Suskind’s The One Percent Doctrine., which relied heavily on senior CIA officials.
Ordering no special response, Bush returned to his month-long vacation of fishing, clearing brush and working on a speech about stem-cell research.
Averting 9/11
While it will never be known whether a different reaction by Bush and his national security team might have disrupted the 9/11 attacks, a variety of options – both short- and long-term – were available.
Inside the FBI in August, there were other warnings that went unheeded. FBI agents in Minneapolis arrested Zacarias Moussaoui because of his suspicious behavior in trying to learn to fly commercial jetliners when he lacked even rudimentary skills.
FBI agent Harry Samit, who interrogated Moussaoui, sent 70 warnings to his superiors about suspicions that the Islamic extremist had been taking flight training in Minnesota because he was planning to hijack a plane for a terrorist operation.
FBI officials in Washington showed “criminal negligence” in blocking requests for a search warrant on Moussaoui’s computer or taking other preventive action, Samit testified more than four years later at Moussaoui’s criminal trial.
Samit’s futile warnings matched the frustrations of other federal agents in Minnesota and Arizona who had gotten wind of al-Qaeda’s audacious scheme to train pilots for operations in the United States. The agents couldn’t get their warnings addressed by senior officials at FBI headquarters.
But another big part of the problem was the lack of urgency at the top. Bush and his top aides shrugged off the growing alarm within the U.S. intelligence community.
Counterterrorism coordinator Richard Clarke said the 9/11 attacks might have been averted if Bush had shown some initiative in “shaking the trees” by having high-level officials from the FBI, CIA, Customs and other federal agencies go back to their bureaucracies and demand any information about the terrorist threat.
If they had, they might well have found the memos from the FBI agents in Arizona and Minnesota. They also might have exploited the information that two known al-Qaeda operatives, Khalid al-Mihdhar and Nawar al-Hazmi, had entered the United States. On Sept. 11, they boarded American Airlines Flight 77 and helped fly it into the Pentagon.
In his book, Against All Enemies, Clarke contrasted President Bill Clinton’s urgency over the intelligence warnings that preceded the Millennium events with the lackadaisical approach of Bush and his national security team.
“In December 1999, we received intelligence reports that there were going to be major al-Qaeda attacks,” Clarke said in an interview about his book. “President Clinton asked his national security adviser Sandy Berger to hold daily meetings with the attorney general, the FBI director, the CIA director and stop the attacks.
“Every day they went back from the White House to the FBI, to the Justice Department, to the CIA and they shook the trees to find out if there was any information. You know, when you know the United States is going to be attacked, the top people in the United States government ought to be working hands-on to prevent it and working together.
”Now, contrast that with what happened in the summer of 2001, when we even had more clear indications that there was going to be an attack. Did the President ask for daily meetings of his team to try to stop the attack? Did Condi Rice hold meetings of her counterparts to try to stop the attack? No.” [CNN’s “Larry King Live,” March 24, 2004]
Other Priorities
In his book, Clarke offered other examples of pre-9/11 mistakes by the Bush administration, including a downgrading in importance of the counterterrorism office, a shifting of budget priorities, an obsession with Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and an emphasis on conservative ideological issues, such as Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars missile defense program.
A more hierarchical White House structure also insulated Bush from direct contact with mid-level national security officials who had specialized on the al-Qaeda issue.
The chairman and vice chairman of the 9/11 Commission – New Jersey’s former Republican Gov. Thomas Kean and former Democratic Indiana Rep. Lee Hamilton – agreed that the 9/11 attacks could have been prevented.
“The whole story might have been different,” Kean said on NBC’s “Meet the Press” on April 4, 2004. Kean cited a string of law-enforcement blunders including the “lack of coordination within the FBI” and the FBI’s failure to understand the significance of Moussaoui’s arrest in August while training to fly passenger jets.
Yet, as the clock ticked down to 9/11, the Bush administration continued to have other priorities.
On Aug. 9, 2001, Bush gave a nationally televised speech on stem cells, delivering his judgment permitting federal funding for research on 60 preexisting stem-cell lines, but barring government support for work on any other lines of stem cells derived from human embryos.
On side trips from his August vacation, Bush also made forays to Middle American cities that Bush said represented “heartland values” and the basic decency of Americans. Some residents living near the Atlantic and Pacific oceans viewed the hype about “heartland values” as a not-so-subtle snub at the so-called “blue” coastal states that favored Al Gore.
Bush kept drawing distinctions, too, between his presidency and Bill Clinton’s. Bush and his senior advisers continued their hostility toward what they viewed as the old Clinton phobia about terrorism and this little-known group called al-Qaeda.
Tenet’s late August trip to Crawford seeking to underscore the urgency of the terrorist threat may have been viewed in that light, helping to explain why it devolved into a meaningless discussion of the ranch’s “flora and fauna.”
Despite the Sept. 4, 2001, meeting of senior Bush aides to review the counterterrorism initiatives that had been languishing since March, the administration still didn’t seem moved by the urgency of the moment.
On Sept. 6, 2001, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld threatened a presidential veto of a proposal by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, seeking to transfer money from strategic missile defense to counterterrorism.
Also on Sept. 6, former Sen. Gary Hart, who had co-chaired a commission on terrorism, was again trying to galvanize the Bush administration into showing some urgency about the threat. Hart met with Rice and urged the White House to move faster. Rice agreed to pass on Hart’s concerns to higher-ups.
Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories in the 1980s for the Associated Press and Newsweek. His latest book, Secrecy & Privilege: Rise of the Bush Dynasty from Watergate to Iraq, can be ordered at secrecyandprivilege.com. It's also available at Amazon.com, as is his 1999 book, Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & 'Project Truth.'
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
Saturday, May 05, 2007
Tenet Still Doesn't Get It.....
"If you can't say something positive about someone, don't say anything." This was drummed into me by my Irish grandmother and, as most of her admonishments, it has stood me in good stead. On occasion, though, it been a real bother - as when I felt called to comment on George Tenet's apologia, "In the Center of the Storm," coming to a bookstore near you tomorrow.
On the verge of despair, I ran into an old schoolmate of Tenet's from PS 94 in Little Neck, Queens, who told me that George was more handsome than his twin brother Billy, and that his outgoing nature and consummate political skill got him elected president of the student body.
Positive enough, Grandma? Now let me add this.
George Tenet's book shows that he remains, first and foremost, a politician - with no clue as to the proper role of intelligence work. He is unhappy about going down in history as "Slam Dunk Tenet." But, George protests, his famous remark to President Bush on December 21, 2002 was not meant to assure the president that available intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a "slam dunk." Rather he meant that the argument that Saddam Hussein had such weapons could be enhanced to slam-dunk status in order to sell war on Iraq. Those of you tuning in to CBS's "60 Minutes" tonight will hear Tenet explain what he meant when he uttered the words he now says everyone misunderstood or distorted in order to blame him for the Iraq war. What he says he meant was simply:
"We can put a better case together for a public case." (sic)
Tenet still doesn't get it. Those of us schooled in the craft and ethos of intelligence remain in wide-mouthed disbelief, perhaps best summed up by veteran operations officer Bob Baer's quip:
"So, it is better that the 'slam dunk' referred to the ease with which the war could be sold? I guess I missed that part of the National Security Act delineating the functions of the CIA - the part about CIA marketing a war. Guess that's why I never made it into senior management."
George's concern over being scapegoated is touching. But could he not have seen it coming? Not even when Rumsfeld asked him in the fall of 2002 (that is, before the war) whether he had put in a system to track how good the intelligence was compared with what would be found in Iraq?
The guys I know from Queens usually can tell when they're being set up. Maybe Tenet was naive enough to believe that the president, whom he describes as a "kindred soul," would protect him from thugs like Vice President Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, even when - as was inevitable - someone had to take the fall. Or did he perhaps actually believe the Cheney dictum that US forces would be greeted as liberators?
So now George is worried about his reputation. He tells "60 Minutes:"
"At the end of the day, the only thing you have ... is your reputation built on trust and your personal honor, and when you don't have that anymore, well, there you go."
I immediately thought back to former Secretary of State Colin Powell's response when he was asked if he regretted the lies he told at the UN on February 5, 2003. Powell said he regretted that speech because it was "a blot on my record."
So we've got ruined reputations and blots on records. Poor boys. What about the 3,344 American soldiers already killed in a war that could not have happened had not these poor fellows deliberately distorted the evidence and led the cheering for war? What about the more than 50,000 wounded, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis whose deaths can be attributed directly to the invasion and its aftermath? There are blots, and there are blots. Why is it that Tenet and Powell seem to inhabit a different planet?
Despite all this, they still have their defenders ... or at least Tenet does. (Powell's closest associate, Col. Larry Wilkerson, decided long ago to turn state's evidence and apologize for his and Powell's role in the intelligence fiasco, but Powell has tried to remain above the battle. He may, I suppose, be writing his own book to explain everything.)
Yesterday on National Public Radio, Tenet's deputy and partner in crime, John McLaughlin, went to ludicrous lengths reciting a carefully prepared list of "all the things that the CIA got right," while conceding that it (not "we," mind you, but "it") performed "inadequately" in assessing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Picky, picky.
Defending Torture ... Again
Hewing to the George W. Bush dictum of "catapulting the propaganda" by endlessly repeating the same claim (the formula used so successfully by Joseph Goebbels), Tenet manages to tell "60 Minutes" five times in five consecutive sentences: "We don't torture people." Like President Bush, however, he then goes on to show why it has been absolutely necessary to torture people.
What do they take us for, fools?
And Tenet's claims of success in extracting information via torture are no more worthy of credulity than the rest of what he says.
His own credibility aside, Tenet has succeeded in destroying the asset without which an intelligence community cannot be effective. And that is serious. He seems blissfully oblivious to the damage he has done - aware only of the damage others have done to his "personal honor."
Lessons Learned
If any good can come out of the intelligence/policy debacle regarding Iraq, it would be the clear lesson that intelligence crafted to dovetail with the predilections of policymakers can bring disaster. The role that Tenet, McLaughlin and their small coterie of senior managers played as willing accomplices in the corruption of intelligence has made a mockery of the verse chiseled into the marble at the entrance to CIA headquarters: "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."
Had Tenet been tenaciously honest, his analysts would have risen to the occasion. And there is a good chance that they could have helped prevent what the Nuremburg Tribunal called the "supreme international crime" - a war of aggression, and a war that Tenet and his subordinates knew had nothing to do with the "intelligence" adduced to "justify" it, as Tenet now admits in his book.
No director of the CIA should come from the ranks of congressional staff, since those staffers work in a politicized ambience antithetical to substantive intelligence work. Tenet is Exhibit A. Outside of intelligence circles, it was considered a good sign that, as a Congressional staffer, Tenet had been equally popular on either side of the aisle. But this raised a red flag for seasoned intelligence professionals.
As we had learned early in our careers, if you consistently tell it like it is, you are certain to make enemies. Those enjoying universal popularity are ipso facto suspect of perfecting the political art of compromise - shading this and shaving that. However useful this may be on the Hill, it sounds the death knell for intelligence analysis. Tenet also lacked experience in managing a large, complicated organization. Such experience is a sine qua non.
Finally, it is a mischievous myth that the CIA director must cultivate a close personal relationship with the president. Nor should he/she try to do so, for it is a net minus. The White House is not a fraternity house; mutual respect is far more important than camaraderie. A mature, self-confident president will respect an independent intelligence director. The latter must resist the temptation to be "part of the team" in the way the president's political advisers are part of the team. Overly close identification with "the team" can erode objectivity and cloud intelligence judgments. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, like Cheney a frequent visitor to CIA headquarters in 2002 to "help" with the analysis on Iraq, told the press that Tenet was "so grateful to the president [presumably for not firing him after September 11, 2001] that he would do anything for him." That attitude is the antithesis of what is needed in senior intelligence officers.
Much is at stake, and it will be an uphill battle to bring back honesty and professionalism to the analysis process and impede efforts to politicize the intelligence product. In an institution such as the CIA, significant, enduring improvement requires vision, courage and integrity at the top. It has been three decades since the CIA has been led by such a person.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. His responsibilities during his 27-year service as a CIA analyst included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President's Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
On the verge of despair, I ran into an old schoolmate of Tenet's from PS 94 in Little Neck, Queens, who told me that George was more handsome than his twin brother Billy, and that his outgoing nature and consummate political skill got him elected president of the student body.
Positive enough, Grandma? Now let me add this.
George Tenet's book shows that he remains, first and foremost, a politician - with no clue as to the proper role of intelligence work. He is unhappy about going down in history as "Slam Dunk Tenet." But, George protests, his famous remark to President Bush on December 21, 2002 was not meant to assure the president that available intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq was a "slam dunk." Rather he meant that the argument that Saddam Hussein had such weapons could be enhanced to slam-dunk status in order to sell war on Iraq. Those of you tuning in to CBS's "60 Minutes" tonight will hear Tenet explain what he meant when he uttered the words he now says everyone misunderstood or distorted in order to blame him for the Iraq war. What he says he meant was simply:
"We can put a better case together for a public case." (sic)
Tenet still doesn't get it. Those of us schooled in the craft and ethos of intelligence remain in wide-mouthed disbelief, perhaps best summed up by veteran operations officer Bob Baer's quip:
"So, it is better that the 'slam dunk' referred to the ease with which the war could be sold? I guess I missed that part of the National Security Act delineating the functions of the CIA - the part about CIA marketing a war. Guess that's why I never made it into senior management."
George's concern over being scapegoated is touching. But could he not have seen it coming? Not even when Rumsfeld asked him in the fall of 2002 (that is, before the war) whether he had put in a system to track how good the intelligence was compared with what would be found in Iraq?
The guys I know from Queens usually can tell when they're being set up. Maybe Tenet was naive enough to believe that the president, whom he describes as a "kindred soul," would protect him from thugs like Vice President Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, even when - as was inevitable - someone had to take the fall. Or did he perhaps actually believe the Cheney dictum that US forces would be greeted as liberators?
So now George is worried about his reputation. He tells "60 Minutes:"
"At the end of the day, the only thing you have ... is your reputation built on trust and your personal honor, and when you don't have that anymore, well, there you go."
I immediately thought back to former Secretary of State Colin Powell's response when he was asked if he regretted the lies he told at the UN on February 5, 2003. Powell said he regretted that speech because it was "a blot on my record."
So we've got ruined reputations and blots on records. Poor boys. What about the 3,344 American soldiers already killed in a war that could not have happened had not these poor fellows deliberately distorted the evidence and led the cheering for war? What about the more than 50,000 wounded, not to mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis whose deaths can be attributed directly to the invasion and its aftermath? There are blots, and there are blots. Why is it that Tenet and Powell seem to inhabit a different planet?
Despite all this, they still have their defenders ... or at least Tenet does. (Powell's closest associate, Col. Larry Wilkerson, decided long ago to turn state's evidence and apologize for his and Powell's role in the intelligence fiasco, but Powell has tried to remain above the battle. He may, I suppose, be writing his own book to explain everything.)
Yesterday on National Public Radio, Tenet's deputy and partner in crime, John McLaughlin, went to ludicrous lengths reciting a carefully prepared list of "all the things that the CIA got right," while conceding that it (not "we," mind you, but "it") performed "inadequately" in assessing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Picky, picky.
Defending Torture ... Again
Hewing to the George W. Bush dictum of "catapulting the propaganda" by endlessly repeating the same claim (the formula used so successfully by Joseph Goebbels), Tenet manages to tell "60 Minutes" five times in five consecutive sentences: "We don't torture people." Like President Bush, however, he then goes on to show why it has been absolutely necessary to torture people.
What do they take us for, fools?
And Tenet's claims of success in extracting information via torture are no more worthy of credulity than the rest of what he says.
His own credibility aside, Tenet has succeeded in destroying the asset without which an intelligence community cannot be effective. And that is serious. He seems blissfully oblivious to the damage he has done - aware only of the damage others have done to his "personal honor."
Lessons Learned
If any good can come out of the intelligence/policy debacle regarding Iraq, it would be the clear lesson that intelligence crafted to dovetail with the predilections of policymakers can bring disaster. The role that Tenet, McLaughlin and their small coterie of senior managers played as willing accomplices in the corruption of intelligence has made a mockery of the verse chiseled into the marble at the entrance to CIA headquarters: "You will know the truth, and the truth will set you free."
Had Tenet been tenaciously honest, his analysts would have risen to the occasion. And there is a good chance that they could have helped prevent what the Nuremburg Tribunal called the "supreme international crime" - a war of aggression, and a war that Tenet and his subordinates knew had nothing to do with the "intelligence" adduced to "justify" it, as Tenet now admits in his book.
No director of the CIA should come from the ranks of congressional staff, since those staffers work in a politicized ambience antithetical to substantive intelligence work. Tenet is Exhibit A. Outside of intelligence circles, it was considered a good sign that, as a Congressional staffer, Tenet had been equally popular on either side of the aisle. But this raised a red flag for seasoned intelligence professionals.
As we had learned early in our careers, if you consistently tell it like it is, you are certain to make enemies. Those enjoying universal popularity are ipso facto suspect of perfecting the political art of compromise - shading this and shaving that. However useful this may be on the Hill, it sounds the death knell for intelligence analysis. Tenet also lacked experience in managing a large, complicated organization. Such experience is a sine qua non.
Finally, it is a mischievous myth that the CIA director must cultivate a close personal relationship with the president. Nor should he/she try to do so, for it is a net minus. The White House is not a fraternity house; mutual respect is far more important than camaraderie. A mature, self-confident president will respect an independent intelligence director. The latter must resist the temptation to be "part of the team" in the way the president's political advisers are part of the team. Overly close identification with "the team" can erode objectivity and cloud intelligence judgments. Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, like Cheney a frequent visitor to CIA headquarters in 2002 to "help" with the analysis on Iraq, told the press that Tenet was "so grateful to the president [presumably for not firing him after September 11, 2001] that he would do anything for him." That attitude is the antithesis of what is needed in senior intelligence officers.
Much is at stake, and it will be an uphill battle to bring back honesty and professionalism to the analysis process and impede efforts to politicize the intelligence product. In an institution such as the CIA, significant, enduring improvement requires vision, courage and integrity at the top. It has been three decades since the CIA has been led by such a person.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. His responsibilities during his 27-year service as a CIA analyst included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing the President's Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Crib Notes on Tenet's Book. Doubt I'll read it after all.
As One would expect, it is self-serving and
On Friday, we got a sneak peek at the new memoir by former CIA director George Tenet, “At the Center of the Storm.”
Of course, it’s completely self-serving and takes plenty of not-so-subtle shots at a long line of enemies in the administration from Dick Cheney and Condi Rice to Steve Hadley and Scooter Libby. (And demonstrates that Tenet has a healthy imagination when it comes to key dates. There isn't much we don't already know or suspect
But it does contain some new revelations about the War on Terror and the behavior of its main players:
“They sought to create a connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks that would have made WMD, the United Nations, and the international community absolutely irrelevant.”
Enemies
- Tenet characterizes the war between the CIA and Dick Cheney’s office as “one-sided,” adding that his team at the agency ”were noncombatants.”
- Tenet reserves particular scorn for NSC deputy Stephen Hadley. Among his crimes: ignoring a CIA request in early 2001 to allow the agency to kill Bin Laden, pestering a CIA official to make so many changes to a report that she almost quit. (They didn't want bin Laden dead! How were they going to replace him?)
- Blames Bob Woodward for telling him that the “slam dunk” anecdote wasn’t a signficant part of the journalist’s ”Plan of Attack” book. “I have another two-word reaction to that statement. The first word is ‘bull’.”
- Tenet blames then-FBI director Tom Pickard for accusing him of failing to notify the FBI about Zacharias Moussaoui. “Hell, it was the FBI’s case, their arrest. I had no idea that the Bureau wasn’t aware of what its own people were doing.” Despite repeated emails from CIA reps about Moussaoui’s terror links, the FBI claimed that they didn’t have enough info to get a FISA warrant to search him. (This has got to be bullshit. Somebody, somewhere didn't just drop the ball, they punted the damn thing out the window and down the street.)
9/11
- As Tenet arrived at the West Wing on September 12, 2001 to brief the president, he ran into Pentagon strategist Richard Perle who nodded to him and said, “Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility.” Tenet’s reaction: “I was stunned but said nothing… At the Secret Service security checkpoint, I looked back at Perle and thought: What the hell is he talking about? Moments later, a second thought came to me: Who has Richard Perle been meeting with so early in the morning on today of all days? I never learned the answer to that question.”
- The FAA produced 105 daily intellgence summaries for airline industry leaders between April 1, 2001 and September 11, 2000. Almost half of them mentioned al-Qaeda, Bin Laden or both.
War on Terror
- A low-level CIA operative confronted Tenet about the 1998 embassy bombings months after a proposal to strike one of Bin Laden’s compounds was cancelled. “If you had allowed us to go ahead with our operation, those people might still be alive!”
- Despite claims that al-Qaeda detainee Abu Zubaydah was mentally unstable because he adopted multiple personas in his personal diary, CIA analysts determined that the terrorist was using a sophisticated literary device to express himself, including his twisted sexual fantasies about women.
- When the first stories about Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s capture portrayed him as an al-Qaeda James Bond due to a photograph of him wearing his traditional robes, Tenet went on a media offensive. He got CIA spokesman Bill Harlow to pick out the infamous photo of Mohammed looking like a hung-over Ron Jeremy and leaked it to the AP. (Wait...hold it! Didn't Tenet have anything better to do than find an ugly picture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, in which he appeared hung-over to say the least, or maybe run over by truck. Who the hell cares what he looks like? What damn difference does it make? Maybe I am just dense, but I would think I would have had better things to do than worry about whether or not the "planner of 9/11" looked too good on TV.
- In several clandestine meetings since 1999, the CIA met with Libyan intelligence officers, including chief Musa Kusa, the mastermind of the Lockerbie bombings. The long-awaited deal with Libya almost collapsed when John Bolton planned a press conference to trumpet a weapons seizure. The CIA later learned that the Libyans had been ripped off by a middleman during the deal to acquire nuclear technology from Pakistani rogue scientist A.Q. Khan, paying $200 million for $100 million of materials. Well, that's not surprising. Bolton could screw up a ....well, you know. Musa Kusa? Where do they get these names? Sounds more like a Mediterranean side dish than an accomplished terrorist
- Tenet and Colin Powell were furious about conservative activist Michael Ledeen’s secret meetings with Italian intelligence and Iranian Manucher Ghorbanifar. The CIA came close to filing a “crimes report” about Ledeen with the Justice Department. When Condi Rice naively claimed that Pentagon officials happened to bump into Iranian dissidents while crossing a street in Paris, Tenet told her, “Condi, in this line of work there is no such thing as an accidental meeting.” (Criminal charges should have been filed. Hey George T., doesn't the name Ghorbanifer ring a bell with you? He was mixed up with the Iran/Contra crowd, which included Poppy "out-of-the-loop" Bush. Was Michael Ledeen even in government when this meeting took place? Did you find out about the other Iranians who were there as well, one of them, a former head honcho in the Revolutionary Guard of Iran? I assume we are talking about the meeting in Italy, Dec 2001, not long after which, those naughty little forgeries about Niger yellowcake showed up, as if by magic, at the White House. Wasn't Larry Franklin, of spying for AIPAC fame, in that meeting as well, or did he come into the picture later. Nice shot at showing Condi up as stupid, as PhDs often are, about anything other than what they have studied all their adult lives, but we already know she is true Bushie twit, and a terrible liar. Apparently she thinks Paris is like the local grocery store, where you coud run into almost anyone, including arms dealers, traitors, forgers and pentagon officials. Jeebus!)
- Tenet’s defensiveness about the 9/11 Commission’s conclusion that he lacked a strategic plan to take on global terrorism. “How could a community without a strategic plan tell the president of the United States just four days after 9/11 how to attack the Afghan sanctuary and operate against al-Qaida in ninety-two countries around the world?” (Didn't Junior have a plan for attacking Afghanistan on his desk, several days before 9/11/01? But nevermind, there weren't enough targets in Afghanistan, according to Rummy the Dummy, even after 9/11. No, not many tagrets; just one very tall Arab man, with lots of cash, who had declared war on the U.S. years before and is, to my knowledge, still freer than I am.)
Iraq War
- “If someone had told me to quit paying so much attention to terrorism in the months following September 11 and to start boning up on Iraq instead, I would have stared at them in disbelief.” (Yep, that's pretty much the way Richard Clarke described his reaction, when he was told just that, by no less than the war preznit, himself, the day after 9/11.)
- The CIA predicted some of the chaos that would ensue in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, producing a December 13, 2002 report titled “The Perfect Storm: Planning for Negative Consequences of Invading Iraq.” Among them was anarchy and the territorial breakup of Iraq, major oil supply disruptions and a surge of global terrorism against US interests. (Everybody warned them George, just like everyone warned them about Al Qaeda. Obviously, my dear, they did not give a damn; not then, not now. Anyone who had bothered to read a few books about Iraq, the middle east, Islam or any other pertinent subject, after the shock of 9/11 had worn off enough to think straight, could have warned them about those things. It isn't rocket science. Just curious, but did anyone think to warn Junior that insulting and kicking dirt in the face of the practically the entire world have some pretty damn serious consequences as well? Apparently, that obvious fact went over his head as well.)
- When two CIA analysts claimed during a high-level meeting that a much stronger case could be made for Iran’s backing of international terrorism than could be made for Iraq’s, Doug Feith said their objections were “persnickety.” (Persnickity? PERSNIKITY? I can sure believe that Feith said that. He just looks like someone who would use that word. Besides, George, you still do not seem to get that this god-awful nightmare, in which we find ourselves, with quite a bit of help from you, is not now and never has been about fighting terrorism. It is about the NeoCon's all consuming, imperial plan for a New American Century, which involved re-shaping the middle east and other places to better meet the needs of American corporations. All they needed was a "New Pearl Harbor." They got one and you got most of the blame. See how that works, "Condi" Tenet?
- The CIA analyst who managed the NIE on Iraq, Bob Walpole, a motorcycle-driving Mormon, was against the war. “I just don’t believe in this war,” he told Tenet. “Some wars are justifiable, but not this one.” (I'll drink to Mr. Walpole and his Harley. Too bad you didn't say that to Junior!)
- After his capture, Saddam Hussein told FBI special agent George Pirro that he pretended to have WMDs because he was trying to send a message to the UN Security Council to encourage a broader disarming of the Middle East and to longtime enemy Iran: “You guys just don’t understand. This is a rough neighborhood.” (I still don't think WMDs had anything to do with the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. The inspectors were there, in Iraq, running to every site our government told them was suspicious; you know those sites that were just to the East, North, West and South, whatever, of Baghdad? Junior was in such a rush to get in there, the inspectors had to leave or get their butts blown off. Saddam bluffed and went down. He misunderestimated a madman or two.
- Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby were the two most ardent proponents of a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, asking CIA analysts repeatedly to recheck their information. (More egg-heads, without a freakin' clue)
- Tenet implicitly claims that Democratic wrangling over the disputed 2000 election distracted the US from retaliating for al-Qaeda’s deadly attack on the USS Cole. “Perhaps it would have been difficult to launch new military ventures while the country was fixated on counting chads and Supreme Court votes.” (OK, that is it! Tenet, you are a true, no-nothing jackass. Do you have any idea how many Americans had no freakin' idea who Osama bin Laden was on 9/11. Why do you suppose that is? After all, according to this government, this man had declared war on America, bombed two of our embassies, almost simultaneously, and one of our naval vessels and yet, while some had maybe heard the name, they knew very little about him. Why? Because the American news media and the public were absolutely obssessed with Bill Clinton's penis and Monica's stained dress; for months on end, that is all we heard. When Clinton fired off a few missiles in Al Qaeda's direction, the Goopers went nutz: Wag the dog, wag the dog, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. How can the entire government be so distracted because of an election, that it cannot seem to function when under a huge threat? That is BS. Democratic wrangling? It was their duty to their voters to wrangle. Democracy goes on, no matter what, or it should, but the government needs to be functional while Democracy is going on.
- Tenet dismissed Internet rumors that Osama Bin Laden had worked for the CIA during the Afghan-Soviet war, stating categorically that the al-Qaeda mastermind had no contact with the agency during that period. (I don't believe this particular rumor, anyway. That is not to say that we did not, in large part, help create Al Qaeda, intentionally or not. We are always creating monsters over which, sooner or later, we lose control. Then, something like this happens.)
- Tenet felt that the incoming Bush administration wasn’t focused on the al-Qaeda threat, citing “a lack of urgency.” (Then, it was your job to make them focus or resign in protest. You weren't all alone. Richard Clarke did all in his power, except resign. The lights were blinking red. You kept saying, we are gonna get hit. They had no desire to stop it. Hell, they were awaiting for it. Junior put Cheney in charge of the terrorism threat. Vice didn't even bother to have a real meeting until a week before 9/11. Everyone warned them! )
- Tenet criticized Pakistan’s former intelligence chief Gen. Mahmood Ahmed for his lack of cooperation. Two days before 9/11, the pair had lunch and Tenet claims that he pushed him on Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader protecting Bin Laden. Mahmood praised Omar and didn’t budge his position.
- CIA field officers had a sure-fire clue to figuring out when Iraq would be invaded: the Starbucks at CIA headquarters switched over to a twenty-four-hour-a-day operation. (Gee, I guess Starbucks, Inc. knew too, eh? The whole world knew it was coming, when the inspectors had to haul ass out of Iraq, before they could finish their jobs.
- Tenet would have fired weapons inspector David Kay if he had been a regular officer at the agency. Kay outraged the CIA by refusing to lend some of his staff to the military’s efforts to track down insurgents in Iraq. (He might as well have. There seems to be no shortage of "insurgents," if that is the noun we are using this week, and a rather huge shortage of WMD, until we got there with ours.)
- The Coalition Provisional Authority was so committed to their optimistic propaganda that the White House had to rely on the British to tell them what was really going on in the country. One CIA analyst told Tenet that CPA “runs like a graduate school seminar, none of them speaks Arabic, almost nobody’s ever been to an Arab country and no one makes a decision but [Jay] Bremer.” (But they were all loyal little Bushies and that's all that matters when fortunes are being made off death and carnage. )
- The Pentagon was so determined to exclude Ba’athists and ex-Army members from the future of Iraq that a U.S. Army colonel, who had been DIA’s liason to Ahmed Chalabi, once advised, “We should round them all up and shoot them.” (We didn't even do that to the Nazis. Why did our military hate these guys so much. Maybe they knew too much, about U.S./Iraq relations over the years.)
- The administration was so obsessed with Chalabi that “you had the impression that some Office of the Vice President and DOD reps were writing Chalabi’s name over and over again in their notes, like schoolgirls with their first crush.” Tenet claims that President Bush was frustrated by the focus on Chalabi, twice asking “What the hell is going on with Chalabi” and concluding “I don’t think he ought to be working for us.” (Then why was he allowed to continue on at a six figure salary. Who is the damn president, anyway?
- Joseph Wilson’s briefing about his notorious trip to Niger? He gave an oral briefing to two CIA analysts at his home one night over Chinese takeout food. Blah, blah, whatever....
- Tenet goes out of his way to prove that the CIA made several attempts to get erroneous information about yellowcake out of presidential speeches in 2002.
Oddball
- When Tenet met his counterparts at Russia’s FSB at a fancy restaurant in Moscow, they were greeted by a voluptuous blonde flanked by two dwarves who escorted them inside. During dinner, Tenet’s aide John McLaughlin performed a magic trick where he turns a 1000-ruble note into a 100,000-ruble note, stunning FSB director Nikolai Kovalev.
- Tenet started a fire at CIA headquarters during a celebration over the capture of Pakistani terrorist Aimal Kasi. After he lit a victor cigar, it fell on the floor in all the excitement and set the carpet on fire in the 6th-floor Global Response Center. Later, that piece of burned carpet was framed and hung on the wall.
- During the 2000 summit at Sharm el-Sheik, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak made fun of Yasser Arafat. While Tenet was huddling with Arafat, he noticed Mubarak quietly laughing and “twirling his finger beside his head, the universal symbol for ‘This guy you’re talking to is nuts!’”
- During the Church of the Nativity crisis in 2002, when Palestinian gunman holed themselves up in the holy site, the CIA’s Geoff O’Connell almost saved the day. He proposed that the Palestinians’ weapons be thrown into the sea. But of course the deal fell apart over a dispute: the Palestinians wanted the guns thrown in the Dead Sea and the Israelis wanted them tossed into the Mediterranean. (If this is true, it is just the kind of thing that causes cranial explosions in normal people.)
- Tenet and his CIA buddies had a pool going over how long it would take Arafat to say “I’m still suffering.” They’d each pick a time and put their money down. Another time, when Tenet was lying on his back on the floor to ease his back pain, Arafat flopped down next to him, saying that he did the same thing for his back. Tenet’s team was petrified that some photojournalist would capture the scene for posterity.
- The CIA’s liason to the Saudis, John Brennan, once spooked the head of Iranian intelligence by walking up to his car and knocking on the window. “As John tells the story, the guy got out of the car, claimed that Iran was a peace-loving country, then jumped back in the car and sped away.”
- In the run-up to the Iraq War, the CIA got an urgent message from Chinese intelligence, sending along the geographic coordinates for their embassy in Baghdad. They were hoping that it was accurately listed in Pentagon databases after their Belgrade embassy was mistakenly bombed by U.S. aircraft in 1999.
- Tenet’s decision to resign was sealed over a meeting with former FBI chief Louis Freeh, whom he accidentally ran into at a local A&P when they were both shopping for Sunday meals.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
On Friday, we got a sneak peek at the new memoir by former CIA director George Tenet, “At the Center of the Storm.”
Of course, it’s completely self-serving and takes plenty of not-so-subtle shots at a long line of enemies in the administration from Dick Cheney and Condi Rice to Steve Hadley and Scooter Libby. (And demonstrates that Tenet has a healthy imagination when it comes to key dates. There isn't much we don't already know or suspect
But it does contain some new revelations about the War on Terror and the behavior of its main players:
“They sought to create a connection between Iraq and the 9/11 attacks that would have made WMD, the United Nations, and the international community absolutely irrelevant.”
Enemies
- Tenet characterizes the war between the CIA and Dick Cheney’s office as “one-sided,” adding that his team at the agency ”were noncombatants.”
- Tenet reserves particular scorn for NSC deputy Stephen Hadley. Among his crimes: ignoring a CIA request in early 2001 to allow the agency to kill Bin Laden, pestering a CIA official to make so many changes to a report that she almost quit. (They didn't want bin Laden dead! How were they going to replace him?)
- Blames Bob Woodward for telling him that the “slam dunk” anecdote wasn’t a signficant part of the journalist’s ”Plan of Attack” book. “I have another two-word reaction to that statement. The first word is ‘bull’.”
- Tenet blames then-FBI director Tom Pickard for accusing him of failing to notify the FBI about Zacharias Moussaoui. “Hell, it was the FBI’s case, their arrest. I had no idea that the Bureau wasn’t aware of what its own people were doing.” Despite repeated emails from CIA reps about Moussaoui’s terror links, the FBI claimed that they didn’t have enough info to get a FISA warrant to search him. (This has got to be bullshit. Somebody, somewhere didn't just drop the ball, they punted the damn thing out the window and down the street.)
9/11
- As Tenet arrived at the West Wing on September 12, 2001 to brief the president, he ran into Pentagon strategist Richard Perle who nodded to him and said, “Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility.” Tenet’s reaction: “I was stunned but said nothing… At the Secret Service security checkpoint, I looked back at Perle and thought: What the hell is he talking about? Moments later, a second thought came to me: Who has Richard Perle been meeting with so early in the morning on today of all days? I never learned the answer to that question.”
- The FAA produced 105 daily intellgence summaries for airline industry leaders between April 1, 2001 and September 11, 2000. Almost half of them mentioned al-Qaeda, Bin Laden or both.
War on Terror
- A low-level CIA operative confronted Tenet about the 1998 embassy bombings months after a proposal to strike one of Bin Laden’s compounds was cancelled. “If you had allowed us to go ahead with our operation, those people might still be alive!”
- Despite claims that al-Qaeda detainee Abu Zubaydah was mentally unstable because he adopted multiple personas in his personal diary, CIA analysts determined that the terrorist was using a sophisticated literary device to express himself, including his twisted sexual fantasies about women.
- When the first stories about Khalid Sheik Mohammed’s capture portrayed him as an al-Qaeda James Bond due to a photograph of him wearing his traditional robes, Tenet went on a media offensive. He got CIA spokesman Bill Harlow to pick out the infamous photo of Mohammed looking like a hung-over Ron Jeremy and leaked it to the AP. (Wait...hold it! Didn't Tenet have anything better to do than find an ugly picture of Khalid Sheik Mohammed, in which he appeared hung-over to say the least, or maybe run over by truck. Who the hell cares what he looks like? What damn difference does it make? Maybe I am just dense, but I would think I would have had better things to do than worry about whether or not the "planner of 9/11" looked too good on TV.
- In several clandestine meetings since 1999, the CIA met with Libyan intelligence officers, including chief Musa Kusa, the mastermind of the Lockerbie bombings. The long-awaited deal with Libya almost collapsed when John Bolton planned a press conference to trumpet a weapons seizure. The CIA later learned that the Libyans had been ripped off by a middleman during the deal to acquire nuclear technology from Pakistani rogue scientist A.Q. Khan, paying $200 million for $100 million of materials. Well, that's not surprising. Bolton could screw up a ....well, you know. Musa Kusa? Where do they get these names? Sounds more like a Mediterranean side dish than an accomplished terrorist
- Tenet and Colin Powell were furious about conservative activist Michael Ledeen’s secret meetings with Italian intelligence and Iranian Manucher Ghorbanifar. The CIA came close to filing a “crimes report” about Ledeen with the Justice Department. When Condi Rice naively claimed that Pentagon officials happened to bump into Iranian dissidents while crossing a street in Paris, Tenet told her, “Condi, in this line of work there is no such thing as an accidental meeting.” (Criminal charges should have been filed. Hey George T., doesn't the name Ghorbanifer ring a bell with you? He was mixed up with the Iran/Contra crowd, which included Poppy "out-of-the-loop" Bush. Was Michael Ledeen even in government when this meeting took place? Did you find out about the other Iranians who were there as well, one of them, a former head honcho in the Revolutionary Guard of Iran? I assume we are talking about the meeting in Italy, Dec 2001, not long after which, those naughty little forgeries about Niger yellowcake showed up, as if by magic, at the White House. Wasn't Larry Franklin, of spying for AIPAC fame, in that meeting as well, or did he come into the picture later. Nice shot at showing Condi up as stupid, as PhDs often are, about anything other than what they have studied all their adult lives, but we already know she is true Bushie twit, and a terrible liar. Apparently she thinks Paris is like the local grocery store, where you coud run into almost anyone, including arms dealers, traitors, forgers and pentagon officials. Jeebus!)
- Tenet’s defensiveness about the 9/11 Commission’s conclusion that he lacked a strategic plan to take on global terrorism. “How could a community without a strategic plan tell the president of the United States just four days after 9/11 how to attack the Afghan sanctuary and operate against al-Qaida in ninety-two countries around the world?” (Didn't Junior have a plan for attacking Afghanistan on his desk, several days before 9/11/01? But nevermind, there weren't enough targets in Afghanistan, according to Rummy the Dummy, even after 9/11. No, not many tagrets; just one very tall Arab man, with lots of cash, who had declared war on the U.S. years before and is, to my knowledge, still freer than I am.)
Iraq War
- “If someone had told me to quit paying so much attention to terrorism in the months following September 11 and to start boning up on Iraq instead, I would have stared at them in disbelief.” (Yep, that's pretty much the way Richard Clarke described his reaction, when he was told just that, by no less than the war preznit, himself, the day after 9/11.)
- The CIA predicted some of the chaos that would ensue in the wake of the invasion of Iraq, producing a December 13, 2002 report titled “The Perfect Storm: Planning for Negative Consequences of Invading Iraq.” Among them was anarchy and the territorial breakup of Iraq, major oil supply disruptions and a surge of global terrorism against US interests. (Everybody warned them George, just like everyone warned them about Al Qaeda. Obviously, my dear, they did not give a damn; not then, not now. Anyone who had bothered to read a few books about Iraq, the middle east, Islam or any other pertinent subject, after the shock of 9/11 had worn off enough to think straight, could have warned them about those things. It isn't rocket science. Just curious, but did anyone think to warn Junior that insulting and kicking dirt in the face of the practically the entire world have some pretty damn serious consequences as well? Apparently, that obvious fact went over his head as well.)
- When two CIA analysts claimed during a high-level meeting that a much stronger case could be made for Iran’s backing of international terrorism than could be made for Iraq’s, Doug Feith said their objections were “persnickety.” (Persnickity? PERSNIKITY? I can sure believe that Feith said that. He just looks like someone who would use that word. Besides, George, you still do not seem to get that this god-awful nightmare, in which we find ourselves, with quite a bit of help from you, is not now and never has been about fighting terrorism. It is about the NeoCon's all consuming, imperial plan for a New American Century, which involved re-shaping the middle east and other places to better meet the needs of American corporations. All they needed was a "New Pearl Harbor." They got one and you got most of the blame. See how that works, "Condi" Tenet?
- The CIA analyst who managed the NIE on Iraq, Bob Walpole, a motorcycle-driving Mormon, was against the war. “I just don’t believe in this war,” he told Tenet. “Some wars are justifiable, but not this one.” (I'll drink to Mr. Walpole and his Harley. Too bad you didn't say that to Junior!)
- After his capture, Saddam Hussein told FBI special agent George Pirro that he pretended to have WMDs because he was trying to send a message to the UN Security Council to encourage a broader disarming of the Middle East and to longtime enemy Iran: “You guys just don’t understand. This is a rough neighborhood.” (I still don't think WMDs had anything to do with the pre-emptive invasion of Iraq. The inspectors were there, in Iraq, running to every site our government told them was suspicious; you know those sites that were just to the East, North, West and South, whatever, of Baghdad? Junior was in such a rush to get in there, the inspectors had to leave or get their butts blown off. Saddam bluffed and went down. He misunderestimated a madman or two.
- Paul Wolfowitz and Scooter Libby were the two most ardent proponents of a link between Iraq and al-Qaeda, asking CIA analysts repeatedly to recheck their information. (More egg-heads, without a freakin' clue)
- Tenet implicitly claims that Democratic wrangling over the disputed 2000 election distracted the US from retaliating for al-Qaeda’s deadly attack on the USS Cole. “Perhaps it would have been difficult to launch new military ventures while the country was fixated on counting chads and Supreme Court votes.” (OK, that is it! Tenet, you are a true, no-nothing jackass. Do you have any idea how many Americans had no freakin' idea who Osama bin Laden was on 9/11. Why do you suppose that is? After all, according to this government, this man had declared war on America, bombed two of our embassies, almost simultaneously, and one of our naval vessels and yet, while some had maybe heard the name, they knew very little about him. Why? Because the American news media and the public were absolutely obssessed with Bill Clinton's penis and Monica's stained dress; for months on end, that is all we heard. When Clinton fired off a few missiles in Al Qaeda's direction, the Goopers went nutz: Wag the dog, wag the dog, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. How can the entire government be so distracted because of an election, that it cannot seem to function when under a huge threat? That is BS. Democratic wrangling? It was their duty to their voters to wrangle. Democracy goes on, no matter what, or it should, but the government needs to be functional while Democracy is going on.
- Tenet dismissed Internet rumors that Osama Bin Laden had worked for the CIA during the Afghan-Soviet war, stating categorically that the al-Qaeda mastermind had no contact with the agency during that period. (I don't believe this particular rumor, anyway. That is not to say that we did not, in large part, help create Al Qaeda, intentionally or not. We are always creating monsters over which, sooner or later, we lose control. Then, something like this happens.)
- Tenet felt that the incoming Bush administration wasn’t focused on the al-Qaeda threat, citing “a lack of urgency.” (Then, it was your job to make them focus or resign in protest. You weren't all alone. Richard Clarke did all in his power, except resign. The lights were blinking red. You kept saying, we are gonna get hit. They had no desire to stop it. Hell, they were awaiting for it. Junior put Cheney in charge of the terrorism threat. Vice didn't even bother to have a real meeting until a week before 9/11. Everyone warned them! )
- Tenet criticized Pakistan’s former intelligence chief Gen. Mahmood Ahmed for his lack of cooperation. Two days before 9/11, the pair had lunch and Tenet claims that he pushed him on Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader protecting Bin Laden. Mahmood praised Omar and didn’t budge his position.
- CIA field officers had a sure-fire clue to figuring out when Iraq would be invaded: the Starbucks at CIA headquarters switched over to a twenty-four-hour-a-day operation. (Gee, I guess Starbucks, Inc. knew too, eh? The whole world knew it was coming, when the inspectors had to haul ass out of Iraq, before they could finish their jobs.
- Tenet would have fired weapons inspector David Kay if he had been a regular officer at the agency. Kay outraged the CIA by refusing to lend some of his staff to the military’s efforts to track down insurgents in Iraq. (He might as well have. There seems to be no shortage of "insurgents," if that is the noun we are using this week, and a rather huge shortage of WMD, until we got there with ours.)
- The Coalition Provisional Authority was so committed to their optimistic propaganda that the White House had to rely on the British to tell them what was really going on in the country. One CIA analyst told Tenet that CPA “runs like a graduate school seminar, none of them speaks Arabic, almost nobody’s ever been to an Arab country and no one makes a decision but [Jay] Bremer.” (But they were all loyal little Bushies and that's all that matters when fortunes are being made off death and carnage. )
- The Pentagon was so determined to exclude Ba’athists and ex-Army members from the future of Iraq that a U.S. Army colonel, who had been DIA’s liason to Ahmed Chalabi, once advised, “We should round them all up and shoot them.” (We didn't even do that to the Nazis. Why did our military hate these guys so much. Maybe they knew too much, about U.S./Iraq relations over the years.)
- The administration was so obsessed with Chalabi that “you had the impression that some Office of the Vice President and DOD reps were writing Chalabi’s name over and over again in their notes, like schoolgirls with their first crush.” Tenet claims that President Bush was frustrated by the focus on Chalabi, twice asking “What the hell is going on with Chalabi” and concluding “I don’t think he ought to be working for us.” (Then why was he allowed to continue on at a six figure salary. Who is the damn president, anyway?
- Joseph Wilson’s briefing about his notorious trip to Niger? He gave an oral briefing to two CIA analysts at his home one night over Chinese takeout food. Blah, blah, whatever....
- Tenet goes out of his way to prove that the CIA made several attempts to get erroneous information about yellowcake out of presidential speeches in 2002.
Oddball
- When Tenet met his counterparts at Russia’s FSB at a fancy restaurant in Moscow, they were greeted by a voluptuous blonde flanked by two dwarves who escorted them inside. During dinner, Tenet’s aide John McLaughlin performed a magic trick where he turns a 1000-ruble note into a 100,000-ruble note, stunning FSB director Nikolai Kovalev.
- Tenet started a fire at CIA headquarters during a celebration over the capture of Pakistani terrorist Aimal Kasi. After he lit a victor cigar, it fell on the floor in all the excitement and set the carpet on fire in the 6th-floor Global Response Center. Later, that piece of burned carpet was framed and hung on the wall.
- During the 2000 summit at Sharm el-Sheik, Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak made fun of Yasser Arafat. While Tenet was huddling with Arafat, he noticed Mubarak quietly laughing and “twirling his finger beside his head, the universal symbol for ‘This guy you’re talking to is nuts!’”
- During the Church of the Nativity crisis in 2002, when Palestinian gunman holed themselves up in the holy site, the CIA’s Geoff O’Connell almost saved the day. He proposed that the Palestinians’ weapons be thrown into the sea. But of course the deal fell apart over a dispute: the Palestinians wanted the guns thrown in the Dead Sea and the Israelis wanted them tossed into the Mediterranean. (If this is true, it is just the kind of thing that causes cranial explosions in normal people.)
- Tenet and his CIA buddies had a pool going over how long it would take Arafat to say “I’m still suffering.” They’d each pick a time and put their money down. Another time, when Tenet was lying on his back on the floor to ease his back pain, Arafat flopped down next to him, saying that he did the same thing for his back. Tenet’s team was petrified that some photojournalist would capture the scene for posterity.
- The CIA’s liason to the Saudis, John Brennan, once spooked the head of Iranian intelligence by walking up to his car and knocking on the window. “As John tells the story, the guy got out of the car, claimed that Iran was a peace-loving country, then jumped back in the car and sped away.”
- In the run-up to the Iraq War, the CIA got an urgent message from Chinese intelligence, sending along the geographic coordinates for their embassy in Baghdad. They were hoping that it was accurately listed in Pentagon databases after their Belgrade embassy was mistakenly bombed by U.S. aircraft in 1999.
- Tenet’s decision to resign was sealed over a meeting with former FBI chief Louis Freeh, whom he accidentally ran into at a local A&P when they were both shopping for Sunday meals.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
Sunday, April 29, 2007
MoDo On Tenet
Saturday, April 28, 2007
Maureen Dowd: More Like an Air Ball
MoDo reminds George Tenet about the part he played in lying America into the phony war in Iraq. Now he wants to declare himself the hero of the whole sorid mess?
The New York Times, April 28, 2007
Poor Slam-Dunk.
Not since Madame Butterfly has anyone been so cruelly misunderstood and misused.
Slam-Dunk says that when he pantingly told the president that fetching information on Saddam's W.M.D. would be a cinch, he did not mean let's go to war.
No matter how eager Slam-Dunk was to tell W. what he wanted to hear while polishing W.'s shoes, that intelligence they craved did not exist. "Let me say it again: C.I.A. found absolutely no linkage between Saddam and 9/11," the ex-Head Spook writes in his new book, self-effacingly titled "At the Center of the Storm."
Besides, Junior and Darth had already decided to go to war to show the Arabs their moxie.The president and vice president wanted Slam-Dunk to help them dramatize the phony case. Everyone had to pitch in!
That Saturday session in December 2002 in the Oval Office was "essentially a marketing meeting," Slam-Dunk writes, just for "sharpening the arguments."Hey, I feel better.
Slam-Dunk always presented himself as the ultimate guy's guy, a cigar-chomping spymaster who swapped jokes with the president. But now he shows us his tender side, a sniveling C.I.A. chief bullied by "remote" Condi.
He says Condi panicked in October 2002 and made him call a Times reporter, Alison Mitchell, who covered the Congressional debate about invading Iraq. He told Alison to ignore the conclusions of his own agency, which had said the links between Saddam and terrorist groups were tenuous, and that Saddam would only take the extreme step of joining with Islamic fanatics if he thought the U.S. was about to attack him.
His nose growing as long as his cigar, he said nothing in the C.I.A. report contradicted the president's case for war."
In retrospect," Slam writes, "I shouldn't have talked to the New York Times reporter at Condi's request. By making public comments in the middle of a contentious political debate, I gave the impression that I was becoming a partisan player."Can't a guy be a lickspittle without being an ideologue?
There were so many nasties trying to push Slam around: Vice, of course, and Wolfie, and Wolfie's neoconcubine Doug Feith. Once, Slam writes, Wolfie "hounded" a C.I.A. briefer to translate the diary of Abu Zubaydah, a captured Al Qaeda official, even though the C.I.A. had decided it was just misogynistic ramblings "about what he wanted to do with women."
Oh, that sexy beast Wolfie.
Look out, Shaha!
But even though he was paid a $4 million advance to settle scores, Slam can't turn on W. Maybe it's the Medal of Freedom. "In a way, President Bush and I are much alike," he writes. "We sometimes say things from our gut, whether it's his 'bring 'em on' or my 'slam-dunk.' I think he gets that about me, just as I get that about him." (He had me at "slam-dunk.")The worst meanie was horrid Bob Woodward.
Slam socialized with Bob and gave him lots of intel for his best sellers, but then Bob "painted a caricature of me leaping into the air and simulating a slam-dunk, not once but twice, with my arms flailing.
Credit Woodward's source with ... a fine sense of how to make me look ridiculous, but don't credit him or her with a deep sense of obligation to the truth."A deep sense of obligation to the truth is something Slam keenly understands, even though he scurried around like the butler in "Remains of the Day," trying to toadie up to the president while, as he belatedly admits, W. was going to invade Iraq without debate or casus belli.
He says he warned Paul Bremer about de-Baathifying the Iraqi Army, but hey, he was just a staff guy. That's probably how the two worst intelligence disasters in our history happened on his watch. He was merely providing intelligence for the guys who wanted to ignore or warp that intelligence and make bad policy. What could he do?
Slam says he was Cassandra. A C.I.A. paper was given to the president's national security team in September 2002 tot sum up the possible negatives of invading Iraq, including anarchy and a breakup in Iraq, instability in the neighborhood, a surge of terrorism against U.S. interests, oil disruptions, and seething allies.But it was discreetly tucked away in the back of the briefing book, after the stuff at the beginning about how great it would be to liberate Iraq and end threats to Iraq's neighbors, and the stuff in the middle about reforming Iraq's bureaucracy.
Slam gives tips to others who want to engage in public service, including: Don't forget that there are no private conversations, even in the Oval Office. Another might be: If you worry about your own survival more than your country's, you might end up as the whiny fall guy.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
Maureen Dowd: More Like an Air Ball
MoDo reminds George Tenet about the part he played in lying America into the phony war in Iraq. Now he wants to declare himself the hero of the whole sorid mess?
The New York Times, April 28, 2007
Poor Slam-Dunk.
Not since Madame Butterfly has anyone been so cruelly misunderstood and misused.
Slam-Dunk says that when he pantingly told the president that fetching information on Saddam's W.M.D. would be a cinch, he did not mean let's go to war.
No matter how eager Slam-Dunk was to tell W. what he wanted to hear while polishing W.'s shoes, that intelligence they craved did not exist. "Let me say it again: C.I.A. found absolutely no linkage between Saddam and 9/11," the ex-Head Spook writes in his new book, self-effacingly titled "At the Center of the Storm."
Besides, Junior and Darth had already decided to go to war to show the Arabs their moxie.The president and vice president wanted Slam-Dunk to help them dramatize the phony case. Everyone had to pitch in!
That Saturday session in December 2002 in the Oval Office was "essentially a marketing meeting," Slam-Dunk writes, just for "sharpening the arguments."Hey, I feel better.
Slam-Dunk always presented himself as the ultimate guy's guy, a cigar-chomping spymaster who swapped jokes with the president. But now he shows us his tender side, a sniveling C.I.A. chief bullied by "remote" Condi.
He says Condi panicked in October 2002 and made him call a Times reporter, Alison Mitchell, who covered the Congressional debate about invading Iraq. He told Alison to ignore the conclusions of his own agency, which had said the links between Saddam and terrorist groups were tenuous, and that Saddam would only take the extreme step of joining with Islamic fanatics if he thought the U.S. was about to attack him.
His nose growing as long as his cigar, he said nothing in the C.I.A. report contradicted the president's case for war."
In retrospect," Slam writes, "I shouldn't have talked to the New York Times reporter at Condi's request. By making public comments in the middle of a contentious political debate, I gave the impression that I was becoming a partisan player."Can't a guy be a lickspittle without being an ideologue?
There were so many nasties trying to push Slam around: Vice, of course, and Wolfie, and Wolfie's neoconcubine Doug Feith. Once, Slam writes, Wolfie "hounded" a C.I.A. briefer to translate the diary of Abu Zubaydah, a captured Al Qaeda official, even though the C.I.A. had decided it was just misogynistic ramblings "about what he wanted to do with women."
Oh, that sexy beast Wolfie.
Look out, Shaha!
But even though he was paid a $4 million advance to settle scores, Slam can't turn on W. Maybe it's the Medal of Freedom. "In a way, President Bush and I are much alike," he writes. "We sometimes say things from our gut, whether it's his 'bring 'em on' or my 'slam-dunk.' I think he gets that about me, just as I get that about him." (He had me at "slam-dunk.")The worst meanie was horrid Bob Woodward.
Slam socialized with Bob and gave him lots of intel for his best sellers, but then Bob "painted a caricature of me leaping into the air and simulating a slam-dunk, not once but twice, with my arms flailing.
Credit Woodward's source with ... a fine sense of how to make me look ridiculous, but don't credit him or her with a deep sense of obligation to the truth."A deep sense of obligation to the truth is something Slam keenly understands, even though he scurried around like the butler in "Remains of the Day," trying to toadie up to the president while, as he belatedly admits, W. was going to invade Iraq without debate or casus belli.
He says he warned Paul Bremer about de-Baathifying the Iraqi Army, but hey, he was just a staff guy. That's probably how the two worst intelligence disasters in our history happened on his watch. He was merely providing intelligence for the guys who wanted to ignore or warp that intelligence and make bad policy. What could he do?
Slam says he was Cassandra. A C.I.A. paper was given to the president's national security team in September 2002 tot sum up the possible negatives of invading Iraq, including anarchy and a breakup in Iraq, instability in the neighborhood, a surge of terrorism against U.S. interests, oil disruptions, and seething allies.But it was discreetly tucked away in the back of the briefing book, after the stuff at the beginning about how great it would be to liberate Iraq and end threats to Iraq's neighbors, and the stuff in the middle about reforming Iraq's bureaucracy.
Slam gives tips to others who want to engage in public service, including: Don't forget that there are no private conversations, even in the Oval Office. Another might be: If you worry about your own survival more than your country's, you might end up as the whiny fall guy.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
Condi just still doesn't get it, or she is the worst freakin' liar in the world.
Listen Condi, All lights were flashing RED!
We had warnings from everyone from Vladimir Putin, to Hosni Mubarak, to some guy in a phone booth in Jamaica and you guys went deaf, dumb, and blind. Over 70 warnings came in that summer, Ms. Rice.
Do you remember that a very tall, guy with a beard had declared war on the U.S. and that his organization, based in Afghanistan, had bombed the USS Cole, among other things. No One did anything, at all, about the Cole, even after learning, for sure, that it was an al Al Qaeda Op. It was an act of war. You guys did nothing, but ignore all the flashing red ights, because you freakin' needed 9/11 to happen. Didn't you?
When a crazy guy with gazillions of petro-dollars declares war on you, perhaps you should listen, eh?
Everyone warned you!!!
How could you or the president have been shocked?
Madam, you are full of crap!
Rice: ‘I Don’t Know What We Were Supposed To Preemptively Strike In Afghanistan’ In July 2001
This evening, 60 Minutes will air its discussion with former CIA Director George Tenet. In one exchange, Tenet elaborates on a briefing that he and his former aide Cofer Black delivered to then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in July 2001 warning of an “urgent threat” from al Qaeda. In the 60 Minutes interview, Tenet says this is the message he delivered to Rice two months prior to 9/11:
We need to consider immediate action inside Afghanistan now. We need to move to the offensive.
On CBS’s Face the Nation, a perplexed and stunned Rice said, “The idea of launching preemptive strikes into Afghanistan in July of 2001, this is a new fact.” Rice then said, “I don’t know what we were supposed to preemptively strike in Afghanistan. Perhaps somebody can ask that.” Watch it:
Note to Rice: The intelligence community was trying to tell you to take the action President Clinton took — that is, make an effort to kill this guy:
Transcript:
SCOTT PELLEY, CBS NEWS (voice-over): By the summer of 2001, Tenet was alarmed by repeated, specific intelligence warning that an attack was coming. He asked for an immediate meeting to brief then national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice.
GEORGE TENET, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: Essentially the briefing says there are going to be multiple, spectacular attacks against the United States. We believe these attacks are imminent. Mass casualties are likely.
PELLEY (on camera): You are telling Condoleezza Rice in that meeting, in the White House, in July, that we should take offensive action in Afghanistan now.
TENET: We need…
PELLEY: Before 9/11?
TENET: We need to consider immediate action inside Afghanistan now. We need to move to the offensive.
PELLEY (voice-over): In his book, Tenet says that even though he told Rice an attack on Americans was imminent, she took his request to launch preemptive action in Afghanistan and delegated it to third tier officials.
SCHIEFFER: So, what he is saying is that you just sort of brushed him off.
RICE: Well, it’s very interesting, because that’s not what George told the 9/11 Commission at the time. He said that he felt that we had gotten it. And, in fact, the very next day or the day after, Steve Hadley, hardly a third tier official, sat with the intelligence agencies to try and determine what more we could do.
We were concerned for instance, could we go after Abu Zubaydah, who might have some information. But the idea of launching preemptive strikes into Afghanistan in July of 2001, this is a new fact, and I will have to…
SCHIEFFER: Well, why would he say something like that?
RICE: Well, I don’t know. I don’t know what we were supposed to preemptively strike in Afghanistan. Perhaps somebody can ask that.
Filed under: National Security
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
We had warnings from everyone from Vladimir Putin, to Hosni Mubarak, to some guy in a phone booth in Jamaica and you guys went deaf, dumb, and blind. Over 70 warnings came in that summer, Ms. Rice.
Do you remember that a very tall, guy with a beard had declared war on the U.S. and that his organization, based in Afghanistan, had bombed the USS Cole, among other things. No One did anything, at all, about the Cole, even after learning, for sure, that it was an al Al Qaeda Op. It was an act of war. You guys did nothing, but ignore all the flashing red ights, because you freakin' needed 9/11 to happen. Didn't you?
When a crazy guy with gazillions of petro-dollars declares war on you, perhaps you should listen, eh?
Everyone warned you!!!
How could you or the president have been shocked?
Madam, you are full of crap!
Rice: ‘I Don’t Know What We Were Supposed To Preemptively Strike In Afghanistan’ In July 2001
This evening, 60 Minutes will air its discussion with former CIA Director George Tenet. In one exchange, Tenet elaborates on a briefing that he and his former aide Cofer Black delivered to then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice in July 2001 warning of an “urgent threat” from al Qaeda. In the 60 Minutes interview, Tenet says this is the message he delivered to Rice two months prior to 9/11:
We need to consider immediate action inside Afghanistan now. We need to move to the offensive.
On CBS’s Face the Nation, a perplexed and stunned Rice said, “The idea of launching preemptive strikes into Afghanistan in July of 2001, this is a new fact.” Rice then said, “I don’t know what we were supposed to preemptively strike in Afghanistan. Perhaps somebody can ask that.” Watch it:
Note to Rice: The intelligence community was trying to tell you to take the action President Clinton took — that is, make an effort to kill this guy:
Transcript:
SCOTT PELLEY, CBS NEWS (voice-over): By the summer of 2001, Tenet was alarmed by repeated, specific intelligence warning that an attack was coming. He asked for an immediate meeting to brief then national security adviser, Condoleezza Rice.
GEORGE TENET, FORMER CIA DIRECTOR: Essentially the briefing says there are going to be multiple, spectacular attacks against the United States. We believe these attacks are imminent. Mass casualties are likely.
PELLEY (on camera): You are telling Condoleezza Rice in that meeting, in the White House, in July, that we should take offensive action in Afghanistan now.
TENET: We need…
PELLEY: Before 9/11?
TENET: We need to consider immediate action inside Afghanistan now. We need to move to the offensive.
PELLEY (voice-over): In his book, Tenet says that even though he told Rice an attack on Americans was imminent, she took his request to launch preemptive action in Afghanistan and delegated it to third tier officials.
SCHIEFFER: So, what he is saying is that you just sort of brushed him off.
RICE: Well, it’s very interesting, because that’s not what George told the 9/11 Commission at the time. He said that he felt that we had gotten it. And, in fact, the very next day or the day after, Steve Hadley, hardly a third tier official, sat with the intelligence agencies to try and determine what more we could do.
We were concerned for instance, could we go after Abu Zubaydah, who might have some information. But the idea of launching preemptive strikes into Afghanistan in July of 2001, this is a new fact, and I will have to…
SCHIEFFER: Well, why would he say something like that?
RICE: Well, I don’t know. I don’t know what we were supposed to preemptively strike in Afghanistan. Perhaps somebody can ask that.
Filed under: National Security
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
Friday, April 27, 2007
Tenet Lambastes Cheney in New Book
April 27, 2007
Ex-C.I.A. Chief, in Book, Assails Cheney on Iraq
By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON, April 26 — George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, has lashed out against Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials in a new book, saying they pushed the country to war in Iraq without ever conducting a “serious debate” about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States.
The 549-page book, “At the Center of the Storm,” is to be published by HarperCollins on Monday. By turns accusatory, defensive, and modestly self-critical, it is the first detailed account by a member of the president’s inner circle of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the decision to invade Iraq and the failure to find the unconventional weapons that were a major justification for the war.
“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” Mr. Tenet writes in a devastating judgment that is likely to be debated for many years. Nor, he adds, “was there ever a significant discussion” about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.
(Well, of course there weren't any discussions about containment or anything else other than invasion and occupation. They had been planning this for years.)
Mr. Tenet admits that he made his famous “slam dunk” remark about the evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But he argues that the quote was taken out of context and that it had little impact on President Bush’s decision to go to war. He also makes clear his bitter view that the administration made him a scapegoat for the Iraq war.
A copy of the book was purchased at retail price in advance of publication by a reporter for The New York Times. Mr. Tenet described with sarcasm watching an episode of “Meet the Press” last September in which Mr. Cheney twice referred to Mr. Tenet’s “slam dunk” remark as the basis for the decision to go to war.
“I remember watching and thinking, ‘As if you needed me to say ‘slam dunk’ to convince you to go to war with Iraq,’ ” Mr. Tenet writes.
As violence in Iraq spiraled beginning in late 2003, Mr. Tenet writes, “rather than acknowledge responsibility, the administration’s message was: Don’t blame us. George Tenet and the C.I.A. got us into this mess.”
(Mr. Tenet, has it ever occured to you that the Clinton hating Bush White House, kept two people from the Clinton White House on: you and Norman Minetta? Why would they do that?
Who got most of the blame for 9/11? The CIA and the FAA, one department run by you, the other, under Minetta.
It stands to reason that you would be scapegoated for Iraq as well, that is one of the reasons you were kept on after 9/11. You were going to serve as a scape goat, one way or the other.
Mr. Tenet takes blame for the flawed 2002 National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq’s weapons programs, calling the episode “one of the lowest moments of my seven-year tenure.” He expresses regret that the document was not more nuanced, but says there was no doubt in his mind at the time that Saddam Hussein possessed unconventional weapons. “In retrospect, we got it wrong partly because the truth was so implausible,” he writes.
(Nobody wanted to hear the truth, it didn't fit their plans!)
Despite such sweeping indictments, Mr. Bush, who in 2004 awarded Mr. Tenet a Presidential Medal of Freedom, is portrayed personally in a largely positive light, with particular praise for the his leadership after the 2001 attacks. “He was absolutely in charge, determined, and directed,” Mr. Tenet writes of the president, whom he describes as a blunt-spoken kindred spirit.
(Hey George, have you never thought it odd that George W. Bush, who fought all the way to the Supreme Court to get into the White House, acted like he had no idea what to do once he got there. He seemed rather lazy, as I recall; fairly bored and unfocused.
He wanted tax breaks.
He got them. Given that there was a surplus, not many peoplle were going to throw a fit about that.
He launched "No Child Left Behind," with the help of Ted Kennedy, then did little to fund the program.
He was headed for one term.
Until 9/11.
After that, it was as if he had been launched, like a unguided missle.
Oh ferchrissake, they were focused on Iraq before the Supremes put them in office!
Mr. Tenet describes helping to kill a planned speech by Mr. Cheney on the eve of the invasion because its claims of links between Al Qaeda and Iraq went “way beyond what the intelligence shows.”
“Mr. President, we cannot support the speech and it should not be given,” Mr. Tenet wrote that he told Mr. Bush. Mr. Cheney never delivered the remarks.
(The hell he hasn't said this. He still says it!)
Mr. Tenet hints at some score-settling in the book. He describes in particular the extraordinary tension between him and Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, in internal debate over how the president came to say erroneously in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa.
He describes an episode in 2003, shortly after he issued a statement taking partial responsibility for that error. He said he was invited over for a Sunday afternoon, back-patio lemonade by Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state. Mr. Powell described what Mr. Tenet called “a lively debate” on Air Force One a few days before about whether the White House should continue to support Mr. Tenet as C.I.A. director.
“In the end, the president said yes, and said so publicly,” Mr. Tenet wrote. “But Colin let me know that other officials, particularly the vice president, had quite another view.”
Surely, you have heard of good cop/bad cop?
He writes that the controversy over who was to blame for the State of the Union error was the beginning of the end of his tenure. After the finger-pointing between the White House and the C.I.A., he wrote, “My relationship with the administration was forever changed.”
No it wasn't. It just became obvious that you were going to be the fall guy, and this had been planned all along.
Mr. Tenet also says in the book that he had been “not at all sure I wanted to accept” the Medal of Freedom. He agreed after he saw that the citation “was all about the C.I.A.’s work against terrorism, not Iraq.”
He also expresses skepticism about whether the increase in troops in Iraq will prove successful. “It may have worked more than three years ago,” he wrote. “My fear is that sectarian violence in Iraq has taken on a life of its own and that U.S. forces are becoming more and more irrelevant to the management of that violence.”
Mr. Tenet says he decided to write the memoir in part because the infamous “slam dunk” episode had come to define his tenure at C.I.A.
He gives a detailed account of the episode, which occurred during an Oval Office meeting in December 2002 when the administration was preparing to make public its case for war against Iraq.
During the meeting, the deputy C.I.A. director, John McLaughlin, unveiled a draft of a proposed public presentation that left the group unimpressed. Mr. Tenet recalls that Mr. Bush suggested that they could “add punch” by bringing in lawyers trained to argue cases before a jury.
“I told the president that strengthening the public presentation was a ‘slam dunk,’ a phrase that was later taken completely out of context,” Mr. Tenet writes. “If I had simply said, ‘I’m sure we can do better,’ I wouldn’t be writing this chapter — or maybe even this book.”
Mr. Tenet has spoken rarely in public, and never so caustically, since stepping down in July 2004.
Asked about Mr. Tenet’s assertions, a White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe, defended the prewar deliberations on Thursday. “The president made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein for a number of reasons, mainly the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s own actions, and only after a thorough and lengthy assessment of all available information as well as Congressional authorization,” the spokesman said.
(Bullshit!)
The book recounts C.I.A. efforts to fight Al Qaeda in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks, and Mr. Tenet’s early warnings about Osama bin Laden. He contends that the urgent appeals of the C.I.A. on terrorism received a lukewarm reception at the Bush White House through most of 2001.
(Well, of course they did. No Bushite had any interest in stopping the event they had long hoped for; a newPearl Harbor. As a matter of fact, they probably encouraged it.
“The bureaucracy moved slowly,” and only after the Sept. 11 attacks was the C.I.A. given the counterterrorism powers it had requested earlier in the year.
Mr. Tenet confesses to “a black, black time” two months after the 2001 attacks when, sitting in front of his house in his favorite Adirondack chair, he “just lost it.”
“I thought about all the people who had died and what we had been through in the months since,” he writes. “What am I doing here? Why me?” Mr. Tenet gives a vigorous defense of the C.I.A.’s program to hold captured Qaeda members in secret overseas jails and to question them with harsh techniques, which he does not explicitly describe.
Mr. Tenet expresses puzzlement that, since 2001, Al Qaeda has not sent “suicide bombers to cause chaos in a half-dozen American shopping malls on any given day.”
(Yeah, I have to admit, that has puzzled me too. A few well placed bombs in several Walmarts could have broken the economy fast. But no such attacks ever came. I wonder why?)
“I do know one thing in my gut,” he writes. “Al Qaeda is here and waiting.”
(Waiting for what, exactly? Instructions? From Whom?)
David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington, and Julie Bosman from New York.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
Ex-C.I.A. Chief, in Book, Assails Cheney on Iraq
By SCOTT SHANE and MARK MAZZETTI
WASHINGTON, April 26 — George J. Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, has lashed out against Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials in a new book, saying they pushed the country to war in Iraq without ever conducting a “serious debate” about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States.
The 549-page book, “At the Center of the Storm,” is to be published by HarperCollins on Monday. By turns accusatory, defensive, and modestly self-critical, it is the first detailed account by a member of the president’s inner circle of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the decision to invade Iraq and the failure to find the unconventional weapons that were a major justification for the war.
“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” Mr. Tenet writes in a devastating judgment that is likely to be debated for many years. Nor, he adds, “was there ever a significant discussion” about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.
(Well, of course there weren't any discussions about containment or anything else other than invasion and occupation. They had been planning this for years.)
Mr. Tenet admits that he made his famous “slam dunk” remark about the evidence that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. But he argues that the quote was taken out of context and that it had little impact on President Bush’s decision to go to war. He also makes clear his bitter view that the administration made him a scapegoat for the Iraq war.
A copy of the book was purchased at retail price in advance of publication by a reporter for The New York Times. Mr. Tenet described with sarcasm watching an episode of “Meet the Press” last September in which Mr. Cheney twice referred to Mr. Tenet’s “slam dunk” remark as the basis for the decision to go to war.
“I remember watching and thinking, ‘As if you needed me to say ‘slam dunk’ to convince you to go to war with Iraq,’ ” Mr. Tenet writes.
As violence in Iraq spiraled beginning in late 2003, Mr. Tenet writes, “rather than acknowledge responsibility, the administration’s message was: Don’t blame us. George Tenet and the C.I.A. got us into this mess.”
(Mr. Tenet, has it ever occured to you that the Clinton hating Bush White House, kept two people from the Clinton White House on: you and Norman Minetta? Why would they do that?
Who got most of the blame for 9/11? The CIA and the FAA, one department run by you, the other, under Minetta.
It stands to reason that you would be scapegoated for Iraq as well, that is one of the reasons you were kept on after 9/11. You were going to serve as a scape goat, one way or the other.
Mr. Tenet takes blame for the flawed 2002 National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq’s weapons programs, calling the episode “one of the lowest moments of my seven-year tenure.” He expresses regret that the document was not more nuanced, but says there was no doubt in his mind at the time that Saddam Hussein possessed unconventional weapons. “In retrospect, we got it wrong partly because the truth was so implausible,” he writes.
(Nobody wanted to hear the truth, it didn't fit their plans!)
Despite such sweeping indictments, Mr. Bush, who in 2004 awarded Mr. Tenet a Presidential Medal of Freedom, is portrayed personally in a largely positive light, with particular praise for the his leadership after the 2001 attacks. “He was absolutely in charge, determined, and directed,” Mr. Tenet writes of the president, whom he describes as a blunt-spoken kindred spirit.
(Hey George, have you never thought it odd that George W. Bush, who fought all the way to the Supreme Court to get into the White House, acted like he had no idea what to do once he got there. He seemed rather lazy, as I recall; fairly bored and unfocused.
He wanted tax breaks.
He got them. Given that there was a surplus, not many peoplle were going to throw a fit about that.
He launched "No Child Left Behind," with the help of Ted Kennedy, then did little to fund the program.
He was headed for one term.
Until 9/11.
After that, it was as if he had been launched, like a unguided missle.
The attack by Al Qaeda on Manhattan, if that was indeed what happened, could not have come as a surprise to Bush, Cheney, Rice or you. Isn't that right? But you got the blame, nevertheless. Still George W Bush defended you and kept you on, as CIA Director. That really indebted you to him, right?
Think, George!
But Mr. Tenet largely endorses the view of administration critics that Mr. Cheney and a handful of Pentagon officials, including Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith, were focused on Iraq as a threat in late 2001 and 2002 even as Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A. concentrated mostly on Al Qaeda.Oh ferchrissake, they were focused on Iraq before the Supremes put them in office!
Mr. Tenet describes helping to kill a planned speech by Mr. Cheney on the eve of the invasion because its claims of links between Al Qaeda and Iraq went “way beyond what the intelligence shows.”
“Mr. President, we cannot support the speech and it should not be given,” Mr. Tenet wrote that he told Mr. Bush. Mr. Cheney never delivered the remarks.
(The hell he hasn't said this. He still says it!)
Mr. Tenet hints at some score-settling in the book. He describes in particular the extraordinary tension between him and Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, in internal debate over how the president came to say erroneously in his 2003 State of the Union address that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa.
He describes an episode in 2003, shortly after he issued a statement taking partial responsibility for that error. He said he was invited over for a Sunday afternoon, back-patio lemonade by Colin L. Powell, then secretary of state. Mr. Powell described what Mr. Tenet called “a lively debate” on Air Force One a few days before about whether the White House should continue to support Mr. Tenet as C.I.A. director.
“In the end, the president said yes, and said so publicly,” Mr. Tenet wrote. “But Colin let me know that other officials, particularly the vice president, had quite another view.”
Surely, you have heard of good cop/bad cop?
He writes that the controversy over who was to blame for the State of the Union error was the beginning of the end of his tenure. After the finger-pointing between the White House and the C.I.A., he wrote, “My relationship with the administration was forever changed.”
No it wasn't. It just became obvious that you were going to be the fall guy, and this had been planned all along.
Mr. Tenet also says in the book that he had been “not at all sure I wanted to accept” the Medal of Freedom. He agreed after he saw that the citation “was all about the C.I.A.’s work against terrorism, not Iraq.”
He also expresses skepticism about whether the increase in troops in Iraq will prove successful. “It may have worked more than three years ago,” he wrote. “My fear is that sectarian violence in Iraq has taken on a life of its own and that U.S. forces are becoming more and more irrelevant to the management of that violence.”
Mr. Tenet says he decided to write the memoir in part because the infamous “slam dunk” episode had come to define his tenure at C.I.A.
He gives a detailed account of the episode, which occurred during an Oval Office meeting in December 2002 when the administration was preparing to make public its case for war against Iraq.
During the meeting, the deputy C.I.A. director, John McLaughlin, unveiled a draft of a proposed public presentation that left the group unimpressed. Mr. Tenet recalls that Mr. Bush suggested that they could “add punch” by bringing in lawyers trained to argue cases before a jury.
“I told the president that strengthening the public presentation was a ‘slam dunk,’ a phrase that was later taken completely out of context,” Mr. Tenet writes. “If I had simply said, ‘I’m sure we can do better,’ I wouldn’t be writing this chapter — or maybe even this book.”
Mr. Tenet has spoken rarely in public, and never so caustically, since stepping down in July 2004.
Asked about Mr. Tenet’s assertions, a White House spokesman, Gordon D. Johndroe, defended the prewar deliberations on Thursday. “The president made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein for a number of reasons, mainly the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq and Saddam Hussein’s own actions, and only after a thorough and lengthy assessment of all available information as well as Congressional authorization,” the spokesman said.
(Bullshit!)
The book recounts C.I.A. efforts to fight Al Qaeda in the years before the Sept. 11 attacks, and Mr. Tenet’s early warnings about Osama bin Laden. He contends that the urgent appeals of the C.I.A. on terrorism received a lukewarm reception at the Bush White House through most of 2001.
(Well, of course they did. No Bushite had any interest in stopping the event they had long hoped for; a newPearl Harbor. As a matter of fact, they probably encouraged it.
“The bureaucracy moved slowly,” and only after the Sept. 11 attacks was the C.I.A. given the counterterrorism powers it had requested earlier in the year.
Mr. Tenet confesses to “a black, black time” two months after the 2001 attacks when, sitting in front of his house in his favorite Adirondack chair, he “just lost it.”
“I thought about all the people who had died and what we had been through in the months since,” he writes. “What am I doing here? Why me?” Mr. Tenet gives a vigorous defense of the C.I.A.’s program to hold captured Qaeda members in secret overseas jails and to question them with harsh techniques, which he does not explicitly describe.
Mr. Tenet expresses puzzlement that, since 2001, Al Qaeda has not sent “suicide bombers to cause chaos in a half-dozen American shopping malls on any given day.”
(Yeah, I have to admit, that has puzzled me too. A few well placed bombs in several Walmarts could have broken the economy fast. But no such attacks ever came. I wonder why?)
“I do know one thing in my gut,” he writes. “Al Qaeda is here and waiting.”
(Waiting for what, exactly? Instructions? From Whom?)
David E. Sanger contributed reporting from Washington, and Julie Bosman from New York.
(In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. The Lantern has no affiliation whatsoever with the originator of this article nor is The Lantern endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
....And The Truth Shall Set Us Free
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