George Tenet's New Book: It Will Make Your 'Hair Curl'

Bah
George Tenet can add his name to my list of of shame re people (including Colin Powell) who betrayed the American people by not speaking up privately and publicly when he knew the Bush administration was going to make a mistake by invading iraq.

Shame on him!

BBB

About that Presidential Medal of Freedom, Mr. Tenet
04.27.2007
About that Presidential Medal of Freedom, Mr. Tenet
by James Fallows

Two and a half years ago, after interviewing many, many people involved in shaping Iraq-war policy, I wrote the following in the Atlantic (and then in Blind into Baghdad):

There is no evidence that the President and those closest to him ever talked systematically about the "opportunity costs" and tradeoffs in their decision to invade Iraq.

No one has pointed to a meeting, a memo, a full set of discussions, about what America would gain and lose.

The Administration apparently did not consider questions like "If we pursue the war on terror by invading Iraq, might we incite even more terror in the long run?" and "If we commit so many of our troops this way, what possibilities will we be giving up?" Bush "did not think of this, intellectually, as a comparative decision," I was told by Senator Bob Graham, of Florida, who voted against the war resolution for fear it would hurt the fight against terrorism. "It was a single decision: he saw Saddam Hussein as an evil person who had to be removed." ... A man who participated in high-level planning for both Afghanistan and Iraq--and who is unnamed here because he still works for the government--told me, "There was absolutely no debate in the normal sense."

Comes now George Tenet. In those days, as CIA director, Tenet was the man who sat so visibly and solemnly behind Colin Powell during Powell's crucial UN speech presenting "proof" of the WMD threat from Iraq. Tenet's sober presence suggested how powerful America's evidence must be. In those days, Tenet was inseparable from President Bush and from the argument that, as the inescapable next step in the "war on terror," America had to invade Iraq. On December 2, 2004, Tenet was at the White House for perhaps the most cynically dishonorable day in the history of American public service: the day when the freshly reelected President Bush awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom to three men: the one who publicly vouched for a misleading case for invading Iraq (Tenet); the one who beat Saddam's army but was entirely uninterested in what came next (Gen. Tommy Franks), and the one who helped turned that next stage into a catastrophe (Amb. L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer III).

Now Tenet tells us -- according to this story in the New York Times -- that the Administration pushed the country toward war without ever conducting a "serious debate" about Iraq's threat and the possible U.S. responses.

"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.

Gee, thanks for telling us now, Mr. Tenet. Now -- not when it was happening, and the news might still have changed national policy and spared us a "war of choice." Now -- not before the 2004 election, which as the President has told us was the "accountability moment" for his policy toward Iraq. (How differently the world would view the United States if, at its first chance after the Iraq invasion, the public had rejected rather than ratified the policies that led to war.) Now -- when it's not clear what difference it can make at all. People open to evidence about the war, including the majority of the public, now generally consider it to have been a mistake, which doesn't make the decision about what to do next any easier. People not open to evidence still control the Executive Branch. One more book won't change their minds.

If you felt so strongly, why did you wait to say anything until you knew it couldn't do any good? Of course, saying something earlier would have meant resigning in protest, a step that still is vanishingly rare. And there would not have been that Medal of Freedom. Perhaps you'll wear it on the book tour? Just a thought.

Addendum: Sounding harsh is not attractive, and it's possible that I'm being unfair to the whole case Tenet makes. I haven't read the book (which is not yet officially published) and am judging only on the parts quoted in the New York Times. So why this harshness? It's my frustration about people who tell us now that they had cold feet about what is either the most damaging, or the second-most damaging, decision in American diplomatic history, the other possibility being Vietnam. (I think Iraq will prove to be the worst. Many more Americans died in Vietnam than will in Iraq, and -- unless regional war in the Middle East becomes truly catastrophic -- the civilian and military deaths of Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Laotians will outweigh those in Iraq. But the slow, step-by-step escalation in Vietnam was, sadly, more logical and understandable than the wholly discretionary decision to invade Iraq. The long term damage to America's interests and reputation will, I think, be greater -- but we'll see.) So I find it hard to be as understanding and tolerant as I would like to be, when someone who might have made a difference but didn't, at the time, later tells us he was skeptical all along. This is, similarly, why the Iraq years did such damage to Colin Powell.

Tenet and Powell : Pick Up a Bedpan
Tenet and Powell : Pick Up a Bedpan
by Trey Ellis
04.27.2007

It was so cowardly of both of you not to scream, yell and push back with every fiber of your souls against the Cheney-orchestrated, trumped up run up to war. It is almost as cowardly now to claim that you knew all along that it was a bad idea and that you had wished that the administration had found another way of insuring that Saddam was defanged.

Tens of thousands of lives have been lost, hundreds of billions of dollars spent making us less safe, more hated and the region even more destabilized.

And you write a book to clear your name?

Watching the excellent Bill Moyers report on the lack of opposition to the trail of lies that lead us to war I was again struck by the number of people who knew better but stayed silent. Or, much worse, knew better but parroted the administration's lies. When Colin Powell spoke before the U.N. and accused Saddam of harboring al-Zarqawi in northern Iraq I remember screaming at the television, "Liar! Northern Iraq is Kurdish controlled and in our no-fly zone. There are already more U.S. Special Forces there on the ground than Iraqi troops." And yet General Powell has the balls to leak to Bob Woodward that he lobbied to avoid this madness.

Tenet and Powell should worry more about the lives that they helped ruin than their precious reputations. They should march over to Walter Reed and empty bedpans for now legless soldiers, read Tom Clancy novels to now sightless marines. If they were Japanese they would have long ago fallen on their swords.

I do not want that for them, or for anyone. However if these two men truly want to restore honor to their reputations they need to dedicate the rest of their days to atoning for the pointless misery that they helped unleash on our country, on Iraq and the world.

Waxman Invites Tenet to Testify
Waxman Invites Tenet to Testify
By Patrick O'Connor
The Politico
Friday 27 April 2007

House Oversight and Government Reform Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) has invited former CIA Director George Tenet to testify before his committee next month about claims that Iraq sought to buy uranium in Africa.

Waxman sent a letter to Tenet, in the care of his lawyer, Robert B. Barnett, on Friday asking the former CIA director to appear before his committee to discuss the intelligence data that President Bush cited in his 2003 State of the Union speech to justify the invasion of Iraq.

"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 the letter.

Earlier this week, the committee voted to authorize a subpoena for Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to compel her to answer questions about these claims, a move that committee Republicans decried as an "overreach."

Tenet famously claimed that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction in his now infamous "slam dunk" comment that now seems more like a cover-your-butt background leak from some other White House official who was worried the president might be culpable for the pre-war intelligence.

Tenet now slams the White House back in his new book, "At the Center of the Storm," saying they twisted his quote about the weapons of mass destruction and claiming there was never a "serious debate" leading up to the invasion. According to an Associated Press preview of the book, the former CIA chief has nice things to say about Bush himself, reserving his ire for Cheney.

Together with Bill Moyers show the other night a case is compiled. Harry Reid says Bush is 'a liar'. Yes he betrayed us into war as Gore said. An unjust and unneeded war as former CIC Carter said. Most Americans say Bushie deliberately misled us into war. A highly impeachable offense. But with hundreds of thousands dead in that war Bushie is a criminal and mass murderer and impeachment would be a slap on the wrist. Bushie should be tried for crimes against humanity along with Blair.

Poor Slam-Dunk - More Like an Air Ball
More Like an Air Ball
By Maureen Dowd
The New York Times
Saturday 28 April 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.

BBB, thanks for the great coverage of this important matter.

Poor George Tenet; He Still Doesn't Get It
Poor George Tenet; He Still Doesn't Get It
By Ray McGovern
t r u t h o u t | Guest Contributor
Sunday 29 April 2007

"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.
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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).
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Letter to George Tenet
By Phil Giraldi, Ray McGovern, Larry Johnson, Jim Marcinkowski, Vince Cannistraro and David MacMichael

The following was sent to George Tenet today in care of his publisher. The letter, written by a group of former intelligence officers, reflects disgust with George Tenet's effort to burnish his image with his new "tell all" book.

28 April 2007
Mr. George Tenet
c/o Harper Collins Publishers
10 East 53rd Street 8th Floor
New York City, New York 10022

ATTN: Ms. Tina Andredis

Dear Mr. Tenet:

We write to you on the occasion of the release of your book, At the Center of the Storm. You are on the record complaining about the "damage to your reputation". In our view the damage to your reputation is inconsequential compared to the harm your actions have caused for the U.S. soldiers engaged in combat in Iraq and the national security of the United States. We believe you have a moral obligation to return the Medal of Freedom you received from President George Bush. We also call for you to dedicate a significant percentage of the royalties from your book to the U.S. soldiers and their families who have been killed and wounded in Iraq.

We agree with you that Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials took the United States to war for flimsy reasons. We agree that the war of choice in Iraq was ill-advised and wrong headed. But your lament that you are a victim in a process you helped direct is self-serving, misleading and, as head of the intelligence community, an admission of failed leadership. You were not a victim. You were a willing participant in a poorly considered policy to start an unnecessary war and you share culpability with Dick Cheney and George Bush for the debacle in Iraq.

You are not alone in failing to speak up and protest the twisting and shading of intelligence. Those who remained silent when they could have made a difference also share the blame for not protesting the abuse and misuse of intelligence that occurred under your watch. But ultimately you were in charge and you signed off on the CIA products and you briefed the President.

This is not a case of Monday morning quarterbacking. You helped send very mixed signals to the American people and their legislators in the fall of 2002. CIA field operatives produced solid intelligence in September 2002 that stated clearly there was no stockpile of any kind of WMD in Iraq. This intelligence was ignored and later misused. On October 1 you signed and gave to President Bush and senior policy makers a fraudulent National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) - which dovetailed with unsupported threats presented by Vice President Dick Cheney in an alarmist speech on August 26, 2002.

You were well aware that the White House tried to present as fact intelligence you knew was unreliable. And yet you tried to have it both ways. On October 7, just hours before the president gave a major speech in Cincinnati, you were successful in preventing him from using the fable about Iraq purchasing uranium in Africa, although that same claim appeared in the NIE you signed only six days before.

Although CIA officers learned in late September 2002 from a high-level member of Saddam Hussein's inner circle that Iraq had no past or present contact with Osama bin Laden and that the Iraqi leader considered bin Laden an enemy of the Baghdad regime, you still went before Congress in February 2003 and testified that Iraq did indeed have links to Al Qaeda.

You showed a lack of leadership and courage in January of 2003 as the Bush Administration pushed and cajoled analysts and managers to let them make the bogus claim that Iraq was on the verge of getting its hands on uranium. You signed off on Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations. And, at his insistence, you sat behind him and visibly squandered CIA's most precious asset - credibility.

You may now feel you were bullied and victimized but you were also one of the bullies. In the end you allowed suspect sources, like Curveball, to be used based on very limited reporting and evidence. Yet you were informed in no uncertain terms that Curveball was not reliable. You broke with CIA standard practice and insisted on voluminous evidence to refute this reporting rather than treat the information as suspect. You helped set the bar very low for reporting that supported favored White House positions, while raising the bar astronomically high when it came to raw intelligence that did not support the case for war being hawked by the president and vice president.

It now turns out that you were the Alberto Gonzales of the intelligence community - a grotesque mixture of incompetence and sycophancy shielded by a genial personality. Decisions were made, you were in charge, but you have no idea how decisions were made even though you were in charge. Curiously, you focus your anger on the likes of Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Condi Rice, but you decline to criticize the President.

Mr. Tenet, as head of the intelligence community, you failed to use your position of power and influence to protect the intelligence process and, more importantly, the country. What should you have done? What could you have done?

For starters, during the critical summer and fall of 2002, you could have gone to key Republicans and Democrats in the Congress and warned them of the pressure. But you remained silent. Your candor during your one-on-one with Sir Richard Dearlove, then-head of British Intelligence, of July 20, 2002 provides documentary evidence that you knew exactly what you were doing; namely, "fixing" the intelligence to the policy.

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.

Most importantly and tragically, you failed to meet your obligations to the people of the United States. Instead of resigning in protest, when it could have made a difference in the public debate, you remained silent and allowed the Bush Administration to cite your participation in these deliberations to justify their decision to go to war. Your silence contributed to the willingness of the public to support the disastrous war in Iraq, which has killed more than 3300 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

If you are committed to correcting the record about your past failings then you should start by returning the Medal of Freedom you willingly received from President Bush in December 2004. You claim it was given only because of the war on terror, but you were standing next to General Tommy Franks and L. Paul Bremer, who also contributed to the disaster in Iraq. President Bush said that you "played pivotal roles in great events, and [your] efforts have made our country more secure and advanced the cause of human liberty."

The reality of Iraq, however, has not made our nation more secure nor has the cause of human liberty been advanced. In fact, your tenure as head of the CIA has helped create a world that is more dangerous. The damage to the credibility of the CIA is serious but can eventually be repaired. Many of the U.S. soldiers maimed in the streets of Fallujah and Baghdad cannot be fixed. Many will live the rest of their lives missing limbs, blinded, mentally disabled, or physically disfigured. And the dead have passed into history.

Mr. Tenet, you cannot undo what has been done. It is doubly sad that you seem still to lack an adequate appreciation of the enormous amount of death and carnage you have facilitated. If reflection on these matters serves to prick your conscience we encourage you to donate at least half of the royalties from your book sales to the veterans and their families, who have paid and are paying the price for your failure to speak up when you could have made a difference. That would be the decent and honorable thing to do.

Sincerely yours,

Phil Giraldi
Ray McGovern
Larry Johnson
Jim Marcinkowski
Vince Cannistraro
David MacMichael

Tenet's Instinct to Please
Tenet's Instinct to Please
by Walter Isaacson
04.30.2007

As I was reading the excerpts and reports of George Tenet's new book, I was reminded of a dinner I went to recently where I got to listen to Václav Havel, the playwright, former Czech president, prisoner, and human rights activist. He said that there were two types of people he had dealt with over the years: those with the soul of a collaborationist and those who were comfortable defying authority.

He was obviously in the latter category, and he was speaking of a European archbishop who had collaborated with the communists.

George Tenet's woes, it seems to me, come from the very natural instinct to please rather than tell uncomfortable truths to those in authority. Watching Bill Moyers's show on how the media failed to question the march to the war in Iraq, I reflected on how I, likewise, when I was at CNN, was too willing to accept what those in authority were telling me. And reading Bob Dallek's new book on Nixon and Kissinger, I was reminded how Kissinger, someone I once wrote about, was too willing to cater to and collaborate with the darker impulses of Nixon.

It's not always possible nor even a good thing to be defiant of authority, as I sometimes try to explain to my daughter. Yet Havel's distinction seems, each day, to become more relevant to me as I watch folks like Tenet try to explain themselves. I think, in contrast, of a person like Brent Scowcroft, who repeatedly had the intellectual honesty to say publicly and privately when he disagreed with his former protégés in the Bush Administration, even at the cost of being excluded from the inner circle.

A rebellious willingness to defy authority is what I think most characterized Albert Einstein, my most recent biography subject. You see it in his politics, as he becomes the sole dissenter among the academic elite in Berlin to oppose German militarism during World War I and later to oppose the Nazis, communists, and then McCarthyites when he moved to America. In all cases, it was because he felt people should not be compelled to cater to authority. Likewise in his personal life; even as a young kid, he gets asked to leave school because his attitude is undermining authority, and as a yound patent examiner he learned to question every premise in front of him. And in his science, Einstein's triumphs came from questioning the received wisdom about space and time and gravity that was handed down from Newton.

Not everyone is an Einstein, and many people who repeatedly defy authority are cranks rather than heroes. On the other hand, Havel is right to draw an interesting distinction between people like Einstein and people whose laudable respect for authority spills over into an overeagerness to cater to power.

Watching various interviews of Tenet, I concluded that he is more suited to be a storm window salesman than head of the CIA.

Even now, he is highly protective of Bush. This is because he has benefited from the Bush family for many years.

He knew the Bush reasons were phony, and never said a word. He bears a lot of responsibility for the many deaths of Americans and Iraqis. I hope that no one buys his book.

Bob Woodward Reviews Tenet's Book in 'Post'
Bob Woodward Reviews Tenet's Book in 'Post' -- And Admits He Had A Hand In It
By E&P Staff

Published: May 05, 2007 12:05 AM

NEW YORK Bob Woodward, who has written three books about the Iraq war, each one more skeptical about it than the previous, takes a shot at former CIA director George Tenet's new volume in The Washington Post. Woodward calls "At the Center of the Storm" a "remarkable, important and often unintentionally damning memoir."

He adds: "A dedicated, often innovative and strong leader beloved by many at the CIA, Tenet nevertheless was hampered by a bureaucrat's view of the world, hobbled by the traditional chain of command, convinced that the CIA director's 'most important relationship with any administration official is generally with the national security adviser.'

"No. Your most important relationship is with the president."

Woodward criticizes Tenet for not coming clean with the president -- and now the readers -- about the intelligence failures in Iraq. He also offers a full disclosure: "In discussions with Tenet as a reporter for this paper, I many times urged him to write his memoir, and, after he resigned from the CIA, I even spent a day with him and his co-writer, Bill Harlow, in late 2005 to suggest questions he should try to address. Foremost, I hoped that he would provide intimate portraits of the two presidents he had served as CIA director -- George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Instead, he has adhered to the rule of CIA directors: protect the president at all costs."

Reaping the Whirlwind
Sunday, May 6, 2007; BW03
AT THE CENTER OF THE STORM - My Years at the CIA
By George Tenet with Bill Harlow
REVIEW BY BOB WOODWARD
Bob Woodward, an assistant managing editor of The Washington Post, has coauthored or authored 14 books.

In his remarkable, important and often unintentionally damning memoir, George Tenet, the former CIA chief, describes a meeting with Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, two months before the 9/11 terrorist attacks. In much more vivid and emotional detail than previously reported, Tenet writes that he had received intelligence that day, July 10, 2001, about the threat from al-Qaeda that "literally made my hair stand on end."

According to At the Center of the Storm, Tenet picked up the phone, insisted on meeting with Rice about the threat from al-Qaeda, and raced to the White House with his counter-terrorism deputy, Cofer Black, and a briefer known only as "Rich B."

"There will be a significant terrorist attack in the coming weeks or months," Rich B. told Rice, and the attack would be "spectacular." Black added, "This country needs to go on a war footing now." He said that President Bush should give the CIA new covert action authorities to go after Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda organization. After the meeting, Tenet's briefer and deputy "congratulated each other," Tenet writes. "At last, they felt, we had gotten the full attention of the administration."

Though Tenet was meeting almost daily with President Bush to give him an intelligence briefing and an update on threat reports -- "extraordinary access," he labels it -- by his own account he did not take the request for action "now" directly to the president.

During a CBS "60 Minutes" television interview that aired April 29, correspondent Scott Pelley nailed the crucial question that Tenet leaves unanswered in his book "Why aren't you telling the president, 'Mr. President, this is terrifying. We have to do this now'? " Pelley asked Tenet.

"Because the United States government doesn't work that way," Tenet replied. "The president is not the action officer. You bring the action to the national security adviser and people who set the table for the president to decide on policies they're going to implement."

Whoa! That's a startling admission. I'm pretty certain that President Bush or any president, for that matter, would consider himself or herself the action officer when it comes to protecting the country from terrorism. I can already see the 2008 presidential candidates promising, "I will be your action officer on terrorism and security."

To be fair to Tenet and the CIA, they had been working their tails off for years, often successfully, to thwart terrorists around the globe. But Tenet should have been the instant messenger to the Oval Office in the summer of 2001. His lapse and apparent decision not to carry the request for action to the president himself doesn't mean that the 9/11 attacks might have been averted. But the failure does reveal Tenet's limitations. He was the president's intelligence officer, the top man responsible not only for providing information, but also for devising possible solutions to threats.

A dedicated, often innovative and strong leader beloved by many at the CIA, Tenet nevertheless was hampered by a bureaucrat's view of the world, hobbled by the traditional chain of command, convinced that the CIA director's "most important relationship with any administration official is generally with the national security adviser."

No. Your most important relationship is with the president.

How he rose to his position is telling. The staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee, then the Clinton White House NSC intelligence director and then deputy CIA director, he became CIA Director in 1997 basically because President Clinton's first choices could not be confirmed. A strong people person, Tenet did much to improve CIA morale and lay out a rebuilding program, but in this memoir of his seven-year tenure as CIA director, he wonders whether he was up to the job. "No previous experience had prepared me to run a large organization," he writes. "I was no Jack Welch and I knew it."

Nonetheless, Tenet oversaw significant successes, most notably planning and executing the paramilitary assault to dislodge al-Qaeda from its Afghanistan sanctuary in the weeks and months after 9/11 -- essentially the action he had proposed to Rice in the meeting of July 10, 2001.

Full disclosure: In discussions with Tenet as a reporter for this paper, I many times urged him to write his memoir, and, after he resigned from the CIA, I even spent a day with him and his co-writer, Bill Harlow, in late 2005 to suggest questions he should try to address. Foremost, I hoped that he would provide intimate portraits of the two presidents he had served as CIA director -- George W. Bush and Bill Clinton. Instead, he has adhered to the rule of CIA directors: protect the president at all costs.

That said, several chapters by themselves are worth the price of the book: Chapter 14, "They Want to Change History," lays out al-Qaeda's and other terrorist groups' persistent efforts to obtain strategic weapons of mass destruction, including nuclear devices. Reading it is scary, and Tenet makes a compelling case that terrorism inside the United States is not over. Chapter 15, "The Merchant of Death and the Colonel," is an insider's chilling summary of the dismantling of the secret nuclear proliferation network run by A.Q. Khan, the father of the Pakistani nuclear program.

Tenet is candid about how the CIA regularly dispensed money to assist in the capture of al-Qaeda figures. "We would show up in someone's office, offer our thanks, and we would leave behind a briefcase full of crisp one-hundred-dollar bills, sometimes totaling more than a million in a single transaction."

He also provides further documentation that the Bush national security team was dysfunctional and members didn't communicate among themselves very well or at all. This lack of communication becomes apparent in his own understanding of crucial decisions: "One of the great mysteries to me is exactly when the war in Iraq became inevitable," he writes. He doesn't know when Bush decided to go to war. But he writes that in September 2002, "there was no decision to go to war yet" and that by December 2002 the war "decision had already been made." He provides no evidence or statements to support these claims, and I think he is wrong about the latter date. (From my reporting and interviews with Bush and the other key players, I believe Bush finally decided to go to war in early January 2003.)

On Aug. 26, 2002, seven months before the invasion of Iraq, Tenet says he was totally surprised when Vice President Cheney said during a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars that "there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction." Cheney was effectively issuing his own National Intelligence Estimate -- he was treading on Tenet's territory. "The speech also went well beyond what our analysis could support," Tenet writes, and he acknowledges that he should have privately told Cheney so.

In truth, Tenet should have raised hell on such a critical issue -- privately and publicly. He writes that his silence implied agreement. But five weeks later Tenet issued the famous 90-page National Intelligence Estimate that essentially reached the same wrong conclusion: "Baghdad has chemical and biological weapons."

One of Tenet's most baffling fixations has to do with his assertion to the president and the administration's war cabinet on Saturday, Dec. 21, 2002 (three months before war), that Iraq's WMDs were "a slam dunk case." This was first reported in my 2004 book, Plan of Attack.

Tenet disputes the version I reported, acknowledging now that he said "slam dunk," but denying that he rose from the couch in the Oval Office and threw his arms in the air. The gathering was "essentially a marketing meeting," he writes, to decide what intelligence could be made public to prove Iraq had WMDs. He says my recounting "ignited a media bonfire, and I was the guy being burned at the stake."

Over the years, Tenet has been all over the lot on this "slam dunk" comment, first denying he ever said it, then later saying he did not recall it but would not dispute that it happened. In 2005, I participated in a public forum in Los Angeles with Tenet before an audience of 5,000 people. Asked about "slam dunk," he replied, "Those are the two dumbest words I ever said." He does not include that in his book.

Instead, he recounts how he called Andrew Card, the White House chief of staff, and complained that the leak of the "slam dunk" story "made me look stupid, and I just want to tell you how furious I am about it. For someone in the administration to now hang this around my neck is about the most despicable thing I have ever seen in my life."

Tenet incorrectly suggests that I had one source for this report. There were at least four firsthand sources. When I interviewed President Bush in December 2003, he quoted the "slam dunk" phrase four times, and then in a fifth citation the president said, "And Tenet said, 'Don't worry, it's a slam dunk.' And that was very important." I provided this portion of the transcript to Tenet.

"I truly doubt President Bush had any better recollection of the comment than I did," Tenet writes in At the Center of the Storm, "Nor will I ever believe it shaped his view about either the legitimacy or timing of waging war." Tenet could be right about that, but he keeps trying to get himself off the hook for that comment. "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."

But 10 weeks after the "slam dunk" comment, Tenet and the CIA provided Secretary of State Colin Powell with the intelligence he used in his famous Feb. 5, 2003, presentation to the United Nations and the world, arguing that Saddam had WMD. Tenet writes that he believed it was a "solid product." That, of course, is a less memorable and less colorful way of saying "slam dunk."

Of Powell's U.N. speech, Tenet writes, "It was a great presentation, but unfortunately the substance didn't hold up. One by one, the various pillars of the speech, particularly on Iraq's biological and chemical weapons programs, began to buckle. The secretary of state was subsequently hung out to dry in front of the world, and our nation's credibility plummeted."

In truth, Powell blames Tenet for hanging him out to dry. Though Tenet takes some responsibility for his and his agency's mistakes, he often dodges it in his book. "Maybe it's just the way Washington works," he laments when he gets blamed for intelligence failures. Or maybe it's just accountability.

He spends nine pages dissecting how a senior CIA officer, Tyler Drumheller, and the German intelligence service didn't alert him to the fabrications of a source (code-named, appropriately enough, Curve Ball) who alleged that Iraq had mobile biological labs. This was a centerpiece of Powell's U.N. presentation, yet Tenet offers no apology to Powell.

But the other critical intelligence assessment he didn't carry to the Oval Office -- surely the most critical of his career -- was his misgivings about invading Iraq. As I reported in my third book on Bush, State of Denial, in the months before the invasion in the fall of 2002, Tenet confided to one of his top aides, John O. Brennan, that he thought it was not the right thing to do. "This is a mistake," Tenet told Brennan.

But he never said as much to the commander in chief. And he doesn't say it to readers of his memoir. *

George Tenet cashes in on Iraq
The former CIA chief is earning big money from corporations profiting off the war -- a fact not mentioned in his combative new book or heard on his publicity blitz.
link

George Tenet cashes in on Iraq
George Tenet cashes in on Iraq
By Tim Shorrock
Salon
May. 07, 2007 |

The former CIA chief is earning big money from corporations profiting off the war -- a fact not mentioned in his combative new book or heard on his publicity blitz.

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.

When Tenet hit the talk-show circuit last week to defend his stewardship of the CIA and his role in the run-up to the war, he did not mention that he is a director and advisor to four corporations that earn millions of dollars in revenue from contracts with U.S. intelligence agencies and the Department of Defense. Nor is it ever mentioned in his book. But according to public records, Tenet has received at least $2.3 million from those corporations in stock and other compensation. Meanwhile, one of the CIA's largest contractors gave Tenet access to a highly secured room where he could work on classified material for his book.

Tenet sits on the board of directors of L-1 Identity Solutions, a major supplier of biometric identification software used by the U.S. to monitor terrorists and insurgents in Iraq and Afghanistan. The company recently acquired two of the CIA's hottest contractors for its growing intelligence outsourcing business. At the Analysis Corp. (TAC), a government contractor run by one of Tenet's closest former advisors at the CIA, Tenet is a member of an advisory board that is helping TAC expand its thriving business designing the problematic terrorist watch lists used by the National Counterterrorism Center and the State Department.

Tenet is also a director of Guidance Software, which makes forensic software used by U.S. law enforcement and intelligence to search computer hard drives and laptops for evidence used in the prosecution and tracking of suspected terrorists. And Tenet is the only American director on the board of QinetiQ, the British defense research firm that was privatized in 2003 and was, until recently, controlled by the Carlyle Group, the powerful Washington-based private equity fund. Fueled with Carlyle money, QinetiQ acquired four U.S. companies in recent years, including an intelligence contractor, Analex Inc.

By joining these companies, Tenet is following in the footsteps of thousands of other former intelligence officers who have left the CIA and other agencies and returned as contractors, often making two or three times what they made in their former jobs. Based on reporting I've done for an upcoming book, contractors are responsible for at least half of the estimated $48 billion a year the government now spends on intelligence. But exactly how much money will remain unknown: Four days before Tenet's book was published, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence decided not to release the results of a yearlong study of intelligence contracting, because disclosure of the figure, a DNI official told the New York Times, could damage national security.

That may be a real break for Tenet. Under his watch, according to former CIA officials and contractors I've interviewed, up to 60 percent of the CIA workforce has been outsourced. A spokesman for the CIA told me last week that that figure "is way off the mark," but wouldn't provide the actual figure, which he said is classified. But publication of that number could prove embarrassing to Tenet, particularly in light of his own deep involvement in the privatization of U.S. intelligence.

Despite making himself available for plenty of airtime of late, Tenet was not available for an interview with Salon, said Tina Andreadis, his publicist at HarperCollins. She referred me to Bill Harlow, Tenet's co-author and his former director of public affairs at the CIA, who said Tenet's work on corporate boards "is all a matter of public record."

Tenet's ties with contractors were underscored last week in a dispute between two groups of former CIA officials over Tenet's legacy. On April 28, six former intelligence officers wrote to Tenet, saying he shared culpability with President Bush and Vice President Cheney for "the debacle in Iraq," and suggesting he donate half the royalties from his book to Iraq war veterans and their families. All of the signatories had severed their ties to U.S. intelligence, although three of them, Phil Giraldi, Larry Johnson and Vince Cannistraro, work as consultants for news organizations, corporations and government agencies outside of intelligence.

A few days later, six recently retired officers responded. They called the first letter a "bitter, inaccurate and misleading attack" on Tenet and pointed out that it was drafted by officers who "had not served in the Agency for years." Tenet, his supporters said, "literally led the nation's counterterrorism fight." And three of its six signatories were directly involved in that fight -- as contractors. They included John Brennan of the Analysis Corp.; Cofer Black, Tenet's former counterterrorism director and vice chairman of Blackwater, the private military contractor; and Robert Richer, the former deputy director of the CIA's clandestine services. Richer recently left Blackwater to become the CEO of Total Intelligence, a new company formed with Black and other ex-CIA officials to provide intelligence services to corporations and government agencies.

The company with the closest ties to the CIA -- and the biggest potential financial payoff for Tenet -- is L-1 Identity Solutions, the nation's biggest player in biometric identification. L-1's software, which can store millions of ID records based on fingerprints and eye and facial characteristics, helps the Pentagon and U.S. intelligence "in the fight against terrorism by providing technology for insurgent registration [and] combatant identification," the company says. L-1 technology is also employed by the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security for U.S. passports, visas, drivers' licenses and transportation worker ID cards. L-1 clearly hired Tenet for the business he could secure at the CIA. "We want the board to contribute in a meaningful way to the success of the company," CEO Bob LaPenta told analysts during an earnings conference call last year. "You know, we're interested in the CIA, and we have George Tenet."

Last fall, as part of its push into intelligence outsourcing, L-1 acquired SpecTal, a Reston, Va., intelligence contractor with at least 300 employees with security clearances, gaining instant access to several agencies where SpecTal had contracts, including the CIA, the NSA and the Defense Intelligence Agency. Just recently, L-1 picked up another intelligence contractor, Advanced Concepts Inc., where 80 percent of the 300 employees have top-secret clearances. Tenet, according to company filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, was provided with 80,000 shares of L-1 stock when the company acquired Viisage, where Tenet was also a director. At the company's recent price of $19.79, those shares are worth more than $1.5 million. According to an SEC filing on April 6, in 2006 Tenet received director's compensation of $129,337, and $332,030 worth of stock. "George has amazing experience," said Doni Fordyce, L-1's executive vice president for communications. "We're in the security business, right? So he's a tremendous asset." In 2006, L-1 earned $164.4 million, up from $66.2 million in 2005.

Last October, Tenet continued to profit from the defense industry by joining the board of directors of QinetiQ Group PLC. QinetiQ, whose name draws from the fictional British spook who made the gadgets in the James Bond movies, moved aggressively into the U.S. market in 2003 after a majority of its voting stock was acquired by the Carlyle Group. (Carlyle sold off its remaining shares in February, making a $470 million profit on its original investment.)

Here, too, Tenet is profiting from involvement in Iraq and the broader war on terror. QinetiQ's recent acquisitions in the U.S. market include defense contractor Foster Miller Inc., which makes the so-called TALON robots used by U.S. forces in Iraq to neutralize IEDs. QinetiQ also controls Analex Corp., an information technology and engineering company that earns 70 percent of its revenue from the Pentagon. Among the clients listed on Analex's Web site are the National Reconnaissance Office, which manages the nation's spy satellites, and the Pentagon's Counter-Intelligence Field Activity office -- a secretive agency that has been criticized by members of Congress for collecting intelligence on American antiwar activists. According to QinetiQ's Annual Report and Accounts for 2006, non-executive directors like Tenet are paid a minimum of $70,000, with some paid up to more than a quarter-million dollars.

At QinetiQ, Tenet is working with Duane P. Andrews, a former assistant secretary of defense who is QinetiQ's CEO for North America. Prior to coming to QinetiQ, Andrews served for 13 years as a senior executive with Science Applications International Corp. SAIC is one of the largest U.S. intelligence contractors and a major provider of private sector analysts to both the CIA and the National Security Agency. Vanity Fair recently referred to it as a "shadow government."

There is an intriguing detail about SAIC buried in Tenet's acknowledgements in his new book: "Arnold Punaro of SAIC," he writes, "graciously provided me with a secure workspace to review and work with classified material." Punaro is identified on the SAIC Web site as the company's executive vice president for government affairs, communications and support operations, as well as general manager of its Washington operations.

Getting use of such a secure room is no small feat. In the intelligence business, such rooms are known as sensitive, compartmented information facilities, or SCIFs. To prevent eavesdroppers from picking up top-secret conversations, a typical SCIF has film on the windows, walls fitted with soundproof steel plates and white-noise makers embedded in the ceiling. Punaro must have had approval from SAIC and the CIA to allow Tenet such access. Harlow, Tenet's co-author, explained to Salon that Tenet could have used office space at the CIA to work on the book, but that he "believed it would be better not to be producing his memoirs at a government facility." It was "a matter of convenience" to use the room at SAIC, Harlow said.

In 2006, shortly after he joined TAC's advisory board, Tenet joined the board of directors of Guidance Software. One of Guidance's products, EnCase, has been used extensively by U.S. law enforcement, intelligence and military agencies to collect evidence in criminal and counterterrorism cases, including the prosecution of Enron executives and the British "shoe bomber," Richard Reid. Tenet's "years of experience fighting terrorism and extensive knowledge of potential and existing threats will expand Guidance's unparalleled expertise in computer forensics and network investigations," the company noted in a press release. According to SEC records, Tenet earned $58,112 in 2006 as a director and holds 9,700 shares of company stock. At its recent price of $12.85 per share, that would make Tenet's stock worth more than $124,000.

In his work at the Analysis Corp., Tenet has been reunited with John O. Brennan, his former chief of staff and, according to the book, one of his "closest advisers." Brennan spent 25 years in the CIA, and was deputy executive director at the time of the 9/11 attacks. In 2003, he was dispatched by Tenet to run the CIA's Terrorist Threat Integration Center. It eventually morphed into the U.S. government's National Counterterrorism Center, which Brennan ran from December 2004 to August 2005, when he retired from government. (The center, which integrates intelligence from various agencies, the Pentagon and the Department of Homeland Security, is staffed primarily by contractors.) In November 2005, Brennan joined TAC, which has contracts with the State Department, Homeland Security and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Brennan, the company's CEO, also declined a request from Salon for comment for this report.

In a statement TAC released when Tenet was appointed to that company's board last year, Tenet said he would help the company "address critical needs as government and industry work together to fight terrorism." Serving with Tenet on the advisory board there are Alan Wade, Tenet's former chief information officer, and John P. Young, a former CIA senior analyst. TAC is a privately held company and no public information is available regarding compensation for its board members. But between the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and 2006, the company's income quintupled, from less than $5 million in 2001 to $24 million in 2006.

Clarke, O'Neill Accounts Support Tenet's Claims
Clarke, O'Neill Accounts Support Tenet's Claims
By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t | Report
Monday 07 May 2007

With the publication of his memoir, "At the Center of the Storm," former CIA Director George Tenet joins a growing list of former Bush administration officials who have written books accusing the White House of cooking intelligence immediately after 9/11 to win support for a US-led invasion of Iraq.

Tenet is the highest-ranking administration official to level such charges against senior White House members, claiming that there was a coordinated effort within the Office of the Vice President, the National Security Council and the Pentagon to fix intelligence related to the so-called Iraqi threat around Bush's policy toward the country. He claims that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were used to justify an invasion, despite the absence of intelligence showing Iraq was an imminent threat.

The ex-CIA chief's assertions support similar claims over the past few years by other, former high-ranking officials. Among them are Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism czar, and Paul O'Neill, the treasury secretary, who provided reporter and author Ron Suskind with detailed information about the White House effort to overthrow Saddam Hussein prior to 9/11.

Tenet got a $4 million advance for his memoirs. Since his book's revelation became public last week, he has been the subject of a widespread backlash by former intelligence colleagues, who said he should have spoken out sooner. Still, his information on flawed prewar intelligence related to Iraq has once again sparked serious debate within Congress on whether the White House knowingly misled the public. The Iraq war has claimed the lives of more than 3,300 US soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.

With Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, hearings and investigations have been launched in an effort to determine how the bogus intelligence made its way into the hands of the White House executive staff, and why it was cited as fact despite prior warnings about its veracity by Tenet and other intelligence analysts at the CIA.

This issue comes up time and again, whenever a new book by Washington insiders is published. And every time a revelation turns up in a book about the White House's interest in toppling Saddam Hussein prior to 9/11, administration officials dismiss the allegations as conspiratorial, saying publicly they don't recall having such discussions with former White House officials-turned- authors.

That was the case over the weekend. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice appeared on three Sunday news shows to deny Tenet's claims that the administration did not seriously discuss whether Iraq was a threat. Rice made identical statements when Clarke published his book, "Against All Enemies," and when O'Neill's claims were quoted in Suskind's book, "The Price of Loyalty."

Veracity of Prewar Iraq Intelligence Hotly Debated

The question of whether the Bush administration targeted Iraq prior to 9/11 has long been the subject of heated debate between Democrats and Republicans. The Bush administration says Iraq was not in its crosshairs before 9/11. Rice, who was national security adviser during Bush's first term as president, has for years denied the existence prior to 9/11 of any plan to attack Iraq. She has long maintained that the White House had been focused on rooting out Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda network, testifying before the 9/11 Commission that Bush was "tired of swatting at flies."

Rice's comment regarding the president not wanting to swat at flies as it pertained to the 9/11 commission's inquiry could raise broader questions about how the White House handled pre-9/11 warnings by Tenet and others. If in fact it was Bush's policy that responding to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda's plans constituted swatting at flies, that would cast a more critical light on the administration's non-response to Tenet's now-famous August 6, 2001 briefing to Bush at the White House titled, "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US".

"We also moved to develop a new and comprehensive strategy to eliminate the al-Qaeda terrorist network," Rice said, according to a copy of her testimony. "President Bush understood the threat, and he understood its importance. He made clear to us that he did not want to respond to al-Qaeda one attack at a time. He told me he was "tired of swatting flies." This new strategy was developed over the spring and summer of 2001, and was approved by the president's senior national security officials on September 4. It was the very first major national security policy directive of the Bush administration - not Russia, not missile defense, not Iraq, but the elimination of al-Qaeda."

Not so, said O'Neill and Clarke, and now Tenet. They claim the administration was searching for reasons to invade Iraq as soon as Bush took office in January 2001. The common theme in Tenet's and Clarke's books is that both say they had personally warned Rice in the summer of 2001 about a looming attack being planned by al-Qaeda, but were rebuffed by the former national security adviser. They say Rice and other White House officials had been shifting military and intelligence resources toward Iraq.

Bush's Hard-Line Stance Toward Iraq Surfaced in January 2001

A January 11, 2001 article in the New York Times, "Iraq Is Focal Point as Bush Meets with Joint Chiefs," which has been overlooked post-9/11, seems to support the assertions of Tenet, O'Neill and Clarke.

"George W. Bush, the nation's commander in chief to-be, went to the Pentagon today for a top-secret session with the Joint Chiefs of Staff to review hot spots around the world where he might have to send American forces into harm's way," reads the lead paragraph of the Times article.

Bush was joined at the Pentagon meeting by Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and National Security Adviser Rice.

The Times reported that, "About half of the 75-minute meeting ... focused on a discussion about Iraq and the Persian Gulf, two participants said. Iraq was the first topic briefed because 'it's the most visible and most risky area' Mr. Bush will confront after he takes office, one senior officer said."

"Iraq policy is very much on his mind," one senior Pentagon official told the Times. "Saddam was clearly a discussion point."

Responding to a reporter's question on January 26, 2001 about the Bush administration's policy toward Saddam Hussein's regime days after his Senate confirmation hearing, Rumsfeld said, "I think that the policy of the country is that it is not helpful to have Saddam Hussein's regime in office."

In his inaugural address on January 20, 2001 President Bush also alluded to the possibility of war, although he did not mention Iraq by name.

"We will confront weapons of mass destruction, so that a new century is spared new horrors," Bush said. "The enemies of liberty and our country should make no mistake. We will defend our allies and our interests."

Sanctions Were Working, Powell Said

In February 2001, Bush sent Powell on a trip to the Middle East to study the situation in Iraq and decide whether the administration should keep the sanctions in place or start to lay the groundwork for a preemptive strike.

Powell returned to the US and championed the sanctions, saying Iraq posed absolutely no threat to the US. He made that statement while testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on March 8, 2001 - much to the dismay of Cheney, Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, all of whom believed in using military force to oust Saddam Hussein.

"When we took over on the 20th of January, I discovered that we had an Iraq policy that was in disarray, and the sanctions part of that policy was not just in disarray; it was falling apart," Powell testified. "We were losing support for the sanctions that had served so well over the last ten years. With all of the ups and downs and with all of the difficulties that are associated that regime, it was falling apart. It had been successful. Saddam Hussein has not been able to rebuild his army, notwithstanding claims that he has. He has fewer tanks in his inventory today than he had 10 years ago. Even though we know he is working on weapons of mass destruction, we know he has things squirreled away, at the same time we have not seen that capacity emerge to present a full-fledged threat to us."

Former Officials Call White House "Obsessed With Iraq Prior to 9/11"

In Suskind's book, "The Price of Loyalty," O'Neill told Suskind that the Iraq war was planned just days after the president was sworn into office.

"From the very beginning, there was a conviction that Saddam Hussein was a bad person and that he needed to go," O'Neill said, adding that going after Saddam Hussein was a priority 10 days after Bush's inauguration and eight months before September 11.

"From the very first instance, it was about Iraq. It was about what we can do to change this regime," Suskind wrote, quoting O'Neill. "Day one, these things were laid and sealed."

As treasury secretary, O'Neill was a permanent member of the National Security Council. He is quoted in the book as saying he was surprised at the meeting that questions such as "Why Saddam?" and "Why now?" were never asked.

O'Neill was fired from his post for disagreeing with Bush's economic policies. The White House dismissed O'Neill's allegations, and labeled him a "disgruntled employee," whose remarks about a plot to invade Iraq pre-9/11 were "laughable."

Clarke's book also says the Bush administration was obsessed with Iraq before 9/11.

Tenet Warned Rice About al-Qaeda

In Tenet's tell-all, he portrays Rice, Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld as obsessed with finding a rationale to attack Iraq. Moreover, Tenet claims that while top administration officials were focusing on Iraq, he was advising Rice and others about the increasing threat from al-Qaeda. He said his warnings fell on deaf ears, and he further claims that national security was not a top priority for Bush, Rice and others during their first eight months in office.

Tenet testified before Congress on February 7, 2001 that Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaeda terrorist network remained the single greatest threat to US interests. Tenet eerily describes in the report a scenario that six months later would become a grim reality.

"Terrorists are also becoming more operationally adept and more technically sophisticated in order to defeat counter-terrorism measures," the former CIA director said. "For example, as we have increased security around government and military facilities, terrorists are seeking out "softer" targets that provide opportunities for mass casualties."

"Osama bin Laden and his global network of lieutenants and associates remain the most immediate and serious threat," he added.

Making the rounds on the Sunday news programs, Rice, who has been the recipient of much of the scorn in Tenet's book, denied that she had focused heavily on Iraq in early 2001 and paid little attention to what Tenet claims were numerous warnings about a possible attack against the US by the terrorist network.

Documents Show National Security Not a White House Priority Before 9/11

However, Rice's statements claiming that national security and the threat posed by al-Qaeda were a huge priority for the White House in early 2001 are undercut by a review of White House transcripts and press releases between January and September 2001. Those documents would appear to back up Tenet's allegations against Rice and other senior Bush administration officials.

Indeed, two weeks before 9/11 occurred, security - job security, health security and national security - was last on a list of major issues Bush planned to deal with in the fall of 2001, according to a transcript of an August 31, 2001 speech Bush gave to celebrate the launch of the White House's new web site.

Rice Lobbied for Preemptive Strike Against Iraq in 2000

But one year before she was tapped to be Bush's national security adviser, Rice was part of the same group of White House officials trying to sell a war with Iraq. In January 2000, she wrote an article for Foreign Affairs magazine titled "Campaign 2000 - Promoting the National Interest."

"As history marches toward markets and democracy, some states have been left by the side of the road. Iraq is the prototype. Saddam Hussein's regime is isolated, his conventional military power has been severely weakened, his people live in poverty and terror, and he has no useful place in international politics. He is therefore determined to develop WMD. Nothing will change until Saddam is gone, so the United States must mobilize whatever resources it can, including support from his opposition, to remove him. These regimes are living on borrowed time, so there need be no sense of panic about them.

Rice was interviewed by dozens of print and broadcast journalists between January and September 2001. An extensive search of more than 400 news stories available on Lexis Nexus between January 1, 2001 and September 10, 2001 show that Rice never once spoke about the threat posed by al-Qaeda or its leader, Osama bin Laden.

On July 29, 2001 Rice was interviewed by CNN's John King. She was asked how the United States would respond to missiles Iraq had allegedly fired at US warplanes patrolling the no-fly zones. She didn't mince words with her answer.

"Well, the president has made very clear that he considers Saddam Hussein to be a threat to his neighbors, a threat to security in the region, in fact, a threat to international security more broadly," Rice said. "And he has reserved the right to respond when that threat becomes one that he wishes no longer to tolerate."

Rice added, "But I can be certain of this, and the world can be certain of this: Saddam Hussein is on the radar screen for the administration. The administration is working hard with a number of our friends and allies to have a policy that is broad; that does look at the sanctions as something that should be restructured so that we have smart sanctions that go after the regime, not after the Iraqi people; that does look at the role of opposition in creating an environment and a regime in Baghdad that the people of Iraq deserve, rather than the one that they have; and one that looks at use of military force in a more resolute manner, and not just a manner of tit-for-tat with him every day."

Rice Subpoenaed

It remains to be seen whether Congress's probe of the Bush administration's misuse of intelligence in the runup to the Iraq war will result in a conclusive finding that the public was knowingly deceived.

Rice was subpoenaed last week by Congressman Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Government Reform and Oversight Committee, to testify about Rice's role in disseminating a key piece of intelligence stating that Iraq had attempted to acquire uranium from Niger. The uranium claim helped to win support for an invasion. The intelligence later turned out to be based on crude forgeries. Tenet said he had personally warned Rice in 2002 not to rely on the Niger claims to make a public case that Iraq constituted an imminent threat. Tenet said the uranium intelligence was dubious. Rice has said she will ignore the subpoena. Waxman is still unsure whether his committee will hold Rice in contempt.
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Jason Leopold is a former Los Angeles bureau chief for Dow Jones Newswire. He has written over 2,000 stories on the California energy crisis and received the Dow Jones Journalist of the Year Award in 2001 for his coverage on the issue as well as a Project Censored award in 2004. Leopold also reported extensively on Enron's downfall and was the first journalist to land an interview with former Enron president Jeffrey Skilling following Enron's bankruptcy filing in December 2001. Leopold has appeared on CNBC and National Public Radio as an expert on energy policy and has also been the keynote speaker at more than two dozen energy industry conferences around the country.

The real reason George Tenet let us go to war.
Good Soldiers
by Ronald Steel
Only at TNR Online | Post date 05.09.07 Discuss this article (44)



he spectacle of George Tenet desperately--and far too tardily--trying to salvage his reputation raises important questions about political responsibility in the American system of government. Tenet, immortalized to his eternal embarrassment for having assured George W. Bush that it would be a "slam dunk" case to prove that Saddam Hussein was acquiring "weapons of mass destruction," now maintains, in a newly published book, that it was all a big misunderstanding.

But what he "really meant" is now far beyond the point. If his oft-quoted words were wrongly interpreted, he had plenty of time to correct the record when the White House first began using them to justify the invasion of Iraq. At that time Tenet's correction would have carried weight.


As head of the CIA, and thus the nation's chief intelligence officer, Tenet was in a better position than anyone else in the American government to know the state of Saddam Hussein's arsenal. It was not only his job, but his duty, to ensure that the critical decisions over war and peace were being made on correct--rather than on politically motivated and distorted--judgments.

Yet he did not object when the intelligence reports of the organization he directed were manipulated to justify a war launched on false premises. Indeed, he sat literally at Colin Powell's right hand at the United Nations when the then-secretary of state staked his own reputation--and that of the nation he represented--on what Tenet knew, even at the time, was a distortion of the truth. Instead, Tenet kept his silence. For this he was rewarded by Bush, who pinned the Presidential Medal of Freedom on his chest as he eased him out the door. The award might properly be called the Presidential Medal of Silence.

Now, four years later, after the death of some 3,000 American servicemen and women and at least 100,000 Iraqis, the devastation of a once-prosperous nation, the radicalization of millions of Muslims against the United States, the weakening of our traditional alliances, the swelling of the recruitment pool for Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups, the erosion of our own civil liberties, and a growing threat to our safety at home, Tenet lamely tells us that the quote was taken out of context.

And whom does he blame? Not the self-declared Decider who rewarded him with a medal, but Vice President Dick Cheney. To be sure, Cheney has been a relentless promoter of the war who directed efforts within the administration of justify it. But it is hardly an act of courage to blame the most suspect, and even disliked, public figure in America--rather than Cheney's ostensible boss, whom Tenet extols as a leader "absolutely in charge, determined and directed."

The sad thing about Tenet is not so much that he was a genial enabler, telling his superiors what they wanted to hear and providing cover for an operation they were intent on pursuing. Rather, it's that he exemplifies the rule that those in high places will endure virtually any humiliation before surrendering a position of power.

Occasionally lower-level officials may resign as a matter of personal conscience (and there were a number of these during this war). But in only two cases over the past century has a secretary of state resigned in protest over a presidential decision deemed harmful. The first was William Jennings Bryan in 1915, because he feared that Woodrow Wilson was leading the nation into war by his belligerent policy toward Germany's use of submarines against British shipping during World War I.

The second was Cyrus Vance, who opposed Jimmy Carter's quixotic and ill-fated effort in 1980 to send a helicopter team to Tehran to rescue diplomats held hostage in the U.S. Embassy by student radicals. When Carter, with disastrous results, ignored his counsel, Vance resigned as a matter of principle.



hy did only Bryan and Vance leave the government rather than implement policies they believed to be wrong? Are American officials more craven than those of other democracies? Probably not. But the American system leaves them nowhere else to go if they cannot bear to leave the suburbs of powers--except to become lawyers or lobbyists.

In a parliamentary system, high officials often have an elected seat in the legislature. If they leave the government, they still have a bully pulpit, maintain a public role, and may even try to supplant the leader they once served. In America, the choices are stark: Return to the Podunk from which you came, join a think tank, or find an office on K Street.

No wonder that they linger in their appointed posts, swallow their pride, and behave like good soldiers. Nearly everyone wants to be invited back to play another day. Troublemakers are unwelcome. That is the American way. George Tenet is no more cowardly than most. Even bumped from the team, he still prefers a cold seat on the bench to exile in the bleachers.

Ronald Steel is a contributing editor at The New Republic. He teaches international relations at the University of Southern California.

Scumbag Richard Perle heard from
How the CIA Failed America
By Richard N. Perle
Friday, May 11, 2007; Page A19
New York Times

George Tenet sets the stage in his memoir by recalling a conversation he claims to have had with me on Sept. 12, 2001: "As I walked beneath the awning that leads to the West Wing[, I] saw Richard Perle exiting the building just as I was about to enter. . . . Perle turned to me and said, 'Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility.' I looked back at Perle and thought: Who has [he] been meeting with in the White House so early in the morning on today of all days?"

But I was in Europe on Sept. 12, 2001, unable to get a return flight to Washington, and I did not tell Tenet that Iraq was responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, not then, not ever. That should have been the end of the story: a faulty recollection, perhaps attributing to me something he may have heard elsewhere, an honest mistake.

So I was surprised when, having been made aware of his error, Tenet reasserted his claim, saying: "So I may have been off on the day, but I'm not off on what he said and what he believed."

On "Meet the Press" last Sunday, Tenet argued that his version "seems to be corroborated" by a comment I made to columnist Robert D. Novak on Sept. 17 and a letter to President Bush that I signed, with 40 others, on Sept. 20. But my 10-word comment to Novak made no claim that Iraq was responsible for Sept. 11. Neither did the letter to the president, which said that "any strategy aiming at the eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power."

Tenet insists on equating two statements that are not at all the same: that Iraq was responsible for Sept. 11 -- which I never said -- and that removing Saddam Hussein before he could share chemical, biological or nuclear weapons with terrorists had become an urgent matter, which I did say. He continues to assert falsely that the president's decision to remove Hussein was encouraged by lies about Iraq's responsibility for the Sept. 11 attacks.

Understandably anxious to counter the myth that we went into Iraq on the basis of his agency's faulty intelligence, Tenet seeks to substitute another myth: that the decision to remove Saddam Hussein resulted from the nefarious influence of the vice president and a cabal of neoconservative intellectuals. To advance that idea, a theme of his book, he has attributed to me, and to others, statements that were never made.

Careful readers will see at once that what Tenet calls "corroboration" is nothing of the sort. But Tenet is not a careful reader -- a serious deficiency in a CIA director and a catastrophe for an intelligence organization. Indeed, sloppy analysis and imprecision with evidence got Tenet and the rest of us stuck in a credibility gap that continues to damage our foreign policy.

For years the American intelligence establishment has failed to show meticulous regard for the facts that are essential to its mission. The CIA's assessment that Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons was only the most recent damaging example. The president, the vice president, Congress and others relied on intelligence produced by Tenet's CIA -- and repeated CIA findings that never should have been presented as fact.

When Defense Department officials pressed the CIA to reassess whether Hussein's intelligence service supported terrorists, and had links to al-Qaeda, Tenet first resisted, then treated with derision the evidence of such links that CIA analysts had ignored. While he later acknowledged some of that evidence in a letter to then-Sen. Bob Graham (D-Fla.), he continues to minimize it while targeting critics of the CIA.

But the greatest intelligence failure of the past two decades was the CIA's failure to understand and sound an alarm at the rise of jihadist fundamentalism. It is Wahhabi extremism and the call to holy war against infidels that gave us the perpetrators of Sept. 11 and much of the terrorism that has followed. In his attempts to blame others for CIA shortcomings, Tenet cannot say, "I told the president that our Saudi allies were financing thousands of mosques and schools around the world where a hateful doctrine of holy war and violence was being inculcated in young potential terrorists." Fatefully, the CIA failed to make our leaders aware of the rise of Islamist extremism and the immense danger it posed to the United States.

George Tenet and, more important, our premier intelligence organization managed to find weapons of mass destruction that did not exist while failing to find links to terrorists that did -- all while missing completely the rise of Islamist fundamentalism. We have made only a down payment on the price of that failure.
-------------------------------------------

The writer was chairman of the Defense Policy Board from 2001 to 2003.

And this is the major problem with our political reporting today. These reporters see themselves and the politicians they cover, as people who are not bound by the chain of command or by ordinary rules and laws, but merely need to find ways to 'go around' them.

What a fool

Cycloptichorn