It was the kind of well-sourced documentary evidence after which intelligence analysts and lawyers positively lust. But the mainstream press dropped it like a hot potato after Bill Harlow (yes, Tenet’s co-author), in his role as CIA spokesperson, angrily protested (a bit too much) that the Newsweek story was “incorrect, bogus, wrong, untrue.” It was, rather, entirely correct; it was documentary—and not forged this time. Curiously, the name of Hussein Kamel shows up on a listing of Iraqis in the front of Tenet’s book, but nowhere in the text. Tenet and Harlow apparently decided to avoid calling attention to the fact that they suppressed information from a super source, preferring instead to help the White House grease the skids for war.
In late summer 2002 CIA operatives had a signal success. They had recruited Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabri and had him working in place--for the U.S. Proud of their successful recruitment of a senior Iraqi official, officers of CIA’s clandestine service immediately sought and were given an early meeting with President Bush and his senior advisers.
The information Sabri had already passed to us had checked out well. Naively, the agency officers were expecting sighs of relief as they quoted him saying there were no WMD in Iraq. The information went over like a lead balloon, dispelling all excitement over this high-level penetration of the Iraqi government.
When the CIA officers got back to Headquarters and told colleagues what had just happened at the White House, those who had been tasking Naji Sabri asked whether they should seek additional intelligence from him on the subject. According to Tyler Drumheller, the division chief in charge of such collection, the answer was loud and clear: “Well, this isn’t about intel any more. This is about regime change.”
And then there was Curveball. Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin, played a direct role regarding the notorious “Curveball,” a former Iraqi taxi driver and convicted embezzler whom German intelligence deemed a mentally unstable alcoholic, who was "out of control." Unlike the unwelcome reporting from the Iraqi foreign minister, Curveball provided very welcome, if bogus, information on alleged mobile laboratories producing biological weapons in Iraq—grist for the “artist renderings” for Powell’s UN speech.
It was all a crock. And Tenet and McLaughlin both knew it, because Drumheller gave them chapter and verse before Powell's speech, and has now written a book about this sad story.
Moreover, the normally taciturn, but recently outspoken former director of State Department intelligence, Carl Ford, has noted that both Tenet and McLaughlin took a personal hand in writing a follow-up report aimed at salvaging what Curveball had said. Ford spared no words: The report “wasn’t just wrong, they lied...they should have been shot."
Nor can Tenet expunge from the record his witting cooperation in the cynical campaign to exploit the trauma we all felt after 9/11, by intimating a connection with that heinous event and Saddam Hussein. If, as Tenet now concedes, no significant connection could be established between Saddam and al-Qaeda, why did he sit quietly behind Powell at the UN as Powell spun a yarn about a "sinister nexus" between the two? That sorry exhibition destroyed what was left of the morale of honest CIA analysts who, until then, had courageously resisted intense pressure to endorse that evidence-less but explosive canard.
A Cropping Worth a Thousand Words
George Tenet's book includes a photo that is a metaphor for both the primary purpose of his memoir and its unintended result. Most will remember the famous photo of Colin Powell briefing the UN Security Council, with Tenet and then-US ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte sitting staunchly behind him. Well, on a centerfold page large enough to accommodate the familiar shot, the photo has been cropped to exclude Tenet altogether and include only Negroponte’s shoulder and nose (which, mercifully, he was not holding at the time.) This is an incredibly adolescent attempt to distance Tenet from that scandalous performance, even though he was the one most responsible for it. The cropping also suggests that Tenet and Harlow are only too aware that by including spurious “intelligence” in Powell’s speech and then sitting stoically behind him as if to validate it, Tenet visibly squandered CIA's most precious asset--credibility.
“It was a great presentation, but unfortunately the substance didn’t hold up,” blithely write Tenet and Harlow, without any trace of acknowledgment of the enormous consequences of the deception. In a Feb. 5, 2003 Memorandum for the President regarding Powell’s speech that day, we Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) gave him an “A” for presentation, and a “C-” for content. (If we knew then what we know now we would of course have flunked him outright.) In the VIPS memo we warned the president that intelligence analysts were “increasingly distressed at the politicization of intelligence...and finding it hard to be heard above the drumbeat for war.”
That a war of choice was on the horizon was crystal clear—as were the consequences. We urged the president to “widen the discussion beyond violations of Resolution 1441,and beyond the circle of those advisers clearly bent on a war for which we see no compelling reason and from which we believe the unintended consequences are likely to be catastrophic.” We take no comfort in having got that one right. Former UN Chief Inspector and U.S. Marine Major, Scott Ritter, was screaming it from the rooftops (and was blacklisted by the domesticated media). It was a no-brainer.
Tenet Breaks Tenet
Tenet’s tell-some-but-not-all book is unwittingly self-incriminating in another key respect, an illustration of what happens when you have a politician, with PR help, running U.S. intelligence. Much of the Tenet/Harlow self-justifying prose is transparent to any observer who has been paying the slightest attention to issues of intelligence on Iraq over the past few years. What may not be fully clear is that, in his zeal to indict others and exculpate himself, Tenet plays fast and loose with a cardinal tenet of intelligence work. You don’t reveal confidential discussions with policymakers—and you especially don’t quote the president. You simply do not do that. For once you violate confidentiality, not only your effectiveness but also that of those who succeed you will be greatly impaired, if not ended.
In normal circumstances presidents have a right to expect that their conversations with advisers will be kept in strictest confidence, and not revealed later by some buffoon pushing a book. And it is the height of irresponsibility for an intelligence director to quote a president still in office. If the president and senior advisers are unable to count on confidences being kept, it becomes impossible to conduct sensible discussions on policy making.
Why do I say “in normal circumstances?” Because no president has the right to plan a war of aggression with high confidence that accomplices, or others that might become privy to such plans, will stay quiet and not blow the whistle. The oath we take to defend the Constitution of the United States supersedes any promise, explicit or implicit, to enable the president to commit crimes in our name. (And someone ought to tell that to Sen. Dick Durbin, who recently confessed that he knew the intelligence justification for war was a crock, but could not tell the American people because it was secret!)
Am I saying there are circumstances in which conscience may require divulging the confidential remarks of the president of the United States? Of course there are, and these circumstances are a case in point. But that, sadly, was/is far from George Tenet’s intent. That he sees fit now to violate the principle of confidentiality in a quixotic attempt at self-justification (and, yes, his share of the $4 million) betokens not only an adolescent narcissism oblivious to the importance of trust, but also a lack of genuine respect for policymakers, including the president. Those of us who have been privileged to brief the president’s father and other senior national security officials—and there must be a hundred of us by now—never violated that trust the way Tenet has done.
Most people do not know that personal access to the president and his top advisers was a rarity during most of the CIA’s first three decades. Regularized personal access by CIA officers did not begin until former director and then-vice president George H. W. Bush persuaded President Ronald Reagan to authorize the sharing of the President’s Daily Brief (PDB) in one-on-one morning briefings for the vice president, the secretaries of state and defense, and the president’s national security adviser. (With White House approval, we later added the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs as a daily consumer.)
These early morning briefings were conducted by us senior analysts who prepared the PDB (and badgered the drafter/analysts with all manner of questions) the day and night before. We were experienced intelligence professionals steeped in substance and just a secure telephone call away from the analysts we knew could provide additional, trustworthy detail if needed. It was a position of great trust.
Our ethos, our job, was to speak unvarnished truth to power, irrespective of the policy agendas of the officials we briefed. We were trusted to do that as honestly and professionally as possible. The last thing we needed was a CIA director looking over our shoulder—particularly one, like Tenet, not well schooled in the need to protect the credibility of intelligence by avoiding policy advocacy like the plague. During the Reagan presidency, the CIA director rarely joined us for the PDB briefings and did no pre-publication review. The director had quite enough on his plate. His was a dual job involving herding the cats of a scarcely manageable, multi-agency intelligence community, while trying to manage one agency (CIA) itself conceived with a serious birth defect.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. During his 27-years as a CIA analyst, he chaired NIEs: he is now on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
Tenet, like the rest of the politicians in this criminal governmet lie as part of their living. Politics, politicians and lying have gone hand in hand for centuries.
George is no different than the other lying George in power. Steal, kill, distort, spy and lie.
No one even mentions the boxes of data from Iraq about their Weapons and their disposal.
Remember there was thousands of documents, yet, 'they' still said that Iraq had not accounted for them all.
Scott Ritter said that there was no way that they could have accounted for every one of them.
bushco was making Iraq prove a negative. Making it impossible to stop the US from attacking Iraq.
Our media was telling us that the inspectors were still not permitted to inspect all they wanted. Then they wanted to inspect the palace bunkers. I'm sure that bush would let inspectors, reporting back to Iran, know where he would go in an emergancy, and what exact precautions had been taken to protect our congress and government. LOL
by
LYNNE KRINGLER (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 41 comments)
on Tuesday, May 15, 2007 at 11:32:26 PM
The first and foremost, in my mind, is the question of logic.
Why would you bomb the hell out of a country, village, and/or city, to get a few thugs?
Wouldn't that be like bombing Ireland to get the IRA's?
Like bombing Las Vegas, Chicago and New jersy to get the mofia?
Like bombing LA, San Francisco, chicago, NY to get the gangs?
Like bombing Texas, NY, CA., Florida, NM, and others to get the drug dealers?
I'm really serious about this. Kerry suggested that it should be handled the same as any other crime, using special forces, CIA, FBI ect. He was mocked by everyone. I think, he is absolutely right.
I watched as the troops and an 'embedded' reporter, on the way to Baghdad, stopped to wait for the rest of the column. They went into a huge ammo dump (al caucau, mispelled), they broke and entered a sealed bunker, (no special protective gear), opened boxes of white powdery stuff, there were stacks of them. Weapons were everywhere. As they left the bunkers and were sitting there, a pickup with Iraqis zoomed by with 4-6 men (inside the ammo dump) and waved at them. Later an UN inspector explained what we had seen. It was one of the largest dumps in Iraq. The little seal was an UN seal. That dump had just been inspected earlier that month, and was intact. The powdery stuff was highly explosive, (used for construction of tunnels and such) 'a small handful could bring down a 707 (?) airplane'. Next we heard, the dump had been left unguarded and was empty. They tried to say that it had already been emptied. Whoops! the film had been on the way into Baghdad and had just been inspected (intact). Then they tried to show a satellite photo of 1 truck and explained that it must of been the Russians. Whoops! no Russians after the invasion. I believe that that powdery stuff and the rest of the munitions out of unguarded ammo dumps, all over Iraq, are killing our troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Where was the logic in this?
1. Why would they pull the inspectors out to bomb Iraq?
2. Why would they have to lie about tubes and Niger if they had all of that other 'proof'?
3. Why wouldn't they secure the ammo dumps? the borders?
4. Why was bremmer allowed to give those 100 orders before leaving Iraq? Why are most of them still in effect?
5. Why won't the State Dept let the Pentagon re-open the state owned, shuttered factories?
6. Why are we letting the US multi-nationals plunder Iraq and protecting them with our troops and billions or trillions of tax-payer dollars?
Who are we fighting and how do our troops know which is which as they are kicking down doors, arresting, imprisoning, beating, torturing or even killing them?
Why have we not repeated and echoed over and over, and over "the facts are being fixed around the policy"?
Hope you can answer some of these questions. It seems as though my congressmen cannot or will not.
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LYNNE KRINGLER (0 articles, 0 quicklinks, 0 diaries, 41 comments)
on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 at 12:16:54 AM
"not always successful," (unlike your analyses Mr. McGovern)
This is worth being awake at 3:14 am! Nothing like real history to explain the lies and deceit of the ultimate Mandarin, the so-called Democrat from the HIll, George Tenet.
....not always successful!!! The Tenet flack phrase needs explamation marks. Let's see, there was 911, then the botched opportunities in Afghanistan, and, reaching his perroration, Tenet is the nation;s midwife for Iraq.
My undertanding is that Leon Jaworski convicted the Watergate crew on a simple statute called defrauding the federal government: your work is so pathetic, it's fraud to take a paycheck. There so many in the WH that merit this distinction but no cabinet member more deserving than Tenet. He knew better.
Outstanding article. Thanks for being our best source on the truth about intelligence and, in the case of Tenet and the neo conseravtive cadre, the lack thereof.
by
Michael Collins (88 articles, 13 quicklinks, 5 diaries, 328 comments)
on Wednesday, May 16, 2007 at 2:31:16 AM
