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Yes, the 100-page-plus CIA IG report bears the date May 7, 2004. And yes, former Vice President Dick Cheney's aphorism about "the dark side is evoked by the hundreds of paragraphs completely blackened out (the thirsty report drank two full print cartridges). And yes, the entire four pages of the "Recommendations section are blackened out.Still, I think this is truly a case of better-late-than-never. And those of us who have been following this painful issue closely can readily fill in many of those paragraphs.
A Recommendation Right on the Mark
Unable to see beneath the black-out, it is left to us to make recommendations. Here's one for starters. It's not original; rather it came in the wake of the CIA role in coups in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954), and South Vietnam (1963), to mention just a few.
"I"would like to see the CIA be restored to its original assignment as the intelligence arm of the President"and that its operational duties be terminated or properly used elsewhere. "We have grown up as a nation respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the CIA has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.
It is no surprise that President Truman felt very close to this, since it was he who pushed very hard to create the CIA. His purpose was two-fold: to prevent another Pearl Harbor and to create an independent agency he could depend upon to speak to him and his senior advisers without fear or favor "an agency with guaranteed access to all significant sources of information on a given country or issue.
As he explained in the widely published op-ed:
"I decided to set up a special organization charged with the collection of all intelligence reports from every available source, and to have those reports reach me as President without department ˜treatment' or interpretations.
But a sentence that was shoehorned into the National Security Act of 1947 also authorized the president to use the CIA to perform "other functions and duties. And that secret role including covert action gradually came to dwarf what was originally the primary task of speaking plain truth to power.
For much of CIA's 62 years, that one-sentence tail has been wagging the CIA dog, marginalizing its central role to collect information, analyze it, and present the truth in as unvarnished a way as humanly possible.
Looking Back
George Tenet was a disaster as Director of Central Intelligence. Although it was a major part of his job description, before 9/11, to ensure that the entire intelligence community was functioning as an organic whole, he much preferred hobnobbing with princes and potentates abroad and backslapping senior officials in Washington.
With 15 intelligence units in the federal government, there is always a strong centripetal tendency, and Tenet's misfeasance in managing the community resulted in important pre-9/11 intelligence falling through the cracks. His malfeasance in "fixing substantive intelligence to support President Bush's wish to attack Iraq and then enthusiastically carrying out Bush/Cheney orders for torture and other abuses marks the worst chapter in Agency history "bar none.
Even so, before 9/11 Tenet did manage to give his good buddy Bush and then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice quite enough in the way of repeated warnings that they should have, well, at least seen to it that the airlines put locks on cockpit doors. CIA directors keep copies of such warnings, of course, and this made Bush reluctant to fire Tenet after the terrorist attacks.
A kind of mutual blackmail ensued, disguised as good-ol'-boy bonhomie. I won't fire you, George, if you promise not to tell anyone how many times you warned me that something very big and very bad was going to happen. And, from now on, you'll do exactly as I say. Newt Gingrich, like Cheney a frequent visitor to CIA headquarters in those years, commented that George Tenet was so grateful to Bush for not firing him, that he "would do anything for him.
Including Perjury?
The most tangible manifestation of this Faustian bargain came on April 14, 2004 when Tenet lied under oath before the 9/11 commission to protect Bush. Tenet told the commission under the prime-time klieg lights that he had not spoken to Bush "even on the telephone "during the entire month of August 2001.
It turns out that Tenet was lying. He did visit Crawford not once but twice during August and briefed Bush again in Washington at the end of the month. After the TV cameras were shut off, Tenet's public affairs folks phoned the commission staff to say Oops, Tenet misspoke.
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