Closing in on Tenet
The Senate may deliver a harsh assesment of the CIA director
By TIMOTHY J. BURGER AND DOUGLAS WALLER. TIME
Saturday, May. 22, 2004
The senate intelligence Committee is getting closer to delivering a scathing report on the CIA's prewar intelligence on Iraq. Sources tell Time that the assessment, which is nearing completion, is so tough that it is sowing doubt even among longtime fans of CIA Director George Tenet. One panel member dodged a question from Time about whether the member still had full confidence in the director, saying Tenet "has done incredible things" for the CIA but adding, "This is not going to be a happy report." Sources tell Time the committee's two ranking members interviewed Tenet secretly earlier this month at CIA headquarters. He submitted to the three-hour session willingly and was cooperative, sources said. But Tenet wouldn't confirm whether he told President Bush before the war that evidence of Saddam Hussein's weapons-of-mass-destruction arsenal was a "slam dunk," as reported in Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack. The panel last week sent Tenet the several-hundred-page report—minus its conclusions—for a declassification review.
Another big stack of pages is causing concern over at the Senate Armed Services Committee, which is investigating abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. Committee aides discovered belatedly that their copy of the 6,000-page report on prison abuses produced by Major General Antonio M. Taguba might not be complete. The copy they got after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's testimony on May 7 was a thick document with 106 annexes, and it was quickly arranged into separate binders. Only later did the committee stack up all the pages, compare them with a ream of 6,000 blank pages and decide that at least 2,000 pages were missing. "We'd certainly like to know why they're missing," said Republican Senator John McCain. Pentagon spokesman Larry Dirita insisted, "If there is some shortfall in what was provided, it was an oversight." Committee staff members haven't actually counted the pages. Chairman John Warner will investigate this week to see what is missing. |
