Interesting article, and interesting website from Doug Feith.....
dougfeith.com
I would expect Mr. Tenet isn't going to be wild about his review of Tenet's book....including this:
Un-Ready Officials
Mr. Tenet hosted our briefing because my boss, Donald Rumsfeld, personally suggested he do so. Mr. Tenet knew that the Agency's dismissive view of Iraq's relationship with al Qaeda was controversial -- and of importance to the nation. So there was no excuse, weeks later, for senior CIA officials to be so thoroughly un-ready to brief Mr. Cheney on the subject. The September 2002 meeting was not a surprise bed-check, after all; it was a scheduled visit by the vice president.
Mr. Tenet writes that, two months later, his team was "ready for another visit by the vice president." But he fails to mention that in the meantime -- on Oct. 7, 2002 -- he sent the Senate Intelligence Committee a letter about Iraq and al Qaeda that became the administration's most important public statement on the subject.
Why is this key statement omitted from Mr. Tenet's book? Well, it vindicated the earlier criticism of the CIA's analysts. Mr. Tenet's Oct. 7 letter made clear that the analysts had been understating the problem. The letter set out concerns about the al Qaeda-Iraq relationship more clearly than anything the CIA had published before. The Senate Intelligence Committee reviewed the entire arc of this controversy -- the agency's first analyses, the sequence of meetings, the input from the White House and Pentagon -- and concluded, in its unanimous June 2004 report: "The Committee found that this process -- the policymakers' probing questions -- actually improved the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) products." Mr. Tenet does not mention this Senate finding either. |
