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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (145214)	4/16/2002 6:25:43 PM
From: TimF	Respond to of 1572775

Tenet's Palestinian By WILLIAM SAFIRE WASHINGTON -- Until last week, the greatest humiliation of an American director of central intelligence took place in 1985. William J. Casey, President Reagan's experienced spymaster, became convinced of the bona fides of Vitaly Yurchenko, a supposed defector from the K.G.B.'s First Directorate. Casey became personally involved in the debriefing because he was all too sure the Russian was the real thing — until Yurchenko escaped from C.I.A. custody and redefected to Moscow, making our intelligence chief and his agency look foolish. Now the judgment of another director of central intelligence, George Tenet, has been called into question. Again, our D.C.I. in this generation — supremely confident of his judgment of another individual — took personal command of an evaluation, swallowed the legend concocted for him and was double-crossed. Terrorist masterminds from Baghdad to Ramallah are having a good laugh. This year's entrapper of our C.I.A. chief is Jabril Rajoub. This aide to Yasir Arafat has been, and still is, head of the Palestinians' deceptively named "Office of Preventive Security." As such, Rajoub has been in direct touch with Tenet as well as his Israeli counterpart, ostensibly to arrest Arabs identified as planning to kill civilians in Israel and to shut off terrorist purchases and smuggling of arms into the West Bank. For nearly two years, Tenet and his aides have been assuring reporters that Rajoub was a "moderate." The Palestinian and his lieutenants were supposedly the good guys around Arafat. Through the Clinton-appointed U.S. intermediary, Tenet, Rajoub and his "preventers" received specific information about suicide cells, bomb factories and arms buyers. The object was to enable the Palestinian and his crew to crack down on would-be killers before they struck. Evidence has just surfaced from an Israeli search of Palestinian offices indicating that Rajoub's "preventive security" force was not only failing to prevent murder, but was also helping to supply and disguise the murderers. According to a front-page story by Michael R. Gordon of The Times, documents and other intelligence delivered to the U.S. showed what Israeli officials said was evidence that "elements of the Palestinian office of preventive security, which the United States has backed as a way to enhance the authority of moderate Palestinians and head off terrorist attacks, are also linked to suicide bombings." Found in Rajoub's headquarters were mortars and heavy machine guns, as well as skullcaps and other garb to disguise suicide bombers. (See www.idf.il for the Israel military's outline of evidence found.) Note the words "elements of" in the article: I read that to mean that even the Mossad, which may have been fooled along with Tenet, is reluctant to pin blame on the Palestinian in charge. At the same time, in a classic C.I.A.-C.Y.A., American spooks are spinning that Rajoub was the dupe of terrorist aides all around him and never noticed the yarmulkes in the drawer or the mortars in his file cabinets. Palestinian propaganda dismisses as "fabrications" all captured bills for terror weaponry, especially those with Arafat's damning signature. That puts Tenet's apologists in a bind: our agency has already had to report credible evidence that Arafat's pretense — that he knew nothing of Iran's terror supply ship Karine A — was a baldfaced lie. These bills in Arabic provide the same kind of unwanted evidence that points to Rajoub & Co., Tenet's long-trusted interlocutor, as an abettor of terror. And when we walk back this cat, we find the name of Fuad Shubaki, Arafat's arms buyer, on many documents. He was spotted in Baghdad with Iraqi officials in August of last year, one month before Sept. 11 and four months after Mohamed Atta's rendezvous with Saddam Hussein's man in Prague. The C.I.A. fails to ask: Who benefits most from Arafat's decisions to reject statehood, launch a terror war on Israeli civilians and refuse a cease-fire? Surely not Palestinians. The answer is Saddam, terror's foremost supporter, who gains time to build his bombs while world media fixate on Israel's self-defense. George Tenet apparently doesn't grasp that. He is a likable, patriotic bureaucrat who has President Bush's trust as he works through Brent Scowcroft to seize total control of all U.S. intelligence. The trouble is that our long-bamboozled D.C.I. is in over his head already. nytimes.com