Anyone think Tenet was "an empty suit peddling false information in support of a war that has so far proved to be a lost cause"...??
Tenet leaves CIA's Reputation in Tatters
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Under his Leadership the Agency Peddled Misinformation that created false Rationales for Bad Decisions
by Scott Ritter
Published on Friday, June 4, 2004 by Newsday / Long Island, New York
George Tenet's resignation as director of Central Intelligence has taken the political world of Washington by storm. And yet, it was an act that had been foreseen for some time.
Consider what made Tenet's tenure at the CIA untenable: the combined weight of the 9/11 intelligence failures, the absence of Iraqi WMD and the post-occupation fiasco, as well as the unauthorized disclosure of sensitive information, whether it be the leaking of the identity and the affiliation of Ambassador Joseph Wilson's wife (a CIA covert operative) to the press, of Ahmed Chalabi's allegedly informing the Iranians (courtesy of a leak from the Pentagon) that the United States had broken Iran's diplomatic code.
But, in reflecting on his passing, one should never forget that his troubles were, for the most part, of his own making.
I was an intelligence officer for many years, and I had always been instructed to abide by the adage that "an intelligence officer tells his boss not what they want to hear, but rather what the facts are." George Tenet repeatedly violated that principle during his time as director - most egregiously on Iraq.
In Tenet's haste to please his bosses in both the Clinton and Bush White House (he served both presidents as the CIA director), he oversaw the politicization of the intelligence process to the extent that today the CIA lacks credibility as an institution not only in the United States, but around the world as well.
Perhaps the most glaring example of this can be found in Tenet's February 2004 speech at his alma matter, Georgetown University. In a rambling defense of the CIA's pre-war estimate on Iraqi WMD capabilities, Tenet hedged on his agencies' earlier assertions. For the most part, he provided little or no substance to back up his remarks. But midway through his presentation, Tenet mentioned the 1995 defection of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, who had controlled Iraq's biological weapons program.
"Only then was the world able to confirm that Iraq indeed had an active and dangerous biological weapons program," Tenet said. "Indeed, history matters in dealing with these complicated problems."
The irony of this statement by Tenet is that he, of all people, should have known it to be false. During the course of Hussein Kamel's debriefings with the CIA, British MI-6 and with UNSCOM, he repeatedly talked about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, and his role not only in their manufacture, but also in their destruction following the onset of UN weapons inspections in Iraq in the summer of 1991.
"Nothing remained," Kamel told UN inspectors. "I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear - were destroyed."
Tenet knew this was the case. As deputy director of the CIA in August 1995, he was directly involved with the CIA's debriefing of Hussein Kamel.
As director of the CIA in February 2004, he had total access to the debriefing documents in order to refresh his memory. That he chose to misrepresent the defection of Hussein Kamel during his presentation at Georgetown University only underscores the personal culpability that Tenet bears when it comes to deceiving the president, Congress and the people of the United States about the threat posed by Iraq's WMD.
Tenet's visually defining moment as director of the CIA came on Feb. 5, 2003, when he was prominently seated behind Secretary of State Colin Powell during Powell's now discredited presentation to the UN Security Council on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Tenet's positioning was deliberate, designed to reinforce the credibility of Secretary Powell's assertions by reminding those viewing the proceedings that the weight of the CIA backed the secretary of state's words. At the time, Powell's presentation was considered a tour de force. Today, sobered by the harsh reality that not only was almost every assertion made by Powell that day wrong, but for the most part drawn from data that many in the U.S. intelligence community at that time knew to be suspect.
Today Colin Powell has tried to disassociate himself from the intelligence provided by George Tenet for that fateful briefing. Powell may want to distance himself from his words and deeds of that day, but Tenet will never be able to erase the public vision of him seated behind Powell, on the world stage, an empty suit peddling false information in support of a war that has so far proved to be a lost cause.
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Scott Ritter, a former UN chief weapons inspector in Iraq, 1991-1998, is author of "Frontier Justice: Weapons of Mass Destruction and the Bushwhacking of America."
Copyright © 2004, Newsday, Inc.
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