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Politics : Dutch Central Bank Sale Announcement Imminent? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: GUSTAVE JAEGER who wrote (21197)	6/15/2004 5:04:23 PM
From: sea_urchin	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 80923

Gustave > that doesn't mean that he's willing to play the fall guy for the Iraq fiasco Then why doesn't he point his finger at the real culprits? Is he still chicken? It's quite clear that Tenet was doing only what he had to, like a good soldier. And still is. So if Powell wants to come clean he should come clean and not keep ducking behind the "fall guy". Or even resign, as Tenet did. There's no doubt that the longer Powell remains in the administration, the more "coffee" will fall on him. Like Tenet, and the grunts at Abu Ghraib, he's damned if he does, and damned if he doesn't. fairuse.1accesshost.com >>By manipulating intelligence and punishing dissent while pursuing an extreme foreign-policy agenda, Bush leaders have set spy against U.S. spy and deeply damaged America's intelligence capabilities. "It's a catastrophe beyond belief. Going into Afghanistan was inevitable, and in my opinion the right thing to do. But everything since then has been a horrible mistake," Powers says. "The CIA is politicized to an extreme. It's under the control of the White House. Tenet is leaving in the middle of an unresolved political crisis -- what really amounts to a constitutional crisis." The bitterest dispute, though not the only one, is between the CIA and the Pentagon, whose own secret intelligence unit, the Office of Special Plans, aggressively promoted the war on Iraq. While departing CIA Director George Tenet played along with the Bush administration -- a fact which Powers says reveals the urgent need for a truly independent intelligence chief -- much of the agency is enraged at the Pentagon, which put intense pressure on it to produce reports tailored to the policy goals of the Bush White House. As for the dubiously timed Tenet resignation -- with its fairy-tale like cover story of "I'll be spending more time with my family" -- Powers thinks one possibility is that the CIA director may have been forced out after Pentagon officials, enraged by the Chalabi debacle, pressured Bush to get rid of him. But what troubles Powers the most, he says, is that the Bush administration completely subverted American democracy, browbeating Congress and the national security agencies to launch a war. "They correctly read how the various institutions of our government could be used to stage a kind of temporary coup on a single issue: Whether or not to go to war with Iraq." Do you think Tenet essentially was pushed out by the White House? Tenet was pushed out by the accumulating circumstances, not because he failed to do what Bush wanted him to do, which was essentially two things: The first was to not speak too clearly about the warnings that he'd given the White House before 9/11. You can be certain that it was not easy for Tenet to do that. Tenet has never spoken out clearly and said, "I told the president everything he needed to know to at least start responding to the threat." Secondly, Tenet hasn't spoken clearly on the reason why they got Iraqi WMD wrong. And it's not because people in the bowels of the agency had it all balled up, it's because in the process of writing finished intelligence -- which was required to extract a vote for war from congress -- it got turned on its head at the upper levels of the CIA. They found certainty where there wasn't any; the evidence for WMD stockpiles and programs was extremely thin. Who else could have created this situation besides the policymakers themselves? What about the timing of Tenet's departure? It comes in tandem with more alerts about terrorist attacks this summer, and right around the June 30 transition of power in Iraq. Do you think Tenet was explicitly asked to leave? I think he was definitely asked to leave. He showed every sign of extreme distress. <<