Tenet Abbreviated

We read so you don't have to.

Here are some intriguing tidbits from George Tenet's new book, At the Center of the Storm:

P. xix-xx -- On the morning after 9/11, CIA director George Tenet was walking into the West Wing and passed neocon Richard Perle, then the head of the Defense Policy Board, who was leaving. "Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday," Perle tells Tenet. "They bear responsibility." Tenet writes that he thought, "What the hell is [Perle] talking about?" Then Tenet wondered who had Perle been meeting with in the White House so early on this particular morning. "I never learned the answer to that question?" he says. So much for the intelligence-gathering powers of the director of central intelligence.

P. 6 -- After President Bill Clinton nominated National Security Adviser Tony Lake to be CIA chief in 1997, Senator Richard Shelby, the Republican chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, asked Tenet, who then was second in command at the CIA, "If you have any dirt on Tony Lake, I sure would like to have it."

P. 15 -- In reviewing the troubling times the CIA went through in the 1990s, Tenet writes, "The Agency had also been rocked by false allegations in 1996 that some of its members had been complicit in selling crack cocaine to children in California. The allegations were ludicrous." This allegations was indeed unfounded. But Tenet fails to mention that the CIA's inspector general subsequently released two reports disclosing that the agency had worked with suspected drug traffickers when it supported the contras in Nicaragua in the 1980s.

P. 154 -- Weeks before 9/11, Steve Cambone, the undersecretary of defense (and another neocon), asked Tenet if he had, as Tenet writes, "considered the possibility that al-Qa'ida's threats were just a grand deception, a clever ploy to tie up our resources and expend our energies on a phantom enemy that lacked both the power and the will to carry the battle to us." Tenet adds: "Steve wasn't alone. [Deputy Defense Secretary] Paul Wolfowitz was raising the same question." Tenet doesn't explain why Wolfowitz and Cambone took this position. The reason: before 9/11, some neocons were obsessed with the farfetched notion that Saddam Hussein posed the only significant terrorist threat to the United States and that al Qaeda was no more than a distraction.

Pp. 157-159 -- On 9/11, Tenet told Vice President Dick Cheney that he believed al Qaeda was responsible for the attacks hours before he conveyed this information to President George W. Bush.

P. 275 -- In the summer of 2003, Tenet met with Bush to discuss Russia's involvement in the war on terrorism. "The president was unusually pensive," Tenet writes. Unusually pensive?

P. 301 -- Tenet writes, "One of the great mysteries to me is exactly when the war in Iraq became inevitable." This is the man who was in charge of the entire US intelligence establishment.

P. 305 -- Within the Bush administration, Tenet recounts, there was "never a serious debate...about the imminence of the Iraqi threat....Nor was there ever a significant discussion regarding enhanced containment or the costs and benefits of such an approach versus full-out planning for overt and covert regime change." And Bush went to business school?

P. 308 -- Tenet writes that in none of the prewar meetings of top administration officials was there "a discussion of the central questions. Was it wise to go to war? Was it the right things to do?"

P. 310 -- In September 2002, Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defense for policy (and, yes, another neocon), told a Berlin gathering of U.S. British, French and German officials that war with Iraq "is not optional." In a cable Feith sent to the CIA he quoted himself: "At stake is the survival of the United States as an open and free society."

P. 319 -- At a September 14, 2002 meeting in the White House Situation Room, Bob Walpole, the national intelligence official for strategic programs, remarked that he would not use WMDs to justify an invasion of Iraq. In response Scooter Libby commented to another meeting participant, "Who is this guy?"

P. 332 -- Tenet writes, "Even with more time, could analysts have concluded that Saddam had no weapons programs, or even the ability to quickly surge to produce the weapons themselves? I doubt it? In retrospect, we got it wrong partly because the truth was so implausible." Perhaps. It's damn hard to prove a negative. But that's not the point. A clear-eyed review of the intelligence the CIA possessed in 2002 and 2003 would have indicated that there was no firm evidence that Saddam possessed WMDs. That is what the Bush administration and the CIA should have acknowledged at the time.

P. 356 -- After the invasion of Iraq, US forces gathered and reviewed massive treasure troves of Iraqi documents. "Time and again," Tenet writes, " documents that were supposedly produced in the early 1990s [that contained information tying Iraq to al Qaeda] turned out to be forgeries. CIA officers interviewed Iraqi intelligence officers in Baghdad who also discounted the authenticity of the documents. It was obvious that someone was trying to mislead us. But these raw, unevaluated documents that painted a more nefarious picture of Iraq and al-Qa'ida continued to show up in the hands of senior administration officials without having gone through normal intelligence channels." Seems as if someone had mounted a disinformation project to justify the war. Who could that have been? Not Ahmad Chalabi and the Iraq National Congress, right?

P. 419 -- "Time and again," Tenet writes, "during the months leading up to the invasion and for months thereafter, the representatives of the vice president and Pentagon officials would introduce ideas that were thinly veiled efforts to put Chalabi in charge of post-invasion Iraq."

P. 422 -- After the Coalition Provisional Authority set up shop in Iraq following the invasion, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice ordered the interagency committee overseeing postwar planning to disband.

P. 424 -- In January 2003, a CIA paper said that after an invasion, "Iraq would be unlikely to split apart, but a post-Saddam authority would face a deeply divided society with a significant chance that domestic groups would engage in violent conflict with each other unless an occupying force prevented them from doing so."

P. 438 -- After a November 2003 White House meeting, during which a CIA official mentioned there was an ongoing insurgency in Iraq, Tenet recalls, the "message out of the Oval Office that day was, 'No one in this administration will make any reference to an insurgency.'"

P. 440 -- Tenet writes, "You had the impression that some Office of the Vice President and DOD reps were writing Chalabi's name over and over again in their notes, like schoolgirls with their first crush."

P. 446 -- At a White House meeting in the spring of 2004, the president declared, "I want Chalabi off the [U.S.] payroll." Bush's order was ignored by Condi Rice and the Pentagon.

Pp. 1-506 -- According to Tenet's account, Bush himself committed no specific mistakes.

Now you can wait for the paperback.

Posted by David Corn at May 2, 2007 06:21 PM