Tenet Does 60 Minutes [Necessary Read]

National Review Online ^ | April 30, 2007 | Andrew C. McCarthy

[jdm]

Hawking his new book, At the Eye of the Storm, former CIA Director George Tenet bared his soul Sunday night to Scott Pelley of the CBS news magazine, 60 Minutes. Some preliminary thoughts about his jaw-dropping performance are in order.

1. Tenet met every morning with President Bush. Indeed, he was the point person at the national-security briefing — the daily session Bush, from the beginning of his presidency, has made a point of taking more seriously than his predecessor did. Tenet now claims that in the summer of 2001, he was convinced al Qaeda was on the verge of launching a spectacular, multiple-site attack against the United States. He was convinced the United States should take action against the terror network in its Afghanistan safe haven. But, he maintains he shared this information only with (then) National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, not the president.

Why, day after day after day, didn’t he advise the president of his suspicions? “Because,” Tenet says, “the United States government doesn’t work that way. The president is not the action officer. You bring the action to the national-security adviser and people who set the table for the president to decide on policies they’re gonna implement.”

Sure, Mr. Director. Just one question: What the hell goes on at the daily briefings?

2. Immediately after 9/11, Tenet’s first response was that (a) he knew for certain al Qaeda was responsible (“when you’ve been following this as long as I’ve been following this, when you’ve been thinking about multiple spectacular attacks. There was no doubt what had happened in my mind immediately”), and (b) bin Laden better watch out because “I’m gonna run you and all your bastards down. And here we come. Because the rules are about to change. Here we come; our turn now. Unleashed, authorities, money, direction, leadership; here we come, pal.”

Question: Why did it take 9/11 for that?

We knew Bin Laden had bombed the embassies in 1998. In October 2000, al Qaeda bombed the destroyer, the U.S.S. Cole, in Yemen. The Clinton people say they did not respond to the Cole attack because the intelligence community would not assure them that al Qaeda was responsible. Regardless of what Tenet and others may have been telling them, I find it impossible to believe that the Clinton people did not fully appreciate that al Qaeda was the culprit. But let’s assume, for argument’s sake, there really was some doubt. Was Tenet certain then, as he says he was the minute 9/11 happened, that al Qaeda did the Cole? And since the Cole bombing killed 17 U.S. naval personnel, why didn’t the rules change then? Why was our response to do … nothing.

3. As Bill Kristol has pointed out, Tenet has apparently fabricated a September 12, 2001, meeting with Richard Perle at which Tenet insists Perle said Iraq had to be made to pay for 9/11. (Tenet: “[Perle] said to me, ‘Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday, they bear responsibility.’ It’s September the 12th. I’ve got the manifest with me that tell [sic] me al Qaeda did this. Nothing in my head that says there is any Iraqi involvement in this in any way shape or form and I remember thinking to myself, as I’m about to go brief the president, ‘What the hell is he talking about?’” (Emphasis added).

Leaving aside that Perle denies Tenet’s account, the meeting Tenet vividly recounts could not have happened. Perle was not in the United States on September 12; he was stranded outside the country, unable to return due to the closure of U.S. airspace. Keep that in mind: When Tenet recalls standing there with the manifest in his hand about to brief the president the day after the shocking 9/11 attacks, and then being thrown for a loop by Richard Perle (translation: rabid neocons) raving about Iraq, that never happened.

Now, if it’s possible, let’s give Tenet the benefit of the doubt and forget for a moment that he clearly has an ax to grind when it comes to Iraq. The fact remains that, like others in the intelligence community now running for the hills because Iraq has proved more difficult than they may have thought, Tenet is desperate to change the subject from Iraq’s complicity in jihadist terror to Iraq’s fingerprints on 9/11. He carefully tells Pelley that the CIA could never “verify” that Saddam’s regime had anything to do with 9/11. Not, mind you, that the CIA can categorically state that Iraq was uninvolved in 9/11; just that CIA (which, it turns out, can’t verify much of anything) could not verify Iraq’s involvement in those particular attacks.

Of course, that’s not the point at all. The point was whether Iraq was working with al Qaeda, not whether it was necessarily aware of and complicit in specific operations like 9/11. Al Qaeda exists — its singular purpose is — to carry out operations against the U.S. If you are helping al Qaeda at all, what on earth do you suppose you’re helping it do?

The issue is not rogue-state culpability for 9/11. After all, there’s no hard evidence that the Taliban was involved in 9/11. Yet we attacked and overthrew the Taliban — a military incursion even liberal Democrats say they supported — because the Taliban was aiding and abetting al Qaeda. No one contends that our rationale requires proof of direct Taliban involvement in 9/11.

Al Qaeda was headquartered in Afghanistan, not Iraq, so the evidence of Saddam’s assistance to the terror network is less blatant. But the principle is the same. Let’s pretend for a moment that there were no unresolved issues about Iraq and 9/11 — no possible meeting between Mohamed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague in April 2001; no Ahmed Hikmat Shakir (an Iraqi intelligence operative) at the January 2000 Kuala Lampur meeting involving two of the 9/11 hijackers. That is, let’s pretend 9/11 never happened. There would still be the little matter of Iraq aiding and abetting al Qaeda. That is what the invasion of Iraq was about — the Bush Doctrine: You’re with us or you’re with the terrorists ... especially if there’s good reason to think you might share WMDs with the terrorists (and remember Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee in 2002 that CIA believed Iraq and al Qaeda were working together on both WMDs and conventional weapons).

This talk by Tenet and his cohort about whether Iraq had a role in 9/11 is a red herring. We don’t know that Iraq was uninvolved in 9/11, but we do know Iraq was involved with al Qaeda. The fact that other regimes, like Iran, may be even more involved with al Qaeda than Iraq is an argument for addressing those regimes, not for leaving Saddam in power.

4. In discussing President Bush’s 2002 State of the Union Address (SOTU), CBS relates that, months earlier, the CIA had “knocked down” the contention that Saddam was trying to obtain uranium from Niger. Yet, CBS elaborates, the president made the claim anyway because Tenet was asleep at the switch. For his part, the pliant Tenet concedes that he did not thoroughly review the SOTU speech before it was given, and therefore that he “ultimately [has] to take my share of responsibility” for what the president said.

This is thoroughly disingenuous. And you can tell it is: While CBS piles on the innuendo, it never comes out and alleges that what the president said was false. It just leads you to believe it must have been. Simply stated, though, it is not true that the CIA ‘knocked down” the claim that Saddam was seeking uranium from Niger — not months before the 2002 SOTU, not ever. Indeed, the best intelligence assessment from both U.S. and British agencies, after comprehensive investigations in both countries, indicates that Saddam almost certainly did try to acquire uranium from Niger.

Now, it may well be that the proof of Saddam’s efforts to obtain uranium was not sufficiently strong to merit being mentioned in a SOTU address given the high standards for such a speech. To draw a law-enforcement analogy, many people are properly arrested based on probable-cause evidence that they have committed a crime, but they are never indicted for that crime because the evidentiary standard at trial is significantly higher: proof-beyond-a-reasonable-doubt. The fact that the prosecutor assesses that his proof is not strong enough to convict at trial doesn’t mean a defendant didn’t commit the crime, and doesn’t mean it was wrong to arrest him. Similarly, just because the administration now says it wishes the president had not alluded to Iraq and African uranium in the SOTU does not mean that what he said was untrue or that it has been “knocked down” by the CIA. To the contrary, it has never been proved false, and our best guess is that it was true. The misleading intimation that it was false and has been proved false is a huge part of the canard that Bush lied us into war. Shame on the administration for not vigorously defending itself, and shame on Tenet for allowing himself to be used in this fashion.

5. Tenet, as noted above, claims to remember a meeting with Richard Perle that apparently never happened; but also he claims not to remember a single meeting, in the long run-up to the Iraq invasion, in which the Bush administration seriously considered whether it was prudent to go to war with Iraq, as opposed to how we should go about war with Iraq. This seems ludicrously far-fetched.

We delayed military action on Iraq for months in order to try to get the Security Council on board. In the interim, Congress engaged a spirited debate on the merits of deposing Saddam. Doubtless, many people in the administration believed strongly that we should invade Iraq. But the thought that there was no consideration inside the administration of whether we’d be better off not doing so — at a time when that precise question was being weighed by both the nation and the world — is inane.

Still, this suggestion is presented, unchallenged, as if it were plausible. CBS obviously wants to believe it. But the question begs: Why do the Iraq naysayers never confront the counterfactual scenario of their dreams? If we had left Saddam in place, the sanctions would have disintegrated in short order — Security Council members France, Russia and China were bought and paid for in Oil-for-Food bribes. Once the sanctions had collapsed, Saddam would have been right back in business — his WMD programs ready to be up and running again (to the extent they were not running already) as he sat there with about $20 billion in Oil-for-Food profits and an ongoing relationship with al Qaeda (among many other jihadist groups).

If you want to say we shouldn’t have gone to Iraq, and should have anticipated the present chaos there, fair enough. But at least have the honesty to say you’d prefer the alternative: A Saddam Hussein, emboldened from having faced down the United States and its sanctions, loaded with money, arming with WMDs, and coddling jihadists.

[montag813]

Question: Why did it take 9/11 for that?

Because Berger, Tenet and Rice were all incompetent boobs.

[Gritty]

The fabric of lies about this war the Liberals have constructed from whole cloth these past four years are now accepted as truth.

It's amazing how perceptive Goebbels was.

[SuziQ]

I’m still annoyed with the fact that we won in Iraq — when Bush announced Mission Accomplished. And then we stayed!!!???

Just one problem; President Bush NEVER said that our mission in Iraq was accomplished. In fact, he said JUST THE OPPOSITE in his speech to the sailors on the USS Lincoln. That banner, proclaiming "Mission Accomplished" was created by the commanders of the USS Lincoln for the sailors on the ship, to congratulate them on the tour they had recently completed. The President flew out to the ship to congratulate them as well, but used that time to remind everyone that the war was FAR from over, and that it would take a very long time to defeat terrorism.

Just proves the old adage, if the media repeats a lie long enough, and loud enough, folks will start to believe it.

[Sleeping Beauty]

If we left immediately after removing Saddam (he wasn't captured immediately) do you think Iraq would have remained a non-threat?

syriacus -- yes I do. Here's what would have happened. We would declare Iraq a no-fly zone and watch from the borders. There would have been years of in-fighting between the sunnis and shiites. The herd would be thinned. Something stable would emerge.

If it posed a direct threat to us, we would strike those targets from the air. And so on and so on. It was a clean victory. One we should be proud of.

[Sleeping Beauty]

""Mission Accomplished was for the sailors who had just accomplished their mission at sea. The phrase had NOTHING to do with the mission being accomplished in Iraq.""

Guys, you're talking to ME here. That spin is less than 4 months old.

However, I won't mention our victory again (or the fact that we did acheive it and Bush was absolutely correct).

BTW, what mission DID those sailors accomplish? It must have been a pretty big one for the president of the United States to fly out to their ship with the world press in tow.

[cwb]

“If we had left Saddam in place, the sanctions would have disintegrated in short order — Security Council members France, Russia and China were bought and paid for in Oil-for-Food bribes. Once the sanctions had collapsed, Saddam would have been right back in business — his WMD programs ready to be up and running again”

---

This is something that the Left never considers—and is one of the better reasons why Saddam needed to be deposed. In fact, if there is anyone who thinks Saddam would be sitting quitely in Iraq today...as Iran continues to buld nuclear weapons, they’re nuts.

We’d be lookig at a Mid-East arms race between two nutballs, as other ME nations began looking at their own nuclear options (which might still happen just because of Iran). With Pakistan and India already possessing nukes—and Iran on the way, there is no way Saddam was going to abide by any UN sanction...especially as he watches Iran snub their nose at the world.

[Wildbill22]

Well has it been totally discounted that there WERE any WMDs? What about the Mossad reporting convoys crossing the Iraqi/Syrian boarder? And possible Russian collusion in removing all evidence of such programs prior to the US invasion of Iraq? If there is any evidence of that we must be broadcasting it to counter Tenet’s claim that the CIA was just wrong on their existence.

[hosepipe]

If George Tenet was any good for the job Bill Clinton would NOT HAVE appointed him the day after Vince Foster was murdered.. George Bush’s first move after inauguration SHOULD HAVE BEEN replace George Tenet..

BUT Bush DID NOT replace the Attoneys in the justice either.. You know the attoneys that Clinton replaced in the Justice Department ALL OF THEM.. not just 8 of them..

Bush pretty much used the Executive branch setup that Bill Clinton setup.. George Bush is a very very very trusting idiot.. You know like his father..

[LexBaird]

syriacus -- yes I do. Here's what would have happened. We would declare Iraq a no-fly zone and watch from the borders. There would have been years of in-fighting between the sunnis and shiites. The herd would be thinned. Something stable would emerge.

History argues the opposite. Take, for example, Afghanistan. There, with massive covert support from the US, the Soviet dictatorship was removed. Then, the US abandoned the region to sort itself out. This left a power vacuum that was filled by the Taliban and created the safe haven for Al Queda.

Politics, like Nature, abhors a vacuum, and out of chaos, it is rare that anything but a thug state emerges to make things stable. Given the history of Mesopotamia since the time of Abraham, what makes you think Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia would be content to let things settle out in the strategic breadbasket of the Middle East?

[Tolik]

 

Andrew C. McCarthy Nails Tenet!
 

This ping list is not author-specific for articles I'd like to share. Some for the perfect moral clarity, some for provocative thoughts; or simply interesting articles I'd hate to miss myself. (I don't have to agree with the author all 100% to feel the need to share an article.) I will try not to abuse the ping list and not to annoy you too much, but on some days there is more of the good stuff that is worthy of attention. You can see the list of articles I pinged to lately  on  my page.
You are welcome in or out, just freepmail me (and note which PING list you are talking about). Besides this one, I keep 2 separate PING lists for my favorite authors Victor Davis Hanson and Orson Scott Card.   

[tillacum]

I think this was the first carrier to return from Iraq. They did accomplish a mission, 1. Their planes flew into Iraq and Aphfanistan and bombed them. 2. Some of their missiles were used to help soften up the enemy. Yes, they had a mission and did it well. It was the first ship to return from that area and the President thanked them for a job well done.

[Sleeping Beauty]

Given the history of Mesopotamia since the time of Abraham, what makes you think Iran, Syria, and Saudi Arabia would be content to let things settle out in the strategic breadbasket of the Middle East?

In the case of Iraq:

1. Relatively flat terrain with easy surveillance.

2. A no fly zone with sea-launched missiles to shoot offenders down.

3. A continuation of the struggle between Sunnis (Syria) and Shias (Iran) making everything else a footnote.

4. A land locked country with nowhere to go.

5. Who cares if they fight and kill each other?

6. No reason for Al Qaeda to be there because there are no infidels to kill.

7. Chaos that ensures no sophisticated organization to threaten us.

Of course, we're there now and it is all too late for this. But I read military history and I don't know a General alive today who would have put soldiers into Iraq to catch bullets -- unless that General was under direct orders to do so by the Commander in Chief.

I will say it again. We DID win the war in Iraq years and years ago.

The terrorists were elsewhere at the time.

And then we decided to stick around.

Now, we urgently need 200,000 additional troops, at the very least, to police every single square inch of Iraq -- and protect each other. Our enemies are invisible until they attack us. Ever see that movie Predator? That's what its like for an American soldier to fight a guerrilla war. It sucks.

[SandRat]

Tenet trying to re-write history.

[LexBaird]

In the case of Iraq:

1. Relatively flat terrain with easy surveillance.

Do you have any clue how BIG the area is you are proposing surveillance on? With what assets do you think that job could be done? And what exactly would surveillance do about a few Iranian divisions pouring across the border?

2. A no fly zone with sea-launched missiles to shoot offenders down.

And where, with the continuing resistance to basing troops in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Turkey are you going to base this "No Fly" force, and what makes you think it would be any more successful than the failed effort against Saddam? Unless you are willing to commit the US to a seaborne invasion of Iran, they can interdict the Persian Gulf at will. If they should invade, by land, an Iraq in collapse, how would the US stop it?

3. A continuation of the struggle between Sunnis (Syria) and Shias (Iran) making everything else a footnote.

Currently, the Syrians and Iranians are co-operating to destabilize Iraq. Given that it is one of the few fertile area in the ME, why wouldn't they co-operate to partition it up? Not to mention that Turkey would love to rid itself of the Kurds.

4. A land locked country with nowhere to go.

Nowhere but Turkey, Jordan, Israel, the Saudi and Kuwaiti oil fields. Yet, you advocate using sea-based force to monitor and interdict from. It is also the historical controlling area of the region, with the most desireable terrain.

5. Who cares if they fight and kill each other?

Anybody who wants to eliminate terrorist hiding places, breeding grounds for fanatics, threats to world energy supply, and the chance that the Islamacist regimes of the area may expand and secure their flanks.

6. No reason for Al Qaeda to be there because there are no infidels to kill.

They were there before. And in Afghanistan before. And in Somalia before and returned after we left. And in Sudan, which has been hands off. And in the Philippines, which we treat as a friendly nation. Why would they leave, if the US was so stupid as to create the sort of "strongman" environmental chaos that they thrive in, and then abandon the field to them?

7. Chaos that ensures no sophisticated organization to threaten us.

It didn't insure it in post-Soviet Afghanistan, nor does a group need to be "sophisticated" to launch terror attacks.

[Grizzled Bear]

Was Tenet the one who was swapping classified material between his Official Lap Top computer and his Internet connected home computer?

It was him or the CIA boss just before him.

[Sleeping Beauty]

Well, heck, Lex —

I could have picked apart my argument even better than you did.

[NonLinear]

I could have picked apart my argument even better than you did.

Why use a bazooka to kill a gnat? It didn't take much.

[CyberAnt]

Well .. that may have been true about him when you knew him .. but anybody .. and I mean ANYBODY who comes in contact with the Clintons becomes tainted.

I’m still convinced Hillary’s people were leaning on him about writing this book. She cannot afford for her scum of a husband to be seen as the philandering, do-nothing president he was.

And .. his comments about Libby were just abismal!

[Rummyfan]

Tenet is a lying, weak, miserable career bureaucrat trying to cash in by feeding the liberal MSM what it wants: more bashing of the Administration. I doubt the man has ever been acquainted with the truth in his entire miserable life.

As for the CIA... well they did accurately predict the Pakistani development of nuclear weapons and the fall of the Soviet Union didn't they? Ooops.....

[Constantine XIII]