New Republic: CIA Back-Stabbed Bush to Cover Itself

The CIA leaked that infamous Aug. 6 memo mentioning a possible terrorist hijacking to throw the blame on President Bush and cover up its own incompetence, suggests the New Republic.

The left-leaning but respected magazine notes the meaningless vagueness of the memo. "The real scandal, in other words, isn't Bush's non-reaction to the CIA memo. It is the memo itself - which testifies powerfully to the shoddy nature of the CIA's pre-9/11 anti-terrorism work," Richard Miniter writes.

"But rather than focusing on CIA incompetence, the media and congressional Democrats have used the memo to push the juicier story of White House inaction. Which may be just what the people who leaked the memo wanted - because the people who leaked it may be from the CIA itself."

In an appearance Friday morning on Fox News Channel, Miniter used stronger language than that. He indicated that though there was no absolute proof of the CIA's guilt in leaking the memo to CBS (the most anti-Bush of the non-cable networks), it was all but certain.

Asked why CIA Director George Tenet would do such a thing to the president, Miniter responded that Tenet was a Washington insider concerned mainly with protecting himself and diverting attention from the failures of his own agency.

The article in the June 3 issue of New Republic details the CIA's motive for back-stabbing Bush:

"The Agency has been defensive about its pre-9/11 failures from the start; and in recent months the House and Senate Intelligence Committees' investigation into the intelligence failures preceding the attacks has made it much more so. Senate Intelligence Committee Vice Chairman Richard Shelby is on record as calling for CIA Director George Tenet's resignation, and last month the committee forced Tenet's longtime associate, L. Britt Snider, to resign as the committee's staff director.

"In response, the CIA is obstructing the investigation as much as it dares. It has barred its employees from giving committee staff its business cards, according to The Washington Post. And - using a classic bureaucratic stalling tactic that won't win any friends on Capitol Hill - Langley has refused to turn over documents it got from the FBI and other agencies without those agencies' approval.

"Recently, when the Agency learned that some Senate Intelligence Committee staffers faulted the CIA for failing to grasp the significance of an April 2001 meeting in Prague between 9/11 ringleader Mohammed Atta and Iraqi intelligence officer Ahmed al-Ani, the CIA suggested that the meeting probably never occurred. (Had they grasped its significance, they might have investigated Atta and found that he was in the United States.) Unfortunately for Langley, Czech intelligence is standing by its story, and a Czech member of parliament briefed by that nation's intelligence service believes airport security cameras caught the meeting.

"Add to this the committee's apparent interest in the CIA's long-standing inability to hire Arabic-, Turkic-, and other language specialists; its legendary refusal to share information with other parts of the government; and the fact that it analyzes less than 10 percent of the data that its costly satellites collect, and you have an investigation that frightens Langley to death," Miniter writes.

In addition to motive, the agency had opportunity. "Only Tenet and a handful of top CIA officials would have had access to the August 6 memo. Which suggests that either they leaked it, or they allowed it to fall into the hands of someone who did."

Miniter, a senior fellow at the Brussels think tank Center for the New Europe, goes on to elaborate why it is unlikely the FBI or congressional Democrats leaked the memo.

He concludes that "you can bet that a White House with a deep hatred of leaks has already put out the bloodhounds to find the source of this one. The CIA's effort to deflect the political heat, in other words, may end up backfiring. And sometime later this year, don't be surprised if Tenet quietly announces that he is leaving his post to 'spend more time with his family.' If he does, the August 6 memo will have finally done some good after all."

Is it "Langley", or maybe the leaks to NY Times, Newsday, etc. were from a "senior administration source" with access...Beers, Clarke, who knows?

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