|
Sorry They’ve Been So Mean To You, George
By Ray
McGovern
04/30/07 "ICH"
-- -- “If you can’t say something positive about someone,
don’t say anything.” This was drummed into me by my Irish
grandmother and, as was the case with most of her admonishments,
it has stood me in good stead. On occasion, though, it has been
a real bother—as when I felt called to comment on George Tenet’s
apologia, In the Center of the Storm, coming soon to a
bookstore near you.
On the verge of despair, I ran into an old classmate of Tenet’s
from PS 94 in Little Neck, Queens. Help at last. He told me
that George was more handsome than his twin brother Billy, and
that his outgoing nature and consummate political skill got him
elected president of the student body.
Positive enough, Grandma? Now let me add this.
George Tenet’s book shows that he remains, first and foremost, a
politician—with no clue as to the proper role of intelligence
work. He is unhappy about going down in history as “Slam Dunk
Tenet.” George protests that his famous remark to President
Bush on Dec. 21, 2002 was not meant to assure the president that
available intelligence on weapons of mass destruction in Iraq
was a “slam dunk.” Rather he meant that the argument that
Saddam Hussein had such weapons could be readily enhanced to
slam-dunk status in order to sell war on Iraq. Yesterday
evening on CBS’ 60 Minutes Tenet explained what he meant when he
uttered those words—the words he says have now been distorted to
blame him for the war in Iraq. What he says he meant was
simply:
“We can put a better case together for a public case.” (sic)
Tenet still doesn’t get it. Those of us schooled in the
craft and ethos of intelligence remain in wide-mouthed
disbelief, perhaps best summed up by veteran operations officer
Bob Baer’s recent quip:
“So, it is better that the ‘slam dunk’ referred to the ease
with which the war could be sold? I guess I missed that part of
the National Security Act delineating the functions of the
CIA—the part about CIA marketing a war. Guess that’s why I
never made it into senior management.”
Reluctant Scapegoat
George’s concern over being scapegoated is
understandable. But could he not have seen it coming? Not even
when then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld asked him in the
fall of 2002 whether he had created a system for tracking how
good the intelligence was compared with what would be actually
found in Iraq? The folks I know from Queens usually can tell
when they’re being set up. Maybe Tenet was naive enough to
believe that his friend the president (“President Bush and I are
much alike,” he writes) would protect him from the likes of
Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney even when—as was
inevitable—someone would have to take the fall. Or did George
actually believe Cheney’s insight that US forces would be
greeted in Iraq as liberators, and that at that point, the
absence of the weapons of mass destruction would not matter?
Now George is worried about his reputation. He told 60
Minutes:
“At the end of the day, the only thing you have...is your
reputation built on trust and your personal honor, and when you
don’t have that anymore, well, there you go.
I immediately thought back to former Secretary of State
Colin Powell’s response when he was asked if he regretted the
lies he told at the UN on Feb. 5, 2003. Powell said he
regretted that speech because it was “a blot on my record.”
So we’ve got ruined reputations and blots on records. Poor
boys. What about the 3, 344 American soldiers already killed in
a war that could not have happened had not these poor fellows
deliberately distorted the evidence and led the cheering for
war. What about the more than 50,000 troops wounded, not to
mention the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians whose
deaths can be attributed directly to the invasion and its
aftermath. There are blots, and there are blots. Why is it
that Tenet and Powell seem to inhabit a different planet?
Despite all this, they still have their defenders...or at least
Tenet does. (Powell’s closest associate, Col. Larry Wilkerson,
decided long ago to turn state’s evidence and apologize for his
and Powell’s role in the intelligence/policy fiasco, but Powell
has tried to remain above the battle. He may, I suppose, be
writing his own book.)
Saturday on National Public Radio Tenet’s deputy and
partner in crime, John McLaughlin, went to ludicrous lengths
reciting a carefully prepared list of “all the things that the
CIA got right,” while conceding that it (not “we,” mind you, but
“it”) performed “inadequately” in assessing weapons of mass
destruction in Iraq.
[What Tenet has said, both while writing his book and while
hawking it on TV, is highly troubling—so much so that a number
of us wrote him a letter yesterday to express our concern to him
directly. I shall include a copy below.]
Defending Torture...Again
Hewing to the George W. Bush dictum of “catapulting the
propaganda” by endlessly repeating the same claim (the formula
used so successfully by Joseph Goebbels), Tenet manages to tell
60 Minutes five times in five consecutive sentences: “We
don’t torture people.” Like President Bush, however, he then
goes on to show why it has been absolutely necessary to torture
people. Do they take us for fools? And Tenet’s claims of
success in extracting information via torture are no more
deserving of credulity than the rest of what he says.
His own credibility aside, Tenet has succeeded in destroying the
asset without which an intelligence community cannot be
effective and informed policy making is at grave
risk—trustworthiness. That is serious. He seems blissfully
oblivious to the damage he has done—aware only of the damage he
accuses others of doing to his “personal honor.”
Lessons
If any good can come out of the intelligence/policy
debacle regarding Iraq, it would be the clear lesson that
intelligence crafted to dovetail with the predilections of
policymakers can bring disaster. The role that Tenet,
McLaughlin and their small coterie of malleable managers played
as willing accomplices in the corruption of intelligence has
made a mockery of the verse chiseled into the marble at the
entrance to CIA headquarters: “You will know the truth, and the
truth will set you free.”
Had Tenet been tenaciously honest, his analysts would have risen
to the occasion. And there is a good chance that they could
have helped prevent what the Nuremburg Tribunal called the
“supreme international crime”—a war of aggression—a war that
Tenet and his subordinates knew had nothing to do with the
“intelligence” adduced to “justify” it, as Tenet now admits in
his book.
No director of the CIA should come from the ranks of
congressional staff, since those staffers work in a politicized
ambience antithetical to substantive intelligence work. Tenet
is Exhibit A. When he was nominated for the job, outside
observers deemed it a good sign that, as a congressional
staffer, Tenet had been equally popular on both sides of the
aisle. But for intelligence professionals, this raised a huge
red flag.
As we had learned early in our careers, if you consistently tell
it like it is, you are certain to make enemies. Those enjoying
universal popularity are ipso facto suspect of perfecting
the political art of compromise—shading this and shaving that.
However useful this may be on the Hill, it sounds the death
knell for intelligence analysis. Tenet also lacked experience
in managing a large, complicated organization. Such experience
is a sine qua non.
Finally, it is mischievous myth that the CIA director must
cultivate a close personal relationship with the president. Nor
should he/she try to do so, for it is a net minus. The White
House is not a fraternity house; mutual respect is far more
important than camaraderie. A mature president will respect an
independent intelligence director. The latter must resist the
temptation to be “part of the team” in the same way that the
president’s political advisers are part of the team. Overly
close identification with “the team” can erode objectivity and
cloud intelligence judgments. Former House Speaker Newt
Gingrich, like Cheney a frequent visitor to CIA headquarters in
2002 to “help” with the analysis on Iraq, told the press that
Tenet was “so grateful to the president [presumably for not
firing him after Sept. 11, 2001] that he would do anything for
him.” That attitude is the antithesis of what is needed in
senior intelligence officers.
Much is at stake, and it will be an uphill battle to bring back
honesty and professionalism to the analysis process and impede
efforts to politicize the intelligence product. In an
institution like the CIA, significant, enduring improvement
requires vision, courage, and integrity at the top. It has been
almost three decades since the CIA has been led by such a
person.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, the publishing arm of
the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in Washington, DC. His
responsibilities during his 27-year service as a CIA analyst
included chairing National Intelligence Estimates and preparing
the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran
Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
An earlier version of the above article appeared on
Truthout.com.
Letter to George Tenet
The following was sent to George Tenet in
care of his publisher. The letter, written by a group of former
intelligence officers, reflects disgust with George Tenet's
effort to burnish his image with his new "tell all" book.
28 April 2007
Mr. George Tenet
c/o Harper Collins Publishers
10 East 53rd Street
8th Floor
New York City, New York 10022
ATTN: Ms. Tina Andredis
Dear Mr. Tenet:
We write to you on the occasion of the release of your book, At
the Center of the Storm. You are on record complaining about
the “damage to your reputation” caused by your role on the Iraq
war. In our view the damage to your reputation is
inconsequential compared to the harm your actions have caused
for the U.S. soldiers engaged in combat in Iraq and for the
national security of the United States. We believe you have a
moral obligation to return the Medal of Freedom you received
from President George W. Bush. We also call for you to dedicate
a significant percentage of the royalties from your book to the
U.S. soldiers and their families who have been killed and
wounded in Iraq.
We agree with you that Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush
administration officials took the United States to war for
flimsy reasons. We agree that the war of choice in Iraq was ill
advised and wrong headed. But your lament that you are a victim
in a process you helped direct is self-serving, misleading and,
as head of the intelligence community, an admission of failed
leadership. You were not a victim. You were a willing
participant in a poorly considered policy to start an
unnecessary war and you share culpability with Dick Cheney,
George W. Bush, and others for the debacle in Iraq.
You are not alone in failing to speak up and protest the
twisting and shading of intelligence. Those who remained silent
when they could have made a difference also share the blame for
not protesting the abuse and misuse of intelligence that
occurred on your watch. But ultimately you were in charge and
you signed off on the CIA products and you briefed the
President.
This is not a case of Monday morning quarterbacking. You helped
send very mixed signals to the American people and their
legislators in the fall of 2002. CIA field operatives produced
solid intelligence in September 2002 that stated clearly there
was no stockpile of any kind of WMD in Iraq. This intelligence
was ignored and later misused. On October 1 you signed and gave
to President Bush and senior policy makers a fraudulent National
Intelligence Estimate (NIE)—which dovetailed with unsupported
threats presented by Vice President Dick Cheney in an alarmist
speech on August 26, 2002.
You were all too well aware that the White House tried to
present as fact intelligence you knew was unreliable. And yet
you tried to have it both ways. On October 7, just hours before
the president gave a major speech in Cincinnati, you were
successful in preventing him from using the fable about Iraq
purchasing uranium in Africa, although that same claim appeared
in the NIE you signed only six days before.
Although CIA officers learned in late September 2002 from a
high-level member of Saddam Hussein's inner circle that Iraq had
no past or present contact with Osama bin Laden and that the
Iraqi leader considered bin Laden an enemy of the Baghdad
regime, you still went before Congress in February 2003 and
testified that Iraq did indeed have links to Al Qaeda. (http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/09/20060915-4.html).
You showed a lack of leadership and courage in January of 2003
as the Bush Administration pushed and cajoled analysts and
managers to let them make the bogus claim that Iraq was on the
verge of getting its hands on uranium. You signed off on Colin
Powell's presentation to the United Nations. And, at his
insistence, you sat behind him and visibly squandered CIA's most
precious asset—credibility.
You may now feel you were bullied and victimized but you were
also one of the bullies. You cannot claim that you were bullied
into acting by the administration, while you chose to remain
silent as the White House misled Congress and the American
people. In the end you allowed suspect sources, like the
notorious Curveball, to be used based on very limited reporting
and evidence. Yet you were informed in no uncertain terms that
Curveball was not reliable. You broke with CIA standard
practice and insisted on voluminous evidence to refute this
reporting rather than treat the information and source as
suspect. You helped set the bar very low for reporting that
supported favored White House positions, while raising the bar
astronomically high when it came to raw intelligence that did
not support the case for war being hawked by the president and
vice president.
It now turns out that you were the Alberto Gonzales of the
intelligence community--a grotesque mixture of incompetence and
sycophancy shielded by a genial personality. Decisions were
made, you were in charge, but you have no idea how decisions
were made, even though you were in charge. Curiously, you focus
your anger on the likes of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and
Condoleezza Rice, but you decline to criticize the President.
Mr. Tenet, as head of the intelligence community, you failed to
use your position of power and influence to protect the
intelligence process and, more importantly, the country. What
should you have done? What could you have done?
For starters, during the critical summer and fall of 2002, you
could have gone to key Republicans and Democrats in the Congress
and warned them of the pressure. But you remained silent. Your
candor during your July 20, 2002 one-on-one with Sir Richard
Dearlove, then-head of British Intelligence, provides
documentary proof that you knew exactly what you were doing;
namely, "fixing" the intelligence to the policy.
By your silence you helped build the case for war. You betrayed
the CIA officers who collected the intelligence that made it
clear that Saddam did not pose an imminent threat. You betrayed
the analysts who tried to withstand the pressure applied by
Cheney and Rumsfeld.
Most importantly and tragically, you failed to meet your
obligations to the people of the United States. Instead of
resigning in protest, when it could have made a difference in
the public debate, you remained silent and allowed the Bush
Administration to cite your participation in these deliberations
to justify its decision to go to war. Your silence contributed
to the willingness of the public to support the disastrous war
in Iraq, which has killed more than 3300 Americans and hundreds
of thousands of Iraqis.
If you are committed to correcting the record about your past
failings then you should start by returning the Medal of Freedom
you received from President Bush in December 2004. You claim it
was given only because of the war on terror, but you were
standing next to General Tommy Franks and L. Paul Bremer, who
also contributed to the disaster in Iraq. President Bush said
that you:
Played pivotal roles in great events, and [your] efforts have
made our country more secure and advanced the cause of human
liberty.
The reality of Iraq, however, has not made our nation more
secure nor has the cause of human liberty been advanced. In
fact, your tenure as head of the CIA has helped create a world
that is more dangerous. The damage to the credibility of the
CIA is serious but can eventually be repaired. Many of the U.S.
soldiers maimed in the streets of Fallujah and Baghdad cannot be
fixed. Many will live the rest of their lives missing limbs,
blinded, mentally disabled, or physically disfigured. And the
dead have passed into history.
Mr. Tenet, you cannot undo what has been done. It is doubly sad
that you seem still to lack an adequate appreciation of the
enormous amount of death and carnage you have facilitated. If
reflection on these matters serves to prick your conscience we
encourage you to donate at least half of the royalties from your
book sales to the veterans and their families, who have paid and
are paying the price for your failure to speak up when you could
have made a difference. That would be the decent and honorable
thing to do.
Sincerely yours,
/s/
Phil Giraldi
Ray McGovern
Larry Johnson
Jim Marcinkowski
Vince Cannistraro
David MacMichael
W. Patrick Lang
Click here
to comment on this and other articles
Send Page To a Friend
In accordance
with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material
is distributed without profit to those who have
expressed a prior interest in receiving the
included information for research and educational
purposes. Information Clearing House has no
affiliation whatsoever with the originator of
this article nor is Information ClearingHouse
endorsed or sponsored by the originator.)
|
