Down Goes Tenet

By William Rivers Pitt

http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/060404A.shtml

The news over the last week or so has been grim for the
White House. Ahmad Chalabi, Bush’s favorite Iraqi, has
been accused of passing high-level intelligence secrets
to Iran. Questions as to who could have coughed up those
secrets have been auguring towards Defense Department
officials Douglas Feith and William Luti, the two men
who ran the secretive Office of Special Plans (OSP).

The OSP, organized for the express purpose of massaging
intelligence data on the threat posed by Iraq so as to
justify the already-made war decision, was fueled in no
small part by the data provided by Chalabi. This story
unfolded under the deepening gloom of the Abu Ghraib
torture scandal, which appears to be spreading far
beyond Iraq, and threatens to subsume a number of high-
ranking officials.

Late Wednesday night, a wire report appeared stating
that George W. Bush was seeking legal advice on how to
protect himself from the looming investigation into who
in the White House outed the name of CIA agent Valerie
Plame. According to the report, Bush was "ready to
cooperate" with the investigation - an interesting
comment, considering the fact that the investigation has
been going on for months, and that his people have been
stonewalling the investigation across the board. When
the President needs a lawyer, it is usually a sign that
there is blood in the water.

Then, on Thursday, CIA Director George Tenet resigned
his position. The news was delivered by George W. Bush
just before he boarded a plane to absorb a beating from
our former European allies.

Whither goes Tenet? Why did he resign? The official
version holds that he quit for "personal reasons," and
has intended to leave for a while now. It was put forth
that perhaps this Clinton holdover never quite fit the
Bush administration mold. Some said he was quitting
because no weapons of mass destruction were found in
Iraq. Some used the word ’fired’ to describe his
departure.

In the end, however, it appears Tenet bailed out to save
George W. Bush.

Ray McGovern, a 27-year veteran analyst for the CIA and
unabashed critic of both Bush and Tenet, had this to say
when reached by phone on Thursday afternoon: "It is
pretty clear this resignation came for two reasons. The
first is the failed policy in Iraq. The cry for
accountability and resignations has reached a din here
in Washington D.C. Things have gone from bad to worse,
the White House was looking for a sacrificial lamb, and
Tenet being the good soldier he is, took the fall."

"An ancillary reason," continued McGovern, "is the Pat
Roberts report coming out of the Senate Intelligence
Committee next week. The report excoriates Tenet and the
entire intelligence community for the failure to find
weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. You need to
remember that Roberts is the archetypal GOP stalwart.
The whole name of the game now is to blame the
intelligence community and protect the White House."

"The truth, as we now know," said McGovern "is
different. The war had nothing to do with weapons of
mass destruction or al Qaeda, but with the ideological
vision of the neoconservatives. Tenet was always trying
to compromise, trying to make everyone happy. He tried
to make the administration happy by telling Bush the WMD
case against Iraq was a ’slam dunk.’ Pat Roberts is
preparing to hang him for it, which helps Roberts
protect the White House."

McGovern has never spoken well of Pat Roberts,
Republican of Kansas and Chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee. In an interview McGovern gave
truthout in June of 2003, he offered the following
perspective: "When the Niger forgery was unearthed and
when Colin Powell admitted, well shucks, it was a
forgery, Senator Jay Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat
on that Committee, went to Pat Roberts and said they
really needed the FBI to take a look at this. After all,
this was known to be a forgery and was still used on
Congressmen and Senators. We’d better get the Bureau in
on this. Pat Roberts said no, that would be
inappropriate."

"So Rockefeller drafted his own letter," continued
McGovern in the interview, "and went back to Roberts and
said he was going to send the letter to FBI Director
Mueller, and asked if Roberts would sign on to it.
Roberts said no, that would be inappropriate. What the
FBI Director eventually got was a letter from one
Minority member saying pretty please, would you maybe
take a look at what happened here, because we think
there may have been some skullduggery. The answer he got
from the Bureau was a brush-off. Why do I mention all
that? This is the same Pat Roberts who is going to lead
the investigation into what happened with this issue."

"There is a lot that could be said about Pat Roberts,"
said McGovern. "I remember way back last fall when
people were being briefed, CIA and others were briefing
Congressmen and Senators about the weapons of mass
destruction. These press folks were hanging around
outside the briefing room, and when the Senators came
out, one of the press asked Senator Roberts how the
evidence on weapons of mass destruction was. Roberts
said, oh, it was very persuasive, very persuasive. The
press guy asked Roberts to tell him more about that.
Roberts said, ’Truck A was observed to be going under
Shed B, where Process C is believed to be taking place.’
The press guy asked him if he found that persuasive, and
Pat Roberts said, ’Oh, these intelligence folks, they
have these techniques down so well, so yeah, this is
very persuasive.’ And the correspondent said thank you
very much, Senator. So, if you’ve got a Senator who is
that inclined to believe that kind of intelligence,
you’ve got someone who will do the administration’s
bidding."

This, very clearly, has been proven out over the course
of time. Roberts has used his Committee to shield the
Bush administration from any culpability. Nowhere in the
deliberations of the Committee did the Office of Special
Plans come to the fore. The data on the Iraqi threat
Roberts praised did not come from CIA, but from the
Office of Special Plans.

The OSP, recall, was created by Defense Secretary Don
Rumsfeld specifically to second-guess and reinterpret
intelligence data to justify war in Iraq. The OSP was
staffed by rank amateurs, civilians whose ideological
pedigree suited Rumsfeld and his cabal of hawks. Though
this group was on no government payroll and endured no
Congressional oversight, their information and
interpretations managed to prevail over the data being
provided by the State Department and CIA. This group was
able to accomplish this incredible feat due to devoted
patronage from high-ranking ultra-conservatives within
the administration, most prominently Vice-President
Cheney.

This group worked according to a strategy that they
hoped would recreate Iraq into an Israeli ally, destroy
a potential threat to Persian Gulf oil trade, and wrap
U.S. allies around Iran. The State Department and CIA
saw this plan as being badly flawed and based upon
profoundly questionable intelligence. The OSP responded
to these criticisms by cutting State and CIA completely
out of the loop. By the time the war came, nearly all
the data used to justify the action to the American
people was coming from the OSP. The American
intelligence community had been totally usurped.

When the OSP wanted to change or exaggerate evidence of
Iraqi weapons capabilities, they sent Vice President
Cheney to CIA headquarters on unprecedented visits where
he demanded "forward-leaning" interpretations of the
evidence. When Cheney was unable to go to the CIA, his
chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, went in his
place. On three occasions, former congressman Newt
Gingrich visited CIA in his capacity as a "consultant"
for ultra-conservative hawk Richard Perle and his
Defense Policy Board. According to the accounts of these
visits, Gingrich browbeat the analysts to toughen up
their assessments of the dangers posed by Hussein. He
was allowed access to the CIA and the analysts because
he was a known emissary of the OSP.

Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski worked in the
office of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas
Feith until her retirement a year ago, and often worked
with the Office of Special Plans. "What I saw was
aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and
discipline," Kwiatkowski wrote of her experience in the
run-up to the invasion. "If one is seeking the answers
to why peculiar bits of ’intelligence’ found sanctity in
a presidential speech, or why the post-Saddam occupation
has been distinguished by confusion and false steps, one
need look no further than the process inside the Office
of the Secretary of Defense."

Kwiatkowski went on to charge that the operations she
witnessed during her tenure regarding the Office of
Special Plans, constituted "a subversion of
constitutional limits on executive power and a co-
optation through deceit of a large segment of the
Congress". According to Kwiatkowski, the same operation
that allegedly cooked the intelligence also was
responsible for the administration’s failure to
anticipate the problems that now dog the U.S. occupation
in Iraq. Kwiatkowski reported that the political
appointees assigned there and their contacts at State,
the NSC, and Cheney’s office tended to work as a
"network." The OSP often deliberately cut out, ignored
or circumvented normal channels of communication both
within the Pentagon and with other agencies.

"I personally witnessed several cases of staff officers
being told not to contact their counterparts at State or
the (NSC) because that particular decision would be
processed through a different channel," wrote
Kwiatkowski. In one interview, she insists that her
views of the OSP were widely shared by other
professional staff. Quoting one veteran career officer
"who was in a position to know what he was talking
about," Kwiatkowski says, "What these people are doing
now makes Iran-Contra look like amateur hour."

Is Tenet being a good soldier and allowing CIA to take
the blame for the mess in Iraq? He has done it before.
Remember that last summer, on a Friday to be exact, CIA
Director Tenet took public blame for the fraudulent use
of the Niger uranium evidence in Bush’s State of the
Union Address in January 2003. According to Tenet,
Bush’s use of data from known forgeries to support the
Iraq war was completely his fault. He never told Bush’s
people that the data was corrupted, and it was his fault
those "sixteen words" regarding Iraqi attempts to
procure uranium from Niger for a nuclear program made it
into the text of the speech.

Condoleezza Rice and Don Rumsfeld had been triangulating
on Tenet since that Thursday, claiming the CIA had never
informed the White House about the dubious nature of the
Niger evidence. Tenet fell on his sword and took
responsibility for the error. On that Saturday, White
House spokesman Ari Fleischer told the press corps that
Bush had "moved on" from this controversy. The New York
Times editorial board thought otherwise. The paper
published an editorial on that Saturday entitled "The
Uranium Fiction." The editorial read, in part, as
follows:

"It is clear, however, that much more went into this
affair than the failure of the CIA. to pounce on the
offending 16 words in Mr. Bush’s speech. A good deal of
information already points to a willful effort by the
war camp in the administration to pump up an accusation
that seemed shaky from the outset and that was pretty
well discredited long before Mr. Bush stepped into the
well of the House of Representatives last January.
Doubts about the accusation were raised in March 2002 by
Joseph Wilson, a former American diplomat, after he was
dispatched to Niger to look into the issue. Mr. Wilson
has said he is confident that his concerns were
circulated not only within the agency but also at the
State Department and the office of Vice President Dick
Cheney. Mr. Tenet, in his statement yesterday, confirmed
that the Wilson findings had been given wide
distribution, although he reported that Mr. Bush, Mr.
Cheney and other high officials had not been directly
informed about them by the CIA."

The next day, on Sunday, the Washington Post’s lead
headline read, "CIA Got Uranium Reference Cut in
October." The meat of the article states:

"CIA Director George J. Tenet successfully intervened
with White House officials to have a reference to Iraq
seeking uranium from Niger removed from a presidential
speech last October, three months before a less specific
reference to the same intelligence appeared in the State
of the Union address, according to senior administration
officials. Tenet argued personally to White House
officials, including deputy national security adviser
Stephen Hadley, that the allegation should not be used."

Here is CIA Director Tenet arguing in October of 2002
against the use of the Niger evidence, stating bluntly
that it was useless. He made this pitch directly to the
White House. The administration later claimed they were
never told the evidence was bad. Tenet responds by
taking the blame for the whole thing. He earned some of
it, to be sure. But all of it?

The Valerie Plame case is creeping towards the White
House, and Bush is reaching out to lawyers. Ahmad
Chalabi is being sized for leg irons because he has been
acting on behalf of Iran. The war is a disaster, and the
Office of Special Plans owns a vast amount of blame for
it, along with the neo-con hawks who put the whole
scheme together.

Is Tenet’s last act a last-ditch effort to pull the
White House out of the maelstrom by, again, scapegoating
himself and his agency? Former CIA Director Stansfield
Turner seems to think so. Turner believes this
resignation is "too significant a move at too important
a time" to be motivated by personal considerations. "I
think he’s being pushed out," Turner said on CNN. "The
president feels he has to have someone to blame. I don’t
think (Tenet) would pull the plug on President Bush in
the midst of an election cycle without being asked by
President Bush to do that."

It makes sense. Tenet’s resignation will allow the Bush
administration to say the Iraq situation was the fault
of CIA and the ’intelligence’ offered. Tenet’s position
can now be filled with a Bush loyalist; one name floated
recently for the position was none other than Deputy
Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

Will it work? If the mainstream media chooses to accept
White House spin as fact, Bush will be helped by this
resignation. If the mainstream media continues to avoid
reporting on the OSP, the true source of the Iraq
’intelligence,’ and the real reasons for this war, Bush
will be helped by this resignation.

Yet Bush is calling his lawyer. Hm.

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and
international bestseller of two books - ’War on Iraq:
What Team Bush Doesn’t Want You To Know’ and ’The
Greatest Sedition is Silence.’