Bush: CIA Director George Tenet resigns
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| Thu, 06-03-2004 - 11:03am |
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/apwashington_story.asp?category=1155&slug=Tenet%20Resigns
Thursday, June 3, 2004 · Last updated 7:57 a.m. PT
Bush: CIA Director George Tenet resigns
By PETE YOST
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
WASHINGTON -- CIA Director George Tenet, who weathered storms over intelligence lapses about suspected weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has resigned, President Bush said Thursday.
"I will miss him," Bush said.
Tenet came to the White House to inform Bush about his decision Wednesday night. "He told me he was resigning for personal reasons," Bush said. "I told him I'm sorry he's leaving. He's done a superb job on behalf of the American people."
Bush said that deputy, John McLaughlin, will temporarily lead America's premier spy agency until a successor is found. Among possible successors is House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss, R-Fla., a former CIA agent and McLaughlin.
"He's been a strong and able leader at the agency. and I will miss him," Bush said of Tenet as he got ready to board Marine One for a trip to Andrews Air Force Base, Md., and on to Europe.
"George Tenet is the kind of public servant you like to work with," the president added. "He's strong, he's resolute. He's served his nation as the director for seven years. He has been a strong and able leader at the agency. He's been a strong leader in the war on terror."
"I send my blessings to George and his family and look forward to working with him until he leaves the agency," Bush said.
Tenet had been under fire for months in connection with intelligence failures related to the U.S.-led war against Iraq, specifically assertions the United States made about Saddam Hussein's purported possession of weapons of mass destruction, and with respect to the threat from the al-Qaida terrorist network.
In May, a panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks released statements harshly criticizing the CIA for failing to fully appreciate the threat posed by al-Qaida before the terrorist hijackings. Tenet told the panel the intelligence-gathering flaws exposed by the attacks will take five years to correct.
During his seven years at the CIA, speculation at times has swirled around whether Tenet would retire or be forced out, peaking after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and surging again after the flawed intelligence estimates about Iraq's fighting capability.
Even when his political capital appeared to be tanking, Tenet managed to hang on with what some say was a fierce loyalty to Bush and the CIA personnel. A likable, chummy personality, also helped keep him above water.
Conventional wisdom had been that Tenet, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, did not plan to stay on next year, no matter who won the White House. Tenet has been on the job since July 1997, an unusually lengthy tenure in a particularly taxing era for the intelligence community that he heads.
Tenet is the son of Greek immigrants who grew up in Queens, N.Y.
Some close to Tenet have said the job overseeing more than a dozen agencies that make up the intelligence community has been taxing for him. He suffered heart problems while at the National Security Council during the Clinton administration, although a CIA official said his resignation was not health related.
On Capitol Hill, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., called Tenet "an honorable and decent man who has served his country well in difficult times, and no one should make him a fall guy for anything."
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May 26, 2004 Gore said, "George Tenet should also resign. I want to offer a special word about George Tenet, because he is a personal friend and I know him to be a good and decent man. It is especially painful to call for his resignation, but I have regretfully concluded that it is extremely important that our country have new leadership at the CIA immediately. "
JMO I think he was 'encouraged' to report the existence of WMD in Iraq.
Op-ed: Tenet no longer useful to Bush?
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/06/03/ensor/index.html
CIA Director George Tenet has resigned, citing personal reasons, President Bush said Thursday. Tenet has faced harsh criticism over intelligence failures before September 11 and during the buildup to the war in Iraq.
CNN national security correspondent David Ensor discusses Tenet's career and how the national intelligence community might be restructured after the CIA chief's departure.
ENSOR: If they're going to be reorganizing the intelligence community and the way the leadership is structured, it might be wise to do that before picking the person who's going to have the job.
And there may be two jobs in the future. There may be a director of national intelligence, a Cabinet officer -- this is the idea that some of the 9/11 commission people have been talking about -- and then a separate person who is the CIA director, who runs the CIA itself.
Now George Tenet has said that he has some questions about that idea. He believes that there's always been an advantage for him in that he has troops, so to speak. He has first-hand, face-to-face relationships with the kinds of officers who go off and do the things that need to be done around the world to gather intelligence for the United States.
He's always felt that that combination of being able to know the hands-on people who do that kind of work as well as being able to go to the White House to brief the president in the morning has always given him special strength as a servant of the United States. If you reorganize it, it might not be that way.
You've heard several 9/11 commission members say over the past few weeks that change is in the air -- there are going to be changes whether you like it or not.
I would like to point out one other thing about George Tenet and his longevity amid all the "failures" that have been talked about. In a way, it's been useful to President Bush to keep George Tenet. George Tenet has been a lightning rod, someone who could fall on his sword from time to time, be blamed for what seemed to be failures of U.S. intelligence. And it's allowed the president to deflect the blame in a different direction.
It may be that there are just too many of these issues at this point. There was the failure to warn the United States that India was about to test a nuclear weapon. The India-Pakistan thing got very hot -- there was no intelligence warning of that. And there have been a succession of other failures, or perceived failures, relating to the war on terrorism, the war in Iraq.
The most famous failure, of course, was the matter at the United Nations where George Tenet was sitting behind Colin Powell, in effect saying, "We back this material up."
And so much of it is now in question. The biological weapons labs, the mobile trucks -- people are saying now that was just fabricated by émigrés. The aluminum tubes that were supposed to have been parts for centrifuges -- now people are saying those were just supposed to be parts for conventional rockets.
Some of these intelligence assessments that were made under the watch of George Tenet are not looking so good anymore. He's taken a bit of a battering.
At the same time, this is the director who has expanded the intelligence agency and moved it into the 21st century and turned it to the war on terrorism in a very concrete way.
We should remember that this is the man who in the summer of 2001 was repeatedly warning pretty much anyone who would listen that al Qaeda was coming, that al Qaeda wanted to attack the United States, that something major could happen.
He was warning senior officials from the president on down. He warned publicly in hearings before Congress that trouble was brewing. Not many people listened.
http://www.cnn.com/2004/ALLPOLITICS/05/24/tenet.tm/index.html
The Senate Intelligence Committee is getting closer to delivering a scathing report on the CIA's prewar intelligence on Iraq.
Sources tell Time that the assessment, which is nearing completion, is so tough that it is sowing doubt even among longtime fans of CIA Director George Tenet. One panel member dodged a question from Time about whether the member still had full confidence in the director, saying Tenet "has done incredible things" for the CIA but adding, "This is not going to be a happy report."
Sources tell Time the committee's two ranking members interviewed Tenet secretly earlier this month at CIA headquarters. He submitted to the three-hour session willingly and was cooperative, sources said.
But Tenet wouldn't confirm whether he told President Bush before the war that evidence of Saddam Hussein's weapons-of-mass-destruction arsenal was a "slam dunk," as reported in Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack. The panel last week sent Tenet the several-hundred-page report -- minus its conclusions -- for a declassification review.
Another big stack of pages is causing concern over at the Senate Armed Services Committee, which is investigating abuses at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison. Committee aides discovered belatedly that their copy of the 6,000-page report on prison abuses produced by Major General Antonio M. Taguba might not be complete.
The copy they got after Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's testimony on May 7 was a thick document with 106 annexes, and it was quickly arranged into separate binders. Only later did the committee stack up all the pages, compare them with a ream of 6,000 blank pages and decide that at least 2,000 pages were missing.
"We'd certainly like to know why they're missing," said Republican Senator John McCain. Pentagon spokesman Larry Dirita insisted, "If there is some shortfall in what was provided, it was an oversight." Committee staff members haven't actually counted the pages. Chairman John Warner will investigate this week to see what is missing.
(Me: Is McCain the only one with enough gumption to ask these questions?)
CIA: Pentagon lied in run-up to war
Wednesday 10 March 2004, 9:02 Makka Time, 6:02 GMT
Tenet is the third-longest-serving director in CIA history
CIA director George Tenet has revealed that a senior defence official leaked a false intelligence report before the US-led invasion of Iraq, ignoring agency advice.
Answering questions before the Senate Armed Services Committee on Tuesday, Tenet confirmed that an article in November's Weekly Standard was written by Undersecretary of Defence for Policy Douglas Feith.
The magazine claimed to have obtained a leaked top-secret document, but the CIA chief admitted the third highest Pentagon official wrote it specifically for publication.
Vice President Dick Cheney then cited the leaked unapproved document as "the best source of information" on cooperation between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida.
Question time
Michigan's Senator Carl Levin asked the CIA director: "Did the CIA agree with the contents of the Feith document?"
"Senator, we did not clear the document. We did not agree with the way the data was characterised in that document."
"Senator, we did not clear the document. We did not agree with the way the data was characterised in that document"
Tenet added that the Pentagon had also disavowed the Feith document.
He had planned to speak to Vice President Cheney about the matter.
But in an hour of questioning, Tenet said other officials also chose to ignore agency advice.
Embarrassing revelations
Speaking to Senator Edward Kennedy, Tenet said there had been instances when he warned administration officials they were overstating the threat posed by Iraq.
Tenet had personally told the vice president he was wrong to say that two trailers recovered in Iraq were "conclusive evidence" that Hussein had a biological weapons programme.
Nevertheless, Cheney made the assertion in a 22 January 2003 interview with National Public Radio.
Nearly all analysts now believe the "mobile biological-weapons facilities" were in fact used for making hydrogen gas to fill weather balloons.
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/09A59841-7C86-4E31-9962-91F00CE4CB0B.htm
Now Chalabi is accusing Tenet of making-up stories about WMD. It's been reported widely that Chalabi is behind the stories.
Chalabi accuses George Tenet of being behind allegations against him.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-06-03-chalabi-tenet_x.htm
There were three articles today:
Allawi's ascent follows extensive PR campaign
By Jim Drinkard, USA TODAY
Iraq's new prime minister waged an expensive lobbying and public relations campaign beginning last year to build political support — not in Baghdad, but in Washington.
Allawi benefited from at least $340,000 in spending for Washington lawyers and lobbyists and New York PR agents, all paid for by a wealthy Iraqi expatriate who lives in London.
Allawi's selection last week by his colleagues in the interim Iraqi Governing Council testified to his political skills. But some analysts said his campaign in Washington also had been a major help.
"It was a bid for influence, and it was money well spent," said Danielle Pletka, a Middle East analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington think tank. "Allawi has always assumed, in many ways correctly, that he didn't need a constituency in Iraq as long as he had one in Washington."
http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2004-06-02-allawi-rise_x.htm
BAGHDAD, Iraq, June 2 — The United Nations special envoy called on the new Iraqi government on Wednesday to broaden discussions to include Iraqis who oppose the American occupation, and he suggested that his own authority in shaping the new government had been sharply limited by American officials.
Lakhdar Brahimi, at a news conference wrapping up a nearly monthlong visit here, suggested that the Americans were pursuing a strategy in Iraq that relied too heavily on force and not enough on subtlety and persuasion.
Mr. Brahimi, who called L. Paul Bremer III, the chief American administrator here, a "dictator," seemed to stop just short of calling on the United States to open talks with the insurgents.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/03/international/middleeast/03IRAQ.html?pagewanted=all&position=
I couldn't locate the third that said al Sistani was unhappy with the new government. Surprise, Surprise!