Tenet vs. Cheney

[subgenius]

The battle is joined:

Tenet at first appeared to defend the administration, saying that he didn't believe the White House misrepresented intelligence provided by the CIA.

The administration's statements, he said, reflected a prewar intelligence consensus that Saddam had stockpiled chemical and biological weapons and was pursuing nuclear bombs.

But under sharp questioning by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., Tenet reversed himself, saying there had been instances when he had warned administration officials that they were misstating the threat posed by Iraq.

"I'm not going to sit here and tell you what my interaction was ... and what I did and didn't do, except that you have to have confidence to know that when I believed that somebody was misconstruing intelligence, I said something about it," Tenet said. "I don't stand up publicly and do it."

Tenet admitted to Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the committee's senior Democrat, that he had told Cheney that the vice president was wrong in saying that two truck trailers recovered in Iraq were "conclusive evidence" that Saddam had a biological weapons program.

Cheney made the assertion in a Jan. 22 interview with National Public Radio.
.....
Levin also questioned Tenet about a Jan. 9 interview with the Rocky Mountain News, in which Cheney cited a November article in the Weekly Standard, a conservative magazine, as "the best source of information" on cooperation between Saddam and al-Qaida.

The article was based on a leaked top-secret memorandum. It purportedly set out evidence, compiled by a special Pentagon intelligence cell, that Saddam was in league with al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden. It was written by Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith, the third-highest Pentagon official and a key proponent of the war.

"Did the CIA agree with the contents of the Feith document?" asked Levin.

"Senator, we did not clear the document," replied Tenet. "We did not agree with the way the data was characterized in that document."

Tenet, who pointed out that the Pentagon, too, had disavowed the document, said he learned of the article Monday night, and he planned to speak with Cheney about the CIA's view of the Feith document.

In building the case for war, Bush, Cheney and other top officials relied in part on assessments by the CIA and other agencies. But they concealed disputes and dissents over Iraq's weapons programs and links to terrorists that were raging among analysts, U.S. diplomats and military officials.

They also used exaggerated and fabricated information from defectors and former Iraqi exile groups that was fed directly into Cheney's office and the Pentagon. Those groups included the Iraqi National Congress, whose leader, Ahmad Chalabi, was close to hawks around Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and the White House, but who was distrusted by the CIA and the State Department.

Adm. Lowell Jacoby, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, the military's main intelligence arm, said that "some" information provided by defectors had checked out, but that they also gave material that was "fabricated or embellished."

http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/8145154.htm?template=contentModules/printstory.jsp

Are we all bored with this already? After all its not as exciting as sex in the Oval Office.

 

[Frank Newgent]

Who are you calling a beslubbering boil-brained
clack dish? Listen you screwheads: Here is a man
who wouldn't take it any more, a man who stood
up against the scum, the c*nts, the dogs, the filth.

 

[Frank Newgent]

[size=1/2]Sorry if certain famous and not-so-famous quotes interspersed beneath a picture of delinquent and racketeer Lex Luthor, undisputed master of Metropolis and lord of all he surveys, have acted to hijack this thread.[/size]


http://www.iht.com/articles/509523.html

Levin seemed particularly interested in the work of the Pentagon Office of Special Plans, created the year before the Iraq war, and how it had interacted - or bypassed - the CIA.
.
Some Democratic critics have suggested that that office served as a sort of parallel intelligence bureau meant to marshal data to support an administration already determined to launch war. Douglas Feith, head of that Pentagon office, was a chief proponent of the war.
.
Analysts in Feith's office reviewed existing intelligence for possible links between Iraq and terrorists and concluded that such connections existed. The CIA, which had developed some of the intelligence Feith's office used, had found insufficient evidence to assert such a link, The New York Times has reported.
.
Levin, referring to at least one prewar briefing by Feith's team to the National Security Council and the vice president's office, asked Tenet whether he had known about it.
.
Tenet said that last week was the first time he had learned that Feith's office had provided direct briefings to those entities.
.
Levin asked if it was standard procedure for an intelligence analysis to be presented to the National Security Council and the vice president's office without Tenet's knowledge.
.
"Was the administration listening to the Office of Special Plans rather than the intelligence community?" he asked.

I've read elsewhere that Tenet said that he thought policy-makers were entitled to "flexibility in how they interpret and describe intelligence". He's a funny guy.

 

[subgenius]

WTF, I'm derailing my own thread.
Levin was a Detroit Councilman back in the '70's when I, like many Detroiters was broke and unemployed (things have come full circle).
Big splash in the papers when Council voted themselves new cars. I happened to bump into Carl on the street, and in my brash youthfully indignant way, gave him a piece of my mind about it.
"How do you like your new car?" I asked loudly.
"I refused to take it." he answered patiently.
I shriveled into the crack in the sidewalk as I profusely apologized.
Besides ethics, the man is one of the most intelligent people in Congress.

 

[Frank Newgent]

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FC12Ak01.html

While it is now clear that professional intelligence analysts made some serious errors in assessing Iraq's WMD programs - largely through a combination of assuming "worst-case scenarios" in the absence of hard evidence and lacking reliable agents or assets in Iraq either as informants or investigators - the "Feith factor" has recently emerged as the key focus of the committees' work.

Shortly after the September 11, 2001, attacks on New York and the Pentagon, Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith set up two groups, the Office of Special Plans (OSP) and the Counter-Terrorism Evaluation Group (CTEG). These groups were tasked to review raw intelligence to determine if official intelligence agencies had overlooked connections between Shi'ite and Sunni terrorist groups and between al-Qaeda and secular Arab governments, especially Saddam Hussein's.

The effort, which reportedly included interviewing "defectors", several of them supplied by the Iraqi National Congress (INC), an exile group close to neo-conservatives who support Israel's Likud Party, closely tracked the agenda of the Defense Policy Group (DPG), chaired by Feith's mentor, Richard Perle.

It's known that the DPG convened after September 11 with INC leader Ahmad Chalabi to discuss ways in which the terrorist attacks could be tied to Saddam. Yet neither the State Department nor the CIA was informed about the meeting.

The OSP, which was overseen by Abram Shulsky, then brought on Michael Malouf, who had worked for Perle in the Pentagon 20 years before and specialized in obtaining authorizations, thereby giving the office access to analyses produced by official intelligence agencies, according to knowledgeable sources.

Malouf's operation, called the "bat cave", permitted hawks in the Pentagon and in Cheney's office to anticipate the intelligence community's more skeptical arguments about the alleged threats posed by Saddam, and then to devise questions or develop their own evidence that would be used to challenge the more benign views of the professional analysts, according to these sources.

At the same time, the OSP, which consisted of only two permanent staff members but which employed dozens of like-minded consultants, developed its own "talking points" and briefing papers, one of which - on the subject of Saddam's alleged ties to al-Qaeda - was leaked last November to the neo-conservative publication the Weekly Standard.

It consisted of 50 excerpts taken from raw, mostly uncorroborated intelligence reports from sources of varying reliability from 1990 to 2002, which purported to show an operational relationship between captured leader Saddam and the terrorist group. But when it was published, former intelligence officials dismissed the work as amateurish, unsubstantiated and indicative (even if most of the allegations were true) of the absence of any operative relationship.

"This is meant to dazzle the eyes of the not terribly educated," former State Department intelligence officer Greg Thielmann told Inter Press Service at the time. But as recently as last month, Cheney referred to the paper as "the best source of information" for intelligence on Iraq.

It was this paper that reportedly formed the basis of a briefing by Feith given to the NSC and Cheney's office in August 2002. Tenet said on Tuesday that he "vaguely" remembered having received a similar briefing by Feith, but was never informed that it was also presented to the White House. Even then, the presentation to the CIA reportedly omitted certain remarks made to the White House to the effect that the CIA was deliberately ignoring evidence of Saddam-al-Qaeda links.

"Did you ever discuss with the secretary of defense or other administration officials whether the Department of Defense policy office run by Mr Feith might be bypassing normal intelligence channels?" Levin asked Tenet on Tuesday.

"I did not. I did not," he replied.

If, as according to Socrates, all that human beings can know is their own ignorance, then Dick Cheney is a cognoscenti

 

[subgenius]

EDITORIAL
Tenet: A spy in the dark

AS AMERICA'S chief intelligence officer, CIA Director George Tenet should have been keenly aware of all covert information on Iraq -- who was gathering it, how it was being interpreted and to whom it was being delivered. Certainly, he should have loudly protested if it was being distorted to justify last year's U.S.-led war in Iraq.

Tenet said he was uninformed that a special Pentagon intelligence analysis unit had privately briefed the White House on the alleged ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. He also, admittedly, was "wildly inconsistent" about challenging President Bush's exaggerated assessments about Iraq's true weapons capabilities. In either case, it is disheartening or dangerously irresponsible.

Tenet told the Senate Armed Services Committee that he first learned about intelligence briefings held by the now-disbanded Pentagon office at a recent congressional hearing. His testimony strongly suggests that the in- house military intelligence team studiously orchestrated is information to fit the president's predilection for war.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2004/03/11/EDG305HISE1.DTL

Heck of an intelligence agency. They didn't even know there was another one elsewhere.

 

[subgenius]

"Is that a normal thing to happen, that there [is] a formal analysis relative to intelligence that would be presented to the NSC [National Security Council] that way, without you even knowing about it?" an incredulous Democratic senator, Carl Levin, asked Tenet during contentious hearings.

"I don't know. I've never been in the situation," Tenet replied, insisting, "I have to tell you, Senator, I'm the president's chief intelligence officer; I have the definitive view about these subjects."

"I know you feel that way," Levin said, betraying a hint of sarcasm.
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/FC12Ak01.html

 

[Frank Newgent]

Looks like it's just you and I, oh Foobaz of the Slowly Inclining. What I'm trying to figure out is how those who may believe we are merely hyping the story actually regard this. Might this all seem acceptable because it is believed that the truth behind the misrepresentations is what has freed our Iraqi equals or are these but sundry confabulations of an election year?

I sincerely hope that there is a difference.

 

[subgenius]

I find the sound of crickets very comforting at times.

 

[Dorian Gray]

I watched the Tenet grilling live on C-SPAN. He was squirming like a kid in church, obviously uncomfortable. He started sweating after about 25 minutes.

He tried his hardest to seem innocent while simultaneously trying to make Bush and Co. seem not so bad. My God, did he fail.

 

[fishbob]

I find the sound of crickets very comforting at times.

The Chenoid apologists are off stewing about gay marriage. The Bushkins are ranting about Kerry's bunch of crooks comments. No time to evaluate these very interesting developments.

 

[subgenius]

Tenet's future
CIA Director George J. Tenet is under fire from Democrats over questions related to intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction.
We asked the CIA chief after he had just finished a somewhat heated session before the Senate Armed Services Committee this week whether he planned to step down after the November elections.
"And miss all this fun?" Mr. Tenet said, referring to sometimes heated exchanges with Democrats during the three-hour hearing.
According to a White House source, Mr. Tenet is said to be looking forward to leaving the agency after the November elections, after seven years as director of central intelligence, plus two years as deputy DCI.
http://www.washtimes.com/national/inring.htm

Think he'll last that long?

Edited to add: "According to a White House source, Mr. Tenet is said to be looking forward to leaving the agency....."

Wonder if they've told him he's looking forward to leaving?

 

[subgenius]

Bush on Meet the Press:
President Bush: This commission? You know, testify? I mean, I’d be glad to visit with them. I’d be glad to share with them knowledge. I’d be glad to make recommendations, if they ask for some.

I'm interested in getting — I'm interested in making sure the intelligence gathering works well.

Listen, we got some fine — let me — let me, again, just give you a sense of where I am on the intelligence systems of America. First of all, I strongly believe the CIA is ably led by George Tenet. He comes and briefs me on a regular basis about what he and his analysts see in the world.

Russert: His job is not in jeopardy?

President Bush: No, not at all, not at all. We've got people working hard in intelligence gathering around the world to get as good an information as possible.

Intelligence requires, you know, all kinds of assets to bring information to the President, and I want that intelligence service to be strong, viable, competent, confident, and provide good product to the President so I can make judgment calls.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4179618/

And that's why its good to have a shadow intelligence unit that you don't tell the CIA about.