George Tenet's 60 Minutes' appearance

[Jolie Rouge]

Andy McCarthy reacts to George Tenet's 60 Minutes' appearance: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q...VhZWFhN2ZiNjM=

Why do the Iraq naysayers never confront the counterfactual scenario of their dreams? If we had left Saddam in place, the sanctions would have disintegrated in short order — Security Council members France, Russia and China were bought and paid for in Oil-for-Food bribes. Once the sanctions had collapsed, Saddam would have been right back in business — his WMD programs ready to be up and running again (to the extent they were not running already) as he sat there with about $20 billion in Oil-for-Food profits and an ongoing relationship with al Qaeda (among many other jihadist groups).

If you want to say we shouldn’t have gone to Iraq, and should have anticipated the present chaos there, fair enough. But at least have the honesty to say you’d prefer the alternative: A Saddam Hussein, emboldened from having faced down the United States and its sanctions, loaded with money, arming with WMDs, and coddling jihadists.

Here's Bill Kristol on Tenet's imaginary encounter with Richard Perle. http://www.weeklystandard.com/Conten...3/593daqmw.asp

SCOTT SHANE REPORTED in Saturday's New York Times that former CIA chief George Tenet's dramatic description in his book, At the Center of the Storm, of an August 2002 presentation at the CIA by defense undersecretary Douglas Feith and his staff, is at the very least misleading. In order to suggest that Feith's staff was utterly out of its depth, Tenet characterized the main briefer, Tina Shelton, as a "naval reservist." In fact, she had been a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst for almost two decades. Tenet also claimed that Shelton said in her presentation of Iraq-al Qaeda contacts, "It is an open-and-shut case." Shelton and Feith both deny she said that. One person who served in government with Shelton told THE WEEKLY STANDARD today he finds it "inconceivable" that Shelton, an experienced analyst, would have made such an unequivocal assertion.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has now learned of a second, more stunning error in Tenet's book (which is due to appear in bookstores tomorrow). According to Michiko Kakutani's review in Saturday's Times :

On the day after 9/11, he [Tenet] adds, he ran into Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative and the head of the Defense Policy Board, coming out of the White House. He says Mr. Perle turned to him and said: "Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility."

Here's the problem: Richard Perle was in France on that day, unable to fly back after September 11. In fact Perle did not return to the United State until September 15.

Did Tenet perhaps merely get the date of this encounter wrong? Well, the quote Tenet ascribes to Perle hinges on the encounter taking place September 12: "Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday." And Perle in any case categorically denies to THE WEEKLY STANDARD ever having said any such thing to Tenet, while coming out of the White House or anywhere else.

According to Kakutani, Tenet concludes by paraphrasing Daniel Patrick Moynihan's comment: "Policymakers are entitled to their own opinions--but not to their own set of facts."

How many other facts has George Tenet invented?



Tenet's memoirs draw heated backlash
By KATHERINE SHRADER, Associated Press Writer
8 minutes ago

NEW YORK - The backlash has built up even before the official release of former CIA Director George Tenet's memoir, with criticism about his version of the run-up to the Iraq war, interrogation techniques and other events.

Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice on Sunday disputed Tenet's claim that the Bush administration, before the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, never had a serious debate about whether Iraq posed an imminent threat or whether to tighten existing sanctions. "The president started a discussion practically on the day that he took power about how to enhance sanctions against Iraq," she said. "You may remember that in his first press conference, he said the sanctions had become Swiss cheese."

Rice, who was Bush's national security adviser in his first term, said the administration reviewed the sanctions, went to the United Nations to strengthen them and tried to tighten the no-fly zone in northern Iraq to better police Saddam Hussein's forces.

She also said the question about the imminence of the threat was not "if somebody is going to strike tomorrow."

"It's whether you believe you're in a stronger position today to deal with the threat, or whether you're going to be in a stronger position tomorrow," she said. "And it was the president's assessment that the situation in Iraq was getting worse."

A Tenet associate, who spoke on condition of anonymity before the book's release Monday, said Tenet was not talking about improving the sanctions, but rather the debate about the wisdom of going to war. The associate said those debates did not happen in the presence of Tenet or other senior CIA officials, despite their participation in numerous discussions in the White House's situation room.

The memoir from the second-longest serving CIA chief covers many topics — from his attempts to help negotiate peace between the Israelis and the Palestinians during the Clinton administration, to the days surrounding Sept. 11, 2001, and to the invasion of Iraq and its aftermath.

Looking ahead, he says, al-Qaida wants to change history and meet its top one goal of obtaining a nuclear device.

Tenet highlights the errors of others during his tenure from July 1997 to July 2004, such as the extraordinary efforts by Vice President Cheney and others to connect Iraq and al-Qaida.

Tenet also takes blame for other failures, such as the production of the botched National Intelligence Estimate in 2002 that was used to justify invading Iraq.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., said he does not accept assertions from Tenet that the U.S. government saved lives through some of the agency's most aggressive interrogation techniques.

In an often defensive interview on CBS' "60 Minutes" aired Sunday, Tenet says the intelligence gained from suspected terrorists in the CIA's covert detention program and its "enhanced interrogation techniques" was more valuable than all the other terrorism-related intelligence gathered by the
FBI, the National Security Agency and his own agency.

Yet McCain said the U.S. cannot torture people and maintain its moral superiority in the world. "I don't care what George Tenet says. I know what's right. I know what's morally right as far as America's behavior," the presidential candidate and former prisoner-of-war said Sunday.

McCain said he does not accept Tenet's premise that the CIA's practices save lives because torture and mistreatment historically have not worked in intelligence collection. "We've gotten a huge amount of misinformation as well as other information from these techniques," McCain said.

Tenet and the CIA deny using torture. But McCain's words suggest he believes the CIA's practices amounted to torture and were wrong.

In his book, Tenet said McCain has engaged the country in an important moral debate "about who we are as people and what we should stand for, even when up against an enemy so full of hate they would murder thousands of our children without a thought."

If elected officials believe certain interrogation actions put the country in a difficult moral position, they should be stopped, according to Tenet, once the Democratic staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Critics have started picking apart the book's accuracy. In a dramatic preface, Tenet said he ran into former

Pentagon adviser Richard Perle coming out of the White House on Sept. 12, 2001, and Perle told him Iraq had to pay for the attack. "They bear responsibility," Tenet recalls Perle saying.

On Sunday, Perle categorically denied the exchange to the editor of the conservative Weekly Standard and noted he was out of the country until Sept. 15. Tenet's associate said the date may have been wrong, but the exchange took place.

Writing in Sunday's Washington Post, the one-time head of Tenet's Osama bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer, said Tenet should have told his story sooner. "At this late date, the Bush-bashing that Tenet's book will inevitably stir up seems designed to rehabilitate Tenet in his first home, the Democratic Party. He seems to blame the war on everyone but Bush (who gave Tenet the Medal of Freedom) and former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell (who remains the Democrats' ideal Republican)," Scheuer wrote.

A half-dozen former CIA officers — including counterterrorism experts Larry Johnson and Vince Cannistraro — are urging Tenet to dedicate a significant portion of his royalties to soldiers and families of those killed or wounded in Iraq. "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," they wrote.

Rice appeared on CNN's "Late Edition," ABC's "This Week," and "Face the Nation" on CBS. McCain was on "Fox News Sunday."


Associated Press Writer Scott Lindlaw in San Francisco contributed to this report.

On the Net: CIA background on Tenet: http://tinyurl.com/29mo9a

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070430/...h8yh6U3tas0NUE

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[Jolie Rouge]

And here's Scott Ott's spoof: Former CIA Boss Out of Loop on Parts of His New Book http://www.scrappleface.com/?p=2583

April 30, 2007
Former CIA Boss Out of Loop on Parts of His New Book
by Scott Ott

(2007-04-30) — Former CIA Director George Tenet said today that he was not included in discussions about key portions of his book that have been called into question by eyewitnesses to the events recounted.

“There was no serious debate at the publisher’s office, at least none that included me, about whether to retain certain questionable assertions in my book,” Mr. Tenet told 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley. “And yet, as usual, it looks like I’m going to take the heat for what appears in those pages just because I happen to be the author.”

Mr. Tenet’s book, “At the Center of the Storm“, explains that during his tenure as the nation’s leading intelligence officer, he was intimately involved in many decisions that turned out well, but left “out of the loop” by White House officials on most situations that, in hindsight, have turned out badly.

Among the problematic passages in the book, Mr. Tenet claims that former Pentagon adviser Richard Perle said, on September 12, 2001, that Iraq must pay for the 9/11 terror attacks. Mr. Perle denies making the remark, and says he was out of the country at the time that Mr. Tenet claims he talked with him at the White House.

Publisher HarperCollins has issued an “author’s intelligence estimate” that the book is based on information from a usually reliable source, and that its case against former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is “a slam dunk.”







I think that the news media is missing some really ironic things here:

•In the book Tenet states that intelligence reports show that Al Quaida is planning an even bigger attack on the US via nuclear device.
a. So if his intelligence on Iraq was wrong, why should we believe that his intelligence on Al Quaida is correct?
b. Since he never found Bin Laden, why would we accept anything that he has to say about the plans of Bin Laden?

•If there is a terrorist threat against the US from Al Queida as outlined in Tenet’s book, and if the left accepts his book as an indictment against the Bush administration, then they must also accept that there is a need for a “War on Terror” so that we might avoid this nuclear attack.
a. If there is terror and a need to fight it, then that is a War on Terror and John Edwards is an idiot.
b. If there is no War on Terror, as John Edwards says, (because you can’t have a war against an action, just against nations), then there can be no War on Poverty, or War on Civil Rights, or War on Hunger, or War Against Aids or War against Illiteracy or War Against Drugs or War against the Unethical Treatment of Animals….my the looney left will be all out of wars to fight and victims to exploit. Sigh.



See also A Loser’s History:
George Tenet’s sniveling, self-justifying new book is a disgrace.

http://ww.slate.com/id/2165269