posted May 20, 2004 04:01 PM            

Published: May 15, 2004

ASHINGTON, May 14 — Despite weeks of steadfast rejections from Senator John McCain, some prominent Democrats are angling for him to run for vice president alongside Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, creating a bipartisan ticket that they say would instantly transform the presidential race.

The enthusiasm of Democrats for Mr. McCain, an Arizona Republican, is so high that even some who have been mentioned as possible Kerry running mates — including Senator Bill Nelson of Florida and Bob Kerrey, the former Nebraska senator — are spinning scenarios about a "unity government," effectively giving Mr. Kerry a green light to reach across the political aisle and extend an offer.

"Senator McCain would not have to leave his party," Mr. Kerrey said. "He could remain a Republican, would be given some authority over selection of cabinet people. The only thing he would have to do is say, `I'm not going to appoint any judges who would overturn Roe v. Wade,' " the Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion, which Mr. McCain has said he opposes.

Chris Lehane, a Democratic strategist who once worked for Mr. Kerry, said such a ticket "would be the political equivalent of the Yankees signing A-Rod," referring to Alex Rodriguez, the team's star third baseman.

Mr. Kerry, the presumptive Democratic nominee, "continues to be interested in" Mr. McCain, a fellow Vietnam veteran whom Kerry aides describe as the candidate's best friend in the Senate, as a running mate, said one longtime Democratic official who works for the Kerry campaign.

But the official said the plan was unrealistic, because Mr. McCain "won't do it." In an interview on Friday, Mr. McCain said, "I have totally ruled it out."

Even so, Democrats say a bipartisan Kerry-McCain ticket, featuring two decorated Vietnam War veterans from different parties and regions of the country, would give them a powerful edge in the debate over who can best lead the nation in the war on terror. "It would be a dream team," Mr. Lehane said.

This kind of open speculation suggests that Democrats are so eager to regain the White House in November that they are willing to overlook members of their own party, and to accept a candidate who disagrees with one of the core tenets of their platform, the right to an abortion. At the same time, the Kerry-McCain talk is testimony to the close friendship between the two, and the cool relationship between Mr. McCain and President Bush. The senator from Arizona is co-chairman of President Bush's re-election campaign there, but it is no secret in Washington that Mr. McCain has not quite forgiven Mr. Bush for the attacks on him during the 2000 Republican presidential primaries.

Mr. Kerry defended Mr. McCain then, and the Arizona senator returned the favor in March, dismissing suggestions by the Bush camp that Mr. Kerry is weak on defense. "If you don't stand by your friends if they are unfairly attacked," Mr. McCain said Friday, "then you've lost your bearings."

The two men talk on the phone periodically, most recently a few days ago. On the campaign trail, Mr. Kerry drops Mr. McCain's name almost daily. On Friday, he invoked Mr. McCain, a former prisoner of war, at a news conference when asked whether he thought pictures of abuse at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison should be released to the public.

"I think John McCain really had the right formula, personally," he said, referring to the Arizona senator's suggestion that the pictures would eventually find their way into public view, and should be put out in an organized fashion.

And it was not surprising that the words "our good friend John McCain" were the first thing out of Mr. Kerry's mouth earlier this week, when he was asked to name possible replacements for Donald H. Rumsfeld, President Bush's embattled secretary of defense.

Despite Mr. McCain's protestations that he would not be Mr. Kerry's No. 2, Senator Nelson, of Florida, said he had spoken to both Mr. McCain and Kerry campaign officials about it.

"There's a collective sigh that says, `This feels right,' " Mr. Nelson said Friday, adding, "I think it's very plausible that, with Iraq still in chaos, that if offered to him, he would say it's time for me to go serve my country again in another capacity, where I can do some good."

Such an offer would undoubtedly be controversial among Democrats. Some say Mr. McCain would upstage Mr. Kerry; others regard him as too conservative. Among the latter is Donna Brazile, who ran Al Gore's campaign in 2000. "McCain has not been pro-choice; he's not been out front on affirmative action," Ms. Brazile said. "He's not been out front on core issues that have defined the Democratic Party."

The list of possible Democratic contenders is a long one and runs the gamut from senators like John Edwards of North Carolina and Bob Graham of Florida, to governors like Bill Richardson of New Mexico and Thomas J. Vilsack of Iowa.

For Mr. McCain, 67, joining a Kerry ticket would mean giving up his Senate seat, since he is up for re-election this year. He is also in line to become chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee when the term of the current chairman, John W. Warner, expires in 2006.

Mr. McCain is also well aware that his power and influence in Washington derives from his candor, a trait he would have to curb as vice president. And despite his strained relationship with the president, his friends say he simply would not challenge Mr. Bush. Asked last week if he thought Mr. Bush should be re-elected, Mr. McCain said yes, "because I think he has led the nation with strength and clarity since Sept. 11."

Rick Davis, who ran Mr. McCain's 2000 presidential campaign, said such public pronouncements were his way of tamping down speculation about him and Senator Kerry.

"His point that he's trying to make publicly is to send Kerry a message to say, `Don't put me in that position,' " Mr. Davis said.

The two senators were not instantly close. When Mr. Kerry first ran for the Senate in 1984, Mr. McCain, then a freshman House member, went to Massachusetts to campaign against him. Mr. McCain, a former Navy pilot who spent more than five years in captivity, had little use for Mr. Kerry, who became a war protester and famously threw away his ribbons.

"I didn't approve of it," Senator McCain said in an interview. "I still don't approve of it."

But the two formed a strong bond in the 1990's as they investigated the politically sensitive question of whether American soldiers remained missing in Southeast Asia. Max Cleland, the former Democratic senator from Georgia who is also a Vietnam veteran, said the relationship between Mr. McCain and Mr. Kerry was "deep and personal."

If Mr. McCain is offered the vice-presidential spot, people close to Mr. Kerry say, the request will come from the candidate himself and not through the campaign's vice-presidential vetting process.

Asked if Senator Kerry had made such an offer, Mr. McCain said no without hesitation. But asked if the two men had ever discussed it, even casually, he paused for a moment.

"No," he said finally. "We really haven't."

--------------------------------------------

That's what I say,we need to have Both parties to finally come together and get all these problems resolved,so we get on with our lives and looking at some real issues here by getting back to blaming all of our problems on Canada again!

posted May 29, 2004 09:50 PM            

I would love to see this man in office,to set things right for AMERICA for once!

posted May 29, 2004 11:24 PM            

If Kerry and the rest of the dim-ocrat establishment has to rely on a Republican, John McCain to win the day for them in the general election, what can you say Ozone?

Kerry, lacks values, lacks issues, lacks vision, lacks wisdom, lacks character and every other ingredient necessary to win in November.

The fact the Kerry campaign is turning to a Republican, John McCain to bail out a failed dim-ocrat candidate speaks volumes about the modern dim-ocrat party, don't you agree Ozone?

Perhaps you've already forgotten Ozone, the rest of the dim-ocrats seems to have forgotten too. Bush already beat McCain, decisively . So, are you looking for a rematch?

posted May 30, 2004 09:03 AM            

Don't you know that John Heinz Kerry accused US military personnel in Vietnam of being murderers? Hell Ozone, McCain, as a Navy Pilot was over there dropping napalm bombs, iron bombs, gas bombs and Kerry as much as said they were all baby killers.

Or, had you forgotten John McCain, was in Vietnam.

Of course we already have Kerry's own testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and national TV that he's a murderer, firing 50 caliber machine guns into "free fire zones".

"They told the stories at times they had personally raped, cut off ears, cut off heads, taped wires from portable telephones to human genitals and turned up the power, cut off limbs, blown up bodies, randomly shot at civilians, razed villages in fashion reminiscent of Genghis Khan, shot cattle and dogs for fun, poisoned food stocks, and generally ravaged the countryside of South Vietnam in addition to the normal ravage of war, and the normal and very particular ravaging which is done by the applied bombing power of this country."

Besides Ozone how would it look for America to have 2 johns leading the country. Sounds more like something one would see on a police blotter.

posted May 30, 2004 12:20 PM            

I think about,all of Washington are @$$es , we get a bunch of boobs and a handful of nuts and I think that we will be in business!

posted May 30, 2004 01:50 PM            

John McCain is a graduate of the United States Naval Academy (Annapolis).

posted May 30, 2004 03:00 PM            

Not much is known but a lot is speculated about the Yale campus secret society. You can go here and read what they have to say but you probably know as much about the group as they do
http://www.rosslyntemplars.org.uk/more_skull_and_bones.htm

posted May 30, 2004 09:51 PM            

Oh yeah, he's a man who compromised national security, putting lives of American agents in danger. Wait, I forgot a word there. What was it? Oh, I remember! Allegedly.

Rove is an old-school political operator who would have been right at home working on Huey Long's campaign. Of course, Long did a lot of good things for his constituents, to offset the sleaze and corruption. Rove's protege, George W Bush, has a ways to go in that regard.

Rove was a "Young Republican" back when being a Young Republican wasn't cool (a historical era ranging from 1959 through the present). As a student at the prestigious University of Utah, Rove (who still had hair at the time) teamed up with a young Lee Atwater to seize control of the College Republicans political club in the early 1970s.

By all accounts, the race for the coveted chairmanship of the meaningless College Republicans organization was a portent of things to come. According to the Washington Post, the two men executed a balls-to-the-wall campaign to put Rove in the catbird's seat, and once there, he wasted no time getting his group involved in dirty tricks on behalf of Richard M Nixon's 1972 campaign. You may remember that campaign, it was the beginning of Watergate.

Oxymoronically, Rove dropped out of college to become executive director of the College Republicans, all the while practicing dirty tricks on behalf of the candidates of his choice. According the Post, these tricks included identity theft, petty larceny and campaign fraud. Rove characterized these felonies and misdemeanors as a "youthful prank."

A political visionary, Rove recognized early on that he had the opportunity to leech onto not one, but two failed, third-rate presidents in the form of what is comically referred to as the "Bush Dynasty." Rove worked as an assistant to George Bush Sr. in the Republican National Committee during what is arguably the lowest point in the history of the Republican Party, the aftermath of the Nixon presidency.

For the next decade or so, Rove kept his nose buried up the ass of the nearest Bush. He helped George Jr. embarrass himself in a 1978 congressional bid, then bailed out of Bush Sr.'s first and failed presidential bid in 1979.

He maintained a close buddyship with the future president Junior, however. In a high point of Time Magazine's history of powerful journalistic coverage, a 2001 report revealed that George W. Bush's pet name for Rove is "Turd Blossom." No, really.

Rove helped Bush Jr. transform himself from rich-dilletante wastrel into rich-dilletante-wastrel-with-power in 1994, acting as his political adviser in Dubya's successful run for Texas governor. According to ABC News, more than half of the campaign's nearly $1 million budget went to Rove. Considering the challenge of making Bush look good, the sum was probably not out of line.

Rove's tactics tend toward making politics more about playing percentages than kissing babies. An early adopter of direct mail and targeted computer lists, Rove is widely credited with making the Texas GOP the cash cow is today. He also specialized in converting conservative Democrats who were already Republicans in every meaningful sense into Republicans in name as well, including arch-conservative and failed presidential candidate Phil Gramm, who suspiciously resembles a much thinner version of Rove himself.

Brought in to shepherd Junior to his rightful place as chief executive of the last superpower, Rove was largely responsible for creating the veneer of "compassionate conservatism" that led George Jr. to his triumphant loss in the 2000 presidential election.

First, Rove and his little buddy had to beat off a surprise primary challenge from charismatic war hero John McCain, whose sacrifices in a military prison camp in Vietnam looked all the more impressive against Bush's no-show National Guard travesty. Rove conducted a whisper-campaign to spread sleaze, pushing ridiculous allegations, such as that McCain was a stoolie while imprisoned in Vietnam. Rove was reputedly the brains behind a sleazy e-mail forward that alleged McCain had fathered an illegitimate black daughter, a lie which was "proven" by actual pictures of McCain with his black daughter, whom he had actually adopted.

Obviously, McCain should have been drinking and snorting coke throughout the '70s, rather than serving his country, enduring torture and adopting children. Bush trampled the challenger handily, and moved on to the general election, where he faced Vice President Al Gore.

Despite running against the stiffest Democratic candidate since Adlai Stevenson, Dubya couldn't quite clear the hurdle in the nationwide popular vote, which he lost by a margin five times larger than Nixon lost to Kennedy in 1960. But the pesky little electoral college thing sank Gore, thanks to Jeb and Florida. As early as Labor Day, Rove was doing the usual political dance and predicting it would be a close race. And how close it was! As mentioned above, Gore won the popular vote by a small but convincing margin. However, the electoral college — which actually dictates who will become president — was right down to the wire. The outcome of the election rode on the election results in Florida, which Gov. Jeb Bush had promised to "deliver" for his brother.

You all remember Florida. We won't beat it to death again here. Karl Rove's role in Florida was "damage control," and there was a lot of damage to control. Rove's basic public strategy consisted of "we won, so leave us alone." Voting irregularities, mandated recounts -- these things were trivia, bureaucracy, Democratic dirty tricks. "We won" was the message of the day.

Privately, of course, the Bush team was far from certain that they had, in fact, won. Jeb Bush promised to stay out of the recount debate, and instead entrusted it to his political appointees, who lived for no other reason than to curry favor. Rove didn't like the looks of this, so he stacked the deck in every conceivable way.

Among the tactics he employed: Loading Republican operatives from Washington, D.C., onto a bus and sending them to Florida, where they played the part of "angry mob" shouting and intimidating the hapless bureaucrats who had been lumped with the unenviable job of evaluating the ballots. Ah, those youthful pranks!

In the end, Bush came out on top, of course, catapulting Rove into a position of power that few Mr. Hooper-lookalikes have ever achieved. Although the White House repeatedly insisted that Rove had no policy-making role, the advice of his "White House Office of Strategic Initiatives" was sought on virtually every major decision that Bush administration faced.

After September 11, Rove found himself feeling cranky, according to investigative reporter Bob Woodward. Rove was ****** off because he wasn't being allowed to sit in on National Security Council and war cabinet meetings. Bush and Dick Cheney were afraid the politico's presence would send the wrong message.

Bear in mind, it wasn't that Rove wasn't being consulted. He was consulted about every single thing that happened in the White House and every decision that emerged from the Oval Office. He just wasn't being allowed to sit at the meetings himself. He had to get his updates after the fact from Bush, Cheney and Condoleezza Rice.

Despite his enormous power, Rove was mostly spared any real scrutiny by the mainstream media, which preferred to write with grudging admiration about his alleged political skills and chuckle over the "Turd Blossom" thing. By the time the Iraq invasion rolled around, Rove was back to sitting in the meetings.

His thoughtful evaluation (told to Woodward) of the ramifications of invading a sovereign country and deposing its leader? "The victor is always right."

Until late 2003, anyway, when an ugly little incident revealed just how dark the dark side of Karl Rove could be, in a burgeoning scandal that could have serious consequences for the Bush White House.

A former U.S. ambassador by the name of Joseph Wilson was one of the biggest political liabilities the White House faced in 2003. Wilson had been dispatched to Niger early in 2002 to investigate whether Iraq was trying to buy uranium there. Turns out, they weren't.

He reported this information back to the White House, which promptly ignored it. Bush cited the uranium story in his 2003 State of the Union address, Cheney cited it repeatedly, and the State Department cited it in several of its endless justifications for why the U.S. just had to invade Iraq.

When the war was "over" and still no Weapons of Mass Destruction had been found, Wilson pointed out to the media that he had TOLD the White House that there was no uranium purchase. He wrote about his fact-finding trip in the New York Times as well.

This did not please the White House. It was bad for politics, bad for poll numbers. And when the poll numbers are threatened, Karl Rove gets cranky. Homicidally cranky, apparently. Did I say apparently? I meant allegedly.

In July 2003, arch-conservative Robert Novak reported that Wilson's wife was a CIA agent, blowing her cover and endangering her life, not to mention national security. (Inexplicably, no one has gone after Novak over this issue.)

Wilson and his wife didn't take this lying down. They came out swinging. Wilson accused Rove of being the source for the leak that endangered his wife's life and destroyed her career.

"Rove is someone who at a minimum would have condoned it and certainly did nothing to knock it down for over a week after the article appeared. The outing of my wife was obviously a political or communications move. The head of the political operation is Karl Rove," Wilson told reporters.

In late September, the Justice Department launched a full criminal investigation into the leak, which is an aggravated felony punishable by up to three years in prison and a $10,000 fine (which actually seems a little low for treasonous activity and political intimidation designed to silence political opposition and whistleblowing).

The White House has refused to speculate on the source of the leak. Not only has it refused it speculate, it's actually refused to care. Despite widespread outrage, the White House declined to launch an internal investigation of the leak, with a Bush flak saying that it was "ridiculous" to suggest Rove was involved, and that "there has been absolutely nothing brought to our attention to suggest any White House involvement." I guess they don't get CNN on the cable system there.

Needless to say, the prospect of the Bush Justice Department investigating a Bush political operative doesn't thrill Democrats, who have already called for an independent counsel investigation.

Fortunately for Republicans, the party leadership cleverly disabused the nation about the worth of special prosecutors and impeachment proceedings a few years ago, when they hounded Bill Clinton into a constitutional crisis over blow jobs.

Considering the mounting list of actual scandals the Bushies are racking up, that strategy is proving to be prescient. Most Americans are about as thrilled at the prospect of a special prosecutor as they are at the prospect of a root canal.

In the meantime, just remember: don't cross Karl Rove. Whoops! We just did... dammit!

timeline
25 Dec 1950 Karl Rove born, Denver CO.
1970 Karl Rove sneaks into the campaign office of Illinois Democrat Alan Dixon and steals some letterhead. He then prints up 1,000 party invitations promising "free beer, free food, girls and a good time for nothing," which he then distributes to homeless shelters.
1971 Drops out, University of Utah.
1980 First person hired by the George HW Bush presidential campaign.
1981 Starts political consulting firm Karl Rove & Co.
1993 John Ashcroft campaign pays Karl Rove & Co. over $300,000 to help with his senate race. New York Times.
1999 The George W Bush campaign effort pays Karl Rove & Co. $2.5M for July through December. According to Rove, "About 30 percent of that is postage."
1999 Sells Karl Rove & Co..
Dec 2000 Signs a campaign disclosure form, but neglects to mention he is still President of Karl Rove & Co.
Mar 2001 White House political adviser Karl Rove meets with executives from Intel, seeking approval for a merger between a Dutch company and an Intel supplier. The government rubberstamps the deal, and Rove's $100,000 in Intel stock surges.
Apr 2001 Arnold Schwarzenegger meets with Bush political advisers to discuss whether the actor should run for Governor of California in 2002. Karl Rove says "That would be really nice. That would be really, really nice."
Jun 2001 White House political adviser Karl Rove meets with two pharmaceutical industry lobbyists. At the time, Rove holds almost $250,000 in drug industry stocks.
Jun 2001 White House political adviser Karl Rove meets with a group of Muslim activists including Sami Al-Arian.
12 Mar 2000 George W Bush and his wife Laura are photographed with, during a campaign stop at the Florida Strawberry Festival.
30 Jun 2001 White House political adviser Karl Rove divests his stocks in 23 companies, which included more than $100,000 in each Enron, Boeing, General Electric, and Pfizer.
30 Jun 2001 The White House admits that political adviser Karl Rove was involved in administration energy policy meetings, while at the same time holding stock in energy companies including Enron.
10 Apr 2003 Arnold Schwarzenegger meets with White House political adviser Karl Rove to discuss anything other than whether the actor should run for Governor of California in 2006.
14 May 2003 During a meeting with South Korean president Roh Moo-hyun, President George W Bush brings only two officials: National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice and political adviser Karl Rove.
29 Aug 2003 Retired ambassador Joseph C. Wilson names Karl Rove as the White House insider who leaked his wife's identity as a CIA operative to the press.
28 Mar 2004 Several hundred supporters of the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act pile out of school busses in front of Karl Rove's house in Washington D.C., swarming onto his front lawn and shouting for him to support the act. Rove appears briefly to order the mob off his property, at which point they rush his house, banging on the windows and doors. He finally agrees to talk to two representatives if the mob disperses; they do, and after a couple minutes of discussion he shuts the door on them midsentence.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

This is something else about the man:

NICE DREAMS

posted May 31, 2004 10:11 AM            

There are always some, perhaps like you Ozone who think your rights to protest have no bounds. Lucky they are it wasn't my home. Every single one of them would have been arrested and I would have sworn out a criminal conspiracy complaint against the organizers. After that there would have been civil suits for money damages against the group and every individual who showed up and violated my rights.

Mobs don't rule in America Ozone, the law does. Typical bunch of leftists, trying to get by mob action what they can't win at the ballot boxes.

posted May 31, 2004 05:12 PM            

... and you don't think that blowing the cover of a CIA operative is not an act of treason,right?

All I can say is that the last time someone that was that big, butt horns with these guys,ended up becoming swiss cheese instantly in broad daylight,in public,video taped,down in Dallas Texas,over 40 years ago!

I think that Rove would be more than happy to have so many protesters banging at his windows,for then they would make great possible witnesses,if things went down for him.

Rove should no longer look at the Bush Administration as a power play,but a life support system!

posted May 31, 2004 08:20 PM            

In 1963, well before the American public generally understood where Vietnam was, a young Army captain led a South Vietnamese unit through the A Shau Valley to systematically burn villages to the ground. This was to deprive the so-called Vietcong of any base of support, and was called "draining the sea," a reference to Mao's dictum that the guerrilla is the fish and the population is the sea.

That captain would later write, "I recall a phrase we used in the field, MAM, for military-age male. If a helo spotted a peasant in black pajamas who looked remotely suspicious, a possible MAM, the pilot would circle and fire in front of him. If he moved, his movement was judged evidence of hostile intent, and the next burst was not in front, but at him. Brutal? Maybe so. But an able battalion commander with whom I had served... was killed by enemy sniper fire while observing MAMs from a helicopter. And Pritchard was only one of many. The kill-or-be-killed nature of combat tends to dull fine perceptions of right and wrong."

On March 16, 1968, the US Infantry of C Company, Task Force Barker, 11th Infantry Brigade, Americal Division went into a Vietnamese hamlet designated My Lai 4 and killed 347 unarmed men, women, and children, engaging in rape and torture along the way for four hours before a US helicopter pilot who observed the massacre ordered his door gunners to open fire on the grunts if they didn't desist. The chopper pilot, however, did not report the massacre. Six months later, a young enlisted man, Spec 4 Tom Glen, sent a letter to General Creighton Abrams, commander of US forces in Vietnam. Without specifically mentioning My Lai, Glen said that murder had become a routine part of
Americal operations. The letter was shunted over to Americal Divison, and then to the
office of the same officer who had been leading the South Vietnamese arson campaign five years earlier, since promoted to major. He was now the deputy assistant Chief of Staff of the division--a functionary who was directed to craft a response to this report of widespread atrocities against Vietnamese civilians.

"In direct refutation of this portrayal," wrote the officer dismissively and with no investigation whatsoever, "is the fact that relations between Americal soldiers and the Vietnamese people are excellent." Perhaps he believed that those killed were MAMs, and therefore outside the protection of the Geneva Conventions and international law.
That officer is now the Secretary of State, Colin Powell, who is still dutifully spinning out prevarications and excuses for his massahs. Apparently his perceptions of right and wrong are still dulled by his brief experience of "combat," burning people's houses and barns and crops and ordering that young men who run from heliborne machine gun fire be killed because running away from machinegun fire is... "hostile."

Meanwhile, back in Iraq, the MAMs are back. Brigadier General Mark Kimmitt, the rat-faced boy of CENTCOM, with help from a Marine moron named Mattis, has resurrected the MAM to justify coordinated air-land attacks against weddings. At 3 AM, on May 19th, 2004, the Rakat family of Makr al-Deeb--a village in western Iraq--were winding down after an all night party celebrating a double wedding, when American war planes suddenly screamed in from over the dark horizon and dumped a fiery axis of bombs across the village. In the wake of the bombing "prep," ground troops equipped with night vision equipment, explosives, and expensive aimpoint sights on their weapons, swept over the shattered ruins and through the terrified and fleeing wedding guests delivering a kind of close-up coup.

Neil McKay writes a harrowing account in the Sunday Herald, in which witnesses describe the ground assault as little different than the My Lai incident, just shorter and on a smaller scale. Troops were razing buildings and killing people as they were encountered. People's children were killed in front of them.There is an unofficial excuse making the rounds that this was a mistake, that war planes targeted the wedding because this "alien culture" fires weapons into the air during celebrations. This comports well with the notion that being sodomized and sexually humiliated and beaten to death are "particularly offensive to Arabs," as if Americans, for example, would equate this
treatment to root canal work--unpleasant but tolerable.

If it were an error from the air, how in the hell did a ground force follow through for the air attack? I can tell you how. There was no error. These planes were not randomly cruising the Iraqi skies at 3 AM, and suddenly responding to ground fire. And ground troops don't suddenly show up at the same place. Combined air-ground operations require detailed planning and coordination, which means this attack was planned in advance. I don't know what really happened that killed 45 people at Makr al-Deeb, but I can assure readers that this premeditation is part of it.

The official line, adopted as the Abu Ghraib scandal metastasizes into a political crisis for the Bush administration, is that there was no error at all, and that there was no wedding. They were combatants, pure and simple, and goddamit we are not going to apologize to anyone for it. Foreign fighters every one of them, and that whole ******* village is just a pack of rag-headed liars."How many people go into the middle of the desert to hold a wedding eighty miles from the nearest civilization," scoffed Major General James Mattis of the 1st Marines. "There were more than two dozen MILITARY-AGED MALES. "Either Mattis is shameless or he is an idiot. We can't rule out either... or both. It's in the job description for senior officers right now--probably a line on their officer evaluation reports--if they want their careers to progress.

Makr al-Deeb is a real village in a real civilization that is, oh by the way General, a hell of a lot older than the one you hail from. Kimmitt apparently felt compelled to top Mattis for stupidity, when he blurted out last week that, "There may have been some kind of
celebration. Bad people have celebrations, too."

The manufacture of evidence is now experiencing a speed-up, with Kimmitt telling a yet-again-obedient press corps that there were military items and even possibly cocaine (!) on the site (no fetishes for devil worship... yet) , and no evidence of a wedding. To bolster this preposterous case, they have provided snapshots of (gasp) binoculars, and virtually the entire US press corps has forgotten that Colin Powell presented doctored photos to the UN just last year. The press forgot, because they never reported it. Now they are
submissively echoing the Kimmitt evidence photos and the cover story that goes with
them. Kimmitt says there is categorically no evidence of a wedding at all, and he
stubbornly denies that ANY children were killed, even though every Iraqi medical
official says there were at least 15. Liars, according to Kimmitt. "In direct refutation of this portrayal," Kimmitt might have said, "is the fact that relations between American soldiers and the Iraqi people are excellent."Lo and behold, however, there is an independent press still surviving in the marginal niches of post-modern capitalism--where the image is all--and they are hauling facts out from time to time that smell up the area like a pile of decomposing bodies. A video has surfaced of the site, and there is ample
evidence of dead children, musical instruments, and all the paraphernalia of... a wedding. Oops.

The footage was shown on Al-Arabiya television, whereupon the weasel Kimmitt and his dour gangsters demanded that Al-Arabiya give them the name of the cameraman who shot the video. Maybe they planned a Mazen Dana treatment for the offender--Dana being the Reuters journalist who was shot dead by US troops when his camera's eye had drifted too close to their actions. We are reaching a point of polarization with respect to this war, where these oxygen thieves with suits and stars feel they can get away with the MAM argument, justifying the murder of anyone who is male, military-aged and brown. We have reached some kind of social baseline of racially stupefied consensus,
where all that PC posturing is no longer necessary, where another half-wit in Congress can say he is "outraged at the outrage," and there is 35% of the US population that will sit perfectly still for it, many even cheering it on. For that polarization to be complete, we need 35% of the population that sets aside their maddening liberal squeamishness and dithering and demands that these suits and stars be strung up by their testicles.
We need a good, in-your-face, knock-down, drag-out fight in this place.

Anyone who thinks, at this point, that the election of that hound-dog from Massachusetts--when he promises to send MORE troops to Iraq--is going to fundamentally change any of this is smoking angel dust. It's getting close to grown-up time, and we're going to have to put aside our electoral cake and ice cream.

This place hasn't had a good old fashioned DEEP-DOWN change since Reconstruction. It's time. Stan Goff is the author of "Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US
Invasion of Haiti" (Soft Skull Press, 2000) and of the upcoming book "Full Spectrum
Disorder" (Soft Skull Press, 2003). He is a member of the BRING THEM HOME NOW! coordinating committee, a retired Special Forces master sergeant, and the father of an active duty soldier. Email for BRING THEM HOME NOW! is bthn@mfso.org.
Goff can be reached at: sherrynstan@igc.org

posted May 31, 2004 08:38 PM            

What becomes a legend most? Not this

Is Colin Powell melting down?

It's hard to come up with another explanation for his jaw-dropping behavior last week before the House International Relations Committee. There he sat, recounting for the umpety-umpth time why, back in February 2003, he believed the pessimistic estimates about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. "I went and lived at the CIA for about four days," he began, "to make sure that nothing was—" Suddenly, he stopped and glared at a Democratic committee staffer who was smirking and shaking his head. "Are you shaking your head for something, young man back there?" Powell grumbled. "Are you part of the proceedings?"

Rep. Sherrod Brown, an Ohio Democrat, objected, "Mr. Chairman, I've never heard a witness reprimand a staff person in the middle of a question."

Powell muttered back, "I seldom come to a meeting where I am talking to a congressman and I have people aligned behind you, giving editorial comment by head shakes."

Oh, my.

Here is a man who faced hardships in the Bronx as a kid, bullets in Vietnam as a soldier, and bureaucratic bullets through four administrations in Washington, a man who rose to the ranks of Army general, national security adviser, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and secretary of state, a man who thought seriously about running for president—and he gets bent out of shape by some snarky House staffer?

Powell's outburst is a textbook sign of overwhelming stress. Maybe he was just having a bad day. Then again, he's also been having a bad three years.

As George Bush's first term nears its end, Powell's tenure as top diplomat is approaching its nadir. On the high-profile issues of the day, he seems to have almost no influence within the administration. And his fateful briefing one year ago before the U.N. Security Council—where he attached his personal credibility to claims of Iraqi WMD—has destroyed his once-considerable standing with the Democrats, not to mention our European allies, most of the United Nations, and the media.

At times, Powell has taken his fate with resigned humor. Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in The New Yorker last year of a diplomatic soiree that Powell attended on the eve of war, at which a foreign diplomat recited a news account that Bush was sleeping like a baby. Powell reportedly replied, "I'm sleeping like a baby, too. Every two hours, I wake up, screaming."

At other times, though, Powell must be frustrated beyond measure. One can imagine the scoldings he takes from liberal friends for playing "good soldier" in an administration that's treated him so shabbily and that's rejected his advice so brazenly. That senseless dressing-down of the committee staffer—a tantrum that no one with real power would ever indulge in—can best be seen as a rare public venting of Powell's maddened mood.

The decline of Powell's fortunes is a tragic tale of politics: so much ambition derailed, so much accomplishment nullified.

From the start of this presidency, and to a degree that no one would have predicted when he stepped into Foggy Bottom with so much pride and energy, Powell has found himself almost consistently muzzled, outflanked, and humiliated by the true powers—Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. (Bureaucratic battles between Foggy Bottom and the Pentagon have been a feature of many presidencies, but Powell has suffered the additional—and nearly unprecedented—indignity of swatting off continuous rear-guard assaults from his own undersecretary of state, John Bolton, an aggressive hard-liner who was installed at State by Cheney* for the purpose of diverting and exhausting the multilateralists.)

One of Powell's first acts as secretary of state was to tell a reporter that the Bush administration would pick up where Bill Clinton left off in negotiations with North Korea—only to be told by Cheney that it would do no such thing. He had to retract his statement. For the next nine months, he disappeared so definitively that Time magazine asked, on its cover of Sept. 10, 2001, "Where Is Colin Powell?"

The events and aftermath of 9/11 put Powell still farther on the sidelines. He scored something of a victory a year later, when Bush decided, over the opposition of Cheney and Rumsfeld, to take his case for war against Iraq to the U.N. General Assembly. But Powell's attempts to resolve the crisis diplomatically ended in failure.

Once the invasion got under way, the principles of warfare that he'd enunciated as a general—the need to apply overwhelming force on the battlefield (which, during the last Gulf War, was dubbed the "Powell Doctrine")—were harshly rejected (and, in this case, rightly so—Rumsfeld's plan to invade with lighter, more agile forces was a stunning success, at least in the battlefield phase of the war). Powell's objections to Ariel Sharon's departure from the Israeli-Palestinian "road map" were overridden by a White House where Eliot Abrams had been put in charge of Middle East policy. Powell's statements on the Middle East came to be so widely ignored—because no one saw them as reflecting U.S. policy—that Bush sent Condoleezza Rice to the region when he wanted to send a message that would be taken seriously. When Bush dispatched an emissary to Western Europe after the war to lobby for Iraqi debt-cancellation and make overtures for renewing alliances, he picked not Powell but James Baker, the Bush family's longtime friend and his father's secretary of state.

Ian Bremmer, president of the Eurasia Group, a political risk-assessment firm, notes that Powell has scored significant policy achievements on China, Georgia, and the India-Pakistan dispute. But these are issues over which neither Cheney nor Rumsfeld has much at stake—politically, ideologically, or financially.

There have also been occasions, on higher-profile topics, when Powell has broken through the barricades and advanced his positions. He (and Condi Rice) persuaded Bush, over Rumsfeld's opposition, to implement the U.S.-Russian accord reducing strategic missiles. However, he couldn't stop the president from pulling out of the Anti-Ballistic-Missile Treaty.

Last September, Powell met with President Bush in the Oval Office to make the case for presenting a new U.N. resolution on the occupation of Iraq—and to announce that the Joint Chiefs agreed with him. This was a daring move: Rumsfeld opposed going back to the United Nations; Powell, the retired general, had gone around him for support. Even here, though, Powell's triumph was partial, at best. Bush went back to the United Nations, but the resulting resolution did not call for internationalizing political power in Iraq to anywhere near the degree that Powell favored.

Similarly, Powell has had a few successes at getting Bush to participate in negotiations with North Korea over its nuclear-weapons program. (Cheney and Rumsfeld oppose even sitting down for talks.) Yet Bush has declined to adopt any position on what an acceptable accord, short of North Korea's unilateral disarmament, might be. More than a year into this perilous drama, the fundamentals of U.S. policy haven't changed at all.

Powell has also won the occasional battle—or, more accurately, has been on the winning side—when his position converges with Bush's vital political interests. For instance, against the advice of Cheney and Rumsfeld, Bush will probably turn over at least some political control in Iraq to the United Nations. He will do so not because Powell has advised such a course, but because the presidential election is coming up and Bush needs to show voters that he has an exit strategy and that American soldiers will not be dying in Baghdad and Fallujah indefinitely.

If there is a second Bush term, Powell will almost certainly not be in it. News stories have reported that he'll step down. He has stopped short of quitting already not just because he's a good soldier, but because that's not what ambitious Cabinet officers do in American politics. Those who resign in protest usually write themselves out of power for all time. They are unlikely to be hired even after the opposition party resumes the Executive Office because they're seen as loose cannons.

Powell, who at one point might have been an attractive presidential candidate for either party, has fallen into a double-damned trap. He can't quit for reasons cited above; yet his often-abject loyalty to Bush, especially on the Iraq question, makes him an unseemly candidate for a future Democratic administration.

He seems to have launched a rehabilitation campaign, to escape this dreaded state. Last month, after David Kay resigned as the CIA's chief weapons inspector and proclaimed that Iraq probably didn't have weapons of mass destruction after all, Powell told a reporter that he might not have favored going to war if he'd known there were no WMD a year ago. He almost instantly retracted his words, as all internal critics of Bush policies seem to do.

Powell's best option, after January, may be to abandon his ambitions for further public office, nab a lucrative job in the private sector, and write the most outrageous kiss-and-tell political memoir that the world has ever seen.

Correction, Feb. 19, 2004: The piece originally identified John Bolton as the No. 2 in the State Department. In fact, Richard Armitage, the Deputy Secretary, is the department's No. 2. Bolton is one of six under secretaries. Return to the corrected sentence.

posted June 03, 2004 04:32 PM            

President Bush said Thursday that Tenet was leaving for personal reasons. ''I will miss him,'' the president said.

Tenet, 51, came to the White House to inform Bush about his decision Wednesday night and the two men talked for about an hour.

Tenet's announcement came amid new storms over intelligence issues, including an alleged Pentagon leak of highly classified intelligence to Ahmad Chalabi, an Iraqi politician. At the same time, a federal grand jury is pressing its investigation of the leak of a CIA operative's name, and Bush acknowledged he might be questioned in the case.

The CIA denied that Tenet's resignation was connected with any of the those issues. ''Absolutely not,'' said Mark Mansfield, CIA spokesman.

Tenet addressed CIA employees and said, ''It was a personal decision, and had only one basis in fact: the well being of my wonderful family, nothing more and nothing less.''

The news caught Washington by surprise. Bush informed his senior staff Thursday morning at an Oval Office meeting that included Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of State Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser. The president told his staff he did not want anyone speculating that Tenet was leaving for anything other than personal reasons, a White House official said.

''He told me he was resigning for personal reasons. I told him I'm sorry he's leaving. He's done a superb job on behalf of the American people,'' the president said at a hurriedly arranged announcement before boarding a helicopter to begin a trip to Europe. Cheney stood outside the Oval Office to watch Bush's announcement.

Tenet will serve until mid-July. 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.

Tenet had given some consideration to leaving last summer, but decided to stay on. Some close to him believe he wanted to catch al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden, who remains at large and is believed to be on the Afghan-Pakistani border.

Like many who resign from government, Tenet plans to take time off with his family, and eventually pursue public speaking, teaching, writing or working in the private sector, according to the officials close to him.

''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.''

FBI Director Robert S. Mueller III praised Tenet. ''George has sought at every turn to bridge the gap between the CIA and FBI with one goal in mind - the security of the American public,'' Mueller said. ''Due to his constant efforts to bring the intelligence agencies closer together, we are better able to predict the actions of our adversaries and to protect Americans from evolving transnational threats.''

But Sen. Pat Roberts, R-Kansas, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the intelligence community had to be held accountable for its failings.

More on This Story


· Career Successes and Failures
· Good and Bad News for Bush
· Tenet Called WMD Case a 'Slam Dunk"
· Tenet's Effort to Turn Around the CIA
· CIA Bio of Tenet


''Simply put, I think the community is somewhat in denial over the full extent ... of the shortcoming of its work on Iraq and also on 9/11,'' Roberts said at a breakfast Thursday morning, apparently unaware of Tenet's decision. ''We need fresh thinking within the community, especially within the Congress, to enable the intelligence community to change and adapt to the dangerous world in which we live.''

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 al-Qaida.

In April, 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.

''I'm surprised,'' said Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle. ''I don't think anyone saw it coming. I think we need to know more about the reasons why this surprise announcement came today,'' the South Dakota Democrat said.

''Mr. Tenet's been under very harsh criticism. I think clearly he's been under great pressure and some criticism. Whether or not that's a factor is not something I can comment on,'' Daschle said.

Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, said Tenet ''restored morale and provided stability and continuity at a crucial time.''

''I have been critical of the prewar intelligence on Iraq's WMD and ties to terror, as well as failures leading up to the attacks of 9-11,'' she noted. ''With Tenet's departure, the president has the opportunity to fix these problems by transforming the job that Tenet held.''

Said Goss: ''Just boat loads of stuff have been dumped on him by all kinds of people. He was given the job of rebuilding an agency that had been depleted.''

House Speaker Dennis Hastert said: ''He served his country a long time. History will tell what the implications of his tenure were.''

''I think history will tell,'' the Illinois Republican said when asked how Tenet's performance would be judged. ''It's too early to make that snap judgment.''

''I think history will either vindicate him or say, 'Hey there was a problem there','' Hastert said.

Retired Adm. Stansfield Turner said he thought Tenet was pushed out.

''I think the president feels he's in enough trouble that he's got to begin to cast some of the blame for the morass that we are in in Iraq to somebody else, and this was one subtle way to do it,'' said Turner, himself a former CIA director.

Tenet spoke to CIA personnel at a late-morning gathering at the CIA auditorium. ''It was a personal decision, and had only one basis in fact: the well being of my wonderful family, nothing more and nothing less,'' he said, according to a CIA official who was willing to describe Tenet's talk with CIA workers but only on grounds of anonymity because Tenet had spoken for himself.

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.

Some close to Tenet have said the job of 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.

06-03-04 12:12 EDT

posted June 03, 2004 04:53 PM            

WASHINGTON (June 3) - George Tenet, whose resignation as CIA director was announced on Thursday, was one of the closest advisers to President Bush on national security and played a key role in crafting the president's contested case for war with Iraq.

A veteran Washington insider who had also worked closely with President Bill Clinton, especially on Middle East peace, the burly, straight-talking Tenet held the top national intelligence job for the second-longest term -- seven years.

The straight-talking Tenet helped rebuild morale at the CIA after some years of instability and at a time of calls for more focus on human spy work after criticism that U.S. intelligence had become over-reliant on high-tech methods like satellites.

But he has been drawn into disputes over the quality of the intelligence before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks and over the reliability of the case that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the main reason cited for last year's invasion.

Critics of the Iraq war say he and other members of the Bush administration overestimated the threat from Iraq, saying the evidence was based too much on the now discredited Iraqi opposition leader Ahmad Chalabi.

In a book on events leading up to the Iraq invasion, journalist Robert Woodward quoted Tenet as telling Bush in December 2002, "Don't worry, it's a slam-dunk," using a basketball expression for an easy score to portray the weapons evidence as a certainty.

Tenet, 51, took the top job as Director of Central Intelligence, which includes overseeing all the major intelligence agencies including the CIA, in July 11, 1997.

This year he became the second-longest serving CIA director ever, behind CIA chief Allen Dulles, who served at the height of the Cold War from 1953-1961.

Intelligence experts attribute Tenet's staying power to his Washington insider's savvy, his negotiating skills that made him a trusted mediator for Palestinians and Israelis, and the successes he did have -- despite the high-profile failures -- against the militant Muslim group al-Qaida.

FIGHTING AL-QAIDA

Al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden has not been caught but about two-thirds of the network's top leadership have either been captured or killed.

Tenet was also credited with providing stability to the CIA, which had three directors in the five years before him.

Before his resignation, the Republican Bush repeatedly expressed confidence in Tenet -- a registered Democrat -- despite calls for his resignation, particularly from some senior members of Congress from the president's own party.

The Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, following an elaborate plot involving al-Qaida agents inside and outside the United States, were seen as a major intelligence failure.

Tenet was also spy chief when the USS Cole warship was struck in Yemen and when U.S. forces bombed the Chinese Embassy during the Yugoslav air campaign due to inaccurate targeting provided by intelligence agencies.

"Tenet I think endeared himself to George Bush because he and the CIA were ready on 9/12 to give him some help. And really they were very effective in helping to end up driving the Taliban and al-Qaida out of Afghanistan," said former CIA chief Stansfield Turner, who served under Democratic President Jimmy Carter.

Turner also described Tenet as a man who demonstrated over the years that he was intensely loyal to his superiors.

After Bush administration statements about an "gathering" danger from Iraq's nuclear, biological and chemical weapons programs turned out to be hollow, Tenet accepted that some of the intelligence may have been off the mark but insisted his agency had done the best it could with uncertain material.

TAKING RESPONSIBILITY

He took responsibility last year for the inclusion of an inaccurate claim that Iraq sought uranium from Africa in Bush's prewar State of the Union address in January 2003.

Some intelligence experts say Tenet was slow to restructure intelligence operations to deal more effectively with post-Cold War threats from terrorism, partly because of the CIA director's limited authority over the intelligence budget which is mostly under Pentagon control.

He is credited with raising morale in an agency battered by budget cuts in the 1990s and his charisma has won popularity among his troops, like the time he led a conga line at CIA's 50th anniversary party.

"He gets very high marks for bringing the agency back into a sense of itself, of elan, being part of something that is very unique and special," a former intelligence official said.

Tenet was CIA director when, under a congressionally-sponsored plan, the agency's headquarters in Langley, Va., was named for Bush's father, who was CIA director in 1976 and later went on to become president.

George J. Tenet was born January 5, 1953, in New York. He received a bachelor's degree from Georgetown University School of Foreign Service in 1976 and a master's from Columbia University School of International Affairs in 1978.

In his speeches to college students and young people, Tenet would recount his personal background as evidence that people of varied upbringing could succeed in the United States.

Tenet said his mother escaped from southern Albania on a British submarine just as the Iron Curtain was closing after World War Two and his father came to the United States from Greece just prior to the Great Depression of the 1930s speaking no English and without any money.

"Each of you has family stories of courage and sacrifice. They are part of your heritage -- reminders of what your values are and who you are as men and women. Never forget them," Tenet said in a speech at a graduation ceremony.

"They will guide you through the darkest days of your life, and sweeten your happiest moments," he said.

06/03/04 12:58 ET

posted June 03, 2004 04:55 PM            

President Bush loses a trusted adviser but also a symbol of high-profile intelligence failures.

By Peter Grier and Faye Bowers | Staff writers of The Christian Science Monitor

WASHINGTON – For the White House, there's bad news and good news in CIA Director George Tenet's sudden resignation.
The bad news is that it deprives President Bush of someone he insists has been a trusted adviser. The personal chemistry between the backslapping Mr. Bush and his gregarious chief of intelligence has always been good.

The good news is that an official who attracted criticism as surely as if he were a lightning rod on top of the CIA's Langley, Va., headquarters is now gone.

The upcoming 9/11 commission report is almost certain to hit the CIA, among others, for its failures prior to the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. That's on top of recent controversies concerning various intelligence leaks, and the mistaken US predictions about Saddam Hussein and weapons of mass destruction.

"You can understand why he might resign under those circumstances," says Jim Walsh, a security expert at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, Mass.

Bush, not Mr. Tenet himself, announced the resignation. Just prior to leaving for Europe, where he will celebrate the 60th anniversary of D-Day and confer with various world leaders, Bush told reporters that his CIA chief had resigned for "personal reasons."

Tenet told the president of his decision Wednesday night. He will stay on at Langley until mid-July. After he leaves, the CIA's deputy director, John McLaughlin, will serve as acting director.

Bush said that Tenet had done a superb job and was "the kind of public servant you like to work with."

"He has been a strong leader in the war on terror, and I will miss him," Bush said.

A former staff director of the Senate Committee on Intelligence, Tenet had run the CIA for seven years. In the Bush White House, he was a rarity - a Clinton-era official kept on and accepted into the inner circle of administration power.

On the plus side, Tenet brought stability to an agency that was in some turmoil when he arrived. He had access to, and was trusted by, two US chief executives of different parties who were themselves very different personalities.

That "tells you something about the man's skills and endurance," says Judith Yaphe, an Iraq expert at the National Defense University and a intelligence analyst at the CIA.

But fairly or not, Tenet will also have to bear responsibility for things that happened on his watch. Most important, the intelligence community failed to detect the work of the 9/11 plotters. And it insisted that Iraq continued to work on weapons of mass destruction.

Prior to the invasion of Iraq, Tenet reportedly insisted that the case for Iraqi WMD was a "slam-dunk." That has demonstrably not been the case.

"WMD and 9/11 will always haunt the agency," says Ms. Yaphe.

At the CIA, Tenet was well liked, but not wildly so. He was not an intelligence lifer who had come up through the ranks - but neither was he a knife-wielding cost-cutter ousting veteran agents.

"He was seen as doing a job and tackling something that needed to be done - complete reformation of the intelligence community," says Stanley Bedlington, a former senior analyst in the CIA's counterterrorist center.

Outside the agency, however, Tenet was becoming a symbol of faulty intelligence to the administration's critics. The failures with the 9/11 plotters and Iraq's purported WMD were just part of it. Tenet was reportedly responsible for the inclusion of the assertion in a State of the Union address that Iraq was seeking uranium in Niger - an assertion later deemed false by US intelligence.

Tenet has also been tarred by the Wilson affair.

A retired US ambassador, Joseph Wilson, had looked into the Niger connection and debunked it even before the president asserted its truth in a speech. After Mr. Wilson's role became public, the fact that his wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA covert operative was leaked to the press.

The Justice Department is currently conducting an inquiry into who might have done that leaking.

More recently, federal investigators have begun looking into which US government official might have leaked the fact that the US had broken Iranian codes to Ahmed Chalabi, the former Iraqi exile who has long been a favorite of some in the Pentagon.

"Maybe [the Chalabi investigation] was the one that broke the camel's back" and convinced Tenet to leave, says Mr. Walsh of the JFK School.

Speaking to CIA employees in the agency's auditorium Thursday, Tenet said that the decision to resign was the most difficult one he had ever had to make.

He said that the reasons were personal - "the well-being of my wonderful family and nothing less."

His son was in second grade when he started at the CIA, noted Tenet. Now that son will be a senior in high school this fall.

"He said he's had a wonderful son. Now he wants to be a wonderful father," says a CIA official who heard the talk.

posted June 03, 2004 05:13 PM            

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- About two weeks before deciding to invade Iraq, President Bush was told by CIA Director George Tenet there was a "slam dunk case" that dictator Saddam Hussein had unconventional weapons, according to a new book by Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward.

That declaration was "very important" in his decision making, according to "Plan of Attack," which is being excerpted this week in The Post.

Bush also made his decision to go to war without consulting Vice President Dick Cheney, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld or Secretary of State Colin Powell, Woodward's book says.

Powell was not even told until after the Saudi ambassador was allowed to review top-secret war plans in an effort to enlist his country's support for the invasion, according to Woodward, who has written or co-written several best-selling books on Washington politics, including "All the President's Men" with Carl Bernstein.

The book also reports that in the summer of 2002, $700 million was diverted from a congressional appropriation for the war in Afghanistan to develop a war plan for Iraq.

Woodward suggests the diversion may have been illegal, and that Congress was deliberately kept in the dark about what had been done.

Woodward talked about his book Sunday on CBS's "60 Minutes."

The book is based on interviews with 75 people involved in planning for the war, including Bush, the only source who spoke for attribution.

Woodward quotes Bush as saying he did not feel the need to ask his principal advisers, including Cheney, Rumsfeld and Powell, whether they thought he ought to go to war because "I could tell what they thought."

But he said he did discuss his thinking with Condoleezza Rice, his national security adviser.

"I didn't need to ask them their opinion about Saddam Hussein. If you were sitting where I sit, you could be pretty clear. I think we've got an environment where people feel free to express themselves," Bush is quoted as saying.

In the book, Woodward reports that on November 21, 2001 -- about three months after the September 11 attacks and shortly after the Taliban regime crumbled in Afghanistan -- Bush took Rumsfeld aside, ordered him to develop a war plan for Iraq and told him to keep it secret.

'The best we've got?'
As the war planning progressed, on December 21, 2002, Tenet and his top deputy, John McLaughlin, went to the White House to brief Bush and Cheney on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, Woodward reports.

The president, unimpressed by the presentation of satellite photographs and intercepts, pressed Tenet and McLaughlin, saying their information would not "convince Joe Public" and asking Tenet, "This is the best we've got?" Woodward reports.

According to Woodward, Tenet reassured the president that "it's a slam dunk case" that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

In his CBS interview, Woodward said he "asked the president about this, and he said it was very important to have the CIA director, 'slam-dunk' is as I interpreted it, a sure thing, guaranteed."

About two weeks later, shortly after New Year's Day 2003, Bush -- frustrated with unfruitful U.N. weapons inspections -- made up his mind to go to war after consulting with Rice, according to Woodward.

She urged him to act on his stated threat to take military action if Saddam did not provide a full accounting of his weapons of mass destruction, Woodward reports.

"If you're going to carry out coercive diplomacy, you have to live with that decision," Rice is quoted as telling Bush.

On "Face The Nation" Sunday, Rice insisted that Bush's conversation with her in January did not amount to a decision to go to war, which she said wasn't made until March when military strikes were ordered.

"Part of the relationship between a national security adviser and a president is that the president, in a sense, kind of thinks out loud, if I could put it that way," she said.

Questions about Hans Blix
Woodward also reports that U.S. officials were skeptical about the weapons inspections because they were receiving intelligence information indicating that chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix was not reporting everything he had uncovered and was not doing everything he said he was doing.

Some of the president's top advisers thought Blix was a liar, according to the book.

Shortly after the meeting with Rice, Bush told Rumsfeld, "Look, we're going to have to do this, I'm afraid," according to the book.

Subsequently, on January 11, Rumsfeld, Cheney and Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers met in Cheney's office with Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the United States.

At that meeting, Myers showed Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador, a map labeled "top secret noforn," meaning that it was not to be seen by any foreign national, Woodward told CBS.

The map outlined the U.S. battle plan for Iraq, which was to begin with an air attack, followed by land invasions moving north from Kuwait and south from Turkey, according to the book.

Myers said Sunday on CNN's "Late Edition" that though he had not read Woodward's book, he was familiar with the account of the meeting, and it was "basically correct."

"At that time, we were looking for support of our allies and partners in the region. Saudi Arabia's been a strategic partner in the region over a very long time," he said.

Powell's skepticism
Two days after the meeting with Bandar, on January 13, Bush met with Powell in the Oval Office to inform his chief diplomat that he had decided to go to war.

"You know you're going to be owning this place?" Powell is reported as telling Bush, cautioning him that the United States would be assuming the responsibility for the postwar situation.

Bush told Powell that he understood the ramifications, Woodward said.

Despite his reservations about the policy, Powell told the president he would support him, deciding that it would be "an unthinkable act of disloyalty" to both Bush and U.S. troops to walk away at that point, according to Woodward.

In her interview with "Face The Nation," Rice disputed the suggestion that Powell was kept less in the loop than the Saudi ambassador.

She said again that the decision to go to war did not take place until March, well after Bush had informed Powell of his intentions and after his U.N. presentation.

"The secretary of state was privy to all of the conversations with the president, all of the briefings for the president," she said.

"It's just not the proper impression that somehow Prince Bandar was in the know in a way that Secretary Powell was not."

posted June 03, 2004 05:57 PM            

Two men who would later each run the world's premier foreign intelligence service sat down to lunch at a tony Italian restaurant in Washington, D.C. It was late 1992, and Jim Woolsey, then head of the executive committee at the Smithsonian, was looking for a general counsel. He had called George Tenet, staff director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Tenet, Woolsey says, listened to his pitch and asked smart questions. Woolsey was encouraged; maybe he'd found his man. Only at lunch's end, after Woolsey had paid the bill, did Tenet deliver the punch line: "But, Jim, there's one problem with the general counsel's job: I'm not a lawyer."

God knows it helps, if you're the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, to be a little cunning. It also helps, in these days of Iraq and al Qaeda—not to mention North Korea and Iran—to have a sense of humor. George Tenet, 50, has now held one of the most difficult jobs in the world for six years, making him the third-longest-serving director of Central Intelligence (DCI) in the Agency's 56-year history. And the period during which he has presided is one in which the word "tumultuous" hardly does justice.

When Tenet became acting director in 1996, he was the CIA's seventh boss in five years. Budgets had been slashed brutally, and the cutting would continue (needless to say, the CIA's budget is classified). President Clinton was not a particular admirer of the Agency, and the coin of the realm in Washington—face time with the President—barely existed for the DCI. (When a crackpot flew a light plane into the White House in 1994, the then-famous joke in Washington was that it was Jim Woolsey trying to get a meeting with Clinton. This was a time, mind you, when people joked about planes flying into buildings.) Agency morale had plummeted, nowhere more so than in the fabled directorate of operations—the "DO," as the spooks call it—home to the undercover spies who do the Agency's most basic and important work: recruiting foreign sources abroad to betray their countries. Devastated by scandal and desperately in search of a post-Cold War mission, the DO was "practically inert," says a former operative. "It was the nadir," agrees Marty Petersen, the Agency's deputy executive director and a 31-year veteran. "A lot of people quit, and a lot more people thought about it. Myself included."

That was the Agency George Tenet inherited. Today, six years on, it is a very different place. Morale is up. Recruitment is soaring. The popular culture, for the most part, treats the CIA with respect. The President cares a lot about what the Agency thinks, and Tenet briefs him six days a week when Bush is in town. Even despite its pre-Sept. 11 intelligence failures—a date now routinely referred to as the most massive intelligence blunder since Pearl Harbor—the Agency is more competent than it has been in some time (witness its critical role during the war in Afghanistan), if not yet as competent as it needs to be (witness the embarrassing hunt for Iraq's weapons of mass destruction). Some of this transformation, of course, is attributable to Sept. 11. But some of it, people in and out of the Agency agree, is due to the DCI himself.

In mid-September the CIA opened the doors at its 258-acre campus-like headquarters in the woods of Langley, Va., to a FORTUNE reporter in a way it rarely does. For three days officials up and down the ranks submitted to interviews. They talked about where the Agency had been, where it is now, and what still needs to be done in what is, let's face it, a grim time for the country.

Secrecy. Mystique. Aura. They all appear daily at the Central Intelligence Agency. How the U.S.'s foreign intelligence service does business remains a mystery to most Americans. For some the Agency is the stuff of fantasy—think the butt-kicking, comely star of the hit TV show Alias—for others it's a secretive, money-wasting joke. "A combination of James Bond and Maxwell Smart," concedes John McLaughlin, the deputy director of intelligence, the second highest official in the Agency. (He's not so far off. Two otherwise intelligent friends, jokingly told that I'd spent a few days at the Agency and "got to use Tenet's shoe phone," replied—not jokingly—"He doesn't really have a shoe phone, does he?")

What's striking to realize, after talking to Agency people from Tenet on down, is how businesslike they are about their jobs. That's "businesslike" in the sense that FORTUNE readers will understand. Breaking down barriers between departments. Getting departments that didn't trust each other to grow up and cooperate. Getting abreast of rapidly advancing technology. Focusing on the core mission of the institution. The CIA, known for years as the "company," has never made a profit, but it is, in many ways, a classic turnaround story.

When Tenet, a New York native, took over, he knew he had to make an immediate impression on his employees. This was the post-Cold War era, when politicians of both parties were eager to spend the so-called peace dividend. Funding the CIA might have been more important than funding the National Parks Service—but only just. On May 5, 1998, Tenet gave a speech to 500 deeply cynical Agency employees who had gathered in the headquarters auditorium. "Oh, yeah, sure," Tenet now says, placing himself in the audience's shoes, "five directors in seven years. Here comes yet another strategic vision, great.'' In short, he says, "I needed to get their attention.'' To do so he was typically, if brutally, direct. He stood them over an open grave. He noted that the CIA had just passed its 50th anniversary, then said that unless things change, fast, "We will never get to our 60th. We will no longer be relevant."

His first priority was to rebuild the spy shop, the DO. Cynics say that the first thing the DO does, before it recruits any spies overseas, "is recruit the DCI." That's why, they say, the DO never changes, why it's the last to know when a traitor like Aldrich Ames is selling the crown jewels to the Russians. The cynics are not completely wrong. But in this case, that recruitment needed to happen—and the target, Tenet, was willing. The DO had been "devastated in the '90s," says Jim Pavitt, who as head of the directorate is the nation's reigning spook. In 1995 the Agency trained all of 25 operations officers, a "frighteningly low'' number, Pavitt says. Nearly 30% of the CIA's stations, or overseas offices, were shut between 1991 and 1997. And the trend lines didn't seem as if they would change anytime soon.

Tenet does not try to gussy up the business of the CIA. "We steal secrets," he says. "We steal secrets so the President can know about things happening in the short and long run in places that he needs to know about. That's what we do." And without "humint," as human intelligence is known, it is very hard to steal secrets. In an era of declining resources, Tenet cobbled together enough money for the DO to increase its number of recruits and boost their training. "Unfortunately," says Pavitt, "there's no pill you can give a new recruit that would give him seven or eight years' experience in the field." So the CIA also began assembling a team of mostly retired Agency operatives who could be sent into the field quickly, depending on events. "Surge capacity," Pavitt calls it. Those efforts got a boost in 1999, when Congress, thanks mainly to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, kicked in an extra $1 billion for the Agency. In late 2001, after the Sept. 11 attacks, some of the first Agency people deployed to Afghanistan were retired officers with experience in that country. One literally carried a suitcase full of cash that he distributed to Northern Alliance leaders and others who were critical in eventually toppling the Taliban.

Internally, Tenet tried to transform what had become a seriously dysfunctional place. For help he turned to Wall Street. In 1998, Tenet hired A.B. "Buzzy" Krongard as counselor to the DCI. Krongard had been the CEO of Alex. Brown and then vice chairman of Bankers Trust after it acquired the Baltimore-based investment bank in 1997. Krongard had applied to the Agency as a young man in 1961 but opted for a career on Wall Street instead. Over the years he had "consulted informally" for other directors, but still, when he came onboard, the culture shock was significant: "I was going from a culture where if a department head came back to me with $5 million in saved money at the end of the year, I'd kiss him and give him a big bonus. Here, if you don't spend every dime they give you, they think you're nuts."

Tenet promoted Krongard to executive director—"the Exdir," in Agency-speak—and asked him, in the spring of 2001, to look into overhauling everything from the Agency's structure and technology to its compensation systems. Less than a month later Krongard delivered his report, and in June, three months before Sept. 11, the Agency undertook what may have been the most sweeping reorganization in its history.

The department of administration, which had become the bureaucratic backwater its name evokes, was nuked. The Agency set up departments of information technology, human resources, and finance, among others. More important, the heads of each sat on the executive board, right next to Tenet and the chiefs of the three core Agency directorates: operations, intelligence (which handles the agency's analysts), and science and technology. Sci-tech, not the Defense Department, operates the highly successful Predator, the unmanned attack and surveillance plane. In an institution as hidebound as the Agency, this was pretty radical stuff. The notion that the head of human resources would be elevated to the same level as the DO? Well, as Yogi Berra might say, if "Wild" Bill Donovan (head of the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's predecessor) were alive today, he'd be spinning in his grave.

Many of the changes speak to just how far the Agency had to go. Some of that, to be sure, is due to the obvious: The CIA, for all its aura and mystique, is a government agency. Thus pay for performance is inevitably constrained. Still, Krongard implemented a pay scheme that, among other things, linked bonuses with language proficiency. That this hadn't been the case in the foreign-intelligence service of the most powerful nation on earth is a little depressing. But at least it's true now.

Similarly with technology. In Tenet's wake- up speech he had said, "We have now connected all our officers to each other by computer, and now ... we must ensure that our analysts have online access to the rest of the intelligence community, to our customers, and colleagues in other government agencies." This is 1998, when the information revolution was at full throttle. And the Agency had only then enabled all its people to communicate via the Internet. Without question the lag was partly due to security concerns. But it also speaks to the "stovepiping," as Agency people call it, that used to be routine. Departments didn't trust each other or even deal with each other. "Need to know" was everything. Jami Miscik, the DI, or director of intelligence (in charge of the Agency's analysts), recalls a time when the DO and the DI were sealed off from each other by locked doors.

Tenet, with Krongard riding herd, was turning around the proverbial aircraft carrier, when history intervened. On Sept. 11 he was eating breakfast at the St. Regis hotel in Washington with David Boren, the former Senator from Oklahoma with whom Tenet had worked closely during his days on the Intelligence Committee. When the planes slammed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, the post-Cold War era was officially over. The United States had been attacked, and plenty of people in Washington who may have had a different opinion on Sept. 10 realized the CIA mattered after all.

As is now widely known, Tenet impressed President Bush with his and the Agency's performance after Sept. 11. The CIA was famously better prepared to get people into Afghanistan and start taking the fight to al Qaeda than was the Pentagon (a fact that, by all accounts, drove Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld to distraction). Some Pentagon officials say the Agency's Afghanistan successes have been exaggerated, and add that the historical tension between the CIA and the military was hardly absent during the war. However true, the Agency, at least as far as Bush was concerned, had had a "good war," and Tenet's relationship with the President was cemented.

The far more controversial war in Iraq—indeed, more controversial by the day—would be next, and by then the CIA's world had been turned upside down. "The pace and range of things we've been asked to do, the amount of risk that we have been asked to take, the stakes that we are playing for, all of that has changed," says Tenet. Although the Agency's budget has increased substantially, so too has the pressure; Tenet says it has "magnified enormously."

For companies and government agencies alike, crises can often be the best agents of change. So it was at the CIA, post-Sept. 11. Recruiting is no longer a problem: The Agency now receives three times the resumes it did in 2000. In one recent survey new engineering and science graduates chose it as their fifth-most-desired employer, behind Boeing, 3M, BMW, and GE.

In the DO, Tenet eliminated old rules constraining agents from recruiting "unsavory" characters. Meanwhile, some internal walls have tumbled down. Jami Miscik now boasts about how many analysts from her directorate work in tandem with DO and sci-tech agents abroad, including several currently in Iraq. Increasingly, those analysts in the field can access data that used to be available only at headquarters. The CIA also laid so much broadband fiber in Iraq during the war, says Bobby Brady, deputy chief information officer, that videoconferencing is easier there than in Virginia.

In October the Agency will start using a data-mining program called Quantum Leap that's "so powerful it's scary," says Brady. It enables an analyst to get quick access to all the information available—classified and unclassified—about virtually anyone. Civil libertarians, not surprisingly, are unhappy, and even Brady says that in the wrong hands, "This could be Big Brother."

But Quantum Leap will be an extremely useful tool at the new Terrorist Threat Integration Center run by John Brennan, a 23-year CIA veteran. TTIC went into business just four months after President Bush announced its formation last February. It draws on personnel from the FBI, the Department of Justice, and the Department of Homeland Security in the hope that next time, the government will be able to "connect the dots."

Tenet spends roughly 60% of his time dealing with terrorism and related issues (Iraq included). He concedes that the risk, in this environment, is that the longer-term management goals on which he had been focused will get lost in the intense effort to complete "what we're supposed to be doing today." Tenet insists—forcefully—that it's not happening: "If you ask yourself, 'What have you institutionalized that nobody can walk back from,' " the answers, he believes, are clear enough: "We rebuilt the 'humint' service. We now have a training facility and recruitment program that's first class [over $100 million has been invested in the fabled 'Farm' at Camp Peary in Virginia, where the CIA trains new spies]. We reward expertise. The workforce is more diverse than it's ever been. And that's not a do-good program; it's because for a foreign intelligence agency it's an absolute necessity. We locked in a language program and tied it to promotion and pay. The next person who gets this job will inherit a rock-solid foundation."

Tenet says he has "no earthly idea" what he will do when he leaves the CIA—"maybe run something else someday." But he says that whoever succeeds him "will inherit something that really works well. He won't get a patient on life support." As he did, Tenet doesn't have to add.

In the intense post-Sept. 11 environment, the DCI draws his share of criticism. Tenet fervently rejects what he calls the "cartoon"—the idea that the Agency was asleep at the switch on Sept. 11. But he acknowledges that in a war that has been ongoing at least since 1998—when al Qaeda bombed two U.S. embassies in Africa—"We lost a big battle that day. Nobody had to tell us what mistakes we made. We were the ones" who pointed out that the CIA did not tell the FBI and other agencies to put two of the Sept. 11 hijackers on their watch list until August 23, 2001. Tenet fiercely rejects the notion that prior to Sept. 11 he had been remiss in trying to get counterterrorism resources for the Agency. In a closed hearing before Congress in June 2002, he said he told members of the administration and Congress that his counterterrorism budget would be as much as $1 billion short each year for the next five years. "We told that to everybody downtown for as long as anybody would listen and never got to first base."

The other frequent criticism of Tenet is that he has been too eager to please the Presidents he has worked for, Clinton and Bush. Consequently, says one Senate staffer, he has "gone with the flow," with the Agency's analysis following suit. The result, to take one recent alleged example, was the inclusion in President Bush's State of the Union address of Iraq's supposed attempts to buy uranium from Niger. In part to quell the mini-firestorm in the press over this issue, Tenet very publicly fell on his sword, taking responsibility for the mistake, when in fact there was plenty of blame to go around. Why did he do that? "Because it shouldn't have been in the President's speech, and we shouldn't have let it get there. That's about it.''

Tenet is philosophical about the criticism. "If you don't think you are going to get stuff on you, you're in the wrong job," he says. "The risk taking and the human judgment is enormous. We are not going to be right all the time. [But] that's what our business is about. You can sit back and be risk averse and not make choices, but don't think you can do this job that way. You can't."

So Tenet has tried, with a fair degree of success, not to be risk averse, to shake up an Agency that had been—and he wasn't exaggerating in 1998—tilting toward irrelevance. He is quick to acknowledge that perfection, or anything close to it, won't happen, no matter who runs the CIA. "There is no perfection." The age in which we live, he says, means that "there are going to be surprises over the next ten years." And they are not going to be happy ones. Terrorism and weapons proliferation and the access "bad guys" have to information—"You can get targeting [coordinates] off the Internet, you can learn how to build a bomb off the Internet"—make those surprises grimly inevitable.

George Tenet inherited the CIA when the Cold War was over, at a time when people thought the worst was behind us. What could be worse than 10,000 Soviet nuclear warheads targeted on Washington alone? Now we know. Now Tenet knows, better than we. In late September, as this article went to press, he was assembling his second "strategic directions" memo, the successor to the one in 1998 on which he based his speech to the troops. He says it will refine "and deepen" many of the themes he struck five years ago. But it will omit—count on it—any reference to the CIA not celebrating its 60th anniversary.

Feedback: bpowell@fortunemail.com

From the Oct. 13, 2003 Issue

posted June 03, 2004 09:06 PM            

But whatever points he may have lost for being a bureaucratic schmuck, the real test of loyalty lies ahead. If Tenet decides to take the hit for those pesky missing Weapons of Mass Destruction, he'll go down in Company history as a hero. If he pawns it off on his case officers and analysts, he'll be remembered not only as a villain but also probably as the guy who destroyed the remnants of what the CIA was originally intended to be.

Tenet's resume lends itself to government work. He went to Georgetown and Columbia, majoring in "It's A Big World Out There, And We're Not The Only Country In It."

Tenet proceeded to completely fail to distinguish himself in any way in the conventional "real world" sense for about the next 20 years. Needless to say, this meant he was a roaring success in terms of the Washington, D.C., cultural black hole, filling a series of positions that began with "Assistant to" or "Director for" or "Special Assistant to," with a series of incrementally more important people and/or offices following the preposition. Only in Washington can you make "being an assistant" into a life's vocation.

Tenet performed such important duties as coordinating directives on priorities and directing the oversight of negotiations, not to mention preparing reports on such oversight and indeed coordinating oversight activities, not to mention coordinating the oversight of legislative statutory reporting requirements.

You can clearly see how all this experience would prepare a man for intelligence work. The only active verb to be found anywhere on Tenet's resume was "kiss" and the only subject for that verb was "ass." This particular specialty would, in the final analysis, vault him to the top.

By 1994, Tenet had latched onto a hated CIA director John Deutch, who ran amuck in the Agency by operating essentially on the theory that the CIA shouldn't do so much of that nasty spying stuff. Deutch left in 1996, and his designated replacement was Tony Lake, Bill Clinton's National Security director, a widely despised Washington insider with a reputation for making policy political.

When Clinton tried to push Lake into the CIA director's job, muffled screams of anguish could be heard emanating from the Agency's headquarters in Langley, Va., and not-at-all-muffled screams of outrage were heard from the Republican senators who were in charge of confirming any CIA director nomination.

Lake's nomination sank like a rock, and with no backup plan in place, Clinton turned to the "special assistant for" and asked him to step up to the plate. By virtue of having been a nonentity for 20 years in the Beltway, Tenet hadn't ****** anyone off inordinately. He got the job.

The CIA was about as worthless a pile of crap as could be imagined at this stage. The collapse of the Soviet Union had provoked an existential crisis about what the agency was supposed to do with itself, and much hand-wringing ensued at virtually every level of government, and within the agency itself.

Tenet quickly won over both the CIA grunts and the White House suits mostly on the basis of his personal charm. He was a key player in the Clinton administration's ludicrously ineffective efforts to nab Osama bin Laden, and later in the Bush² administration's spectacularly ineffective efforts to do the same thing.

Unlike most political appointees, Tenet stayed on after Clinton left office, mostly due to an aggressive effort to ingratiate himself with George W Bush, an extremely social animal who responded well to flattery and personal attention.

Although the CIA's failure to anticipate or prevent the al Qaeda attacks of September 11 would seem to be gross derelictions of duty (especially since we knew about the strategy in advance), Tenet managed to dodge or deflect responsibility, part of a tightly coordinated decision at every level of the Bush administration to stonewall the public on the topic of advanced knowledge.

Condoleezza Rice was on the front line in this effort, with flatly ridiculous statements like "I don't think anybody could have predicted ... that they would try to use an airplane as a missile, a hijacked airplane as a missile" despite the fact that Algerian terrorists had hijacked a plane and tried to crash it into the Eiffel Tower in December 1994, that a crazed maniac tried to crash a light airplane into the White House earlier that the same year, that a captured bin Laden operative told the FBI in 1995 that he was going to crash a plane into CIA headquarters, that the FBI knew al Qaeda infiltrators were taking flying lessons in 1994, 1995, 1998 and 2001, and so on, and so on, and so on...

Fortunately for Tenet, most of the known warnings had come through the FBI and not the CIA. It wasn't hard to see how this would happen, since Tenet could bury any document under an "above top secret" clearance for eternity just by sneezing on it.

While 9/11 precipitated a flurry of criticism of the Agency, very little of the shitstorm stuck to Tenet's slightly rumpled gray suits. The CIA director managed to keep coming up roses until January of 2003, when his buddy George W. spoke the fatal "16 words" that would bury the Agency and its director in controversy for the foreseeable future:

"The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."

Would that it had stopped there. This, along with numerous other claims about Iraqi WMDs would encompass not only Tenet but the entire CIA into a morass of investigations, informational hearings and independent panels that shows no sign of slowing as of this writing.

Tenet had to step forward and publicly abase himself for the "16 words." Unfortunately, there were about 900 other words in the same State of the Union address which turned out to be completely untrue as well. These included claims that Iraq had:

materials to make "over 25,000 liters of anthrax, enough doses to kill several million people";
"materials sufficient to produce more than 38,000 liters of botulinum toxin, enough to subject millions of people to death by respiratory failure";
"materials to produce as much as 500 tons of sarin, mustard and VX nerve agent. In such quantities, these chemical agents could also kill untold thousands";
"30,000 munitions capable of delivering chemical agents";
"advanced nuclear weapons development program, had a design for a nuclear weapon and was working on five different methods of enriching uranium for a bomb";
and finally, that Saddam had "attempted to purchase high-strength aluminum tubes suitable for nuclear weapons production."
None of these claims turned out to be true, and even more detailed claims made by Colin Powell in front of the United Nations also turned out to be untrue. In fact, all of these statements turned out not only to be untrue, but to be amazingly, mind-blowingly, senses-shatteringly mega-untrue -- beyond the wildest wet dreams of even the most insanely strident opponent of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. No one could document Saddam Hussein ever giving someone a cold, let alone that he had even a skeletal Biological Weapons program. The other major claim in the 2003 State of the Union speech was the following: "Evidence from intelligence sources, secret communications, and statements by people now in custody reveal that Saddam Hussein aids and protects terrorists, including members of al Qaeda."
This was also flatly wrong. al Qaeda was in Iraq, in the same way that the organization is in the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, the Philippines and Germany, and to a far lesser extent than the organization is entrenched in our so-called allies Pakistan and Saudi Arabia.

Clearly, the White House had some 'splaining to do. Tenet and the CIA were appointed to take the fall. The White House (and its Congressional surrogates) have repeatedly characterized the Iraqi WMD charges as an "intelligence failure," and Tenet has tentatively agreed to play along with this characterization -- despite the fact that to most casual observers, it seems fairly obvious that these claims originated at the express bidding of the White House in general (and Dick Cheney in particular).

Tenet doesn't seem to be in any particular hurry to tender his resignation, however. In a recent speech, he defended his position and trumpeted his importance, saying "the President of the United States sees me six days a week, every day."

The last thing any president wants is a disgruntled former CIA chief out on the streets, which no doubt accounts for the long, secure tenure of William Casey.

But Tenet's current address is the corner of Rock St. and Hard Place Ave. Sneakier, meaner, tougher S.O.B.s than him have been sacrificed to the Gods of Public Deniability in the past, and it's an election year. It might just be time to start updating that resume. I hear there's an opening for a special executive assistant to a senior coordinator for something or other...

Bonus color commentary from Slate Magazine: "As deputy director of the CIA, [Tenet] shaved his beard at his boss's request."

Timeline
5 Jan 1953 George John Tenet born, Flushing NY, to Greek Orthodox parents.
1976 B.S.F.S., Georgetown School of Foreign Service.
1978 M.I.A., Columbia University School of International Affairs.
23 May 1980 Marries author A. Stephanie Gaklas.
1985 Appointed to staff of Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.
1993 NSC, Senior Director for Intelligence Programs.
Jul 1995 Deputy Director, Central Intelligence Agency.
11 Jan 1997 DCI, Central Intelligence Agency.
1998 Under George Tenet, the CIA fails to foresee nuclearization of Pakistan and India.
11 Sep 2001 Under George Tenet, the CIA fails to foresee the attack on the World Trade Center.
20 Jan 2003 President George W Bush in the State of the Union speech utters sixteen poorly vetted (or perhaps deliberately fallacious) words: "The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa."
Jul 2003 George Tenet accepts responsibility for the "sixteen words" in George W Bush's State of the Union speech, wherein Saddam Hussein is accused of attempting to acquire yellowcake from Nigeria. However the CIA is not really responsible for this line being in the speech.
12 May 2004 Stansfield Turner, Carter's CIA director: "I think the biggest problem of intelligence today is political direction from the White House, and I don't know what I would do if I were George Tenet other than resign."

Chalabi Says Tenet Is Behind Leak Allegations

NAJAF, Iraq (June 3) - Iraqi politician Ahmad Chalabi accused CIA director George Tenet on Thursday of being responsible for allegations that the former exile leader passed intelligence information to Iran.

Chalabi, a former member of the Iraqi Governing Council, made the accusation after President Bush announced that Tenet was stepping down as CIA director for personal reasons.

Tenet's announcement came amid new storms over intelligence issues, including an alleged Pentagon leak of highly classified intelligence to Chalabi.

Chalabi told reporters that Tenet "was behind the charges against me that claimed that I gave intelligence information to Iran. I denied these charges and I will deny them again."

In Washington, a U.S. law enforcement official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the FBI is examining whether Pentagon officials who had frequent contacts with Chalabi may have leaked sensitive information that U.S. intelligence had broken Iran's secret communications codes.

Chalabi, a longtime favorite of the Pentagon, is at the center of a controversy over whether he then shared with Iranian officials the closely guarded information about methods used by the United States to spy on the Iranian regime.

The New York Times reported in its Thursday editions that federal investigators have started giving polygraph tests to civilian Pentagon employees in attempt to determine who may have disclosed the highly classified intelligence.

Although Chalabi was close to the Pentagon for years, the CIA favored another Iraqi exile figure, Iyad Allawi, who was named prime minister of the interim government due to take power in Iraq on June 30. Allawi headed an organization made up of former Iraqi army officers who tried unsuccessfully to oust Saddam.

Speaking to reporters, Chalabi lashed out at Tenet, saying the effects of his policies toward Iraq over the past years "have been not helpful to say the least."

"He continued attempting to make a coup d'etat against Saddam in the face of all possible evidence that this would be unsuccessful," Chalabi said. "His policies caused the death of hundreds of Iraqis in this futile efforts."

Chalabi also accused Tenet of providing "erroneous information about weapons of mass destruction to President Bush, which caused the government much embarrassment at the United Nations and his own country."

U.S. officials have said much of the information about Saddam's banned weapons programs came from Chalabi's Iraqi National Congress. No major banned weapons stockpiles have been found.

06/03/04 13:53 EDT

posted June 03, 2004 09:12 PM            

Prior to World War II, U.S. intelligence operations were informally conducted under the auspices of various military and law enforcement agencies. In 1941, the Japanese "surprise" attack on Pearl Harbor highlighted an apparent flaw in this system — namely that U.S. intelligence sucked.

There is a perennially recurring story that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had advance warning of the attack but allowed it to proceed in order to galvanize the American people into a war frenzy. Regardless of the veracity of this allegation, the perceived failure at Pearl Harbor provided the pretext for a new consolidation of intelligence power in Washington.

In 1942, FDR ordered the formation of the Office of Strategic Services. The OSS served as a clearinghouse for intelligence reporting, but it wasn't empowered (officially) to take charge of the various spy shops scattered across the U.S. executive branch.

Toward the end of the war, General William Donovan began floating a proposal to create a super-powerful centralized agency answerable only to the president, which would coordinate intelligence gathering, determine national security objectives and execute "subversive operations" to accomplish said objectives.

In 1947, the CIA was officially born (about a year after it had already effectively started operations), under the auspices of President Harry Truman and the National Security Act. In 1948, its charter was expanded to include "covert actions" in addition to intelligence-gathering. In 1949, the Central Intelligence Act broadened the scope of the CIA's powers and eliminated most oversight and accountability.

Under its charter, the CIA was expressly forbidden from conducting domestic operations — within the context of the aforementioned absence of oversight and accountability.

In the absence of a major international conflict, the CIA floundered aimlessly for its first few years of existence. The onset of the Korean War in the 1950s helped bring the organization into sharper focus. In 1953, Allen Dulles took over as director, and the agency began to morph into the feared-yet-seemingly-ineffectual behemoth it is today.

The looming threat of Communism fueled huge increases in CIA staff and budget through out the next two decades. The mission and ambition of the CIA also grew during this period. Intelligence-gathering is all well and good, but it lacks the joie de vivre of a needlessly elaborate covert action to accomplish a morally ambiguous goal. Under Dulles, and continuing through the present day, the CIA took on the jobs nobody else could... or would... or should...

The Columbia Encyclopedia entry for the agency unintentionally points out the major problem with the CIA's execution of its mission: "While covert operations receive the most attention, the CIA’s major responsibility is intelligence." Covert operations receive the most attention? Hmmm...

The directive empowering the CIA's activist role defines covert actions as activities "conducted or sponsored by this Government against hostile foreign states or groups or in support of friendly foreign states or groups but which are so planned and executed that any US Government responsibility for them is not evident to unauthorized persons and that if uncovered the US Government can plausibly disclaim any responsibility for them."

Among a few of the more colorful highlights of this "plausibly disclaimed" activity:

Cuba: Two words: Exploding cigar. The history of the CIA and Cuba is storied and well-known, involving repeated attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and the Bay of Pigs fiasco, in which the agency guided John F. Kennedy to a spectacularly failed attempt to overthrow the Castro regime. In the latter case, the CIA's post-mortem on the incident identified such strategic failures as neglecting "to advise the president, at an appropriate time, that success had become dubious and to recommend that the operation be therefore canceled" and failing to recognize that covert operation "had become overt."
In the 1950s, the CIA began experimenting with mind-control as part of an infamous program known as MK Ultra. The agency shredded all its documentation on the program in the 1970s, but several details have been leaked and subsequently proven. In the 1950s, the agency discovered LSD. Its chief scientist, Sidney Gottlieb, experimented with the drug extensively — on himself and others. According to the New York Times, "the agency conducted 149 separate mind-control experiments, and as many as 25 involved unwitting subjects. First-hand testimony, fragmentary Government documents and court records show that at least one participant died, others went mad, and still others suffered psychological damage after participating in the project, known as MK Ultra. The experiments were useless, Gottlieb concluded in 1972, shortly before he retired." One of the most notorious MK Ultra projects involved using San Francisco hookers to dose unsuspecting clients and filming the results.
In the late 1950s, the agency trained assassins to kill a CIA-drafted list of political officials to advance a coup in Guatemala. The successful coup overthrew the democratically elected president in favor of a procession of fascist dictators who ruled the country through military force and brutal suppression for the next four decades.
The CIA spent 20 years or so sponsoring violent coups to eradicate popular leftist movements in Laos, only to meet with continual failure. Finally, after it became clear things just weren't working out, the military flew into Laos and bombed the country back into the stone age during the Vietnam War. Laos pretty much remains in the Stone Age today.
In the early 1970s, Richard M. Nixon recruited "former" CIA officials (including E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy) to work as part of the Plumbers, a group of vigilante operatives charged with stopping leaks and spying on behalf of the president's re-election efforts. Nixon would eventually fire Richard Helms, then CIA director, when Helms refused to concoct lies about national security in order to stop the FBI's investigation of Watergate.
In 1953, despite a series of gaffes, the CIA succeeded in installing the Shah of Iran, a more or less fascist dictator whose oppressive looting of the nation benefited the U.S. for a couple decades, but ultimately bred the Islamic revolution that brought the Ayatollah Khomeni to power in the 1970s (a revolution which caught the CIA completely by surprise).
Iran was representative of the CIA's seeming inability to comprehend the Islamic and Middle Eastern mindsets, resulting in countless examples of "blowback," the agency's term for covert operations in which U.S.-supported operatives subsequently turn against their sponsors.
Other boners regarding Iran included the infamous Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s, which made Oliver North a household name. Talk about your blowback... The CIA's role in the scandal was never proven, and only a single CIA official was ever indicted in the probe. Then-CIA director William Casey, renowned as one of the spookiest of all spooks, was strongly suspected of having a role in the affair, but he took his secrets to his deathbed (except for a controversial last-minute confession of evilness to which Bob Woodward claims to have been the sole witness).

The CIA's extreme inability to comprehend the consequences of personalities and religion in the Middle East was put on dismal display by two historically disastrous alliances, both formed in the name of fighting communism, which would very publicly highlight two of the CIA's most lavishly funded employees — Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.

Bin Laden was a member of a small army of Islamic Jihadists fighting the Soviet Union in Afghanistan during the 1980s. The strategic minds of the CIA decided that this whole jihad thing looked like a great idea, and provided funding and weaponry to the mujahideen fighters, hoping to enflame the global Muslim community into jihad against the Soviets. The success of that strategy speaks for itself.

Around the same time, Iraq launched a war against neighboring Iran, which was itself a CIA-created disaster. At the time, Iran was stridently anti-American and loosely aligned with the Soviets. The U.S. government operated through both overt and covert channels to provide massive assistance to Hussein's war, including money and conventional weapons. The CIA also facilitated the transfer of supplies and technology for the construction of Biological Weapons, Nerve Agents and other Weapons of Mass Destruction for Iraqi use. Some of these weapons may have been employed against U.S. troops during the first Gulf War (which was conducted by George Bush Sr., himself a onetime director of the CIA), and they provided George Bush Jr. with a pretext for the second Gulf War (which ran along the lines of "How dare they stockpile these awful weapons we gave them?").

Not content with merely creating foreign policy disasters, the CIA also failed to anticipate the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, working in close concert with the FBI to aggressively ignore vital intelligence already in its possession.

Of course, all of the above are merely the indisputably proven gaffes of the CIA. In addition to these known disasters, which are all true despite how ludicrous they might sound, there's a whole slew of suspected disasters which the Agency has not (yet) admitted to. These include:

The assassination of John F. Kennedy.
Running drugs for profit into U.S. inner cities in order to fund covert operations abroad.
Covering up the reality of UFOs (extra-terrestrial or otherwise).
Leaking selected details of Watergate in order to depose Richard Nixon.
Assassinating Robert F. Kennedy.
Assassinating Martin Luther King.
Assassinating U.S. Commerce Secretary Ron Brown.
Assassinating Malcolm X.
Based on what we know about the CIA's activities, most or all of the above claims could quite possibly be true. Sadly, the most compelling argument against most of these claims is Fidel Castro's longevity — evidence which seems to suggest that the CIA just isn't that good at assassinations.
In the aftermath of September 11, a great deal of intelligence authority has now been vested in the Department of Homeland Security. It's unclear how much of a change this actually entails for the Agency, but odds are it's somewhere between "not much" and "none at all."

Despite massive amounts of refreshed public scrutiny, new presidentially granted authority to kidnap and kill terrorists and even U.S. citizens abroad, and all the other new powers and funding we haven't heard about yet, there is little sign that the CIA is poised to re-invent itself for the 21st Century. Given its history, it's not clear whether that should be cause for recrimination or relief.

Either way, Rotten.com would like to stress that it's plain old common sense to be careful about drinking anything a hooker offers you. Just bring bottled water. You'll be glad you did.

Directors of Central Intelligence (DCI)
Rear Adm. Sidney W. Souers
Lt. Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenberg
Rear Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoetter
Gen. Walter Bedell Smith
Allen Dulles
John McCone
Vice Adm. William Raborn, Jr.
Richard Helms
James R. Schlesinger
William Colby
George HW Bush
Adm. Stansfield Turner
William Casey
William Webster
Robert Gates
R. James Woolsey
John Deutch
George Tenet
Timeline
13 Apr 1953 CIA commences MKULTRA, at the instigation of Richard Helms.
5 May 1955 An internal CIA memo emphasizes the need for a drug that creates a state of "pure euphoria" and no letdown. From this springs Operation Midnight Climax, in which CIA brothels were set up in San Francisco, and their customers surreptitiously dosed with LSD by prostitutes. Operative George Hunter White observed reactions behind a two way mirror, purely in the interest of science.
1966 Nixon appoints Richard Helms as DCI, the first careerist to hold that position.
9 Oct 1967 After being debriefed by CIA field agent Felix Rodriguez, Che Guevara is executed in a schoolhouse in La Higuera, Bolivia. Guevara had been captured by the Bolivian 2nd Ranger Battalion, which was specifically trained by U.S. Army Special Forces to catch him.
2 Feb 1973 Richard M. Nixon fires Richard Helms and replaces him with William Colby.
21 Jul 1975 President Gerald Ford publicly apologizes for the death of Dr. Frank Olson, who died in 1953 after unwittingly getting dosed with LSD by the Central Intelligence Agency.
2 Nov 1975 President Gerald Ford fires CIA Director William Colby and replaces him with George HW Bush.
1977 Former CIA Director Richard Helms pleads guilty to perjury, for lying to Congress. In February 1973, he had told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee under oath that the CIA had never attempted to overthrow the government of Chile. Helms receives a $2,000 fine and a two-year suspended sentence.
1983 President Ronald Reagan honors former CIA Director Richard Helms with the National Security Medal. Regarding his 1977 felony conviction for lying to Congress, Helms remarks: "I have no feelings about remorse or exoneration."
17 Oct 1984 The New York Times runs an article entitled "CIA Primer Tells Nicaraguan Rebels How to Kill." The story describes the secret manual Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare which the CIA furnished to the Contras in Nicaragua. The booklet instructed how to kidnap and assassinate civil officials, such as judges and police.
1996 "A safe estimate is that several hundred times every day (easily 100,000 times a year) [Directorate of Operations] officers engage in highly illegal activities (according to foreign law) that not only risk political embarrassment to the US but also endanger the freedom if not lives of the participating foreign nationals and, more than occasionally, of the clandestine officer himself. In other words, a typical 28 year old, GS-11 case officer has numerous opportunities every week, by poor tradecraft or inattention, to embarrass his country and President and to get agents imprisoned or executed." -from IC21: The Intelligence Community in the 21st Century, a staff study produced by the Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence.
26 Apr 1999 Former President George HW Bush: "I have nothing but contempt and anger for those who betray the trust by exposing the names of our [intelligence] sources. They are, in my view, the most insidious of traitors."
7 Oct 2003 President George W Bush, regarding the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame's identity to Robert Novak: "I don't know if we're going to find out the senior administration official. I don't have any idea."
24 Oct 2003 On his television show The O'Reilly Factor, Bill O'Reilly declares: "It looks like President Bush, President Clinton before him, and other powerful Congresspeople were simply given erroneous information by the CIA and other intelligence outlets. We need to know why that happened. George Tenet should get a full hearing. But if his explanations aren't compelling, he should be asked to resign... We need to know exactly why the Iraq situation is so screwed up."