Why does George Tenet still have a job?
On the list of worst intelligence failures in American history, the following have to be at or near the top:
(1) 9/11
(2) Iraq WMD's
Both have occurred under George Tenet's directorship of the CIA. Either one is sufficient to justify his being fired. Taken together, they demand it. So why does he still have his job?
Ray McGovern, a 27 year CIA analyst working from JFK's administration to George H.W. Bush's, has an opinion on the matter:
"George Tenet no doubt has a little computer disc with the 27 or so warnings that he gave the president starting in spring and going right up until September 2001," says McGovern. "The president and his advisors in the White House, knowing this, didn't dismiss Tenet after 911 because it was too much of a risk. Were they to have dismissed Tenet on September 12, they could not have been sure that he wouldn't have said, 'Wait a second. Let me print off some of these warnings. Let me show you what I told the president in the president's daily brief on August 6, 2001.' So that's reason number one.
"Reason number two is that Tenet is simply too useful of a guy to have around. He does what he's told. If he's told to do an estimate and told to make sure the conclusions come out the same as a Dick Cheney speech from the month before, he'll do it."
And how does McGovern feel about this?
"Outrage is just too pale of a word to describe how we intelligence officials feel about George Tenet being so willing to prostitute our intelligence product -- to cook it up to the recipe of high policy. That is the unpardonable sin of intelligence and he's still doing it."
And what does McGovern, a conservative, think about the neo-conservatives guiding foreign policy?
The real reasons for the Iraq War, he says, are to be found online at the neo-conservative website The Project for a New American Century. "And I would simply add, not as an afterthought, but as a core part of this whole calculus, that this war was fought as much for Israeli strategic objectives as it was for American strategic objectives. As a matter of fact, the people running our policy toward Iraq have great difficulty distinguishing between the two."
[snip]
"I don't call them neo-conservatives," he says, "because I'm conservative. I call them neo-fascists, because that's what they are. And what these neo-fascists did was see 911 as a golden opportunity."
Despite being a "classic Jew-hater" (to borrow a phrase from Woody Allen), he has some interesting things to say. Check it out.
11:09:23 PM 
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