RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events CIA Director Tenet to Resign

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Bush: CIA Director George Tenet Resigns
Jun 3, 10:55 AM (ET)

By PETE YOST

WASHINGTON (AP) - CIA Director George Tenet, who weathered storms over intelligence lapses about suspected weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, has resigned, President Bush said Thursday.

"I will miss him," Bush said.

Tenet came to the White House to inform Bush about his decision Wednesday night. "He told me he was resigning for personal reasons," Bush said. "I told him I'm sorry he's leaving. He's done a superb job on behalf of the American people."

Bush said that deputy, John McLaughlin, will temporarily lead America's premier spy agency until a successor is found. Among possible successors is House Intelligence Committee Chairman Porter Goss, R-Fla., a former CIA agent and McLaughlin.

"He's been a strong and able leader at the agency. and I will miss him," Bush said of Tenet as he got ready to board Marine One for a trip to Andrews Air Force Base, Md., and on to Europe. "I send my blessings to George and his family and look forward to working with him until he leaves the agency," Bush said.

Tenet had been under fire for months in connection with intelligence failures related to the U.S.-led war against Iraq, specifically assertions the United States made about Saddam Hussein's purported possession of weapons of mass destruction, and with respect to the threat from the al-Qaida terrorist network.

In May, a panel investigating the Sept. 11 attacks released statements harshly criticizing the CIA for failing to fully appreciate the threat posed by al-Qaida before the terrorist hijackings. Tenet told the panel the intelligence-gathering flaws exposed by the attacks will take five years to correct.

During his seven years at the CIA, speculation at times has swirled around whether Tenet would retire or be forced out, peaking after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 and surging again after the flawed intelligence estimates about Iraq's fighting capability.

Even when his political capital appeared to be tanking, Tenet managed to hang on with what some say was a fierce loyalty to Bush and the CIA personnel. A likable, chummy personality, also helped keep him above water.

Conventional wisdom had been that Tenet, who was appointed by President Bill Clinton, did not plan to stay on next year, no matter who won the White House. Tenet has been on the job since July 1997, an unusually lengthy tenure in a particularly taxing era for the intelligence community that he heads.

On Capitol Hill, Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., called Tenet "an honorable and decent man who has served his country well in difficult times, and no one should make him a fall guy for anything."

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Text of Bush's Remarks
Jun 3, 11:02 AM (ET)

By The Associated Press

Here is the text of President Bush's remarks Thursday on the resignation of CIA Director George Tenet, as transcribed by eMediaMillWorks Inc.:

I met with George last night in the White House. I had a good visit with him. 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. I accepted his letter.

He will serve at the CIA as the director until mid-July, at which time the deputy director of the Central Intelligence Agency, John McLaughlin, will serve as the acting director.

George Tenet is the kind of public servant you like to work with. 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. And I will miss him.

I send my blessings to George and his family. I look forward to working with him until the time he leaves the agency. And I wish him all the very best.

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The Senate Intelligence Committee recently delivered to the agency a still-classified draft report that sources said offered a scathing assessment of the CIA's prewar intelligence on Iraq. The agency's belief that Iraq had chemical and biological weapons provided the basis for the Bush administration's case for war.

An investigation by the committee has uncovered deep problems with the intelligence on Iraq, including evidence that the CIA and other agencies were duped by defectors, had misinterpreted intercepts and satellite photographs, and had disregarded dissenting voices.

A congressional official familiar with the inquiry described it as "extremely critical across the board." Asked whether Tenet was singled out in the committee's report, the official said: "He's in charge."

When Tenet formally steps down July 11, it will be just weeks before the independent commission investigating the Sept. 11 attacks is scheduled to deliver its final report. The panel has found deep faults with the CIA's counterterrorism efforts, and singled out Tenet for serious criticism.

The failure to find banned weapons in Iraq has in some ways been more devastating to the agency's reputation: While the Sept. 11 plot caught U.S. intelligence off-guard, Iraq's weapons programs had been the focus of intensive intelligence efforts for more than a decade.

Many lawmakers based their vote to support the war on the CIA's assessments that Iraq had stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and was likely seeking to reconstitute its nuclear program.

According to a recent book by Washington Post Assistant Managing Editor Bob Woodward, when Bush pressed Tenet in a prewar meeting on the quality of the intelligence on Iraq, Tenet leaped to his feet and declared the case against Iraq a "slam dunk."


....many say George J. Tenet's decision to step down as CIA director on Thursday is unlikely to quell public rancor over intelligence failures.

Instead, Tenet's resignation intensifies focus on the upcoming release of two reports, one by the Senate Intelligence Committee, the other by the independent Sept. 11 commission, which were expected to be critical of the administration's handling of intelligence in advance of the 2001 terrorist attacks and the war in Iraq.

Some said it was no coincidence that Tenet decided to resign shortly before the two reports were to be made public.

"The timing is certainly interesting," said John W. Dean III, former counsel to President Nixon who himself resigned during the Watergate scandal.
Jim Jordan, a former presidential campaign manager for John F. Kerry who is spokesman for America Coming Together, a Democratic advocacy group, agreed the resignation could "whet the appetite of critics."

"The one thing we know for sure is that the president himself still refuses to take any personal responsibility for the failures of his administration," Jordan said. "He obviously would be extremely happy to have the buck stop across the river [at the CIA's Virginia headquarters] in Langley."

Democratic pollster Geoffrey Garin, who worked for retired Gen. Wesley K. Clark in the presidential primaries, suggested that the longer the questions about shoddy intelligence persisted, the worse it was for Bush.

"For the short term at least, the message that comes across to voters is that things in the Bush administration are unsettled on matters of national security and intelligence," Garin said. "And an area that was supposed to be the strong suit, politically, of this administration is in fact an area where there is turmoil and change and uncertainty."

Bush failed to reap maximum benefit from the way he handled the resignation, Garin said. Instead of acknowledging problems at the CIA when he announced the resignation, he said, Bush lauded the former director.

"Whatever potential there may have been for this to kind of serve as a clean break and a point of demarcation was squandered when the president heaped all sorts of praise on Tenet today," Garin said. "The last impression of Tenet as part of the Bush administration was one of kind of a warm and full embrace."

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It's sort of cute how some here still actually believe the very things that caused Tenet to resign.

Of course the "fair and balanced" network was spinning this the day he made his announcment. I heard one commentator saying that Bush had "fired him".

It's also cute how when reality offers these guys lemon after lemon, they call it lemonade.

The psychologist Irving Janis invented the word "groupthink" in 1972 to describe a process in which a group makes foolish choices. Each member of the group tailors his or her view to fit the consensus. Signs of groupthink include the ignoring of expert opinion, selective use of evidence and the illusion of omnipotence.

It is both distressing and delicious to learn the neocon nitwits who have been leading George Bush around on a short leash have themselves been suckered by their primary source of information, Ahmad Chalabi, whose day job seems to have been as an agent of Iranian intelligence.

Turns out the so-called reliable CIA intelligence claimed by the Bush administration was little more than cooked baloney from Ahmad Chalabi and his organization. U.S. authorities have determined that most of the defectors had been coached to provide false information and that most of the information they provided was inaccurate or fabricated.

We were paying them $340,000 a month to provide information, so they had to deliver while the gullible neocon faithful ate it up. They knew Chalabi was suspected of being a con man from the beginning, and now it appears he was betraying us to Iranian intelligence. Bush administration officials should be tossed out of office in November for incompetence, for embarrassing themselves before the eyes of the world and for being such colossal fools.

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I was on my way to bed when I saw this stupid headline on Yahoo News. LOL!

Bush Senses 'Spirit of Unity' on Iraq

Besides being able to personally communicate with God he now has another ESP power. Of course though...

This is the same man who sensed that Iraq would be $20-$30B "operation," tops.

This is the same man who sensed that the mission was accomplished over a year ago.

This is the same man who sensed that Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden plotted joint terrorist strikes together regularly.

This is the same man who sensed that Iraq had enormous stockpiles of WMD just waiting to be exposed to the World Community.

This is the same man who sensed that Iraq could deploy a nuclear weapon within a matter of months if it chose to.

This is the same man who sensed that the faulty intelligence provided by his CIA Director really *was* a slam-dunk.

This is the same man who sensed it was time to invade a sovereign country half a world away without provocation.

This is the same man who sensed that American invaders would be welcomed as liberators and embraced as democratic mentors by the Iraqis.

This is the same man who sensed that the United Nations and World Opinion is irrelevant.

This is the same man who sensed that only a handful of rogue soldiers at Abu Ghrabe were to blame for a systematic pattern of physical and sexual torture that's been widespread in Iraq for over a year.

I hear he also sees dead people.