Tenet Says Cheney Had Eye On Iraq Long Before 9/11

I don't know to what extent Tenet is telling the truth in this book, but the idea that Cheney wanted to go to Iraq prior to 9/11, and wouldn't have been able to do it without it, most assuredly, is true. - Jon

In his book, former CIA director says aides to Cheney and Rumsfeld inserted 'crap' into public justifications for war

Source: chron.com

By KAREN DEYOUNG
Washington Post
4/28/2007

WASHINGTON — White House and Pentagon officials, and particularly Vice President Dick Cheney, were determined to attack Iraq from the first days of the Bush administration, long before the Sept. 11 attacks, and repeatedly stretched available intelligence to build support for the war, according to a new book by former CIA director George Tenet.

Although Tenet does not question the threat Saddam Hussein posed or the sincerity of administration beliefs, he recounts numerous efforts by aides to Cheney and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to insert "crap" into public justifications for the war. Tenet also describes an ongoing fear within the intelligence community of the administration's willingness to "mischaracterize complex intelligence information."

"There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraq threat," Tenet writes in At the Center of the Storm, to be published Monday. The debate "was not about imminence but about acting before Saddam did."

White House counselor Dan Bartlett Friday called Tenet a "true patriot" but disputed his conclusions, saying "the president did wrestle with those very serious questions." Responding to reports from the book in Friday's New York Times, Bartlett suggested that the former CIA director might have been unaware of all the discussions. President Bush, Bartlett said on NBC's Today Show, "weighed all the various consequences before he did make a decision."

In their threat briefings for the incoming Bush administration in late 2000, Tenet writes, CIA officials did not even mention Iraq. But Cheney, he says, asked for an Iraq briefing and requested that the outgoing Clinton administration's defense secretary, William Cohen, provide information on Iraq for Bush.

A speech by Cheney in August 2002 "went well beyond what our analysis could support," Tenet writes. The speech charged, among other things, that Saddam had restarted his nuclear program and would "acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon ... perhaps within a year." Caught off-guard by the remarks, which had not been cleared by the CIA, Tenet says he considered confronting the vice president on the subject but did not.

"Would that have changed his future approach?" he asks. "I doubt it but I should not have let silence imply an agreement." Policy-makers, he writes, "have a right to their own opinions, but not their own set of facts."

For the future, Tenet describes his deepest fear as "the nuclear one." He is convinced, he writes, that this is where Osama bin Laden "and his operatives desperately want to go. They understand that bombings by cars, trucks, trains and planes will get them some headlines, to be sure. But if they manage to set off a mushroom cloud, they will make history."

The book breaks Tenet's long public silence since he resigned in June 2004 over what he considered White House attempts to turn him into a scapegoat, as U.S. efforts in Iraq were bogging down, for the faulty intelligence used to justify the invasion in the first place.

Tenet writes that Bush talked him out of resigning in May 2003. But he decided it was time to go nine months later when a book by The Washington Post's Bob Woodward quoted him as telling Bush in December 2002 that the intelligence case against Iraq was a "slam dunk," a statement he says was taken out of context but subsequently used by the administration to blame him for faulty Iraq intelligence. "I couldn't quit immediately over something that appeared in a book," Tenet writes, "but I didn't see any way I could or should stay on much longer." Bush made no attempt to keep him when he finally resigned in June 2004.

Tenet blames himself, among other things, for the hastily compiled October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, issued on the eve of a congressional vote authorizing the war. The NIE, he said, "should have been initiated earlier. I didn't think one was necessary. I was wrong." The document, he acknowledged, was "not cautious in key judgments" and at times used single sources who turned out to be wrong.

A perennial problem, he writes, was a tendency by intelligence analysts to assume other people thought like they did. When judging whether Saddam was lying when he said Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, "we did not account for ... the mind set never to show weakness in a very dangerous neighborhood."

One of the "lowest moments of my seven-year tenure," Tenet recalls, was when a congressman told him in a public hearing in the spring of 2004 that "we depended on you, and you let us down."

He titles one chapter of the 549-page book "Missed Opportunities," but Tenet misses few opportunities himself to settle scores with Cheney and Rumsfeld and their top aides, and with Bush's first-term national security adviser and current secretary of state, Condoleezza Rice. He characterizes Rice as a "remote" figure who "knew the president's mind well but tended to stay out of policy fights." Under Rice, he says, the National Security Council failed to explore options and reach consensus. Rumsfeld, he says, refused to recognize worsening reality in Iraq and on several occasions undercut CIA efforts with cavalier treatment of secret information.

By contrast, Tenet's treatment of Bush, who presented Tenet with a Medal of Freedom six months after his departure, is relatively gentle. He says he and others sometimes failed to give Bush the information he needed. "The president was not well served," he says by way of example, "because the NSC became too deferential to a postwar strategy that was not working."

Tenet writes defensively about the controversial program to intercept domestic telephone calls involving terrorism suspects. The program was Cheney's idea, and the vice president briefed "the leaders of the House and Senate Intelligence committees 12 times prior to its public disclosure" in late 2005.

He reiterates a claim last year by Bush that the CIA's harsh interrogations of captured al-Qaida figures "helped disrupt plots aimed at locations in the United States, the United Kingdom, the Middle East, South Asia, and Central Asia." He says the agency used "the most aggressive" techniques — which he does not detail — on "a handful of the worst terrorists on the planet" and that the questioning was "carefully monitored at all times to ensure the safety of the prisoner."

i just love when former

i just love when former spooks decide to tell half-truths years later. this guy is a scumbag, now that he has his 4 million hes willing to state his reservations about the run-up to war. definition of a coward. he even rationalizes taking his medal of freedom.

I'm not...

An expert at reading liars, but the other day I watched an interview with him talking about his book, and to me, it seemed as if every word was a lie/half-truth. From what I understand, he "takes the FBI to task for not chasing the CIA's strongest leads before the 2001 attacks."

The only thing I'm really curious about regarding his book is what he has to say about the July 10th meeting.


"So where is the oil going to come from?... The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies."

Richard Cheney - Chief Executive Of Halliburton

of course he (cheney) did (had eyes on iraq)

cheney's buddies wrote this way back in 1996.
"Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria. This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria’s regional ambitions."
http://www.iasps.org/strat1.htm
____________________________________
"Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And when you look long into an abyss, the abyss also looks into you."Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil 89 (1886).
http://anti-neocons.com/

Wouldn't it be interesting

if some of these spook scumbags started spilling the beans on a bunch of shit. that'd be cool.

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Physics/Science/Mathematics do not lie, only people do.
9/11 was an INSIDE JOB

Tenet said...

He would not be the "Fall Guy" for 9/11, which the CIA Inspector General's report seems to entail. It will be interesting to see what his words are if and when that is ever released.


"So where is the oil going to come from?... The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies."

Richard Cheney - Chief Executive Of Halliburton

July 10, 2001

The one good thing Tenet's book seems to do is return attention to the July 10, 2001 briefing of Rice. I know most here will cry "limited hangout," but at least this piece of information adds to the pile that proves they knew about 9/11 in advance, and it's something the msm is willing to report (even if, again, it's just limited hangout).

While we're on the "Iraq was a bald-faced lie" tip, anyone see Sen. Mike Gravel b-slap the leading Dem candidates? Must-see TV, especially the part where he says the military-industrial complex governs the country. Also, watch the video where none of the Dem candidates support Kucinich's articles of impeachment against Cheney. The fact that they're too afraid to impeach the most criminal administration the country has ever seen is a testament to how thoroughly corrupt it is.

I love people with nothing to lose. They're inspirational.

Wow...

The entire Congress isn't completely corrupt and controlled... *sarcasm*


"So where is the oil going to come from?... The Middle East, with two-thirds of the world's oil and the lowest cost, is still where the prize ultimately lies."

Richard Cheney - Chief Executive Of Halliburton