FALLING ON HIS SWORD: The Resignation of George Tenet

Director George Tenet resigned from C.I.A. on Friday, June 4, 2004.

C.I.A. Director George Tenet has suddenly resigned! He is the first in what should be a series of high-level resignations as a result of our catastrophic intelligence failures. Tenet claims to be resigning for personal reasons, but the real reasons are obvious.

Tenet is trying to quiet the rising chorus of criticism against the Bush administration for manipulating and distorting intelligence to justify our first preemptive war. Resigning is a noble act, perhaps, but it doesn’t excuse his part in supporting one of the worst foreign-policy actions in our history.

George Tenet will forever be remembered for his cocky answer to Bush, when the president asked him if there was enough intelligence on weapons of mass destruction to justify a war against Iraq. “It’s a slam dunk, Mr. President,” he reportedly said.

The world now knows that those weapons did not exist and that Iraq was not a grave and imminent threat to our security. And there’s mounting evidence that the C.I.A. knew all along that this was a hollow threat.

This is where George Tenet failed the American public. Instead of standing up to the war hawks — Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Perle, and Feith — and telling them the intelligence did not, in fact, support their preconceived idea, Tenet instead caved in and allowed his agency’s work to be distorted, ignored, manipulated, and selectively applied.

As the voice representing 15 different intelligence agencies, George Tenet should have told Bush what he knew to be the truth: There was no solid evidence that Saddam Hussein possessed stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction.

We’ll never know how different history might have been had Tenet stood up to the neoconservatives at the Pentagon and told Bush that Iraq was not a grave and imminent threat.

We’ll never know if our underfunded war against our real enemy, Osama bin Laden, would have been successful if George Tenet would have forcefully advocated that effort instead of allowing President Bush, Rumsfeld, and Wolfowitz to hijack the country into an unnecessary war against Iraq.

We are now paying dearly for that failure, with over 800 American soldiers killed as well as thousands of Iraqis. We’ve spent over $160 billion so far on our open-ended occupation of Iraq — with much more to be needed — while garnering nothing but fear and suspicion from many of our former friends around the world.

One of the most glaring failures of the neocons at the Pentagon in this whole affair was their selection and blind support of the Iraqi expatriate, Ahmed Chalabi. He was their handpicked successor to Saddam Hussein, even though he had no support whatsoever in Iraq, had been convicted of multiple counts of banking fraud in Jordan, and is still a fugitive on the run. Rumsfeld and company believed what they wanted to believe — and Chalabi was willing to feed their delusions with his bogus intelligence from inside Iraq. The Department of Defense paid Chalabi more than $35 million over the years. Until a few weeks ago, the Pentagon was still paying his discredited group $350 thousand a month of taxpayers’ money.

First Lady Laura Bush sits with invited guests at 2004 State of the Union address (top to bottom, left to right): Con artist Ahmed Chalabi; Foreign Minister of Iraqi Interim Government Hoshyar Zebari; Iraqi Senior Diplomatic Representative Rend al-Rahim; Mrs. Bush; Dr. Adnan Pachachi, who declined the nomination for President of Iraq on June 1, 2004.

The neoconservative war hawks weren’t the only ones completely duped by this con artist masquerading as the savior of a free Iraq. So was the president. Chalabi was given a coveted seat right behind Laura Bush at Bush’s 2004 State of the Union address.

The irony of Tenet’s resignation is that he and the C.I.A. were the only ones with the good sense to dismiss Chalabi’s discredited nonsense and to see him and his group as the charlatans and rank opportunists that they actually are. Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz retaliated by setting up their own Office of Special Plans. It was this ideologically driven group that took C.I.A. intelligence and analysis and bent it to their own liking. Then they presented this so-called evidence to the White House to justify the war — and George Tenet never called them on it.

The Senate Intelligence Committee will report on intelligence failures regarding weapons of mass destruction in July; it apparently will issue a stinging indictment of the C.I.A. for failing to do its job. The September 11 Commission Report will be just as damning.

Colin Powell reportedly has been furious with Tenet ever since the alleged arsenal of WMDs never materialized following the war, in spite of the efforts of a small army of inspectors spending hundreds of millions of dollars. It was with the blessings of the C.I.A. that Powell made his famous U.N. presentation about the grave and imminent threat Iraq posed to our national security. Powell’s credibility on the world stage has taken a body blow from which he may never recover. He is now viewed by many to be just another naïve victim of the neocon bullies in the Bush administration.

At Goals for Americans Foundation, we believe that George Tenet certainly deserves much of the blame for failing to stand up for an honest reading of his agency’s intelligence. But we believe the real perpetrators of this foreign-policy debacle have yet to be held accountable. The neoconservative war hawks at the Pentagon — Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, Donald Rumsfeld, and Richard Perle — promoted this unnecessary war based on manipulated intelligence.

It is time for these individuals to be fired. The damage they have done to our international reputation as a fair an honest broker in the Middle East is incalculable. The damage they can continue to do is a frightening prospect.

President Bush has an unfortunate characteristic in common with Ronald Reagan. Like Reagan, he can hold fast to an idea or belief no matter how many facts say something else, no matter how much reality proves otherwise. He quite often seems oblivious to history as it unfolds around and on top of him.

Bush has yet to hold a single individual in his administration responsible for the intelligence debacles of September 11 nor the massively discredited rationale for starting a preemptive war against Iraq. He believes his people are all doing “a superb job,” and that’s all there is to it, no matter how many times they fail us, lie to us, or insult and deceive our allies.

It is obvious to all that George Tenet was eased out — that he was given the word that resignation was his final option. Being the loyal team player that he has always been, he took the cue and turned in his resignation.

This resignation represents an honorable act done to protect a president who is undeserving of such loyalty.

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