On Saddam's non-relationship with Al Qaeda

Just when you're sure all the intelligence was sexed up prior to the Iraq invasion, comes this account from a former Defense Department intelligence analyst in today's Washington Post. Christina Shelton, who was in a position to know what she is talking about, suggests that in fact, the intelligence was sexed up after - for example in George Tenet's post-mortem of his career as the CIA director:

On Aug. 15, 2002, I presented my part of a composite Pentagon briefing on al-Qaeda and Iraq to George Tenet, then CIA director. In his recent book, "At the Center of the Storm," Tenet wrote that I said in opening remarks that "there is no more debate," "no further analysis is required" and "it is an open-and-shut case."

I never said those things. In fact, I said the covert nature of the relationship between Iraq and al-Qaeda made it difficult to know its full extent; al-Qaeda's security precautions and Iraq's need to cloak its activities with terrorist networks precluded a full appreciation of their relationship. Tenet also got the title of the briefing wrong. It was "Assessing the Relationship Between Iraq and al-Qa'ida," not "Iraq and al-Qa'ida -- Making the Case."

That day I summarized a body of mostly CIA reporting (dating from 1990 to 2002), from a variety of sources, that reflected a pattern of Iraqi support for al-Qaeda, including high-level contacts between Iraqi senior officials and al-Qaeda, training in bomb making, Iraqi offers of safe haven, and a nonaggression agreement to cooperate on unspecified areas. My position was that analysts were not addressing these reports since much of the material did not surface in finished, disseminated publications.

As Shelton goes on to eviscerate Tenet:

It's notable that on Oct. 7, 2002, Tenet sent a letter to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence stating that "our understanding of the relationship between Iraq and al-Qa'ida is evolving." He wrote:

."We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qa'ida going back a decade" and of "the presence in Iraq of al-Qa'ida members, including some that have been in Baghdad."

. "Credible information indicates that Iraq and al-Qa'ida have discussed safe haven and reciprocal nonaggression" and that "al-Qa'ida leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire WMD capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al-Qa'ida members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs."

· "Iraq's increasing support to extremist Palestinians, coupled with growing indications of a relationship with al-Qa'ida, suggest that Baghdad's links to terrorists will increase, even absent US military action."

And she concludes with this coup de grâce:

A more complete understanding of Iraq's relationship with al-Qaeda will emerge when historians can exploit the numerous seized documents free from the politics of the Iraq war. For his part, Tenet, who was at the center of the political thicket, placed himself on both sides of the issue: providing intelligence on al-Qaeda and Iraq's relationship while at the same time inferring that no ties existed, only "concerns."

I wonder if former CIA director George Tenet is beginning to regret having published a book

Now Douglas J. Feith, the undersecretary of defense during the lead-up to the Iraq invasion, makes essentially the same observation about Tenet's book that many others in positions to know what they are talking about have made, namely that:

[Tenet] is willing to make up stories that suit his purposes and to suppress information that does not.

Feith provides an example of Tenets, um, sloppiness, where he, Feith, has firsthand knowledge:

Mr. Tenet resents that the CIA was criticized for its work on Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism, in particular, Iraq's relationship with al Qaeda. On this score he is especially angry at Vice President Dick Cheney, at Mr. Cheney's chief of staff, Scooter Libby, at Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and at me -- I was the head of the Defense Department's policy organization. Mr. Tenet devotes a chapter to the matter of Iraq and al Qaeda, giving it the title: "No Authority, Direction or Control." The phrase implies that we argued that Saddam exercised such powers -- authority, direction and control -- over al Qaeda. We made no such argument.

Rather we said that the CIA's analysts were not giving serious, professional attention to information about ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. The CIA's assessments were incomplete, nonrigorous and shaped around the dubious assumption that secular Iraqi Baathists would be unwilling to cooperate with al Qaeda religious fanatics, even when they shared strategic interests. This assumption was disproved when Baathists and jihadists became allies against us in the post-Saddam insurgency, but before the war it was the foundation of much CIA analysis.

Mr. Tenet's account of all this gives the reader no idea of the substance of our critique, which was that the CIA's analysts were suppressing information. They were not showing policy makers reports that justified concern about ties between Iraq and al Qaeda. Mr. Tenet does tell us that the CIA briefed Mr. Cheney on Iraq and al Qaeda in September 2002 and that the "briefing was a disaster" because "Libby and the vice president arrived with such detailed knowledge on people, sources, and timelines that the senior CIA analytic manager doing the briefing that day simply could not compete." He implies that there was improper bullying but then adds: "We weren't ready for this discussion."

This is an abject admission. He is talking about September 2002 -- a year after 9/11! This was the month that the president brought the Iraq threat before the United Nations General Assembly. This was several weeks after I took my staff to meet with Mr. Tenet and two-dozen or so CIA analysts to challenge the quality of the agency's work on Iraq and al Qaeda.

As Feith goes on:

Mr. Tenet hosted our briefing because my boss, Donald Rumsfeld, personally suggested he do so. Mr. Tenet knew that the Agency's dismissive view of Iraq's relationship with al Qaeda was controversial -- and of importance to the nation. So there was no excuse, weeks later, for senior CIA officials to be so thoroughly un-ready to brief Mr. Cheney on the subject. The September 2002 meeting was not a surprise bed-check, after all; it was a scheduled visit by the vice president.

Mr. Tenet writes that, two months later, his team was "ready for another visit by the vice president." But he fails to mention that in the meantime -- on Oct. 7, 2002 -- he sent the Senate Intelligence Committee a letter about Iraq and al Qaeda that became the administration's most important public statement on the subject.

Why is this key statement omitted from Mr. Tenet's book? Well, it vindicated the earlier criticism of the CIA's analysts. Mr. Tenet's Oct. 7 letter made clear that the analysts had been understating the problem. The letter set out concerns about the al Qaeda-Iraq relationship more clearly than anything the CIA had published before. The Senate Intelligence Committee reviewed the entire arc of this controversy -- the agency's first analyses, the sequence of meetings, the input from the White House and Pentagon -- and concluded, in its unanimous June 2004 report: "The Committee found that this process -- the policymakers' probing questions -- actually improved the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) products." Mr. Tenet does not mention this Senate finding either.

I stress these omissions because Mr. Tenet is doing in his book just what my office had criticized the CIA for doing in its prewar analysis: omitting information that contradicts preconceived arguments. It's a form of cherry-picking, a charge that Mr. Tenet throws at others on several occasions.

Eventually, in a have-it-both-ways concession, Mr. Tenet explains that there actually was a "solid basis" for "concern" about the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda with respect to "safe haven, contacts and training." He winds up confirming the essence of what the CIA's critics had said -- that there was worrisome information about Iraq's ties to al Qaeda that deserved to be presented to policy makers. But he never admits that those critics were correct. He doesn't even acknowledge that they acted in good faith.

Nevertheless, Feith writes that Tenet's book shouldn't be tossed in the dustbin of history, at least not just yet, as:

What it does offer is insight into Mr. Tenet. It allows you to hear the way he talked -- fast, loose, blustery, emotional, imprecise, from the "gut." Mr. Tenet proudly refers to the guidance of his "gut" several times in the book -- a strange boast from someone whose stock-in-trade should be accuracy and precision. "At the Center of the Storm" also allows you to see the way he reasoned -- unimaginatively and inconsistently. And it gives a glimpse of how he operated: He picked sides; he played favorites. The people he liked got his attention and understanding, their judgments his approval; the people he disliked he treated harshly and smeared. His loyalty is to tribe rather than truth.

Mr. Tenet makes a peculiar claim of detachment, as if he had not been a top official in the Bush administration. He wants readers not to blame him for the president's decision to invade Iraq. He implies that he never supported it and never even heard it debated. Mr. Tenet writes: "In many cases, we were not aware of what our own government was trying to do. The one thing we were certain of was that our warnings were falling on deaf ears."

Mr. Tenet's point here builds on the book's much-publicized statements that the author never heard the president and his national-security team debate "the imminence of the Iraqi threat," whether or not it was "wise to go to war" or when the war should start. He paints a distorted picture here.

But even if it were true that he never heard any such debate and was seriously dissatisfied with the dialogue in the White House Situation Room, he had hundreds of opportunities to improve the discussion by asking questions or making comments. I sat with him in many of the meetings, and no one prevented him from talking. It is noteworthy that Mr. Tenet met with the president for an intelligence briefing six days every week for years. Why didn't he speak up if he thought that the president was dangerously wrong or inadequately informed?

Does then CIA director George Tenet deserve to be let off the hook for 9/11?

In tomorrow's Washington Post, Michael Scheuer, head of the CIA's first Bin Laden Unit and author of the books Through Our Enemies' Eyes and Imperial Hubris offers his reaction to former CIA chief George Tenet's upcoming memoires.

According to Scheuer: "[Tenet] will be out to absolve himself of the failings of 9/11 and Iraq. He'll sell a lot of books, of course, but we shouldn't buy his attempts to let himself off the hook."

As he writes:

[W]hat troubles me most is Tenet's handling of the opportunities that CIA officers gave the Clinton administration to capture or kill bin Laden between May 1998 and May 1999. Each time we had intelligence about bin Laden's whereabouts, Tenet was briefed by senior CIA officers at Langley and by operatives in the field. He would nod and assure his anxious subordinates that he would stress to Clinton and his national security team that the chances of capturing bin Laden were solid and that the intelligence was not going to get better. Later, he would insist that he had kept up his end of the bargain, but that the NSC had decided not to strike.

Since 2001, however, several key Clinton counterterrorism insiders (including NSC staffers Richard A. Clarke, Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon) have reported that Tenet consistently denigrated the targeting data on bin Laden, causing the president and his team to lose confidence in the hard-won intelligence. "We could never get over the critical hurdle of being able to corroborate Bin Ladin's whereabouts," Tenet now writes. That of course is untrue, but it spared him from ever having to explain the awkward fallout if an attempt to get bin Laden failed. None of this excuses Clinton's disinterest in protecting Americans, but it does show Tenet's easy
willingness to play for patsies the CIA officers who risked their lives to garner intelligence and then to undercut their work to avoid censure if an attack went wrong.

To be fair, Tenet and I had differences about how best to act against bin Laden. (In the book, he plays down my recommendations as those of "an analyst not trained in conducting paramilitary operations.") The hard fact remains that each time we acquired actionable intelligence about bin Laden's whereabouts, I argued for preemptive action. By May 1998, after all, al-Qaeda had hit or helped to hit five U.S. targets, and bin Laden had twice declared war on America. I did not -- and do not -- care about collateral casualties in such situations, as most of the nearby civilians would be the families that bin Laden's men had brought to a war zone. But Tenet did care. "You can't kill everyone," he would say. That's an admirable humanitarian concern in the abstract, but it does nothing to protect the United States. Indeed, thousands of American families would not be mourning today had there been more ferocity and less sentimentality among the Clinton team.

Scheuer concludes:

Of course, it's good to finally have Tenet's side of the Iraq and 9/11 stories. But whatever his book says, he was not much of a CIA chief. Still, he may have been the ideal CIA leader for Clinton and Bush -- denigrating good intelligence to sate the former's cowardly pacifism and accepting bad intelligence to please the latter's Wilsonian militarism. Sadly but fittingly, "At the Center of the Storm" is likely to remind us that sometimes what lies at the center of a storm is a deafening silence.