Douglas Feith v. George Tenet

Doug Feith reviews Tenent's At the Center of the Storm:

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Another example: 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.

Mr. Tenet savages the staffer from my office who presented that critique, although elsewhere he sanctimoniously derides "despicable" political attacks on hard-working professionals. He misstates her credentials, which include 20 years of experience as a professional intelligence analyst. (He calls her a "naval reservist," which she was not.) He garbles the title of her briefing: It was not "Iraq and al-Qa'ida -- Making the Case" but the perfectly neutral "Assessing the Relationship Between Iraq and al Qaida." Mr. Tenet puts in her mouth the haughty and foolish assertion that the al Qaeda-Iraq issue was "open and shut" and "no further analysis is required." I was there, and she didn't say anything even close to that. The whole point of her presentation was to urge further analysis.

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There is more. Feith mentions a letter that Tenet sent to the Senate on the issue and the Senate's conclusion, "The Committee found that this process -- the policymakers' probing questions -- actually improved the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) products."

The more we learn about these meeting the more it seems that Carl Levin's obsession with Feith's work is misplaced. I think subsequent events have proved that al Qaeda has no trouble working with Baathists. What is more than passing strange is that even with admissions and the evidence out there for all to see, many Democrats are still denying what is obvious. Al Qaeda has no trouble working with the Baathist in Iraq. It must be their lying eyes.

More criticism by a CIA insider here.