mcgovern on tenet

Ray McGovern, a 27-year veteran analyst for the CIA and unabashed critic of both Bush and Tenet, had this to say when reached by phone on Thursday afternoon: "It is pretty clear this resignation came for two reasons. The first is the failed policy in Iraq. The cry for accountability and resignations has reached a din here in Washington D.C. Things have gone from bad to worse, the White House was looking for a sacrificial lamb, and Tenet being the good soldier he is, took the fall."
http://www.truthout.org/docs_04/060404A.shtml

"An ancillary reason," continued McGovern, "is the Pat Roberts report coming out of the Senate Intelligence Committee next week. The report excoriates Tenet and the entire intelligence community for the failure to find weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. You need to remember that Roberts is the archetypal GOP stalwart. The whole name of the game now is to blame the intelligence community and protect the White House."

"The truth, as we now know," said McGovern "is different. The war had nothing to do with weapons of mass destruction or al Qaeda, but with the ideological vision of the neoconservatives. Tenet was always trying to compromise, trying to make everyone happy. He tried to make the administration happy by telling Bush the WMD case against Iraq was a 'slam dunk.' Pat Roberts is preparing to hang him for it, which helps Roberts protect the White House."

Air Force Lt. Col. Karen Kwiatkowski worked in the office of Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Douglas Feith until her retirement a year ago, and often worked with the Office of Special Plans. "What I saw was aberrant, pervasive and contrary to good order and discipline," Kwiatkowski wrote of her experience in the run-up to the invasion. "If one is seeking the answers to why peculiar bits of 'intelligence' found sanctity in a presidential speech, or why the post-Saddam occupation has been distinguished by confusion and false steps, one need look no further than the process inside the Office of the Secretary of Defense."

Kwiatkowski went on to charge that the operations she witnessed during her tenure regarding the Office of Special Plans, constituted "a subversion of constitutional limits on executive power and a co-optation through deceit of a large segment of the Congress". According to Kwiatkowski, the same operation that allegedly cooked the intelligence also was responsible for the administration's failure to anticipate the problems that now dog the U.S. occupation in Iraq. Kwiatkowski reported that the political appointees assigned there and their contacts at State, the NSC, and Cheney's office tended to work as a "network." The OSP often deliberately cut out, ignored or circumvented normal channels of communication both within the Pentagon and with other agencies.

"I personally witnessed several cases of staff officers being told not to contact their counterparts at State or the (NSC) because that particular decision would be processed through a different channel," wrote Kwiatkowski. In one interview, she insists that her views of the OSP were widely shared by other professional staff. Quoting one veteran career officer "who was in a position to know what he was talking about," Kwiatkowski says, "What these people are doing now makes Iran-Contra look like amateur hour."