who ran the secretive Office of Special Plans (OSP).

The OSP, organized for the express purpose of massaging intelligence data on the threat posed by Iraq so as to justify the already-made war decision, was fueled in no small part by the data provided by Chalabi. This story unfolded under the deepening gloom of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal, which appears to be spreading far beyond Iraq, and threatens to subsume a number of high-ranking officials.

Late Wednesday night, a wire report appeared stating that George W. Bush was seeking legal advice on how to protect himself from the looming investigation into who in the White House outed the name of CIA agent Valerie Plame. According to the report, Bush was "ready to cooperate" with the investigation - an interesting comment, considering the fact that the investigation has been going on for months, and that his people have been stonewalling the investigation across the board. When the President needs a lawyer, it is usually a sign that there is blood in the water.

Then, on Thursday, CIA Director George Tenet resigned his position. The news was delivered by George W. Bush just before he boarded a plane to absorb a beating from our former European allies.

Whither goes Tenet? Why did he resign? The official version holds that he quit for "personal reasons," and has intended to leave for a while now. It was put forth that perhaps this Clinton holdover never quite fit the Bush administration mold. Some said he was quitting because no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. Some used the word 'fired' to describe his departure.

In the end, however, it appears Tenet bailed out to save George W. Bush.

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."

"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."

McGovern has never spoken well of Pat Roberts, Republican of Kansas and Chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee. In an interview McGovern gave truthout in June of 2003, he offered the following perspective: "When the Niger forgery was unearthed and when Colin Powell admitted, well shucks, it was a forgery, Senator Jay Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on that Committee, went to Pat Roberts and said they really needed the FBI to take a look at this. After all, this was known to be a forgery and was still used on Congressmen and Senators. We'd better get the Bureau in on this. Pat Roberts said no, that would be inappropriate."

"So Rockefeller drafted his own letter," continued McGovern in the interview, "and went back to Roberts and said he was going to send the letter to FBI Director Mueller, and asked if Roberts would sign on to it. Roberts said no, that would be inappropriate. What the FBI Director eventually got was a letter from one Minority member saying pretty please, would you maybe take a look at what happened here, because we think there may have been some skullduggery. The answer he got from the Bureau was a brush-off. Why do I mention all that? This is the same Pat Roberts who is going to lead the investigation into what happened with this issue."

"There is a lot that could be said about Pat Roberts," said McGovern. "I remember way back last fall when people were being briefed, CIA and others were briefing Congressmen and Senators about the weapons of mass destruction. These press folks were hanging around outside the briefing room, and when the Senators came out, one of the press asked Senator Roberts how the evidence on weapons of mass destruction was. Roberts said, oh, it was very persuasive, very persuasive. The press guy asked Roberts to tell him more about that. Roberts said, 'Truck A was observed to be going under Shed B, where Process C is believed to be taking place.' The press guy asked him if he found that persuasive, and Pat Roberts said, 'Oh, these intelligence folks, they have these techniques down so well, so yeah, this is very persuasive.' And the correspondent said thank you very much, Senator. So, if you've got a Senator who is that inclined to believe that kind of intelligence, you've got someone who will do the administration's bidding."

This, very clearly, has been proven out over the course of time. Roberts has used his Committee to shield the Bush administration from any culpability. Nowhere in the deliberations of the Committee did the Office of Special Plans come to the fore. The data on the Iraqi threat Roberts praised did not come from CIA, but from the Office of Special Plans.

The OSP, recall, was created by Defense Secretary Don Rumsfeld specifically to second-guess and reinterpret intelligence data to justify war in Iraq. The OSP was staffed by rank amateurs, civilians whose ideological pedigree suited Rumsfeld and his cabal of hawks. Though this group was on no government payroll and endured no Congressional oversight, their information and interpretations managed to prevail over the data being provided by the State Department and CIA. This group was able to accomplish this incredible feat due to devoted patronage from high-ranking ultra-conservatives within the administration, most prominently Vice-President Cheney.

This group worked according to a strategy that they hoped would recreate Iraq into an Israeli ally, destroy a potential threat to Persian Gulf oil trade, and wrap U.S. allies around Iran. The State Department and CIA saw this plan as being badly flawed and based upon profoundly questionable intelligence. The OSP responded to these criticisms by cutting State and CIA completely out of the loop. By the time the war came, nearly all the data used to justify the action to the American people was coming from the OSP. The American intelligence community had been totally usurped.

When the OSP wanted to change or exaggerate evidence of Iraqi weapons capabilities, they sent Vice President Cheney to CIA headquarters on unprecedented visits where he demanded "forward-leaning" interpretations of the evidence. When Cheney was unable to go to the CIA, his chief of staff, Lewis "Scooter" Libby, went in his place. On three occasions, former congressman Newt Gingrich visited CIA in his capacity as a "consultant" for ultra-conservative hawk Richard Perle and his Defense Policy Board. According to the accounts of these visits, Gingrich browbeat the analysts to toughen up their assessments of the dangers posed by Hussein. He was allowed access to the CIA and the analysts because he was a known emissary of the OSP.

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."

Is Tenet being a good soldier and allowing CIA to take the blame for the mess in Iraq? He has done it before. Remember that last summer, on a Friday to be exact, CIA Director Tenet took public blame for the fraudulent use of the Niger uranium evidence in Bush's State of the Union Address in January 2003. According to Tenet, Bush's use of data from known forgeries to support the Iraq war was completely his fault. He never told Bush's people that the data was corrupted, and it was his fault those "sixteen words" regarding Iraqi attempts to procure uranium from Niger for a nuclear program made it into the text of the speech.

Condoleezza Rice and Don Rumsfeld had been triangulating on Tenet since that Thursday, claiming the CIA had never informed the White House about the dubious nature of the Niger evidence. Tenet fell on his sword and took responsibility for the error. On that Saturday, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer told the press corps that Bush had "moved on" from this controversy. The New York Times editorial board thought otherwise. The paper published an editorial on that Saturday entitled "The Uranium Fiction." The editorial read, in part, as follows:

"It is clear, however, that much more went into this affair than the failure of the CIA. to pounce on the offending 16 words in Mr. Bush's speech. A good deal of information already points to a willful effort by the war camp in the administration to pump up an accusation that seemed shaky from the outset and that was pretty well discredited long before Mr. Bush stepped into the well of the House of Representatives last January. Doubts about the accusation were raised in March 2002 by Joseph Wilson, a former American diplomat, after he was dispatched to Niger to look into the issue. Mr. Wilson has said he is confident that his concerns were circulated not only within the agency but also at the State Department and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney. Mr. Tenet, in his statement yesterday, confirmed that the Wilson findings had been given wide distribution, although he reported that Mr. Bush, Mr. Cheney and other high officials had not been directly informed about them by the CIA."

The next day, on Sunday, the Washington Post's lead headline read, "CIA Got Uranium Reference Cut in October." The meat of the article states:

"CIA Director George J. Tenet successfully intervened with White House officials to have a reference to Iraq seeking uranium from Niger removed from a presidential speech last October, three months before a less specific reference to the same intelligence appeared in the State of the Union address, according to senior administration officials. Tenet argued personally to White House officials, including deputy national security adviser Stephen Hadley, that the allegation should not be used."

Here is CIA Director Tenet arguing in October of 2002 against the use of the Niger evidence, stating bluntly that it was useless. He made this pitch directly to the White House. The administration later claimed they were never told the evidence was bad. Tenet responds by taking the blame for the whole thing. He earned some of it, to be sure. But all of it?

The Valerie Plame case is creeping towards the White House, and Bush is reaching out to lawyers. Ahmad Chalabi is being sized for leg irons because he has been acting on behalf of Iran. The war is a disaster, and the Office of Special Plans owns a vast amount of blame for it, along with the neo-con hawks who put the whole scheme together.

Is Tenet's last act a last-ditch effort to pull the White House out of the maelstrom by, again, scapegoating himself and his agency? Former CIA Director Stansfield Turner seems to think so. Turner believes this resignation is "too significant a move at too important a time" to be motivated by personal considerations. "I think he's being pushed out," Turner said on CNN. "The president feels he has to have someone to blame. I don't think (Tenet) would pull the plug on President Bush in the midst of an election cycle without being asked by President Bush to do that."

It makes sense. Tenet's resignation will allow the Bush administration to say the Iraq situation was the fault of CIA and the 'intelligence' offered. Tenet's position can now be filled with a Bush loyalist; one name floated recently for the position was none other than Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz.

Will it work? If the mainstream media chooses to accept White House spin as fact, Bush will be helped by this resignation. If the mainstream media continues to avoid reporting on the OSP, the true source of the Iraq 'intelligence,' and the real reasons for this war, Bush will be helped by this resignation.

Yet Bush is calling his lawyer. Hm.

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William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and international bestseller of two books - 'War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You To Know' and 'The Greatest Sedition is Silence.'

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Go to Original

President Bush Cites 'Personal Reasons' in Announcement

The Associated Press

Thursday 03 June 2004

Washington - George J. Tenet, the head of the Central Intelligence Agency, has resigned after months in which the C.I.A. has been criticized for failing to head off the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and for apparently overestimating the threat posed by deadly weapons in Iraq.

"Today, George Tenet, the director of the C.I.A., submitted a letter of resignation," President Bush said on the South Lawn of the White House in a midmorning announcement that stunned Washington by its timing. "I met with George last night in the White House. I had a good visit with him. He told me he was resigning for personal reasons."

Later, the C.I.A. released a videotape of an emotional Mr. Tenet telling C.I.A. employees that he was leaving for one reason, "the well-being of my wonderful family, nothing more and nothing less."

Despite Mr. Tenet's words, and notwithstanding Mr. Bush's remarks that Mr. Tenet had done "a superb job on behalf of the American people" and he was sorry to see him go, there was immediate speculation that there was much more behind the departure than Mr. Tenet's wish to leave the demands of an admittedly taxing post he has held since 1997.

Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A. have come under intense criticism since Sept. 11. The critics, in the government and outside it, have assailed the C.I.A., along with the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other agencies, for failing to "connect the dots," or put together what in retrospect seemed to be a cornucopia of clues that attacks on the United States were imminent.

More recently, Secretary of State Colin L. Powell has reportedly been pressing the C.I.A. to explain why he was apparently misinformed about Saddam Hussein's supposed possession of deadly chemical and biological weapons. Those weapons, which Mr. Powell told the United Nations were already in Iraq's arsenal and which were a key rationale for the American-led war to topple the Baghdad dictator, have so far not been found.

Washington is awaiting the release of a Senate Intelligence Committee report on the Iraqi weapons program, as well as the report by the independent commission that has been studying the Sept. 11 attacks and the response to them.

Mr. Bush announced the resignation of the 51-year-old Mr. Tenet in a way that was almost bizarre. He had just addressed reporters and photographers in a fairly innocuous Rose Garden session with Prime Minister John Howard of Australia. Then the session was adjourned, as Mr. Bush apparently prepared to depart for nearby Andrews Air Force Base and his flight to Europe, where he is to take part in ceremonies marking the 60th anniversary of the Normandy invasion and meet European leaders - some of whom have been sharply critical of the campaign in Iraq.

But minutes later, Mr. Bush reappeared on the sun-drenched White House lawn, surprising listeners with the news of Mr. Tenet's resignation, which the president said would be effective in mid-July. After that, Mr. Bush said, the C.I.A.'s deputy director, John McLaughlin, will be acting director.

Mr. McLaughlin may well be a candidate to succeed Mr. Tenet as director of central intelligence, overseeing a dozen intelligence-gathering agencies as well as the C.I.A. itself. Another obvious candidate is Representative Porter Goss, the Florida Republican who heads the House Intelligence Committee and is a former C.I.A. agent. The position is subject to Senate confirmation.

The president praised Mr. Tenet's qualities as a public servant, saying: "He's strong. He's resolute. He's served his nation as the director for seven years. He has been a strong and able leader at the agency. He's been a, he's been a strong leader in the war on terror, and I will miss him."

Then Mr. Bush walked away, declining to take questions or elaborate on Mr. Tenet's reasons for stepping down.

The official announcement was unconvincing to a former C.I.A. chief, Stansfield Turner, who held the post under President Jimmy Carter.

Mr. Turner said the resignation is "too significant a move at too important a time" to be inspired by nothing more than personal considerations.

"I think he's being pushed out," Mr. Turner said in an interview on CNN. "The president feels he has to have someone to blame."

Mr. Turner went on, "I don't think he would pull the plug on President Bush in the midst of an election cycle without being asked by President Bush to do that."

Although Mr. Turner did not say so, it is not unheard of for a person close to a president, rather than the president himself, to give someone a discreet signal that it is time to go. But Mr. Bush told his senior staff this morning that he did not want anyone speculating that Mr. Tenet's resignation was for anything other than personal reasons, according to The Associated Press.

And Mr. Tenet himself, in his appearance before C.I.A. employees at the agency's headquarters in Langley, Va., did not act like a man hiding bitterness at being forced out.

"I did not make this decision easily," he told his employees. "I know in my heart that the time is right to move on."

Mr. Tenet said President Bush was "a great champion" of the C.I.A. and had been "a constant source of support to him."

The political ramifications of Mr. Tenet's departure were hard to gauge immediately. Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts, Mr. Bush's all-but-certain opponent in the coming election, issued a statement in which he thanked Mr. Tenet for his hard work and wished him the best.

"There is no question, however, that there have been significant intelligence failures, and the administration has to accept responsibility for those failures," Mr. Kerry said.

Other political reaction was varied, and by no means entirely along party lines.

Senator Tom Daschle of South Dakota, the Senate minority leader, said: "Although I appreciate the fact that Director Tenet served for nearly seven years in one of the most difficult and important positions in our government, I think the intelligence community and our country will benefit from new leadership. I am hopeful that the Administration chooses a successor who is committed to fully understanding why mistakes were made in the past and implementing long-overdue reforms of our intelligence community."

Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority leader, said Mr. Tenet's resignation should not be "the only response" to recent intelligence failures. And Representative Jane Harman of California, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told The A.P. that Mr. Tenet deserved credit because he had "restored morale and provided stability and continuity at a crucial time."

Senator Charles E. Schumer, Democrat of New York, said Mr. Tenet was "an honorable and decent man who has served his country well in difficult times, and no one should make him a fall guy for anything."

Senator Trent Lott, Republican of Mississippi and a veteran member of the Intelligence Committee, called Mr. Tenent's decision "a positive move, for him personally and for the agency. His resignation also will give the president the opportunity to implement other needed reforms in the intelligence community to improve its operation."

But Senator Pat Roberts, the Kansas Republican who heads the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the intelligence community had to be held accountable for its failings.

"Simply put, I think the community is somewhat in denial," Mr. Roberts said at a breakfast meeting. "We need fresh thinking within the community, especially within the Congress, to enable the intelligence community to change and adapt to the dangerous world in which we live," Mr. Roberts said, according to The A.P. It was not immediately clear if Mr. Roberts knew by then that Mr. Tenet was stepping down.

Another Republican, Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama, also said he was glad to see Mr. Tenet go. "There were more failures of intelligence on his watch as director of the C.I.A. than any other D.C.I. in our history," Mr. Shelby told The A.P. "I have long felt that, while an honorable man, he lacked the critical leadership necessary for our intelligence community to effectively operate, particularly in the post 9/11 world."

Named to the C.I.A. post by President Bill Clinton, Mr. Tenet proved himself to be a survivor by lasting as long as he did under Mr. Clinton's Republican successor. The director is also known for his gregarious, down-to-earth personality, in contrast to the more starchy figures who have led the C.I.A. in years past.

People close to Mr. Bush say he developed a close relationship with Mr. Tenet, and did so on the advice of his father, who is the only president who was previously head of the C.I.A.

Mr. Tenet acknowledged on Feb. 5 that American spy agencies may have overestimated Iraq's illicit weapons capabilities, in part because of a failure to penetrate the inner workings of the Iraqi government.

"When the facts on Iraq are all in, we will be neither completely right nor completely wrong," Mr. Tenet said in an address at Georgetown University, his alma mater.

He insisted that intelligence agencies had acted independently of policy makers, and he noted that intelligence analysts had never portrayed Iraq as an imminent threat to the United States.

"No one told us what to say or how to say it," he said.

Addressing C.I.A. employees today, Mr. Tenet conceded that "our record is not without flaws."

But he said the C.I.A. was making enormous strides to better itself, not because it is under bureaucratic pressure but because the agency is "a community of patriots" dedicated to protecting the United States. Many of the agency's triumphs, he said, are "unknown and uncounted," but real nonetheless.

His voice full of emotion, Mr. Tenet said the Central Intelligence Agency was ready to meet the challenges and dangers of "a new century, and a new world."

"This is not my legacy," he said. "It is yours."

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