Another less than perfect imperial manager gets fired
Saul Landau
Progreso Weekly, 17 June 2004
Poor George J. Tenet (July 1997- July, 2004). This duplicitous but loyal servant supposedly resigned as CIA Director, but everyone in Washington knows that President Bush considered him a liability. Tenet will become Bush’s patsy, the guy responsible for the CIA’s failure to stop the 9/11 attacks, find Iraqi WMDs and predict the 1998 India-Pakistan nuclear testing. But CIA chiefs are institutionally designed to be fall guys.
The Bushies, splintered by a three way foreign policy war over Iraq involving State, Defense and Vice President Dick Cheney’s office, now need a new buck stopper for their "intelligence failures" when Congress eventually asks them about the still missing lethal Iraqi weapons.
And, when the 9/11 Commission issues its July report, the Bushies will try to deflect charges that they possessed substantial evidence of a major terrorist plot and did nothing. And they will try to defuse charges that they or Ahmad Chalabi, their trusted Iraqi adviser and notorious dissembler, leaked "national security secrets" to Iran.
Special Prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, currently seeking the traitor who "outed" CIA operative Valerie Plame, has begun to question Bush, who has consulted a private attorney on the matter. This suggests that evidence may lead to the President himself authorizing the plan to have columnist Robert Novak leak Plame’s name so as to punish her husband, former Ambassador Joseph Wilson. Wilson exposed Bush’s scam to concoct evidence to show that Saddam Hussein had tried to buy African yellowcake uranium to make into bombs. Add to this mess the Abu Ghraib torture scandal and you would expect the Democrats to have a field day with the fall presidential debates. So, why the long face Mr. Kerry?
But current scandals and petty politics – is there another kind in Washington? - around Tenet's departure obscure the role of the CIA: an agency supposedly designed to both gather and analyze Intelligence and make policy through covert action.
In the 1980s, William Casey directed the CIA to initiate a series of covert wars to destabilize governments linked to the Soviet Union: Nicaragua, Angola, Afghanistan, Mozambique, Cuba and Vietnam. To take revenge on Vietnam, the CIA played footsies with the infamous Pol Pot in Cambodia.
In Angola and Mozambique, the CIA engaged with South Africa and murderous tribal leaders; in Afghanistan, with anti-Western Islamic zealots. Casey’s strategy combined attacks on the Soviet periphery with a weapons race designed in part to force the Soviets to spend precious resources and propaganda wars. The war in Afghanistan took the heaviest toll on the already imploding Soviets.
The planners of multi continent covert war did not, however, consider the consequences – blowback. Conspiring to overthrow other governments means lawbreaking. The CIA obscures its criminal behavior by resorting to the mystique of "covert action." The targeted nation knows full well that US-backed mercenaries have attacked. The Agency wants its secret – illegal activity – kept from the public. After 9/11, the empire simply blew away the frail remains of republican government.
After World War II, the creators of the CIA argued that covert action would compliment intelligence, which the Republic needed. Covert action offered successive presidents an instrument of force that eliminated the ponderous procedure of checking with Congress.
The CIA became the equivalent of the President’s Praetorian Guard, an executive resource that could also reassure – lie to – Congress by posing as an intelligence agency.
When the press uncovered a covert operation, the spinmeisters finessed it: given the cruel and unprincipled communist enemy which we must unfortunately deal, they argued, we must occasionally resort to less than wholesome activities – like overthrowing governments, assassinating foreign leaders and disrupting the routine function of other people’s lives.
When Congress uncovered the CIA’s role in destabilizing the elected government of Chile (1970-73), following revelations of CIA assassination campaigns in Vietnam, demands for reform arose. But the ensuing congressional and public discussion about fixing the Agency centered on reforming procedures, as if the CIA could achieve a balance between republican principles and imperial power. So, past CIA scandals have led to procedural discussions, not the removal of its covert – assassination and terrorism – function.
Members of Congress still fear the consequences of using the "e" (empire) word in these "reform the CIA" rituals. And the CIA will continue to distort intelligence to suit imperial agendas. Its covert forces will kill, torture, and convert natives into traitors as they have done previously. New scandals will emerge. Congress will cry: "how is this possible?" And they’ll hold more hearings to reform procedure and call former CIA directors to testify.
Former CIA Director (under Bush 41) Robert M. Gates epitomizes the avoidance ploy. Distract the public from substantive discussion by focusing on procedure. Instead of asking why a republic needs 725 bases throughout the world, Gates would place the new CIA chief inside "the small policy-making circle when key decisions are made. He's responsible for keeping everybody straight and keeping the debate honest, if you will."
What a joke! Tenet the treacherous keeping the debate honest! As CIA Director, Tenet vacillated between purveying intelligence and promoting Bush’s Iraq War agenda. Is this honesty? TV audiences remember him sitting behind Secretary of State Colin Powell at the UN Security Council on February 5, 2003 – suppressing a yawn? – as Powell power pointed in the cause of sincere prevarication.
Tenet’s very presence at the UN symbolized the weight of CIA intelligence, as if he personally backed every fib Powell uttered about the location of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction.
In January 2004, when the Bush-appointed David Kay and weapons inspection team returned from Iraq empty handed, Tenet, like Powell and the other high level liars, embodied the nadir of Bush Administration credibility.
In Washington, however, nothing succeeds like failure. Under George Tenet’s watch the CIA failed to predict and prevent the 9/11 attacks. Tenet also lacked courage to contradict Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld around their claims that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction and ties to Al-Qaeda. Instead, according to Bob Woodward, Tenet told Bush that proving the WMD case would "be a slam dunk."
After these disastrous intelligence failures and Tenet’s less than truthful answers to congressional questioners regarding both of those subjects, logic should have dictated that Tenet’s prolonged exodus would have provoked headlines like:
"Finally, Bush cans the cowardly head fool at CIA."
Instead, the sheepish media repeat bromides issued by Bush, whose failures make Tenet’s pale. Tenet did a "superb job" in fighting terror. Bush described Tenet’s leadership as "strong." The LA Times credits Tenet with expanding the "CIA corps of analysts and clandestine operatives" reopening overseas stations, increasing "support for foreign espionage" and in general reforming the intelligence apparatus and restoring the Agency’s "sense of mission and purpose."
Compare those procedural "successes" with the substantive failures: he did not anticipate either the India or the Pakistani nuclear weapons testing in 1998, events that changed the geo-politics of the Indian Ocean. In May 1999, his "expanded intelligence corps" gave NATO (the US Air Force) the coordinates to bomb the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.
Despite the precedent of the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, Tenet’s CIA failed to track or penetrate Al-Qaeda.
On Iraq, Tenet played behind the scenes games with neo cons in the Defense and Cheney’s office. While they insisted on linkage between Saddam and Al-Qaeda, Tenet obsequiously told the White House to delete claims from a Bush speech about Saddam trying to buy nuclear fuel in Africa. But that charge, nevertheless, appeared in Bush’s 2003 State of the Union address. Oh well, the strong leader, Tenet tried. Or did he?
Unless strength lies in kissing the butt of the powerful and persistent lying, Tenet’s great intelligence achievements come down to the CIA helping local law enforcement prevent a 1998 attempt by the Egyptian Islamic Jihad to bomb the US Embassy in Tirana, Albania and obstruct Al-Qaeda heavies in a plan to hijack a commercial jet to force the United States to free Sheik Omar Abdel-Rahman, currently serving life for conspiring to bomb New York City locations.
Tenet’s failures far outweigh his successes. It doesn’t matter. US imperial strength survives the failures of its administrators. As long as the Administrator played by the house rules, the imperial clique rewards failure with high honor. Those who award these posh positions assume that the inherent strength of US empire makes it immune from the foibles of the boobs who administer it.
Tenet can now join the revered for Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, and the late Nationall Security Adviser MacGeorge Bundy, whose Vietnam screw ups under Kennedy and Johnson cost millions of lives; and Henry Kissinger, whose murderous performances in Chile, Vietnam, Indonesia and elsewhere earned him wealth, prestige and honor. Perhaps a major network will offer "poor Tenet" a job directing its news department! Are you listening Fox and CNN?
Copyright 2004 Progreso Weekly
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