One George down, one to go

George Tenet was a hapless bumbler who deserved his fate. But as long as the high-ranking Bush cronies who are really responsible for the Iraq nightmare sit safely inside the Pentagon, Americans will not be satisfied.

By Martin Sieff

June 5, 2004 | The resignation of George Tenet, President Bush's loyal, stolid and invariably hapless CIA chief, will not be enough to appease the angry furies screeching at the Bush administration. As is typical for this administration, the abrupt departure of Tenet had nothing to do with justice and everything to do with expediency.

Tenet certainly has been a huge washout as director of central intelligence. He should have been fired immediately after the catastrophe of 9/11, the worst surprise attack and slaughter of American civilians in the United States in the nation's history. And he proved spineless and self-serving in refusing to defend his own agency and analysts when the neocon gang in the Pentagon and the media, especially the New York Times, shamelessly dumped their own culpability for every falsified or fabricated intelligence assessment on Iraq onto the shoulders of the CIA employees in Langley, Va.

Even Tenet's fig-leaf excuse for his resignation reflected the transparent mediocrity that so endeared him to Bush. After hanging on for a full seven years under two presidents as one of the longest-serving U.S. intelligence chiefs, and lacking the decency and self-respect to resign for either the 9/11 or the Iraq fiascoes, Tenet still asserted that he was going only, as he put it, for "the well-being of my wonderful family."

Despite his manifest failings, Tenet was arguably the least culpable -- apart from Secretary of State Colin Powell -- of all of Bush's top appointees for the catastrophe in Iraq. Democratic House Minority Leader Rep. Nancy Pelosi of California got it exactly right: "I think there are many more people who are responsible for the mess that the administration has created," she said.

Tenet and his agency had nothing to do with the awful abuses at Abu Ghraib prison. The CIA's assessments on Iraq were vastly more reliable and accurate than the self-serving pronouncements and outright lies of Iraqi National Congress leader Ahmed Chalabi, which were fervently promoted by Vice President Cheney, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and their neocons. It is top civilian officials in the Pentagon who now must take lie detector tests to supposedly ascertain which of them leaked to Chalabi crucial data on U.S. intelligence-gathering capabilities in Iran. Not a single member of Tenet's huge bureaucracy has come under suspicion, though Chalabi and his neocon allies will no doubt accuse them yet.

But for all his devotion to Bush, Tenet was the obvious scapegoat for two reasons above all. First, President Clinton appointed him. This alone made him the obvious choice. He was not ultimately, to use Margaret Thatcher's pithy phrase, "one of us." As Rep. Robert Matsui, D-Calif., chairman of the House Democratic Campaign Committee, said, "The president won't be able evade responsibility by having, frankly, somebody appointed by Bill Clinton resign."

Second, as much as Bush appears to have valued Tenet's courtier-like skills and ability to meet the president's demanding "comfort level" requirements (the only quality apart from blind ideological acquiescence he demands from any of his most senior officials), Tenet was not his closest enabler. While Tenet provided false encouragement to Bush in his irresponsible actions -- the notorious "slam-dunk" on WMD, for example -- Bush has other more reliable and abasing enablers, such as Condoleezza Rice and Karen Hughes, to serve as emotional crutches.

Next page: Had Bush axed Rummy, the likes of Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh would have had a hissy fit