Did you watch the 60 Minutes interview with George Tenet last night?
He was a great interview, and the 60 Minutes crew were thrilled to death with everything they got from him. Emotional, agitated, full of great quotes and serious looks on his face when talking about the toll 9/11 took on him, on his agency, and on the nation.
60 Minutes found him passionate, combative, apologetic, defiant, and fiercely loyal to the people of the CIA and their fight against terrorism.
“People don’t understand us, you know, they think we’re a bunch of faceless bureaucrats with no feelings, no families, no sense of what it’s like to be passionate about running these bastards down. There was nobody else in this government that felt what we felt before or after 9/11. Of course, after 9/11, everybody had that feeling. Nobody felt like we felt on that day. This was personal,” Tenet tells Pelley.
Here’s the part of the interview that I found the most revolting.
“Two of the 19 hijackers, in your files, in Langley, Virginia, a year and a half before 9/11 … they don’t get on a watch list. They don’t get on a no-fly list. You know these are bad guys,” Pelley remarks.
“Scott, they don’t. And honest people doing honest work, for whatever you know, all of these people who are doing the best that they can, and understand this in great granularity, understand all of this and feel this pain, we all know this. I can’t dress this up for you,” Tenet replies.
What happened?
“People were inundated with data and operations. And they missed it,” Tenet acknowledges. “We’re not trying to intentionally withhold—human beings made mistakes.”
But the 9/11 Commission accused Tenet’s CIA of being bureaucratic and failing to recognize al Qaeda for the threat that it was.
“All these commissions, and all these reports never got underneath the feeling of my people. You know, to see us written about as if we’re idiots. Or if we didn’t understand this threat. As if we didn’t understand what happened on that day. To impugn our integrity, our operational savvy. You know, the American people need to know that’s just not so,” Tenet says. “We’re the ones that stand up and tell you the truth about when we’re wrong. It’s a great thing about this government. The only people that ever stand up and tell the truth are who? Intelligence officers. Because our culture is, never break faith with the truth. We’ll tell you, you don’t have to drag it out of us. You didn’t have to serve me a subpoena to tell me I didn’t watch list Hazmi and Midhar. We knew right away; and we told everybody. Truth matters to us.”
See, here’s the thing. 9/11 happened, and nobody lost his job. 9/11 occurred, and Tenet had been CIA Director for four years, and Deputy Director for two years prior. And he still, to this day, refuses to acknowledge that the biggest intelligence failure in the history of the nation was in any way the CIA’s fault.
Your job, Mr. Tenet, was to ferret out the risks to your country. You blew it. Three thousand people died, and now we’re at war in two separate nations.
The nation doesn’t think you’re a bunch of idiots who couldn’t connect the dots. We think you’re a bunch of intelligence experts who didn’t do their jobs.
This isn’t a corporation that failed to meet its annual Wall Street projections. This is an agency tasked with the protection of America from foreign agents who wish to do her harm. The Millennium Bomber was foiled not because of intelligence work, but because of an alert customs agent. That was another Al Qaeda plot the CIA missed. Under Tenet’s tenure. Another “mistake.” And still, no one was ever fired. No one—until the Bush Administration finally edged out Tenet three years after 9/11.
Throughout the interview, Tenet kept on praising the work of the agency. Went on and on about the great work the CIA did in Afghanistan. Yeah, that’s the country where they missed bin Laden. Great work. Yep. Wonderful. Good to know Osama isn’t around anymore to plot against America. Oh. Wait. Guess that’s another of the CIA “mistakes” under Tenet.
You know, the CIA doesn’t get a bye with me for being human and making mistakes. Not unless after 9/11 they, for instance, conducted an audit of what went wrong, found the problems, rectified them, and set in effect new guidelines to prevent this from ever happening again. That’s not what I heard from Tenet. And we know now that the FBI and CIA are still not working well together.
Tenet should have been fired the week after 9/11. But this is twenty-first century America, where no one bears personal responsibility for anything anymore. The buck stops nowhere.
I won’t be buying Tenet’s books. Particularly after reading the outright lies already being exposed.
THE WEEKLY STANDARD has now learned of a second, more stunning error in Tenet’s book (which is due to appear in bookstores tomorrow). According to Michiko Kakutani’s review in Saturday’s Times,
On the day after 9/11, he [Tenet] adds, he ran into Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative and the head of the Defense Policy Board, coming ut of the White House. He says Mr. Perle turned to him and said: “Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear esponsibility.”
Here’s the problem: Richard Perle was in France on that day, unable to fly back after September 11. In fact Perle did not return to the United State until September 15. Did Tenet perhaps merely get the date of this encounter wrong? Well, the quote Tenet ascribes to Perle hinges on the encounter taking place September 12: “Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday.” And Perle in any case categorically denies to THE WEEKLY STANDARD ever having said any such thing to Tenet, while coming out of the White House or anywhere else.
He’s only human. He makes mistakes. That’s the explanation for the error, I’m sure.
Read this. There was information that was possibly available to thwart 9/11. I just wonder if it was the CIA’s job to do so or the FBI’s?
Also did Bush force Tenet out? He did give him a medal of honor didn’t he?
Of course Tenet realizes by now that the way to riches is to write a tell all book bashing Bush. In the 80’s it was greenmail. In the 90’s it was the tech bubble. Now it’s Bush bashing. (Although one news report said that he was critical of Cheney not Bush.)
To quote Andrew McCarthy at National Review Online regarding George Tenant
‘The act should have been closed on or about September 12, 2001.’
No one rises from Assistant to CIA Director and hangs on for years through Democrat and Republican Presidents unless he’s as slick as oil covered teflon.
The only explanation for Tenet not being fired immediately after 9/11 is the same explanation for why J. Edgar Hoover stayed on at FBI way, way too long. These two Martin Borman types knew too much and people were afraid of them.
I’ll give it to the bastard, he’s a great actor and going to sell some books. Otherwise, as far as I’m concerned, he can rot in hell.
Oh and as for “soccer dad’s” #1 post above, it was EVERY agency’s job in the National Security infrastructure to prevent attacks like 9/11.
Al Quada operated and plotted inside the US and outside the US for years before 9/11. the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency) investigated them, too.
The US doesn’t have more than 30 agencies out there collecting intelligence just so everyone can blame everyone else when something goes wrong.
But of course I’m wrong and, clearly, that’s exactly what all the redundancy is for.
To know what really lead up to the evil of 9/11 you have to read a book called THE TERROR TIMELINE by Paul Thompson. It shows Clinton to be an appeaser and Bush as incompetant. This book uses reliable sources like WSJ and Reuters. The whole narrative of 9/11 is misconstructed. Both the Pakistanis and the Saudis were surely involved. Show a little courage and read this book.
According to caller on the radio this morning (a former CIA employee who knew Tennet), Tennet is one of those polititians who tells everybody what they want to hear, even when everything he says contradicts everything else.
In other words, he fast-talked himself into getting his job, and then into keeping it after years of proven incompetence.
Sort of like everybody else in Washington.