By Jason Leopold
t r u t h o u t Report
Monday 07 May 2007
With the publication of his memoir, "At the Center of the Storm," former CIA Director George Tenet joins a growing list of former Bush administration officials who have written books accusing the White House of cooking intelligence immediately after 9/11 to win support for a US-led invasion of Iraq.
Tenet is the highest-ranking administration official to level such charges against senior White House members, claiming that there was a coordinated effort within the Office of the Vice President, the National Security Council and the Pentagon to fix intelligence related to the so-called Iraqi threat around Bush's policy toward the country. He claims that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were used to justify an invasion, despite the absence of intelligence showing Iraq was an imminent threat.
The ex-CIA chief's assertions support similar claims over the past few years by other, former high-ranking officials. Among them are Richard Clarke, the counterterrorism czar, and Paul O'Neill, the treasury secretary, who provided reporter and author Ron Suskind with detailed information about the White House effort to overthrow Saddam Hussein prior to 9/11.
Tenet got a $4 million advance for his memoirs. Since his book's revelation became public last week, he has been the subject of a widespread backlash by former intelligence colleagues, who said he should have spoken out sooner. Still, his information on flawed prewar intelligence related to Iraq has once again sparked serious debate within Congress on whether the White House knowingly misled the public. The Iraq war has claimed the lives of more than 3,300 US soldiers and tens of thousands of Iraqi civilians.
With Democrats controlling both houses of Congress, hearings and investigations have been launched in an effort to determine how the bogus intelligence made its way into the hands of the White House executive staff, and why it was cited as fact despite prior warnings about its veracity by Tenet and other intelligence analysts at the CIA.
Rice's comment regarding the president not wanting to swat at flies as it pertained to the 9/11 commission's inquiry could raise broader questions about how the White House handled pre-9/11 warnings by Tenet and others. If in fact it was Bush's policy that responding to Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda's plans constituted swatting at flies, that would cast a more critical light on the administration's non-response to Tenet's now-famous August 6, 2001 briefing to Bush at the White House titled, "Bin Ladin Determined To Strike in US".
"We ... moved to develop a new and comprehensive strategy to eliminate the al-Qaeda terrorist network," Rice said, according to a copy of her testimony. "President Bush understood the threat, and he understood its importance. He made clear to us that he did not want to respond to al-Qaeda one attack at a time. He told me he was "tired of swatting flies." This new strategy was developed over the spring and summer of 2001, and was approved by the president's senior national security officials on September 4. It was the very first major national security policy directive of the Bush administration - not Russia, not missile defense, not Iraq, but the elimination of al-Qaeda."
Not so, said O'Neill and Clarke, and now Tenet. They claim the administration was searching for reasons to invade Iraq as soon as Bush took office in January 2001. The common theme in Tenet's and Clarke's books is that both say they had personally warned Rice in the summer of 2001 about a looming attack being planned by al-Qaeda, but were rebuffed by the former national security adviser. They say Rice and other White House officials had been shifting military and intelligence resources toward Iraq. More on the story.
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