Open Letter to George Tenet

Former CIA officers wrote a public letter to George Tenet. They accuse the former CIA Director of using his book to whitewash his role in helping the White House make the case to invade Iraq.

You were not a victim. You were a willing participant in a poorly considered policy to start an unnecessary war and you share culpability with Dick Cheney and George Bush for the debacle in Iraq.

The former CIA officers compare Tenet to Alberto Gonzales. They accuse Tenet of being "a grotesque mixture of incompetence and sycophancy shielded by a genial personality." That is a nice way of saying that Tenet is a useless ass kisser.

The letter also throws the dreaded Curveball at Tenet. The informant got his codename because of his history of lying. An intelligence analyst made an attempt to warn about Curveball's unreliability. He was brushed off.

All those sources are suspect or unreliable, especially the key one nicknamed "Curve Ball," warned the analyst, the only U.S. intelligence official who had met Curve Ball.

The analyst received a dismissive reply. "This war's going to happen regardless of what Curve Ball said or didn't say, and . . . the Powers That Be probably aren't terribly interested in whether Curve Ball knows what he's talking about," replied the deputy chief of the CIA's Iraq task force. The warning was never passed on to Powell or his top aides.

That didn't stop the White House from using Curveball's bogus claims of bioweapons. Tenet and John E. McLaughlin were warned about this information.

Tyler Drumheller, former chief of the CIA European Division, said he and other senior officials in his office — the unit that oversees spying in Europe — had issued repeated warnings about Curveball's accounts.

"Everyone in the chain of command knew exactly what was happening," said Drumheller, who retired in November after 25 years at the CIA. He said he never met personally with Tenet, but "did talk to McLaughlin and everybody else."

Drumheller scoffed at claims by Tenet and McLauglin that they were unaware of concerns about Curveball's credibility. He said he was disappointed that the two former CIA leaders would resort to a "bureaucratic defense" that they never got a formal memo expressing doubts about the defector.

"They can say whatever they want," Drumheller said. "They know what the truth is …. I did not lie." Drumheller said the CIA had "lots of documentation" to show suspicions about Curveball were disseminated widely within the agency. He said they included warnings to McLaughlin's office and to the Weapons Intelligence Non Proliferation and Arms Control Center, known as WINPAC, the group responsible for many of the flawed prewar assessments on Iraq.

The letter points out that Tenet did not stand up to the administration and stop the use of faulty intelligence. Tenet was an active enabler. He could have lobbied members of Congress not to vote for the war resolution. He could have resigned and spoke out. Instead, he sat behind Colin Powell during the Sec. of State's disgraceful United Nations presentation.

Wilkerson said Powell “turned to the DCI, Mr. Tenet, and he [Powell] said, ‘everything here, everything here, you stand behind?’And Mr. Tenet said, ‘absolutely, Mr. Secretary.’ And he [Powell] said, ‘well, you know you’re going to be sitting behind me tomorrow. Right behind me. In camera.”

Tenet had the opportunity to tell Powell the WMD case was not solid. He stood behind. I believe Powell still would have made bogus claims to the U.N. The source is Lawrence Wilkerson and he has been a harsh critic of the administration and publicly disagreed with his friend Powell.

Tenet's book is revisionist history. We will be seeing more of it from other Bushies.