Washington awaits a CIA chief’s revenge (UK TIMES)

[laststeamtrain]

Washington awaits a CIA chief’s revenge
Sarah Baxter, Washington

WASHINGTON is braced for a showdown between the Central Intelligence Agency, the White House and the Pentagon when George Tenet, the former CIA chief, publishes his memoirs next week.

Anxious to restore his reputation after failing to prevent the September 11 attacks and overreacting to flimsy evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, Tenet is said to spread the blame freely among other senior members of President George W Bush’s administration.

<snip>

Tenet is also out to settle a few scores with Vice-President Dick Cheney and his office and neoconservative former Pentagon officials such as Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith. They fought long and hard to discredit the CIA’s belief that there was little evidence of a link between Saddam Hussein’s Iraq and Al-Qaeda, and ran their own separate intelligence-gathering operation at the defence department.

But Tenet is vulnerable to the charge that he exaggerated the presence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. Bob Woodward, the veteran Washington reporter, wrote in his book Plan of Attack that the CIA chief told Bush their existence was a “slam dunk case”. Tenet is finally going to have to reveal whether he really used such definitive words, when there was no conclusive evidence.

<snip>

Tyler Drumheller, the former head of the CIA’s European division, told Tenet on the eve of Powell’s speech not to rely on the evidence of Curveball, an Iraqi informant handled by German intelligence who was deemed to be a mentally unstable alcoholic.

Tenet has denied receiving such a warning and kept Curveball’s claims about the presence of mobile biological weapons laboratories in Iraq in Powell’s presentation. He also gave Bush the go-ahead to assert in a state of the union speech that Saddam was trying to acquire uranium yellowcake from Africa for his nuclear programme - a decision the CIA chief later said he regretted.

<more>

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/us_and_americas/article1687268.ece

[C_U_L8R]

1. Are there any betting pools

on what kind of slime, petty vengeance and namecalling
Bush Rove and Cheney will unleash ??

Who will be their proxies spewing more rancid talking point spittle?

[rusty_parts2001]

2. Is he going to give back the medal?

The whole crowd have no shame or honor, Tenet included.

[Demeter]

3. Let's You and Them Fight

George vs George--and we get to watch and hope they do each other in.