Mr. Tenet, Return the Medal

Posted: Friday, April 27, 2007 7:21 PM by Countdown

27 April 2007

Mr. George Tenet

c/o Harper Collins Publishers

Dear Mr. Tenet:

We write to you on the occasion of the release of your book, At the Center of the Storm.  You are on the record complaining about the "damage to your reputation".  We are stunned that someone who reportedly is earning $50,000 per speaking engagement and has received a $4 million dollar advance for your book is worried only about reputation.  The damage to your reputation pales in terms of the harm that has been inflicted on U.S. soldiers engaged in combat in Iraq and the national security of the United States.  In our view we believe you have a moral obligation to return the Medal of Freedom you received from President George Bush.  We also call for you to dedicate a significant percentage of the royalties from your book to the U.S. soldiers and their families who have been killed and wounded in Iraq.

We agree with you that Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials took the United States to war for flimsy reasons.  We agree that the war of choice in Iraq was ill-advised and wrong headed.  But your lament that you are a victim in a process you helped direct is self-serving and misleading.  You were not a victim. You were a willing participant in a scam to fight an unnecessary war and you share culpability with Dick Cheney and George Bush for the debacle in Iraq.

You are not alone in failing to speak up and protest the twisting and shading of intelligence.  Those who remained silent when they could have made a difference also share the blame for not protesting the abuse and misuse of intelligence that occurred under your watch.  But ultimately you were in charge and you signed off on the CIA products and you briefed the President.

This is not a case of Monday morning quarterbacking.  You helped send very mixed signals to the American people and their legislators in the fall of 2002.  CIA field operatives produced solid intelligence in September 2002 that stated clearly there was no stockpile of any kind of WMD in Iraq. This intelligence was ignored and later misused.  You then allowed a sloppy, inaccurate NIE (National Intelligence Estimate) to go to the most senior policymakers-an estimate deliberately prepared to dovetail with the alarming nuclear and other claims, unsupported by intelligence, in Vice President Dick Cheney's alarmist speech of August 26, 2002.

But even you recognized that the White House repeatedly tried to present as fact intelligence you understood was unreliable.  In October of 2002 you called the White House and stopped the President from using unreliable intelligence a speech in Cincinnati to make the case that Iraq was buying uranium.  

Although CIA officers learned in late September 2002 from a high-level member of Saddam Hussein's inner circle that Iraq had no past or present contact with Osama bin Laden and that the Iraqi leader considered bin Laden an enemy of the Baghdad regime, you still went before Congress in February 2003 and testified that Iraq did indeed have links to Al Qaeda.

You showed a lack of leadership and courage in January of 2003 as the Bush Administration pushed and cajoled analysts and managers to let them make the bogus claim that Iraq was on the verge of getting its hands on uranium.   You signed off on Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations.  You, more than any other U.S. Government senior official, were in the unique position to know that the Secretary of State was selling a pack of lies.  And you sat behind him nodding affirmatively.   

You may feel you were bullied and victimized but you were also one of the bullies.  You cannot claim that you were bullied into acting by the administration while you were helping carry the Bush Administration's water to the American people.  In the end you allowed suspect sources, like Curveball, to be used based on very limited reporting and evidence.  Yet you were informed in no uncertain terms that Curveball was not reliable.  You broke with CIA standard practice and insisted on voluminous evidence to refute this reporting rather than treat the information as suspect.  You helped set the bar very low for reporting that supported favored White House positions, while raising the bar astronomically high when it came to reporting that did not support the solution favored by Bush and Cheney.

It now turns out that you were the Alberto Gonzalez of the intelligence community--a grotesque mixture incompetence shielded by a genial personality.  Decisions were made, you were in charge, but you have no idea how decisions were made even though you were in charge.  Curiously, you focus your anger on the likes of Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Condi Rice, but you leave President George W. Bush out of the line of fire. 

Mr. Tenet, you failed to use your position of power and influence to protect the intelligence process.  What should you have done?  What could you have done?  For starters, during the critical summer and fall of 2002, you could have gone to key Republicans and Democrats in the Congress and warned them of the pressure.  But you remained silent.  Your candor during your one-on-one with Sir Richard Dearlove, then-head of British Intelligence, of July 20, 2002" provides documentary evidence that you knew exactly what you were doing; namely, "fixing" the intelligence to the policy.

Even after the fact you declined to raise these issues with the Robb Silberman Commission?  By your silence you helped build the case for war.  You betrayed the CIA officers who collected the intelligence that made it clear that Saddam did not pose an imminent threat.  You betrayed the analysts who tried to withstand the pressure applied by Cheney and Rumsfeld.  You betrayed the CIA itself by allowing active duty employees like Michael Scheuer to write books critical of Bush, which contributed to the perception that the CIA was a politicized gang eager to embarrass the Bush Administration.

Most importantly and tragically, you have betrayed your country.  Instead of resigning in protest, when it could have made a difference in the public debate, you remained silent and provided the Bush Administration the pretext of respectability for unwarranted claims.  Your silence contributed to the willingness of the public to support the disastrous war in Iraq which has killed more than 3300 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.

So now you are going to correct the record with your book?  Not so fast.  Why don't you start by returning the Medal of Freedom hung around your neck by President Bush in December 2004?  You claim it was given only because of the war on terror, but President Bush's comments were not confined to the threat of terrorism.  He said that you:

played pivotal roles in great events, and [your] efforts have made our country more secure and advanced the cause of human liberty.

The reality of Iraq demonstrates that fruits of your efforts have in fact made our country less secure.  The damage to the credibility of the CIA is serious but can eventually be repaired.  The U.S. soldiers who died or have been maimed in the streets of Fallujah and Baghdad cannot be fixed.  The dead have passed into history.  Many of the wounded will live the rest of their lives missing limbs, blinded, mentally disabled, and physically disfigured.  You cannot remove the bloody stain of that betrayal, George.  But you can do one thing to show that you do have some sense of shame-that you will forgo the opportunity to profit financially from your role in "fixing" intelligence in order to "justify" a war of aggression.  Give at least half of your royalties to the veterans and their families, who have paid and are paying the price for your failure to speak up when you could have made a difference.  That would be the decent thing to do.

Sincerely yours,

Phil Giraldi

Ray McGovern

Larry Johnson

Jim Marcinkowski

Vince Cannistraro

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