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Killing the CIA

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Killing the CIA

05.11.06 (10:45 am) [edit]

May 11, 2006

BUSH TAKES ON THE FIRM

By Sidney Blumenthal

In Goss, Bush found the perfect hatchet man to take vengeance on a despised agency. Now Goss is gone, scandal looms -- and the CIA is ruined.

The moment that the destruction of the Central Intelligence Agency began can be pinpointed to a time, a place and even a memo. On Aug. 6, 2001, CIA director George Tenet presented to President Bush his presidential daily briefing, a startling document titled "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S." Bush did nothing, asked for no further briefings on the issue, and returned to cutting brush at his Crawford, Texas, compound.

In Bush's denial of responsibility after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, the search for scapegoats inevitably focused on the lapse in intelligence and therefore on the CIA, though it was the FBI whose egregious incompetence permitted the plotters to escape apprehension. Bush's intent to invade Iraq set up the battle royal that followed.

Tenet, an inveterate staff careerist held over from the Clinton administration, had ingratiated himself with the new White House tenant with salty stories, but it was in his eagerness to please Bush on Iraq that he ensured his tenure and made himself indispensable. At first, Tenet opposed including in the president's speech of October 2002 the disinformation that Iraq was seeking to build nuclear weaponry using yellowcake uranium Saddam Hussein supposedly sought to purchase in Niger, and the reference was knocked out. Yet, having already been discredited, the falsehood was inserted into the president's State of the Union address of January 2003, becoming the now infamous 16 words.

Tenet reassured Bush that the case for Saddam's possession of WMD was a "slam-dunk." At CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., Tenet promised then Secretary of State Colin Powell that for Powell's Feb. 6, 2003, speech before the U.N. Security Council, the information that would be used to prove Saddam had WMD was ironclad. Powell insisted that Tenet be seated behind him while he spoke as visual reinforcement of his statement's unimpeachable character. Yet every piece of it was false, and the humiliated Powell later said he had been "deceived." Tenet resigned on June 4, 2004, and shortly thereafter was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

After the brief interim appointment of CIA professional John McLaughlin, on Aug. 10, 2004, almost two years to the day after the Aug. 6 president daily briefing on bin Laden, Bush named Porter Goss the new director of central intelligence. The president was looking for someone to rid him of the troublesome agency. In Goss, he thought he had discovered the perfect man for the bloody job, but the nature of the task undid Goss, and in his unraveling another scandal unfolded.

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