COMMENT The
first domino has fallen By Ehsan Ahrari
The
resignation of George Tenet, director of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), on Thursday is the beginning
of the fall of many dominoes of the Bush administration
between now and the November presidential elections. It
is hard to pinpoint when his trouble really began - his
assurance to President George W Bush, according to Bob
Woodward's account in his book Plan of Attack,
that the existence of weapons of mass destruction (WMD)
in Iraq was a "slam-dunk case" might be just one glaring
event.
Tenet's resignation was followed less
than a day later by that of James Pavitt, deputy
director for operations at the CIA, who was in charge of
the agency's spies. He is said to have made the decision
some weeks ago. The CIA says Pavitt's decision is
unconnected with Tenet's departure.
But the
first public evidence of the beginning of Tenet's
mounting problems could have been the prematurely
disclosed report of the panel that is investigating the
September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United
States. That report excoriated the CIA for failing to
comprehend the threat posed by al-Qaeda before the
attacks. Tenet himself blamed the failure on systemic
problems within the intelligence community, which he
said would take several years to fix. Richard Clarke in
his book Against All Enemies also frequently
berated the CIA.
There were many other problems
with the nature and the quality of intelligence about
Saddam Hussein's purported WMD capabilities, and Tenet's
assurance to Bush in that "slam-dunk" remark that he
kept making before the US invasion of Iraq.
It
should also be remembered that the neo-conservatives
such as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, his deputy
Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith, under secretary for
defense policy, and Richard Perle, until recently a
powerful adviser to Rumsfeld - but especially Vice
President Dick Cheney - based their case for the
invasion on the fictitious intelligence provided by the
likes of former Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi and the head
of a rival exile group led by Iyad Allawi, now prime
minister of the interim Iraqi government.
Tenet
should have resigned after former United Nations weapons
inspector David Kay's highly publicized congressional
testimony that everyone in the US government was wrong
on the issue of WMD. However, Tenet's stock, in Bush's
view, remained high. He had served the president well,
especially in developing the strategy to dismantle the
Taliban regime of Afghanistan. Besides, Bush's own
thinking on the subject of invasion of Iraq was not much
different, if at all, from that of the neo-cons. Thus
there was no high-level pressure for Tenet's resignation
stemming from the blatantly wrong call made by the CIA,
save those coming from a few prominent senators such as
Bob Graham of Florida, chairman of the Senate
Intelligence Committee.
The CIA also supplied
the so-called "conclusive" evidence that Secretary of
State Colin Powell used in his now-infamous United
Nations speech of February 2003, in which he made, at
least in his own mind, the case for the US invasion of
Iraq. American viewers remember well the tape of that
speech, with Tenet sitting immediately behind Powell,
well within the focus of the camera, and intently
following the text of the speech. When Powell gave that
speech, Tenet's presence was purposely used to signal to
the international community the high degree of veracity
of the intelligence that Powell was then so grimly
describing to justify the impending US invasion of Iraq.
In future years, Tenet's presence will symbolize how
wrong the United States was in arriving at the ominous
and very wrong conclusion that Saddam Hussein could
launch a WMD attack on the US or the United Kingdom.
The absence of WMD in Iraq forced the Bush
administration to switch gears and justify toppling the
Iraqi dictator for the nefarious character of his
regime, as if Washington became cognizant of the evil
side of Saddam's regime only since the September 11
attacks. Throughout that fiasco of Olympic proportions,
Tenet and the failure of intelligence loom large.
Then came another scandal of a gigantic
proportion: a large-scale - though not widespread -
abuse of Iraqi prisoners by US troops in Abu Ghraib
prison in Baghdad. One theme from that scandal that hurt
the CIA and Tenet was that, more often than not, the
intelligence agents were reported to be driving that
abuse in order to extract information from those
prisoners.
However, on the issue of prisoner
abuse, the focus of inquiry ought to be - as it likely
is to be in the near future - on the Department of
Defense, more precisely on the civilian side of the
Pentagon. The civilian side of the Pentagon - the Office
of the Secretary of Defense - was the one that
established the policy of primacy of extracting
information from prisoners, no matter the techniques
used to do so. That practice was first established to
extract information (euphemistically called
intelligence) from "detainees" from the Afghan theater
of war. Very conveniently, the very same techniques were
transplanted later to abuse prisoners in Abu Ghraib
prison.
One should also remember the Chalabi
episode whereby the erstwhile Iraqi guerrilla, and
onetime aspirant for Saddam's job, was accused of
passing highly sensitive intelligence about the US
capability to break intelligence codes used by Iranian
officials to Iran. The insanity of the whole affair is
mind-boggling. Why would anyone in his or her right mind
speak on such a highly sensitive matter to any
non-citizen, much less Chalabi, whose contacts with the
Iranian government was a known fact for Bush officials?
Even though that case is still being investigated by the
Federal Bureau of Investigation, the fact that
intelligence, once again, became the topic of
controversy did not help Tenet.
Tenet's
departure, as cloudy as it is, cannot be characterized
as "unexpected". Those who ride the tiger also face the
risk of being eaten by it. US intelligence remains very
much akin to a tamed tiger. Tamed though it may be, it
is fully capable of turning against its handler when
mistakes are made.
Undoubtedly, faulty
intelligence was a major variable in the Iraqi debacle.
However, it will be a serious folly to put the blame
substantially on the failure of intelligence for
America's current problems in Iraq. Other variables also
contributed to that mistake. The very proposition of
invading a country without careful examination of
evidence (ie, multi-sourced intelligence), failure of
double-checking and cross-checking that evidence a few
more times, and, most important, failure to obtain the
blessing of the world body before carrying out the
invasion was patently wrong. The CIA was not the only
agency that was a party to it. The Department of Defense
also played a crucial role. For that awesome mistake,
many more dominoes of the Bush administration are likely
to fall in the coming weeks and months.
Ehsan Ahrari, PhD, is an Alexandria,
Virginia, US-based independent strategic analyst.
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