Heard at a U.C. Berkeley wine-and-cheese reception:
"You really want my view--my completely uninformed, Washington-outsider, wild guess view--about why people "familiar with the thinking of George Tenet" have been calling Washington Post reporters with stories about malfeasance that threaten to deprive the president of the services of those he trusts?"
"Yes."
"Okay. My uninformed guess is that something happened that convinced George Tenet that he was about to be fired. When people are about to be fired, they stop being courtiers and start being patriots. And in any event Tenet has now backed George W. Bush into a corner in which Bush cannot fire Tenet--in which any attempt to fire Tenet runs a great risk of being taken as confirmation of everything bad that is now being said about the White House staff."
Posted by DeLong at October 2, 2003 07:10 PM | TrackBack
Firing? A tough thesis to support -- it suggests the CIA director is operating pretty off the cuff and in a reactive mode.
If the CIA is good at anything, its hypothesizing scenarios, and then thinking out the decision tree to the Nth degree. They are nothing if not multi-dimensional Chess players.
No, I suspect this is a far more complex and subtle political manueverings than a mere fear of a firing; This has the air of retirbution to the brain trust behind compromised intelligence, not as much versus Bush (consider him collateral damage) as it is versus Cheney, Wolfowitz and Rove.
There may also be a bit of "Enough's enough, and if we don't get the White House & Iraq under control, the US will be a laughing stock" type of grand, non-partisan patriotic gesture one hopes our career civil servants are capable of . . . More of a: "CIA to NeoCons: Drop Dead"
Just one man's opinion.
fear of firing?
the CIA is always the dealer. They always work from a stacked deck...
this is bigger than a simple firing scare or loyalty test
Posted by: sampo on October 2, 2003 10:28 PMI'd suggest it's smaller. folks like to mythologize the CIA, but it's just a bureaucracy like any other.
what's wrong with the simplest explanation? Tenet was willing to fall on an exceedingly carefully parsed sword, but no more. he and his have been fighting back ever since.
THis was the thesis of a fairly hysterical screed by James Pinkerton (of newsday?) that was in the Boston Globe yesterday. His argument was basically (sorry I can't do a "shorter" I'm just not good enough)
Even though the white house and the neo cons are the last people who want Tenet and the CIA discredited because then the White House's pre-war manipulation of the WMD intelligence would come out, Tenet feared he would be fired and so went nuclear. Now Tenet can not be fired, which we knew the White House wouldn't do anyway until they had exhausted their daily expectations that WMD would be found based on previous intelligence (which they keep claiming was pretty good). But for some reason TEnet is upset. Can't figure out why.
I think that's more or less it. When I described the article for my mother, a mild, poetic type, her response to it was "they must have cut off his head and inserted it in his *&^ for him to offer such a twisted perspective."
--Kate
I disagree with DeLong's guess.
Just a few months ago when the 16 words were the hot topic, we heard a lot of talk about how Tenent couldn't be fired because the last thing the Bush Administration wanted was someone with his knowledge sniping from the outside. As the argument went, by keeping Tenent 'inside' he had to keep his trap shut and play the loyal soldier, even to the point of taking blame for Bush's misteps.
What's happened since then to change that view? Nothing that I can thing of. Seems to me that the LAST thing the Administration would want is to see Tenent take over for Clark as the newest expert CNN commentator on the war on terror, second guessing them in public at every step.
My guess is that this is something far more subtle and complicated as Barry suggests.
Posted by: Kent Lind on October 3, 2003 06:45 AM