MORE 'RUNNING GOVERNMENT LIKE A BUSINESS'

A former long-time CIA analyst has some intriguing things to say:

So here is September 11, the first time since Pearl Harbor that this system failed. It was worse than Pearl Harbor. More people were killed on September 11 than were killed at Pearl Harbor, and where were the pieces? They were scattered all around the government, just like they were before Pearl Harbor. For George Bush to go out to CIA headquarters and put his arm around George Tenet and tell the world that we have the best intelligence services in the world, this really called for some analysis, if you will.

My analysis is that George Bush had no option but to keep George Tenet on as Director, because George Tenet had warned Bush repeatedly, for months and months before September 11, that something very bad was about to happen.

PITT: There was the August 6 2001 briefing…

McG: On August 6, the title of the briefing was, “Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US,” and that briefing had the word “Hijacking” in it. That’s all I know about it, but that’s quite enough. In September, Bush had to make a decision. Is it feasible to let go of Tenet, whose agency flubbed the dub on this one? And the answer was no, because Tenet knows too much about what Bush knew, and Bush didn’t know what to do about it. That’s the bottom line for me.

Bush was well-briefed. Before he went off to Texas to chop wood for a month like Reagan did in California, he was told all these things. He didn’t even have the presence of mind to convene his National Security Council, and say, “OK guys, we have all these reports, what are we going to do about it?” He just went off to chop wood.

PITT: Now why is that? There are people in America who believe this kind of behavior was deliberate – the administration was repeatedly warned and nothing was done about those warnings. It smacks of deliberate policy for a lot of people. This is the current World Heavyweight Champion of conspiracy theories.

McG: In this, I am an adherent of the charitable interpretation, and that comes down to gross incompetence. They just didn’t know what to do. Look at who was in charge there. You have Condoleezza Rice. She knows a lot about Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, but she has no idea about terrorism. She had this terrorism dossier that Clinton NSC director Sandy Berger left behind, and by her own admission she didn’t get to it. “It was still on my desk when September 11 happened,” she said. They didn’t take this thing seriously.

Now, you can probably fault George Tenet for not being careful about crying wolf. In other words, you cry wolf often enough and in an undifferentiated way, then that is not a real service to the President. You really have to say, “Mr. President, you know I warned you about this two months ago, but now this is really serious.” You have to grab him by the collar and say, “We’ve got to do something about this.” Tenet didn’t do that. So I attribute it not to conspiracy theories, but to lack of experience, a kind of arrogance that says, “Who cares what Sandy Berger thinks,” and just gross incompetence.

Now ‘gross incompetence’ is not a nice thing to say about a President, but he had no experience in this at all, and the people he surrounded himself with also had no experience.

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