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| NYT: Tenet’s Resigned Because of Senate Committee’s Report |
| 2004-06-04 |
| From The New York Times George J. Tenet’s resignation may have been hastened by a critical, 400-page report from the Senate Intelligence Committee that was presented to the Central Intelligence Agency for comment last month. Government officials and people close to Mr. Tenet said the classified report was a detailed account of mistakes and miscalculations by American intelligence agencies on whether Iraq possessed illicit weapons before the United States invaded last year. .... Some close to Mr. Tenet said the report was among the factors that led him to resign from a post he had considered leaving for several years. ... Officials who have read the report described it as presenting a broad indictment of the C.I.A.’s performance on Iraq. They said its criticisms ranged from inadequate prewar collection of intelligence by spies and satellites to a sloppy analysis, often based on uncorroborated sources, that produced the conclusion that Iraq possessed biological and chemical weapons. ... the findings alone were portrayed by three officials as likely to be particularly embarrassing to the C.I.A., whose analysts were the main proponents among those from various intelligence agencies of the view that Iraq possessed illicit weapons. .... Among the particular criticisms that government officials said were made in the classified version of the Senate report were the failure of the C.I.A. to develop human sources of intelligence in Saddam Hussein’s government before the war. As late as 2002, intelligence officials have acknowledged, American intelligence agencies could count on no more than four informants in the Iraqi government. The report also criticizes what is called the C.I.A.’s heavy reliance on foreign governments for intelligence about Iraq, including sources who were never interviewed by American intelligence and whose veracity is in doubt. Among those sources were one known as "Curveball," who was introduced to German intelligence by the Iraqi National Congress, a group led by Ahmad Chalabi, and who was cited in American intelligence reports as the primary basis for what now appears to be the mistaken assertion that Iraq had mobile laboratories for the manufacture of biological weapons. The report also calls attention to what one official called "slipshod work" and "factual errors" by C.I.A. analysts and operations officials, including cases in which single sources of intelligence were identified as multiple sources, and in which at least one warning that identified a source of intelligence as a fabricator was ignored. .... government officials who have read the Senate report said it described many more mistakes and did so in abundant detail. .... |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |
| #1 Government officials and people close to Mr. Tenet said the classified report was a detailed account of mistakes and miscalculations by American intelligence agencies on whether Iraq possessed illicit weapons before the United States invaded last year. .... Some close to Mr. Tenet said the report was among the factors that led him to resign from a post he had considered leaving for several years. ... Sounds like a personal reason to me.... |
| Posted by: Bomb-a-rama 2004-06-04 12:20:47 PM |