Try Acronis.
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CH
Also a bonus--some current events education for Indifferent, Apathetic, Not
a Clue, "Watching Dover Coffins fill with apathy" Americans because most of
them don't know anyone impacted by these Dover coffins filling. Currently
Congress has not funded vehicles to stop IEDs and their sequels or
mechanisms that Israel has to do it with 99% efficiency because of lobbyist
contributions and almost no one in Congress has any blood relative in harm's
way, nor their staffs, nor the incessant talking heads on TV media or in the
press media.
Sunday, May 06, 2007 New York Times
*FRANK RICH: Is Condi Hiding the Smoking Gun?*
IF, as J.F.K. had it, victory has a hundred fathers and defeat is an orphan,
the defeat in Iraq is the most pitiful orphan imaginable. Its parents have
not only tossed it to the wolves but are also trying to pin its mutant DNA
on any patsy they can find.
George Tenet is just the latest to join this blame game, which began more
than three years ago when his fellow Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient
Tommy Franks told Bob Woodward that Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's
intelligence bozo, was the "stupidest guy on the face of the earth" (that's
the expurgated version). Last fall, Kenneth Adelman, the neocon cheerleader
who foresaw a "cakewalk" in Iraq, told Vanity Fair that Mr. Tenet, General
Franks and Paul Bremer were "three of the most incompetent people who've
ever served in such key spots." Richard Perle chimed in that the "huge
mistakes" were "not made by neoconservatives" and instead took a shot at
President Bush. Ahmad Chalabi, the neocons' former darling, told Dexter
Filkins of The Times "the real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz."
And of course nearly everyone blames Rumsfeld.
This would be a Three Stooges routine were there only three stooges. The
good news is that Mr. Tenet's book rollout may be the last gasp of this
farcical round robin of recrimination. Republicans and Democrats have at
last found some common ground by condemning his effort to position himself
as the war's innocent scapegoat. Some former C.I.A. colleagues are rougher
still. Michael Scheuer, who ran the agency's bin Laden unit, has accused Mr.
Tenet of lacking "the moral courage to resign and speak out publicly to try
to stop our country from striding into what he knew would be an abyss." Even
after Mr. Tenet did leave office, he maintained a Robert McNamara silence
until he cashed in.
Satisfying though it is to watch a circular firing squad of the war's
enablers, unfinished business awaits. Unlike Vietnam, Iraq is not in the
past: the war escalates even as all this finger-pointing continues. Very
little has changed between the fourth anniversary of "Mission Accomplished"
this year and the last. Back then, President Bush cheered an Iraqi "turning
point" precipitated by "the emergence of a unity government." Since then,
what's emerged is more Iraqi disunity and a major leap in the death toll.
That's why Americans voted in November to get out.
The only White House figure to take any responsibility for the fiasco is the
former Bush-Cheney pollster Matthew Dowd, who in March expressed remorse for
furthering a war he now deems a mistake. For his belated act of conscience,
he was promptly patronized as an incipient basket case by an administration
flack, who attributed Mr. Dowd's defection to "personal turmoil." If that is
what this vicious gang would do to a pollster, imagine what would befall
Colin Powell if he spoke out. Nonetheless, Mr. Powell should summon the guts
to do so. Until there is accountability for the major architects and
perpetrators of the Iraq war, the quagmire will deepen. A tragedy of this
scale demands a full accounting, not to mention a catharsis.
That accounting might well begin with Mr. Powell's successor, Condoleezza
Rice. Of all the top-tier policy players who were beside the president and
vice president at the war's creation, she is the highest still in power and
still on the taxpayers' payroll. She is also the only one who can still get
a free pass from the press. The current groupthink Beltway narrative has it
that the secretary of state's recidivist foreign-policy realism and latent
shuttle diplomacy have happily banished the Cheney-Rumsfeld cowboy arrogance
that rode America into a ditch.
Thus Ms. Rice was dispatched to three Sunday shows last weekend to bat away
Mr. Tenet's book before "60 Minutes" broadcast its interview with him that
night. But in each appearance her statements raised more questions than they
answered. She was persistently at odds with the record, not just the record
as spun by Mr. Tenet but also the public record. She must be held to a
higher standard - a k a the truth - before she too jumps ship.
It's now been nearly five years since Ms. Rice did her part to sell the Iraq
war on a Sept. 8, 2002, Sunday show with her rendition of "we don't want the
smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Yet there she was last Sunday on ABC,
claiming that she never meant to imply then that Saddam was an imminent
threat. "The question of imminence isn't whether or not somebody is going to
strike tomorrow" is how she put it. In other words, she is still covering up
the war's origins. On CBS's "Face the Nation," she claimed that intelligence
errors before the war were "worldwide" even though the International Atomic
Energy Agency's Mohamed ElBaradei publicly stated there was "no evidence" of
an Iraqi nuclear program and even though Germany's intelligence service sent
strenuous prewar warnings that the C.I.A.'s principal informant on Saddam's
supposed biological weapons was a fraud.
Of the Sunday interviewers, it was George Stephanopoulos who went for the
jugular by returning to that nonexistent uranium from Africa. He forced Ms.
Rice to watch a clip of her appearance on his show in June 2003, when she
claimed she did not know of any serious questions about the uranium evidence
before the war. Then he came as close as any Sunday host ever has to calling
a guest a liar. "But that statement wasn't true," Mr. Stephanopoulos said.
Ms. Rice pleaded memory loss, but the facts remain. She received a memo
raising serious questions about the uranium in October 2002, three months
before the president included the infamous 16 words on the subject in his
State of the Union address. Her deputy, Stephen Hadley, received two memos
as well as a phone call of warning from Mr. Tenet.
Apologists for Ms. Rice, particularly those in the press who are embarrassed
by their own early cheerleading for the war, like to say that this is
ancient history, just as they said of the C.I.A. leak case. We're all
supposed to move on and just worry about what happens next. Try telling that
to families whose children went to Iraq to stop Saddam's nukes. Besides,
there's a continuum between past deceptions and present ones, as the
secretary of state seamlessly demonstrated last Sunday.
On ABC, she pushed the administration's line portraying Iraq's current
violence as a Qaeda plot hatched by the Samarra bombing of February 2006.
But that Qaeda isn't the Qaeda of 9/11; it's a largely Iraqi group fighting
on one side of a civil war. And by February 2006, sectarian violence had
already been gathering steam for 15 months - in part because Ms. Rice and
company ignored the genuine imminence of that civil war just as they had
ignored the alarms about bin Laden's Qaeda in August 2001.
Ms. Rice's latest canard wasn't an improvisation; it was a scripted set-up
for the president's outrageous statement three days later. "The decision we
face in Iraq," Mr. Bush said Wednesday, "is not whether we ought to take
sides in a civil war, it's whether we stay in the fight against the same
international terrorist network that attacked us on 9/11." Such statements
about the present in Iraq are no less deceptive - and no less damaging to
our national interest - than the lies about uranium and Qaeda- 9/11
connections told in 2002-3. This country needs facts, not fiction, to make
its decisions about the endgame of the war, just as it needed (but didn't
get) facts when we went to war in the first place. To settle for less is to
make the same tragic error twice.
That Ms. Rice feels scant responsibility for any of this was evident in her
repeated assertions on Sunday that all the questions about prewar
intelligence had been answered by the Robb-Silberman and Senate committee
inquiries, neither of which even addressed how the administration used the
intelligence it received. Now she risks being held in contempt of Congress
by ducking a subpoena authorized by the House's Oversight Committee, whose
chairman, Henry Waxman, has been trying to get direct answers from her about
the uranium hoax since 2003.
Ms. Rice is stonewalling his investigation by rambling on about separation
of powers and claiming she answered all relevant questions in writing, to
Senator Carl Levin, during her confirmation to the cabinet in January 2005.
If former or incumbent national security advisers like Henry Kissinger,
Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski could testify before Congress
without defiling the Constitution, so can she. As for her answers to Senator
Levin's questions, five of eight were pure Alberto Gonzales: she either didn't
recall or didn't know.
No wonder the most galling part of Ms. Rice's Sunday spin was her aside to
Wolf Blitzer that she would get around to reflecting on these issues "when I
have a chance to write my book." Another book! As long as American troops
are dying in Iraq, the secretary of state has an obligation to answer
questions about how they got there and why they stay. If accountability is
ever to begin, it would be best if those questions are answered not on "60
Minutes" but under oath.
Michael Sheuer Founding Head of Bin Ladin Unit CIA
in Washington Post Sunday April 29, 2007
On the disingenuous cowardly idiot George Tenet who helped
kill thousands of Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraquis with his
chicken-_________ted incompetence:
Tenet Tries to Shift the Blame. Don't Buy It.
By Michael F. Scheuer
Sunday, April 29, 2007; B01
George Tenet has a story to tell. With his appearance tonight on "60
Minutes" and the publication of his new memoir, "At the Center of the
Storm," the former director of central intelligence is out to absolve
himself of the failings of 9/11 and Iraq. He'll sell a lot of books, of
course, but we shouldn't buy his attempts to let himself off the hook.
My experience with Tenet dates to the late 1980s, when he was the sharp,
garrulous, cigar-chomping staff director of the Senate intelligence
committee and I was a junior CIA officer who briefed him on covert action
programs in Afghanistan. Later, I worked directly for Tenet after he took
over the CIA and I became the first chief of the agency's Osama bin Laden
unit. We met regularly, often daily. It's impossible to dislike Tenet, who
is smart, polite, hard-working, convivial and detail-oriented. But he's also
a man who never went from cheerleader to leader.
At a time when clear direction and moral courage were needed, Tenet shifted
course to follow the prevailing winds, under President Bill Clinton and then
President Bush -- and he provided distraught officers at Langley a shoulder
to cry on when his politically expedient tacking sailed the United States
into disaster.
At the CIA, Tenet will be remembered for some badly needed morale-building.
But he will also be recalled for fudging the central role he played in the
decline of America's clandestine service -- the brave field officers who run
covert missions that make us all safer. The decline began in the late 1980s,
when the impending end of the Cold War meant smaller budgets and fewer
hires, and it continued through Sept. 11, 2001. When Tenet and his bungling
operations chief, James Pavitt, described this slow-motion disaster in
testimony after the terrorist attacks, they tried to blame the clandestine
service's weaknesses on congressional cuts. But Tenet had helped preside
over every step of the service's decline during three consecutive
administrations -- Bush, Clinton, Bush -- in a series of key intelligence
jobs for the Senate, the National Security Council and the CIA. Only 9/11,
it seems, convinced Tenet of the importance of a large, aggressive
clandestine service to U.S. security.
Like self-serving earlier leaks seemingly from Tenet's circle to such
reporters as Ron Suskind and Bob Woodward, "At the Center of the Storm" is
similarly disingenuous about Tenet's record on al-Qaeda. In "State of
Denial," Woodward paints a heroic portrait of the CIA chief warning national
security adviser Condoleezza Rice of pending al-Qaeda strikes during the
summer of 2001, only to have his warnings ignored. Tenet was indeed worried
during the so-called summer of threat, but one wonders why he did not summon
the political courage earlier to accuse Rice of negligence, most notably
during his testimony under oath before the 9/11 commission.
"I was talking to the national security adviser and the president and the
vice president every day," Tenet told the commission during a nationally
televised hearing on March 24, 2004. "I certainly didn't get a sense that
anybody was not paying attention to what I was doing and what I was briefing
and what my concerns were and what we were trying to do." Now a "frustrated"
Tenet writes that he held an urgent meeting with Rice on July 10, 2001, to
try to get "the full attention of the administration" and "finally get us on
track." He can't have it both ways.
But what troubles me most is Tenet's handling of the opportunities that CIA
officers gave the Clinton administration to capture or kill bin Laden
between May 1998 and May 1999. Each time we had intelligence about bin
Laden's whereabouts, Tenet was briefed by senior CIA officers at Langley and
by operatives in the field. He would nod and assure his anxious subordinates
that he would stress to Clinton and his national security team that the
chances of capturing bin Laden were solid and that the intelligence was not
going to get better. Later, he would insist that he had kept up his end of
the bargain, but that the NSC had decided not to strike.
Since 2001, however, several key Clinton counterterrorism insiders
(including NSC staffers Richard A. Clarke, Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon)
have reported that Tenet consistently denigrated the targeting data on bin
Laden, causing the president and his team to lose confidence in the hard-won
intelligence. "We could never get over the critical hurdle of being able to
corroborate Bin Ladin's whereabouts," Tenet now writes. That of course is
untrue, but it spared him from ever having to explain the awkward fallout if
an attempt to get bin Laden failed. None of this excuses Clinton's
disinterest in protecting Americans, but it does show Tenet's easy
willingness to play for patsies the CIA officers who risked their lives to
garner intelligence and then to undercut their work to avoid censure if an
attack went wrong.
To be fair, Tenet and I had differences about how best to act against bin
Laden. (In the book, he plays down my recommendations as those of "an
analyst not trained in conducting paramilitary operations.") The hard fact
remains that each time we acquired actionable intelligence about bin Laden's
whereabouts, I argued for preemptive action. By May 1998, after all,
al-Qaeda had hit or helped to hit five U.S. targets, and bin Laden had twice
declared war on America. I did not -- and do not -- care about collateral
casualties in such situations, as most of the nearby civilians would be the
families that bin Laden's men had brought to a war zone. But Tenet did care.
"You can't kill everyone," he would say. That's an admirable humanitarian
concern in the abstract, but it does nothing to protect the United States.
Indeed, thousands of American families would not be mourning today had there
been more ferocity and less sentimentality among the Clinton team.
Then there's the Iraq war. Tenet is now protesting the use that Rice, Vice
President Cheney and other administration officials have made of his
notorious pre-war comment that the evidence of Iraq's supposed weapons of
mass destruction programs amounted to a "slam dunk" case. But the only real,
knowable pre-war slam dunk was that Iraq was going to turn out to be a
nightmare.
Tenet now paints himself as a scapegoat for an administration in which there
never was "a serious consideration of the implications of a U.S. invasion,"
insisting that he warned Bush, Cheney and their Cabinet about the risks of
occupying Iraq. Well, fine; the CIA repeatedly warned Tenet of the
inevitable disaster an Iraq war would cause -- spreading bin Ladenism,
spurring a bloody Sunni-Shiite war and lethally destabilizing the region.
But as with Rice and the warnings in the summer of 2001: Now he tells us. At
this late date, the Bush-bashing that Tenet's book will inevitably stir up
seems designed to rehabilitate Tenet in his first home, the Democratic
Party. He seems to blame the war on everyone but Bush (who gave Tenet the
Medal of Freedom) and former secretary of state Colin L. Powell (who remains
the Democrats' ideal Republican). Tenet's attacks focus instead on the
walking dead, politically speaking: the glowering and unpopular Cheney; the
hapless Rice; the band of irretrievably discredited bumblers who used to run
the Pentagon, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith;
their neoconservative acolytes such as Richard Perle; and the die-hard
geopolitical fantasists at the Weekly Standard and National Review.
They're all culpable, of course. But Tenet's attempts to shift the blame
won't wash. At day's end, his exercise in finger-pointing is designed to
disguise the central, tragic fact of his book. Tenet in effect is saying
that he knew all too well why the United States should not invade Iraq, that
he told his political masters and that he was ignored. But above all, he's
saying that he lacked the moral courage to resign and speak out publicly to
try to stop our country from striding into what he knew would be an abyss.
Powell has also been blasted for being a good soldier during the march to
war rather than quitting in protest. The Bush administration would have been
hurt by Powell's resignation, but it might not have stopped the war. But
Tenet's resignation would have destroyed the neocons' Iraq house of cards by
discrediting the only glue holding it together: the intelligence that
"proved" Saddam Hussein guilty of pursuing nuclear weapons and working with
al-Qaeda. After all, the compelling briefing that Powell, with Tenet sitting
just behind his shoulder, gave the U.N. Security Council in February 2003
could never have been delivered if Tenet had blown the whistle.
Of course, it's good to finally have Tenet's side of the Iraq and 9/11
stories. But whatever his book says, he was not much of a CIA chief. Still,
he may have been the ideal CIA leader for Clinton and Bush -- denigrating
good intelligence to sate the former's cowardly pacifism and accepting bad
intelligence to please the latter's Wilsonian militarism. Sadly but
fittingly, "At the Center of the Storm" is likely to remind us that
sometimes what lies at the center of a storm is a deafening silence.
Michael F. Scheuer, the founding head
of the CIA's bin Laden unit, is the author
of "Imperial Hubris" and "Through Our Enemies' Eyes."
