On January 28, 2004 George Tenet testified for the 9/11 Commission. He did so from his office at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Richard Ben-Veniste was in attendence. Someone with access to the transcript read the relevant sections to a Washington Post reporter(s). Here is what it revealed.
At one point in the lengthy session, Tenet recalled a briefing he was given on July 10 by [Cofer] Black and his staff, according to the transcript. He said the information was so important that he quickly called for a car and telephoned Rice to arrange for a White House meeting to share what he had just learned, according to the transcript and Ben-Veniste.
According to the transcript, Tenet told Rice there were signs that there could be an al-Qaeda attack in weeks or perhaps months, that there would be multiple, simultaneous attacks causing major human casualties, and that the focus would be U.S. targets, facilities or interests. But the intelligence reporting focused almost entirely on the attacks occurring overseas, Tenet told the commission…
According to three people present at the session, including Ben-Veniste, Tenet believed that Rice responded seriously to what she had been told. “We particularly questioned him about whether he had the sense that Dr. Rice and the others on the White House side understood the gravity of what he was telling them,” said Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor. “He said that they believed that they did. . . . We asked him further whether Dr. Rice just shrugged this off, and he said he did not have such an impression.”
This verifies part of Woodward’s story and tends to discredit other parts of his story. It verifies that a meeting was held in an impromptu fashion. It verifies that Tenet and Black gained intelligence that strongly suggested that al-Qaeda was planning an attack involving ‘multiple, simultaneous attacks’ against ‘U.S. targets, facilities, and interests’. It verifies that the threat was immanent: ‘weeks or perhaps months’. But it also undermines Woodward’s story on two critical fronts. But, let’s look at Woodward’s version.
Tenet hoped his abrupt request for an immediate meeting would shake Rice. He and Black, a veteran covert operator, had two main points when they met with her. First, al-Qaeda was going to attack American interests, possibly in the United States itself. Black emphasized that this amounted to a strategic warning, meaning the problem was so serious that it required an overall plan and strategy. Second, this was a major foreign policy problem that needed to be addressed immediately. They needed to take action that moment — covert, military, whatever — to thwart bin Laden…
Tenet and Black felt they were not getting through to Rice. She was polite, but they felt the brush-off. President Bush had said he didn’t want to swat at flies.
Woodward’s version emphasizes the domestic threat a little more than Tenet’s testimony. Woodward’s version also directly contradicts Tenet’s testimony as to whether Condi Rice took them seriously or gave them the ‘brush-off’.
There are a lot of issues raised by the revelation of this meeting and the sloppy and contradictory reactions of the State Department and 9/11 Commission. For starters, I am just going to examine the contradictions in Tenet’s statement.
Either he was lying then or he was lying to Bob Woodward. George Tenet gave this testimony in January of 2004. He remained DCI until July 11, 2004. In other words, George Tenet was still an employee of the administration when he gave his testimony. When it came to the facts, such as when he had meetings and what was said, he appears to have testified truthfully. But when it came to expressing matters of opinion, he had more latitude. When asked how he felt about Condi Rice’s response, he could testify any way he wanted. Naturally, he would be inclined to testify in a way that was pleasing to his bosses.
When considering whether he was lying then or lying later to Woodward, we have to incline toward the former view.
If George Tenet is telling a different story now, it is hard to justify. He was testifying to what his impressions were at the time, not in retrospect. And he was giving the same information to Bob Woodward. In changing his story, he is tacitly admitting that he intentionally misled the 9/11 Commission. That is not cool. On the other hand, the transcript tends to support Rice’s contention that the intelligence was focused mostly overseas (at least at the July 10 meeting, we cannot forget the subsequent August 6 memo).
What we can take out of this information is that neither Condi Rice nor George Tenet are very credible. Tenet appears to have misled the 9/11 Commission about his impressions of Rice, and Rice seems to be lying about the facts surrounding the meeting itself.
Then we have to assess the credibility of John Ashcroft. As I noted in What the Hell is Wrong With Condi Rice?, John Ashcroft’s record on pre-9/11 intelligence is extremely hard to justify. First, the 9/11 Commission reported that:
That same day [July 5, 2001], the CIA briefed Attorney General Ashcroft on the al Qaeda threat, warning that a significant terrorist attack was imminent. Ashcroft was told that preparations for multiple attacks were in late stages or already complete and that little additional warning could be expected. The briefing addressed only threats outside the United States.
Second, the acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard testified before the 9/11 Commission staff that he tried to brief Ashcroft about al-Qaeda on July 12th, and was told that Ashcroft didn’t want to hear anymore about it. And now we learn this.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and former Attorney General John Ashcroft received the same CIA briefing about an imminent al-Qaida strike on an American target that was given to the White House two months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The State Department’s disclosure Monday that the pair was briefed within a week after then-National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice was told about the threat on July 10, 2001, raised new questions about what the Bush administration did in response, and about why so many officials have claimed they never received or don’t remember the warning.
Let’s review. On July 5, 2001, the CIA told Ashcroft that “a significant terrorist attack was imminent…that preparations for multiple attacks were in late stages or already complete and that little additional warning could be expected”. On July 10th, Tenet and Black were so alarmed about an impending attack that they raced over to the White House to try to shake Rice out of her stupor. On July 12th, Acting FBI Director Thomas Pickard tried to brief Ashcroft on the threat and was brushed off. Then on July 17th, the Tenet and Black gave the same presentation that they gave to Rice on the 10th, to Rumsfeld and to Ashcroft. On July 26, 2001 CBS News reports that Ashcroft would no longer fly commercial airlines?
In response to inquiries from CBS News over why Ashcroft was traveling exclusively by leased jet aircraft instead of commercial airlines, the Justice Department cited what it called a “threat assessment” by the FBI, and said Ashcroft has been advised to travel only by private jet for the remainder of his term.
“There was a threat assessment and there are guidelines. He is acting under the guidelines,” an FBI spokesman said. Neither the FBI nor the Justice Department, however, would identify what the threat was, when it was detected or who made it.
What does Ashcroft have to say about the July 17th briefing with powerpoint presentations?
David Ayres, who was Ashcroft’s chief of staff at the Justice Department, said that the former attorney general also has no recollection of a July 17, 2001, terrorist threat briefing. Later, Ayres said that Ashcroft could recall only a July 5 briefing on threats to U.S. interests abroad.
He said Ashcroft doesn’t remember any briefing that summer that indicated that al-Qaida was planning to attack within the United States.
Perhaps he remembers following FBI protocol and deciding not to fly commercial for the ‘remainder of his term’? Needless to say, Ashcroft has next to no credibility and his actions are inexplicable. Now let’s move on to Rumsfeld and the 9/11 Commission.
It isn’t clear what action, if any, the administration took in response, but officials said Rumsfeld was focused mostly on his plans to remake the Army into a smaller, high-tech force and deploy a national ballistic missile defense system.
Nor is it clear why the 9/11 commission never reported the briefing, which the intelligence officials said Tenet outlined to commission members Ben-Veniste and Zelikow in secret testimony at CIA headquarters. The State Department confirmed that the briefing materials were “made available to the 9/11 Commission, and Director Tenet was asked about this meeting when interviewed by the 9/11 Commission.”
The three former senior intelligence officials, however, said Tenet raised the matter with the panel himself, displayed slides from the PowerPoint presentation and offered to testify on the matter in public.
Ben-Veniste confirmed to McClatchy Newspapers that Tenet outlined for the 9/11 commission the July 10 briefing to Rice in secret testimony in January 2004. He referred questions about why the commission omitted any mention of the briefing in its report to Zelikow, the report’s main author. Zelikow didn’t respond to e-mail and telephone queries from McClatchy Newspapers.
Okay. Rumsfeld was focused on other things. I guess that is an explanation, as far as it goes. But what about the fact that these powerpoint presentations to Rice, Ashcroft, and Rumsfeld were never revealed in the actual report. Let’s start with Richard Ben-Veniste, a Democratic member of the Commission that actually attended Tenet’s testimony where Tenet “raised the matter with the panel himself, displayed slides from the PowerPoint presentation and offered to testify on the matter in public.” What did Ben-Veniste originally have to say about this?
Another Democratic commissioner, former Watergate prosecutor Richard Ben-Veniste, said that the staff of the Sept. 11 commission was polled in recent days on the disclosures in Mr. Woodward’s book and agreed that the meeting “was never mentioned to us.”
“This is certainly something we would have wanted to know about,” he said, referring to the July 10, 2001, meeting.
He said he had attended the commission’s private interviews with both Mr. Tenet and Ms. Rice and had pressed “very hard for them to provide us with everything they had regarding conversations with the executive branch” about terrorist threats before the Sept. 11 attacks.
That was from the October 1, 2006 New York Times. Now his story has changed rather dramatically.
According to three people present at the session, including Ben-Veniste, Tenet believed that Rice responded seriously to what she had been told. “We particularly questioned him about whether he had the sense that Dr. Rice and the others on the White House side understood the gravity of what he was telling them,” said Ben-Veniste, a former Watergate prosecutor. “He said that they believed that they did. . . . We asked him further whether Dr. Rice just shrugged this off, and he said he did not have such an impression.”
Ben Veniste’s explanation for the discrepancy?
Ben-Veniste said yesterday that there was confusion between two different meetings and that the meeting described by Tenet is different in character from the one portrayed by Woodward.
Maybe Ben-Veniste was initially confused. Or maybe his original story became inoperative.
