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George W. Bush would have had to kiss goodbye the role of cheerleader/war president—and so much else. Thus, Tenet had become critical to Bush's political survival. And Tenet? All he needed was not to be blamed – not to be fired.The bargain: I, George Bush, will keep you on and even praise your performance; you, George Tenet, will keep your mouth shut about all the warnings you gave me during the spring and summer of 2001. Tenet, it is clear, agreed.
On Sept. 26, 2001, the president motored out to CIA headquarters, puts his arm around Tenet and told the cameras, "We've got the best intelligence we can possibly have thanks to the men and women of the CIA."
In his sworn testimony of April 14, 2004, before the 9/11 Commission, Tenet outdid himself trying to honor his bargain with Bush. The commissioners were interested in what the president had been told during the critical month of August 2001.
Answering a question from Commissioner Timothy Roemer, Tenet referred to the president's long vacation (July 29-Aug. 30, 2001) in Crawford and insisted that he did not see the president at all in August.
"You never talked with him?" Roemer asked.
"No," Tenet replied, explaining that for much of August he, too, was "on leave."
That evening, a CIA spokesman called reporters to say that Tenet had misspoken, and that he had briefed Bush on Aug. 17 and 31, 2001. The spokesman played down the Aug. 17 briefing as uneventful and indicated that the second briefing took place after Bush had returned to Washington.
Funny how Tenet could have forgotten his first visit to Crawford. In his memoir, “At the Center of the Storm,” Tenet waxed eloquent about the "president graciously driving me around the spread in his pickup and me trying to make small talk about the flora and the fauna."
But the visit was not limited to small talk. In his book Tenet writes: "A few weeks after the August 6 PDB was delivered, I followed it to Crawford to make sure the president stayed current on events."
The Aug. 6, 2001 President's Daily Brief contained the article "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in the US." According to Ron Suskind's The One-Percent Doctrine, the president reacted by telling the CIA briefer, "All right, you've covered your ass now."
Clearly, Tenet needed to follow up on that. Was Tenet again in Crawford just one week later? According to a White House press release, President Bush on Aug. 25 told visitors to Crawford, "George Tenet and I" drove up the canyon "yesterday."
If, as Tenet says in his memoir, it was the Aug. 6, 2001, PDB that prompted his visit on Aug. 17, what might have brought him back on Aug. 24? That was the day after Tenet had been briefed on Zacarias Moussaoui training to fly a 747 and other suspicion-arousing information.
The evidence is very strong that Tenet told Bush chapter and verse. The extraordinary lengths to which Tenet has gone to disguise that has the former CIA director skating very close to perjury – if not over the line.
Real Terrorists: Moussaoui and Reid
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