America's Head Spook Sputters

If only Osama had faxed an X-marks-the-spot map to the Crawford ranch showing the Pentagon, the Capitol, the twin towers and the word "BOOM!" scrawled in Arabic.

That might have sparked sluggish imaginations. Or maybe not.

Only a couple of weeks after the endlessly vacationing President Bush got his Aug. 6, 2001, briefing with the shivery headline "Bin Laden Determined to Strike in U.S.," the CIA chief, George Tenet, and other top agency officials received a briefing about the arrest of Zacarias Moussaoui after his suspicious behavior in a Minnesota flight school. And that had another shivery headline: "Islamic Extremist Learns to Fly."

"The news had no evident effect" on prompting the CIA to warn anyone, according to the drily rendered report of the 9/11 commission's staff, which faults the agency for management miasma and al-Qaida myopia, citing a failure to make a "comprehensive estimate of the enemy."

Asked by the commission member Timothy Roemer about whether he had shared this amazing news at a Sept. 4 meeting with Condi Rice, Colin Powell, Donald Rumsfeld and Richard Clarke -- the meeting on al-Qaida that Clarke had been urgently begging for since January -- Tenet said no. Asked if he had ever mentioned it to Bush in August, during a month of "high chatter and huge warnings," Tenet said no.

The Man Whose Hair Was Allegedly on Fire told the commissioners that he had not talked to the president at all in August. Bush was in Texas, and he was in Washington. Or he was on vacation, and the president was in Texas. Quel high alert.

After the hearing, Tenet had an aide call reporters to say he had misspoken, that he had briefed the president twice in August, in Crawford on Aug. 17 for a morning briefing he deemed unexceptional and again in Washington on Aug. 31.

I'm not sure whether Tenet -- a mystifyingly beloved figure even though he was in charge during the two biggest intelligence failures since Pearl Harbor and the Bay of Pigs -- has a faulty memory, which is scary. Or if he's fuzzing things up because he told the president more specifics than he wants to admit. But in a town where careers are made on face time with the president, it's fishy that the head spook can't remember a six-hour trip to Crawford for some.

In a commission staff report, there is a stark juxtaposition of Sandy Berger's approach before the millennium and Condi Rice's before 9/11.

"Berger, in particular, met or spoke constantly with Tenet and Attorney General Reno," the report said. "He visited the FBI and the CIA on Christmas Day 1999 to raise the morale of exhausted officials."

Condi and her deputy, Steve Hadley, did not stoop to mere domestic work. "Rice and Hadley told us that before 9/11, they did not feel they had the job of handling domestic security." They left that up to Dick Clarke to broker, the same guy Dick Cheney said "wasn't in the loop."

Maybe Condi's confusion about her job -- that it entailed national security as well as being the president's foreign policy governess and workout partner -- explains why so many critical clues went into the black holes of the FBI and the CIA.

After the Bay of Pigs, President Kennedy spoke to newspaper publishers and said: "This administration intends to be candid about its errors. For as a wise man once said, 'An error does not become a mistake until you refuse to correct it.' ... Without debate, without criticism, no administration and no country can succeed -- and no republic can survive."

Compare Kennedy with Bush, who conceded no errors and warned that any Vietnam analogy with Iraq -- in this acid flashback moment when 64 U.S. troops were reported to have died last week and when McNarummy is forcing up to 20,000 troops to stay in Iraq -- "sends the wrong message to our troops and sends the wrong message to the enemy."

He reiterated that his mission is dictated from above: "Freedom is the almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world."

Given the Saudi religious authority's fatwa against our troops, and given that our marines are surrounding a cleric in the holy city of Najaf, we really don't want to make Muslims think we're fighting a holy war. That would only further inflame the Arab world and endanger our overstretched military, so let's hope that Bush's reference to the almighty was to Dick Cheney.

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