Subject: Tenet: CIA Warned of ‘Anarchy’ in Iraq: Throwing caution to the wind, Bush plunges America into a long, costly and disastrous war; Just like the American press, no one in the administration questions the reasons or considers the consequences; By SCOTT LINDLAW, Friday, April 27, 2007, SAN FRANCISCO, (AP) – The CIA warned the Bush White House seven months before the 2003 Iraq invasion that the U.S. could face a thicket of bad consequences, starting with "anarchy and the territorial breakup" of the country, former CIA Director George Tenet writes in a new book. CIA analysts wrote the warning at the start of August 2002 and inserted it into a briefing book distributed at an early September meeting of President Bush's national security team at Camp David, he writes. The agency analysis painted what Tenet calls additional "worst-case" scenarios: "a surge of global terrorism against U.S. interests fueled by deepening Islamic antipathy toward the United States"; "regime-threatening instability in key Arab states"; and "major oil supply disruptions and severe strains in the Atlantic alliance." Tenet's recollection of the memo also comes at a time when Bush and the Democratic-controlled Congress are locked in a high-stakes dispute over war funding and whether to set hard timetables for ending the war. The book is highly critical of Vice President Dick Cheney and other administration officials, who Tenet argues rushed the United States into war in Iraq without serious debate … Beyond that, he contends, the administration failed to adequately consider what would come in the war's aftermath. Tenet laments that "there seemed to be a lack of curiosity … before committing the country to war." Tenet assigns his own agency part of the blame, saying the intelligence community should have strived to answer the questions not asked by the administration. For the first time, Tenet offers an account of his own view of a historic moment in the run-up to war: Secretary of State Colin Powell's February 2003 speech before the United Nations, with Tenet sitting just behind him. "That was about the last place I wanted to be," Tenet recalls. "It was a great presentation, but unfortunately the substance didn't hold up… "One by one, the various pillars of the speech, particularly on Iraq's biological and chemical weapons programs, began to buckle," he writes. "The secretary of state was subsequently hung out to dry in front of the world, and our nation's credibility plummeted."

RESPONSE: Hey, I watched this Clinton appointment on ‘60 Minutes’ attempt to justify his role in the Iraq quagmire and found the man without any redeeming qualities. Cox and Richardson resigned in disgust from the Nixon administration and Tenent had to be pushed out as his ‘slam dunk’ assessment is right up there with ‘MISSION ACCOMPLISHED’ as emblematic of the all pervasive incompetence of the Bush administration and as a Clinton appointee he was scapegoatble.

His book expresses concern about “a surge of global terrorism against U.S. interests fueled by deepening Islamic antipathy toward the United States" relating to our actions and yet somehow this man defends the torturing of captured detainees as saving American lives. HUH?

Accepting the likelihood that plots were unearthed by American torture of those it defined as ‘enemy combatants’ ...the reality is that for every life so saved, thousands of Muslim terrorists were made through actions that have in the past been perceived as the behavior of less civilized people and never done in the name of America. We are not only a tarnished people in the view of the world...something that will take a generation to overcome...but we are way less safe in the making of more terrorists through these short sighted actions.

The principles that we are a people of law and that torture and other Bush actions that shred the US Constitution ...that set us apart on the high road ...are so badly soiled by the continuing support by decent Republicans of this scum bag Republican administration is hard to understand. It is Democrats who are calling for repeal of some of the un-American laws and policies that Bush ...like Hitler, using ‘fear’ as a tool to usurp power has wielded effectively against the principles of our Founding Fathers that for over two hundred years have proudly defined us as Americans.