When Joe Wilson started blabbing in public about his CIA mission to Niger – and lying about what he reported to the CIA upon his return – why didn’t you say something rather than allow the President’s credibility to be shredded? […] [My ellipses and emphasis]
Above from: Two Questions for George Tenet - The American Thinker. by Herbert E. Meyer (Herbert E. Meyer served during the Reagan Administration as Special Assistant to the Director of Central Intelligence and Vice Chairman of the CIA’s National Intelligence Council. His DVD on The Siege of Western Civilization has become an international best-seller.) More below:
November 4th, 2005 / Finally, the spotlight has started to swing away from Lewis Libby and his allegedly perjurous grand-jury testimony toward where that spotlight should have focused all along: on the CIA's incompetent, weird and possibly treasonous response to Vice President Cheney's inquiry about Iraq's interest in purchasing yellowcake from Niger.
Perhaps an outline of how we did things at the CIA during the Reagan Administration will help to illustrate just how appalling the agency's handling of Mr. Cheney's query really was: [...]
Straight to the DCI [/] It’s quite rare for a Cabinet member to actually ask for intelligence – and even more rare for the Vice President or the President to ask – so when they do it’s a very big deal. President Reagan’s great Director of Central Intelligence, William J. Casey, made clear to all of us that when a top-level official personally asked the CIA to check into something, he was to be notified immediately. No matter what else was going on that day that demanded Casey’s total attention – a revolution in Asia, a covert action in Eastern Europe, another of Bob Woodward’s fantasies in The Washington Post—a direct query from any of the four or five top Administration officials took precedence over everything else. After all, they were our primary customers.
[...] It was always done quietly – if a meeting was necessary, we held it away from the office—and with no paper trail whatever. And we did it all the time. There are literally scores of individuals in Washington, and elsewhere, who during those years gave their time and energy – sometimes at personal risk – to help provide information vital to our country’s security. Of course you don’t know who they are because they never, ever talked about what they did, not even to their friends and colleagues—never gave a speech about it, and never published op-ed essays about it even if they thought the resulting Reagan policies were wrong-headed. They understood that in taking on an assignment for the CIA – however brief, however informal – they were expected to keep their mouths shut.
[...] All this raises two important questions for George Tenet, who was Director of Central Intelligence during all the time that “Plamegate” was going on:
• Why did the CIA, under your direction, treat the Vice President’s query about Iraqi efforts to purchase yellowcake in Niger so casually?
• When Joe Wilson started blabbing in public about his CIA mission to Niger – and lying about what he reported to the CIA upon his return – why didn’t you say something rather than allow the President’s credibility to be shredded? […] [My ellipses and emphasis]
