Bush: Tenet resigns
So Bush has decided that George Tenet is to be the scapegoat, but for what exactly? This seems like a victory for the Pentagon.
Chalabi - White House, Pentagon
Plame - White House
WMD - White House, Pentagon, CIA
9-11 - White House, FBI
Abu Graib - White House, Pentagon, CIA?
Iraq war - White House, Pentagon
This should be an interesting distraction. Will he go down quietly like a good little soldier or can we expect yet another tell-all book by an ex-official by the fall?
Update: From
CNN:
Former CIA Director Stansfield Turner said the timing of Tenet's resignation -- just five months before the presidential election -- cast doubt on the explanation that it was a personal decision.
"I think he's being pushed out or made a scapegoat," said Turner, who led the CIA during the Carter administration. "That is, that the president feels he's got to have somebody to blame, and he's doing it indirectly by asking Tenet to leave. ... I don't think he would pull the plug on President Bush in the middle of an election cycle without having been asked by the president to do that."
My (admittedly limited) understanding has always been that people at this level do not just decide to leave. They serve at the will of the president. If they resign it is almost always because they were told to.
I don't think that we can really expect that book that I am hoping for from him, though. I think that he has publicly defended the president often enough on some of the more damning subjects that if he were to change his tune now we would see every hack in the country pulling these quotes out again and splashing them on the headlines and spitting them out on the talkshows (which is fair enough). It would be like Richard Clark's letter of praise to Bush x 100.
