The Wall Street Journal, June 18, 2004:

It cites CIA Director George Tenet as saying that al Qaeda’s ability to conduct an anthrax attack is “one of the most immediate threats the United States is likely to face.”

The WSJ, June 4, 2004:

It’s a compliment to Mr. Tenet’s political savvy that he was able to leave on his own terms despite the Agency’s mistakes during his seven-year tenure. The largest was the failure to penetrate al Qaeda before 9/11, and more recently the many misjudgments about Iraq, which go well beyond whether or not Saddam Hussein had WMD.

June 18, 2004:

Somehow the Commission also omitted any reference to Mr. Tenet’s 2002 letter to Congress. “We have solid reporting of senior level contacts between Iraq and al-Qaeda going back a decade,” he wrote.

June 4, 2004:

For all of that, the CIA is still a long way from the anti-terror spearhead it needs to become. That’s especially clear from its performance in Iraq, where the Agency has been consistently wrong since it told the first President Bush that Saddam would fall within two months of the Gulf War.

June 18, 2004:

And, [Tenet wrote] “We have credible reporting that al-Qaeda’s leaders sought contacts in Iraq who could help them acquire W.M.D. capabilities. The reporting also stated that Iraq has provided training to al-Qaeda members in the areas of poisons and gases and making conventional bombs.”

June 4, 2004:

The Agency has relied on a Sufi network of Iraqi agents that time and again proved inadequate. The CIA favored an anti-Saddam coup strategy it couldn’t execute, predicted defections of Republican Guard units that never took place, and was twice wrong about having located and killed Saddam. It also failed to predict that the regime’s strategy would be to melt away during the invasion and counterattack with a terrorist insurgency.

This post is dedicated to Robert Louis Stevenson.