Tenet's Swan Song?

In testimony today before the Senate Armed Services Committee he contradicted his boss....Mr. Bush.

Eliminating Osama bin Laden and his al-Qaida network will not end the danger to Americans from a growing Islamic extremist movement, CIA Director George Tenet warned Tuesday.

Tenet told the Senate Intelligence Committee that new groups inspired by bin Laden, his followers and their methods "have become the next wave of the terrorist threat. Dozens of such groups exist."

"We must overcome a movement, a global movement infected by al-Qaida's radical agenda" of attacking the United States with weapons capable of causing mass casualties, he said.

Tenet seems far less sanguine than Bush about our successes in 'defeating terrah.'

Even if bin Laden and his network are eradicated, other Islamic extremist groups will continue attacking targets overseas and in the United States for years to come, Tenet warned.

Al-Qaida has "infected others with its ideology, which depicts the United States as Islam's greatest foe," he said. "The steady growth of Osama bin Laden's anti-U.S. sentiment through the wider Sunni extremist movement and the broad dissemination of al-Qaida's destructive expertise ensure that a serious threat will remain for the foreseeable future - with or without al-Qaida in the picture."

Those inspired by bin Laden include the al Zarqawi network, active in Iraq; Ansar al Islam, an Iraqi Kurdish organization; and groups in Libya, Uzbekistan, Morocco, Indonesia, the Philippines, Kenya, Somalia and other Asian and African countries.

"These far-flung groups increasingly set the agenda and are redefining the threat we face," he said. "They are not creatures of bin Laden, and so their fate is not tied to his. They have autonomous leadership. They picked their own targets. They plan their own attacks."

The threat, Tenet said, goes beyond these groups to individual "jihadists," or holy warriors, who see the presence of 120,000 U.S. troops in Iraq as a "golden opportunity."

Jacoby warned that a failure of U.S. policy in Iraq could turn the country into "a training ground for the next generation of terrorists."

He said he was concerned about trends in the Muslim world that bode badly for the United States and Arab governments that are close to Washington.

Poverty, corruption, joblessness among large numbers of young people and poor education are combining with opposition to U.S. policies to threaten the stability of pro-U.S. regimes and create "a terrorist threat to the United States for years to come," he said.

"Favorable ratings (for the United States) in Morocco declined from 77 percent in 2000 to 27 percent in spring of last year, and in Jordan from 25 percent in 2002 to only 1 percent in May 2003," Jacoby said in a statement submitted to the committee.

Much more at link

I am wondering if this is Tenet's way of saving face in light of the harsh treatment given the CIA from the Bushistas. It would be a nice way to go out. What did Truman say about truth?

"I never give them hell. I just tell the truth and they think it's hell." -- HST

If there's one thing that this administration has issues with, it is the truth. Everything else flows from that fountain.