If George Tenet was fired, as Josh Marshall thinks, why did the firing seem to take the President by surprise?
I have absolutely no information on this I didn’t get from public sources, but it seems to me more plausible that Tenet decided he’d had enough — perhaps after having seen a draft of the Senate Intelligence Committee report — and headed for the door on his own, catching Team Bush flat-footed.
An even more optimistic possibility from the anti-Bush perspective: Tenet wanted to use the fact that the neocons in OSD and the VP’s shop and their buddy Chalabi had managed to blow a major cryptographic secret to persuade the President to carry out a purge of the people who have been giving him such bad advice, and quit when he lost that argument.
In any case, whether Tenet jumped, fell, or was pushed, he’s now (to switch metaphors) potentially a skunk outside the tent pissing in. If he’s sufficiently angry or concerned for the country, he could do the Bush-Cheney re-election campaign a world of damage.
Update: The Deputy Director for Operations (i.e. spies) is quitting, too.
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