A Start at Accountability: CIA Head Finally Rolls

Re “CIA Director, Under Fire for Agency Lapses, Resigns,” June 4: Finally, someone in the Bush administration is accountable for the colossal intelligence failure to connect the dots prior to Sept. 11, 2001, and for the weapons-of-mass-destruction debacle in Iraq. Yet President Bush said, in announcing CIA Director George Tenet’s resignation, that he is “the kind of public servant you like to work with.” If this is the type of incompetent leadership the president applauds, then God help us and the troops he sends into battle.

Robert J. Tormey

Major, USAF (Retired)

Escondido

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Tenet resigns. The administration may be in denial, but most of us know this was a “slam-dunk.”

Mayer Gerson

Northridge

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If Tenet resigned, then Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld should also resign, since Pentagon-based agencies receive nearly 90% of the nation’s intelligence budget.

Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi was a Pentagon intelligence asset whom the CIA and Tenet called untrustworthy. Chalabi provided weapons-of-mass-destruction intelligence and intelligence that Iraqis would welcome our “liberation” of them. Rumsfeld bears more responsibility for the problems in Iraq than Tenet does.

Tenet warned of Al Qaeda before 9/11. Rumsfeld was not concerned to the extent Tenet was.

Bob Liskey

Anaheim

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Tenet is gone. Now, every neoconservative connected with the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, the fraudulent intelligence mill set up to create an Iraq “war of necessity,” should be very nervous. The hard-drive reformatting and paper shredding must be dimming the lights about now.

Stephen Pitt

Moreno Valley