Word: tenet
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...trusts the people around him. "When military details were brought to him, he'd say, 'Don't bring this to me. I've given you a task, and I have full confidence in you to carry it out,'" says a senior U.S. military officer. "That was a big change." Tenet was so sure he had Bush's confidence that he never made the ritual offer to resign after 9/11; he didn't even apologize. And when Tenet came under fire from Republicans, Bush was there with the hoses. "We cannot be second-guessing our team," Bush told a group...
...everything was on the table at Camp David when the war council gathered on Sept. 15. After Tenet briefed the team on his infiltrate-the-spooks operation, General Hugh Shelton, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, laid out four military options for Bush. A quick cruise-missile response was ruled out as ineffective; White House chief of staff Andy Card called this the "pound sand" alternative. Another was more or less a full-scale invasion. Two other options called for different combinations of cruise missiles, bombers, tactical air strikes and special forces, one heavier than the other...
...Afghanistan was only the beginning. "We have a 60-country problem," the CIA's Tenet reminded Bush. Secretary of State Colin Powell argued that support from the Egyptians and the Saudis would crumble if this war were expanded beyond Afghanistan. Pakistan, the key ally in the region, was already wobbly and might fall to agitated Islamic militants. "Focus on the provocation," said Powell, "and the provocation is what the hell these guys did to us. And the provocateurs are in Afghanistan." But others said that the U.S. would never again be in such a strong position to act elsewhere...
...military war would be limited in its first phase to Afghanistan, as Powell had argued. There would be a massive aerial campaign, starting as soon as ships and planes could be put into place. As Tenet had proposed, CIA operatives and a handful of military commandos would go into Afghanistan first, followed closely by the military's special forces. The two armies, one covert and one overt, would work together. White House officials cast the Camp David decision as the most important of the war. "For the first time," said Stephen Hadley, Rice's deputy at the NSC, "America...
...torched effigies of the President, but by and large the Arab world, not to mention Saddam Hussein, was quiet. Bush, however, was impatient. The special forces charged with pinpointing targets for bomber pilots were slow to take up their positions. And the Northern Alliance, on which the CIA's Tenet had staked so much of his plan, looked as if it was flaking out. Its leader, General Mohammed Qassim Fahim, seemed more interested in taking empty hills than in fighting the enemy. "The truth is that Fahim for the longest time wasn't moving," says a White House official...