Tenet's leaving CIA doesn't solve systemic problems

Washington has been preoccupied in the week since George Tenet announced his resignation as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
President Bush went to Europe for the D-day commemoration, former President Ronald Reagan died and now the Group of Eight summit has begun in Sea Island, Ga.
So, perhaps, it is not surprising that there has been little response to Tenet's resignation, which is effective July 11.
But expect, sooner or later, to hear supporters of the Bush administration begin talking about the departure of Tenet as bringing closure to the questions that have been raised about the failure to detect the Sept. 11 plot before the attack was launched or the flawed intelligence regarding Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction on the eve of the U.S. invasion last year.
Not a good scapegoat
While there is little question that the CIA under Tenet's leadership is going to come in for heavy criticism by panels now investigating what went wrong on Sept. 11, 2001, making Tenet a scapegoat will not work. As to weapons of mass destruction, pinning that on Tenet will be almost impossible, because the Defense Department and the office of Vice President Dick Cheney were utilizing their own intelligence resources in the build-up to the war.
One area worth looking at, but which the administration will certainly not be inclined to pursue, is whether Tenet allowed the CIA to become politicized. Did the CIA give the president the best possible intelligence it had gathered or did the agency sometimes tell the president what it thought he wanted to hear?
Tenet's leaving may shade how those questions are debated, but it doesn't change the overall need for a new intelligence culture in Washington.
Alphabet soup
No less than 15 agencies within the CIA, Defense Intelligence Agency, National Security Agency, Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard and departments of Defense, Justice, Energy and Treasury are involved in gathering intelligence.
Organizing the flow of the enormous amount of information being gathered by those departments is a logistical nightmare. It is made even more difficult by rivalries between agencies and their personnel and the jockeying that goes on between agencies for funding.
Whether you work in a plant, an office or a store, think of the times you've questioned why the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing. Now multiply whatever communication problems your company may have by a factor of thousands and the problems of gathering intelligence on a national level begins to come into focus.
Add the fact that the lives of American citizens or life as we know it in America are at stake, and suddenly it becomes clear that whatever questions there may have been about U.S. intelligence-gathering failures in recent years, George Tenet's resignation isn't the answer.