A (right-leaning) reporter familiar with the intel world e-mails:

The Tenet-must-go, should-have-gone-already mentality is the type of
reaction one would expect from the chicken-little left, not from the bright
minds at NRO.
First, firing Tenet immediately after 9/11 would have been a serious
mistake. The CIA was getting an avalanche of information around the world
reacting to the attack. They had the responsibility of uncovering any
additional attacks as well as putting together the intelligence for the U.S.
response against the attackers and their supporters. What better way to
reinforce the risk-averse, keep-your-head-down mentality that dominated the
agency in the 90s than to start firing the bosses immediately after a
crisis? Bush’s visit to Langley and pep talk in late September was exactly
what the institution needed – don’t get distracted by what went wrong
before, focus now on the task at hand.
Like firing the coach in professional sports, the team only gets better if
there’s a better coach to replace him. If those calling for Tenet’s head
have a better candidate, they ought to mention it. (The only serious name
I’ve heard mentioned is Rep. Porter Goss, head of the intel committee and
former CIA officer.)
As for the structural problems Tenet talked about – today America expects
up-to-the-minute assessment of what secretive, shadowy small groups are
planning and thinking from an institution designed to assess the Soviet
Union’s military capabilities. It’s a lot easier to count the number of
tanks on an East German base than to figure out the specific intentions in
the mind of a jihadi.
Every day, the CIA takes in mountains upon mountains of information from
classified and unclassified sources in varied formats such as agent reports,
intercepted emails, copied documents, imagery, and audio in dozens of
languages. All of this has to get analyzed, and then edited, trimmed, and
boiled down to – among other things – a several-page PDB and half-hour to an
hour daily morning briefing for the president.
Of course, in hindsight, important facts are going to get edited out,
deemphasized, or other facts emphasized. The issue of 9/11 wasn’t connecting
dots, it was sorting out which three dots – the flight school reports, the
talk of hijackings, and the old plan of Operation Bojinka – should be
connected amongst the thousands that were empty bluster, false rumors, vague
threats, etc. Today, intelligence agencies face the same problem – sorting
out what’s real from what’s the idle boasts of jihadi wannabes, or outright
disinformation.
“New blood”? Conservatives are the few who understand that change is not
synonymous with progress. A new director does not guarantee of improvement.
“and the fixes YESTERDAY.” What fixes? Less layers between the analysts and
the policymakers? More raw data to the policymakers? Maybe that will improve
things; maybe that will result in policymakers doing the job analysts should
be doing. More information to other agencies? Congress leaks classified
information like a sieve; would the security benefits of giving info to the
FAA, FBI, TSA, Homeland Security, etc. be worth the risk that some
bureaucrat could leak information that can identify sources and methods?
We’ve seen Tenet (and Bush)’s answer: TTIC, the Terrorist Threat Integration
Center. Maybe it will work, maybe it won’t. If it doesn’t, we can try
something else. But so far, there have been 945 days since 9/11, and the
Agency and its domestic partners are 945 for 945 in terms of preventing
another domestic attack.
“A disasterous ship”? Nonsense. There’s no simple, easy reform of the
intelligence community that will guarantee no more attacks.
Tenet will probably retire sometime shortly after the election. He will
leave a record of some big successes, some big failures, but mostly a steady
hand in the Agency’s hardest times.