I don’t know if I buy it, but a well-versed intel watcher e-mails me some good points, in total and complete disagreement with my SMALLEST VIOLIN post:

Uh, yeah, [a Tenet resignation] would [be bad]. Intelligence is an art, not a science. A lot of it is educated guesses, based on the best, though incomplete information available. Firing Tenet over botching this SOTU line would add more caution, more ass-covering, more bureaucratic inertia and bring down the morale that he’s spent his tenure rebuilding. Unless there’s a dynamo replacement candidate to replace him, it’s best to keep a guy who’s got a very solid, trusted, personal relationship with W. and who has some successes to go with his failures (Khalid Sheik Mohammad, the company’s role in taking down the Taliban, catching some of the top 55 Iraqi leaders, etc.).
One other thing–throughout much of the 90s, nobody in Washington was all that interested in al-Qaeda. Certainly not the Clinton White House, very few folks of either party on the Hill, China, the Balkans & trade were the big foreign policy issues. The Agency responds to the needs of policymakers, it can’t force them to focus on an issue that they don’t want to. Almost everybody in Washington dropped the ball on bin Laden; the agency was made a big scapegoat for 9/11.