As one former CIA officer noted, Tenet was a great cheerleader, not a great leader," Risen writes.
A lot of people went to George to tell him that Iraq would hurt the war on terrorism, but I never heard him express an opinion about war in Iraq," a former Tenet aide tells Risen.
Eleven months before Bush launched the Iraq War and six months before he began the charade of going to the United Nations, the leaders of the CIA's Iraq Operations Group spoke to European case officers at a meeting in Rome, Risen reports.
Given Bush's obsession with Iraq, Risen oddly lets Bush off the hook.
Relative to the lows reached in early 1996, the rate on thirty-year conventional fixed-rate home mortgages has risen nearly 1 1/2 percentage points and has been fluctuating around 8 1/2 percent in recent weeks.
Automotive stocks had risen appreciably over the second half of 1995, and some reduction was in train even before a March strike at General Motors curbed production; with the strike, dealer stocks were drawn down sharply.
In the domestic nonfinancial corporate sector, the profit share-pretax profits divided by the sector's GDP-has been hovering around 10 percent since mid-1994, after having risen appreciably over the preceding few years; its current level is similar to the levels attained in the mid-1980s but well below the highs of the 1960s and 1970s.
Individual income taxes have also risen sharply this year; little information is available on the factors behind the surge in individual payments, but it may have resulted, at least in part, from capital gains realizations associated with the strong performance in financial markets last year.
Some other expenditures have risen because of federal mandates, especially those in recent health legislation.
Excluding food and energy, prices for commodities at the consumer level have risen at a rate slightly lower than that recorded for 1988.
At early stages of processing, prices of goods have risen little or declined in recent months.
