An unapologetic Mr Clapper argued that deciphering "foreign leadership intentions" was "a basic tenet" of the intelligence operations of almost any government.
Director of National Intelligence James Clapper said such efforts were a "top tenet" of US intelligence policy.
It is an art or a craft, and as such it cannot be governed by the basic tenets of logic.Intelligence officers must be gifted with imagination and creativity, enabling them to peer behind the curtain of apparent reality.
The Senate found that the flotilla of intelligence agencies under Mr Tenet, the director of central intelligence, were gullible and incompetent, reflecting a "broken corporate culture and poor management".
Some of what the C.I.A. under Mr. Tenet assured Congress about its full sharing of intelligence on suspected weapons sites in Iraq with United Nations inspectors there in 2002 and 2003 turned out to be "factually incorrect," the committee said.
There is another set of critiques, however: That Mr. Tenet's intelligence community missed not only evidence of the Sept. 11 plot, but growing evidence in the 1990's that Abdul Qadeer Khan, the Pakistani scientist, was shipping nuclear goods to Iran, North Korea and Libya.
Based on a follow-up investigation, Mr. Deutch's security clearances were revoked by Mr. Tenet, denying him access to a wide range of intelligence information.
The counterterrorism chief of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Dale Watson, appeared with Mr. Tenet and other intelligence officials before the intelligence committee in a wide-ranging review of terrorism and other threats to the United States.
Mr. Tenet's temporary successor, John E. McLaughlin, has criticized the Senate findings as unfair, and Mr. Tenet took aim at Mr. Roberts on Monday in a statement that criticized the proposal as reflecting "a dangerous misunderstanding of the business of intelligence".
Melvin Goodman, former career CIA intelligence analyst and author of Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA, penned an op-ed in the Baltimore Sun that denounced Brennan and Jami Miscik, another Obama intelligence advisor, as "discredited cronies of the Tenet era".
