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Between Tenet’s Lines
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| Contributor | Imperator |
| Last Edited | Imperator May 03, 2007 05:00am |
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| Category | Perspective |
| News Date | Thursday, May 3, 2007 10:00:00 AM UTC0:0 |
| Description | “Intelligence professionals did not try to tell policymakers what they wanted to hear, nor did the policymakers lean on us to influence outcomes.”
That’s just one of many inconvenient sentences in former CIA Director George Tenet’s memoir, At the Center of the Storm. It’s inconvenient because it runs counter to the central anti-Bush narrative of the last five years — that President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney cooked the intelligence to justify the Iraq invasion. But you can be sure that such inconvenient truths won’t get much play in the fog the book is already generating, at least not from Bush’s critics or the bulk of the media. Full disclosure: I’ve only read some chunks of the book and watched interviews. But from what I can tell, a White House press flack could — and no doubt will — cull numerous quotes from the book that ultimately support Bush.
For example, Tenet argues that the rationale for war was “never a question of a known, imminent threat; it was about an unwillingness to risk surprise” from enemies like Saddam Hussein in the wake of 9/11. Tenet says former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell’s presentation before the United Nations reflected the best intelligence available. He says that the studied opinion among experts was that those infamous aluminum tubes were best suited for nuclear centrifuges and that the controversial allegation that Iraq sought “yellowcake” uranium from Niger was hardly central to the intelligence community’s belief that Iraq was seeking nuclear weapons.
Indeed, Tenet argues that the collective opinion of the intelligence community in 2002 was that, if Hussein could get access to his domestic supply of uranium — unreliably sequestered by international inspectors — he could have had nuclear weapons as early as 2007. |
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