Ex-C.I.A. Chief, in Book, Assails Cheney on Iraq

George Tenet is producing a new book on Monday called “At the Center of the Storm” in which he claims that there was "never any serious debate" in the White House as to whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States.

“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” Mr. Tenet writes in a devastating judgement that is likely to be debated for many years. Nor, he adds, “was there ever a significant discussion” about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.

He is also scathing about Vice President Cheney and alleges that, although he did say the famous "slam dunk" remark, that this had very little to do with the administration's final decision to go to war. He also baldly states that the White House tried to blame the CIA when the WMD failed to materialise.

Mr. Tenet described with sarcasm watching an episode of “Meet the Press” last September in which Mr. Cheney twice referred to Mr. Tenet’s “slam dunk” remark as the basis for the decision to go to war.

“I remember watching and thinking, ‘As if you needed me to say ‘slam dunk’ to convince you to go to war with Iraq,’ ” Mr. Tenet writes.

As violence in Iraq spiraled beginning in late 2003, Mr. Tenet writes, “rather than acknowledge responsibility, the administration’s message was: Don’t blame us. George Tenet and the C.I.A. got us into this mess.”

Mr. Tenet takes blame for the flawed 2002 National Intelligence Estimate about Iraq’s weapons programs, calling the episode “one of the lowest moments of my seven-year tenure.” He expresses regret that the document was not more nuanced, but says there was no doubt in his mind at the time that Saddam Hussein possessed unconventional weapons. “In retrospect, we got it wrong partly because the truth was so implausible,” he writes.

He describes a White House in which a handful of Pentagon officials, including Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith were determined to go to war with Iraq from as early as 2001. This is, of course, totally consistent with the neo-con policy that was pushed by the Project for a New American Century, which many members of the Bush administration were adherents to.

Mr. Tenet describes helping to kill a planned speech by Mr. Cheney on the eve of the invasion because its claims of links between Al Qaeda and Iraq went “way beyond what the intelligence shows.”

“Mr. President, we cannot support the speech and it should not be given,” Mr. Tenet wrote that he told Mr. Bush. Mr. Cheney never delivered the remarks.

As we all know, Cheney has continued to peddle these remarkable lies for the past four years, no matter how many times he is told that they are untrue.

Tenet also describes how his relationship with the administration was "changed forever" by the attempts of Condoleezza Rice, then national security adviser, and her deputy, Stephen J. Hadley, to pin the blame on to Tenet for the inclusion of the famous sixteen words in the State of the Union address.

Nor does he appear to approve of Bush's new surge policy:

He also expresses skepticism about whether the increase in troops in Iraq will prove successful. “It may have worked more than three years ago,” he wrote. “My fear is that sectarian violence in Iraq has taken on a life of its own and that U.S. forces are becoming more and more irrelevant to the management of that violence.”

He also appears to be backing the claims of many other participants in the Bush White House that terrorism was a low priority for Bush prior to 9-11.

He contends that the urgent appeals of the C.I.A. on terrorism received a lukewarm reception at the Bush White House through most of 2001.

“The bureaucracy moved slowly,” and only after the Sept. 11 attacks was the C.I.A. given the counterterrorism powers it had requested earlier in the year.

Personally, I think this is too little, too late. Tenet could have, more than any other person in the world, put a spanner in the works had he not agreed to allow the limited intelligence the US had to be presented to the public in the misleading way that it was, and he could certainly have been more vocal about the way the administration was seeking to link Saddam to 9-11 in the public's mind.

I can understand his anger that the Bushies tried to make him and the CIA carry the can for the whole debacle that is the Iraq war, but - to be fair - he didn't make that very hard for them. After all, he was the head of the CIA and he did sit behind Colin Powell gravely nodding as he read that pile of bull to the UN.

As head of the CIA it was Tenet's job to be sceptical. Instead, he appeared to fall over himself in an attempt to give the administration what it wanted.

It may be very unfair, but I find my judgement is much harsher when it comes to people like Powell and Tenet who caved in to these ideologues. I suppose this is because I have never had a modicum of respect for most of this administration and those two came across as straight hitters, which made their conversion to the dark side all the more unforgivable.

Nor do Tenet's regrets stretch as far as the people now being tortured in US detention centres.

Mr. Tenet gives a vigorous defense of the C.I.A.’s program to hold captured Qaeda members in secret overseas jails and to question them with harsh techniques, which he does not explicitly describe.

The American dream doesn't fall apart when dark people like Dick Cheney do the kind of dark deeds that is their hallmark. It falls apart when good people like Powell and Tenet find themselves embracing Cheney's manifesto's heartlessness.

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Tags: George Tenet, At the Centre of the Storm, Bush, Cheney, Saddam Hussein, Wolfowitz, Feith, Rice, Iraq war, pre-war intelligence, al-Qaeda, Colin Powell, neo-cons, Project for the New American Century