Spencer Ackerman on George Tenet

Spencer Ackerman writes:

George Tenet's Twisted Intel | The American Prospect:In his new memoir, the former CIA chief proves to be a master of non-apology apologies

Let's just leave "slam dunk" aside for a moment.

It's true that in his memoir, At the Center of the Storm, former Director of Central Intelligence George Tenet goes to elaborate rhetorical lengths in denying that he had intended to characterize Iraq's possession of weapons of mass destruction as a dead certainty when he used that infamous phrase. And, like much else in the book, Tenet's focus on the "slam dunk" quote is actually sneaky -- he serves to obscure the real issue at hand while oscillating between contrition and a fiery, if dubious, defense of his tenure....

Tenet has always sought to ingratiate himself with his masters, whether Presidents Clinton and Bush or the GOP Congress, in order to protect himself and the CIA from criticism.... Tenet's own particular brand... involves the unctuous rhetorical tactic of conceding failure up front, only to hastily explain that, in fact, there were no real failures -- not on his part, not on his agency's part, and certainly not on President Bush's part. He's a master of the non-apology apology. Take the most important Iraq-related example of massive failure on his watch: the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. The NIE, which assessed that Iraq had vast stockpiles of chemical and biological weapons and an ongoing nuclear weapons program, only exists because the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence requested it in September 2002, needing an authoritative intelligence judgment on the eve of the vote to authorize the war. In the book, Tenet concedes that he "didn't think one was necessary... I was wrong."...

Tenet places heavy emphasis on the "crash project" that the three-week NIE represented, and implies that weaknesses in the NIE are attributable to the time constraints faced by its chief author, National Intelligence Officer Bob Walpole.... Tenet should mention... the political constraints imposed by the Bush administration. The White House insisted... the war authorization occur before the November congressional elections, so as to enable the Republicans to use the war question as a political cudgel against the Democrats. But he mentions no such thing.....

[Tenet] bristles at the [Senate] panel's desire for an assessment of, in his characterization, "the effectiveness of planned U.S. covert and military actions in Iraq," This is a serious misrepresentation.... Graham, the Democratic chairman, requested... forecasts of what the Middle East would look like in the aftermath of an invasion of Iraq. Graham wanted the full committee to get a broader understanding of the implications of war.... Tenet, however, restricted the NIE to covering only WMD, and now disgraces himself further by implying that the committee attempted to meddle with war planning. There's an irony here: Later in the book Tenet trumpets the CIA's foresight in predicting the chaos of Iraq -- assessments that he stopped Congress from receiving when it counted....

It gets worse when he engages the famous issue of the aluminum tubes.... Nowhere in Tenet's new book can one find even a momentary contemplation of the idea that the NIE should have abandoned its conclusion about the Iraqi nuclear weapons program on account of the DOE's objection, rather than push that outlook to the margins as a dissenting view.... Tenet also gives an unsatisfactory explanation of how these dissents were scrubbed from the public version of the NIE.... In other words, the NIE was tragically misread and misrepresented -- off the hook he and the president go....

His inoculation of Bush from blame is all the more troubling because Tenet is absolutely right about a central claim in the book: The intelligence wasn't determinative of the war. The Bush administration opted to invade Iraq because of a mélange of strategic reasons, for which the public case about weapons of mass destruction was merely, in Paul Wolfowitz's words, "the one issue that everyone could agree on." The proper word for this is "deceit." It's true enough that Tenet had little hope of salvaging his reputation through his memoir, given the overwhelming disrepute in which nearly everyone, left and right, holds him. But he should have devoted much more introspection -- and apology -- to the way in which his faithful service led him to turn intelligence work into policy advocacy. It wouldn't have been very cheerleader-like. But the college basketball season has long since ended.