Joe Conason: Tenet’s Share of the Shame

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/tenets_share_of_the_shame/

Tenet’s Share of the Shame

Posted on May 3, 2007

By Joe Conason

While the natural human fascination with gossip and backbiting among our rulers guarantees media coverage and best-seller status for George Tenet’s new memoir, the former CIA director cannot achieve absolution in print or on television. His clumsy attempts to shift the blame to Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and their rebuttals are titillating but ultimately pointless. He is right about them, of course, but they are right about him, too.

History will absolve none of them. With thousands of Americans and Iraqis dead and national honor permanently tarnished, there is more than enough blame to go around.

As a group of former intelligence officers observed in a letter they sent to Tenet upon the publication of “At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA,” his outrage over the misleading propaganda that led to the war is belated and utterly self-serving. During the critical months between September 2002 and March 2003, in the midst of that White House campaign, he was nothing but the useful tool of those he now criticizes.

From the beginning, Tenet knew that his colleagues in the White House and the National Security Council were concocting a case for war that went far beyond any reliable intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s arsenal and intentions. He knew that his best field officers and most competent analysts didn’t believe the warnings about an Iraqi “mushroom cloud.” He also knew that they had no convincing evidence of ties between Saddam and al Qaeda.

Yet while Cheney and Rice lied dramatically on national television, persuading the majority of Americans that Iraq was indeed behind the 9/11 attacks, Tenet maintained a discreet silence—except when he was enabling them.

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