Former CIA director George Tenet is finally ready to spill the beans on the distorted intelligence that led us into Iraq.
But only because he’s expecting a big payday for doing so — not exactly the most altruistic of motives. Tenet has penned a tell-all book, “At the Center of the Storm,” that is expected to be published Monday by Harper Collins. The New York Times, which bought a prepublication copy, offered a summary of the book:
By turns accusatory, defensive, and modestly self-critical, it is the first detailed account by a member of the president’s inner circle of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the decision to invade Iraq and the failure to find the unconventional weapons that were a major justification for the war.
The book, the Times said, paints President George W. Bush in a positive light while also making it clear that there was little debate over going to war.
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.”
He also
largely endorses the view of administration critics that Mr. Cheney and a handful of Pentagon officials, including Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith, were focused on Iraq as a threat in late 2001 and 2002 even as Mr. Tenet and the C.I.A. concentrated mostly on Al Qaeda.
The revelations, of course, are late in coming and only reinforce what we already know. It also underscores the failure of the Republican Congress to engage in its oversight responsibilities.
David Corn in his Capital Games blog on The Nation Web site offers this take:
But here’s an out-of-the-box question: don’t the citizens of the United States deserve to know what happened in the run-up to the war (and to 9/11) for free? Tenet may feel–as he claims–damn lousy about the screwed-up National Intelligence Estimate that helped pave the way to war in Iraq. But he did not feel bad enough to resign–or to disclose earlier what had gone wrong. He sat on the story and now is peddling it for personal profit.
Tenet should have long ago been questioned openly by a congressional committee about all this–though no Republican committee chair would have dared–or he should have spilled all to 60 Minutes and other media, as a public service, not as an advertisement for his book. On Friday, Representative Henry Waxman, the chairman of the House oversight and government reform committee, sent Tenet a letter asking him to testify before his committee on May 10 regarding “one of the claims used to justify the war in Iraq–the assertion that Iraq sought to import uranium from Niger–and related issues.” Let’s hope Tenet can take time from the book tour to appear.
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Hank Kalet 