By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post
April 28, 2007
Book by ex-CIA chief highly critical of Cheney, Bush
official rejects claims...
White House and Pentagon officials, and particularly Vice
President Cheney, were determined to attack Iraq from the first
days of the Bush administration, long before the Sept. 11,
2001, attacks, and repeatedly stretched available intelligence
to build support for the war, according to a new book by former
CIA director George J. Tenet.
Although Tenet does not question the threat Saddam Hussein
posed or the sincerity of administration beliefs, he recounts
numerous efforts by aides to Cheney and then-Defense Secretary
Donald H. Rumsfeld to insert "crap" into public justifications
for the war. Tenet also describes an ongoing fear within the
intelligence community of the administration's willingness
to "mischaracterize complex intelligence information."
"There was never a serious debate that I know of within
the administration about the imminence of the Iraq threat," Tenet
writes in "At the Center of the Storm," to be released
Monday by HarperCollins. The debate "was not about imminence
but about acting before Saddam did."
Bartlett: Tenet a ‘patriot,’ but wrong
White House counselor Dan Bartlett yesterday called Tenet a "true
patriot" but disputed his conclusions, saying "the
president did wrestle with those very serious questions." Responding
to reports from the book in yesterday's New York Times, Bartlett
suggested that the former CIA director might have been unaware
of all the discussions. President Bush, Bartlett said on NBC's "Today
Show," "weighed all the various consequences before
he did make a decision."
In their threat briefings for the incoming Bush administration
in late 2000, Tenet writes, CIA officials did not even mention
Iraq. But Cheney, he says, asked for an Iraq briefing and requested
that the outgoing Clinton administration's defense secretary,
William S. Cohen, provide information on Iraq for Bush.
Fears al-Qaida ‘is here and waiting’
A speech by Cheney in August 2002 "went well beyond what
our analysis could support," Tenet writes. The speech
charged, among other things, that Hussein had restarted his
nuclear program and would "acquire nuclear weapons fairly
soon . . . perhaps within a year." Caught off-guard by
the remarks, which had not been cleared by the CIA, Tenet says
he considered confronting the vice president on the subject
but did not.
"Would that have changed his future approach?" he
asks. "I doubt it but I should not have let silence imply
an agreement." Policymakers, he writes, "have a right
to their own opinions, but not their own set of facts."
New details about the origins of the current terrorist threat
-- and the way the Clinton and Bush White Houses dealt with
it -- add to a growing body of information about the tumultuous
late 1990s and the first years of the new century. For the
future, Tenet describes his deepest fear as "the nuclear
one." He is convinced, he writes, that this is where Osama
bin Laden "and his operatives desperately want to go.
They understand that bombings by cars, trucks, trains and planes
will get them some headlines, to be sure. But if they manage
to set off a mushroom cloud, they will make history."
Despite all efforts to thwart them, he says, "I do know
one thing in my gut: al-Qa'ida is here and waiting."
Considered resigning in 2003
The book breaks Tenet's long public silence since he resigned
in June 2004 over what he considered White House attempts
to turn him into a scapegoat, as U.S. efforts in Iraq were
bogging down, for the faulty intelligence used to justify
the invasion in the first place.
Tenet writes that Bush talked him out of resigning in May
2003. But he decided it was time to go nine months later when
a book by The Washington Post's Bob Woodward quoted him as
telling Bush in December 2002 that the intelligence case against
Iraq was a "slam dunk," a statement he says was taken
out of context but subsequently used by the administration
to blame him for faulty Iraq intelligence. "I couldn't
quit immediately over something that appeared in a book," Tenet
writes, "but I didn't see any way I could or should stay
on much longer." Bush made no attempt to keep him when
he finally resigned in June 2004.
‘Low moments’
Tenet blames himself, among other things, for the hastily compiled
October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which concluded
that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons, issued
on the eve of a congressional vote authorizing the war. The
NIE, he said, "should have been initiated earlier. I
didn't think one was necessary. I was wrong." The document,
he acknowledged, was "not cautious in key judgments" and
at times used single sources who turned out to be wrong.
A perennial problem, he writes, was a tendency by intelligence
analysts to assume other people thought like they did. When
judging whether Hussein was lying when he said Iraq had no
weapons of mass destruction, "we did not account for .
. . the mind set never to show weakness in a very dangerous
neighborhood."
One of the "lowest moments of my seven-year tenure," Tenet
recalls, was when a congressman told him in a public hearing
in the spring of 2004 that "we depended on you, and you
let us down."
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