Word: slams
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...April with the publication of Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack, which includes a scene in which Tenet lays out for the President the evidence that Saddam possessed chemical and biological weapons. "George, how confident are you?" Bush asked Tenet. "Don't worry," he answered. "It's a slam dunk...
More than a year--but no WMDs--later, those words have returned to slam-dunk Tenet. It doesn't help that the controversies over Iraq and 9/11 follow on intelligence failures stretching back almost to the beginning of Tenet's reign. In his seven years as director of Central Intelligence--only the legendary Allen Dulles served longer--Tenet revived morale at an agency devastated by post--cold war budget cuts and a sharp drop in recruitment. But he also presided over blunders that included the agency's failure to foresee in 1998 that India would test an atomic device...
...According to Bob Woodward's insider account of the decision to go to war, when President Bush had questioned the paucity of hard intelligence on Iraq's unconventional weapons capability, Tenet had told his boss that the WMD case against Iraq was "a slam dunk." But failure to find any such weapons in Iraq after the war led David Kay, the CIA official who led the Iraq Survey Group assigned to find Saddam's banned weapons, to tell Congress that "We were almost all wrong." A bipartisan commission appointed by President Bush into WMD intelligence is due to report early...
...members interviewed Tenet secretly earlier this month at CIA headquarters. He submitted to the three-hour session willingly and was cooperative, sources said. But Tenet wouldn't confirm whether he told President Bush before the war that evidence of Saddam Hussein's weapons-of-mass-destruction arsenal was a "slam dunk," as reported in Bob Woodward's book Plan of Attack. The panel last week sent Tenet the several-hundred-page report--minus its conclusions--for a declassification review...
...Still, it's far from certain that China has the policy tools needed to avoid a crash. Premier Wen Jiabao recently likened his country to a speeding car trying to slow down without skidding. "We cannot slam on the brakes," he said. "We have to press the brakes gently." But the country's rickety financial system may not allow gentle pressure, because it has yet to undergo a full capitalist transformation-for example, some bank loans are issued because the government orders them, not because careful analysis indicates that the borrower is a good risk. So Beijing resorts to administrative...