Word: tenet
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...This is almost painfully clear in Tenet's new book, At the Center of the Storm, his memoir about his seven years as CIA boss currently excerpted on Time.com and in the upcoming issue of TIME magazine. The book - and Tenet's publicity tour interviews, including one with Time.com - has once again reignited all the old fights between Bush Administration neoconservatives and Republican internationalists - starting with 9/11 and continuing right through to the war in Iraq...
...Because Tenet is no neo-con, his probation inside the Bush Administration never really ended. When it came time to find someone to take the blame for Iraq, Tenet maintains, he took the fall. Now, several years later, the book is partly a revealing score-settler: Tenet tags Secretary of State and former National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice for mishandling her job before 9/11 and being slow to realize that Osama bin Laden was preparing to attack the U.S. Rice is portrayed as a National Security adviser who avoided fights, rather than one who tried to settle them. The book...
...Tenet's barbs for Rice are few compared to those he directs at Vice President Cheney, his former top aide Lewis "Scooter" Libby and a host of neo-conservative fellow travelers at the Pentagon. With very few declarative sentences that anyone can quote, Tenet nonetheless repeatedly makes it clear that neoconservatives in and out of the Bush Administration quietly pushed the U.S. to war with Iraq from the very first day after 9/11. The decision to go to war was made, he said, without any clear decision meetings; it proceeded at a number of critical points without any guidance from...
...Which gets back to Tenet's own responsibility for what unfolded. At the heart of the book is a confession - but also an unconvincing argument. Tenet takes a lot of blame for the poor analysis of the prewar intelligence on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction. He explains how the CIA used unreliable sources and vague extrapolations to make a judgment about Saddam's arsenal that was little better than an educated guess. Nonetheless, Tenet says, he believed it. When it came time to make those conclusions public, the CIA (and everyone it was advising) wasn't very careful about...
...When it comes to his storied "slam dunk" comment in the Oval Office, Tenet does not deny saying it. He says instead that it was an aside and did not refer to the quality of the prewar intel. It referred instead, he says, to whether the President had the goods to make the public case for war. And the meeting in question was not about whether...