Word: tenets
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...this triumphal assertion in his State of the Union address a month ago. Five days after the speech, David Kay concluded that the weapons of mass destruction (WMD) Bush appointed him to find apparently did not exist. Twelve days after that, in a speech at Georgetown, CIA chief George Tenet averred that his agency had never told the president that Hussein posed an “imminent threat” to the world. The president’s approval rating plunged in the week after Kay’s “we were almost all wrong” pronouncement?...
Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told lawmakers on the Hill that those weapons might still be found; CIA chief George Tenet defended his intelligence by suggesting there's no such thing as perfection in his business; and the apostate Colin Powell was back in his pew after suggesting he might have some doubts about how we got here. The message from all sides was essentially this: We weren't wrong, and if we were, no one can prove it. Bush himself chose to walk into the lion's den, sitting down with Tim Russert on NBC's Meet the Press...
...bigger arsenal than he had. "Well," Rumsfeld concluded in his testimony before the Senate, "we'll learn more about those various theories in the weeks and months ahead," sounding calm and reasoned as he tiptoed backward out of the saloon before he really got beat up. CIA chief Tenet, in a rare public speech at Georgetown University, made the more cogent--and contrite--argument, admitting that spying is a game of percentages. "In the intelligence business, you are almost never completely wrong or completely right...like many of the toughest intelligence challenges, when the facts of Iraq...
While Rumsfeld and Tenet were defending the process that led to war, the President defended its outcome. He continued his tour of Democratic primary states, visiting South Carolina to scrub off all the anti-Bush graffiti left by the Democrats, who had been denouncing him at every turn. Saddam may not have had those weapons, he said, but he had the means, the knowledge, the infrastructure and the willingness to make and use them. "Knowing what I knew then and knowing what I know today," he declared, "America did the right thing in Iraq...
...They never said there was an imminent threat. Rather, they painted an objective assessment ... of a brutal dictator who was continuing his efforts to deceive and build programs that might constantly surprise us and threaten our interests." GEORGE TENET, CIA Director, defending his agency, following criticism that it overstated the threat from weapons of mass destruction before the war in Iraq...