Watching George Tenet pitching his new book At The Center Of The Storm on 60 Minutes was a nauseating experience. Not being content with having failed to prevent the 9/11 attacks or to capture or kill Osama Bin Laden and his top deputies prior to 9/11, Tenet now insists that he never really believed in the case for going to war with Iraq and was bullied by Cheney et al.
In a letter to Tenet signed by six former CIA officers, he is rightly exorciated for attempting to burnish his reputation and to cash in on his failures. Calling him "a grotesque mixture of incompetence and sycophancy shielded by a genial personality", the former CIA officers charge that "By your silence you helped build the case for war. You betrayed the CIA officers who collected the intelligence that made it clear that Saddam did not pose an imminent threat. You betrayed the analysts who tried to withstand the pressure applied by Cheney and Rumsfeld. Most importantly and tragically, you failed to meet your obligations to the people of the United States. Instead of resigning in protest, when it could have made a difference in the public debate, you remained silent and allowed the Bush Administration to cite your participation in these deliberations to justify their decision to go to war. Your silence contributed to the willingness of the public to support the disastrous war in Iraq, which has killed more than 3300 Americans and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis."
Where was this man's sense of duty to the American people? At least Colin Powell, although equally culpable for making the case for the Iraq War, was asking hard questions of Tenet. Powell insisted that Tenet sit behind him as he made the case for invading Iraq to the U.N. and Tenet did so. More than any other single piece of evidence or speech made by any American official, including President Bush's infamous State of the Union address, the American people knew and trusted Colin Powell, who quite obviously realizes that he sold his soul in a misplaced sense of duty to the Commander in Chief leftover from his service in the Pentagon.
Unlike Powell, who was obviously shut out of day to day foreign policy making despite having the title of Secretary of State, Tenet spoke to Bush every morning about the threats to American security. While both men should have resigned in protest rather than enable Bush's war, only Tenet could have exerted strong back channel pressure in Congress with his briefings to the intelligence committees. Had he raised any doubt in private about the intelligence that Congress was spoon fed by the neocon's, we may very well have avoided one of the worst foreign policy and military debacles in our history.
