George Tenet has a new book out and it can be wrapped up in this sentence: "It wasn't my fault."
I can understand Tenet's position. Who wants to take full credit for 9/11? Certainly not the Clinton administration, which used its lackeys to condemn a docudrama, The Path to 9/11, just to ensure that enough lefties screamed how it was all George Bush's fault!
Certainly not the Bush administration, which had been in power all of eight months when the tragedy occurred. If it weren't for the lefty spin machine, normal people wouldn't think an administration in power for eight months had more culpability than an administration in power for eight years. But, hey, if you're a liberal, you will believe just about anything, especially if it makes George Bush look evil, stupid, or incompetent (depending on the situation).
So, now George Tenet, the guy who told us WMDs were a "slam dunk" is trying to say that it isn't his fault. Riiiiight.
Michael F. Scheuer has this interesting column at Washingtonpost.com telling us not to buy Tenet's story.
At the CIA, Tenet will be remembered for some badly needed morale-building. But he will also be recalled for fudging the central role he played in the decline of America's clandestine service -- the brave field officers who run covert missions that make us all safer. The decline began in the late 1980s, when the impending end of the Cold War meant smaller budgets and fewer hires, and it continued through Sept. 11, 2001. When Tenet and his bungling operations chief, James Pavitt, described this slow-motion disaster in testimony after the terrorist attacks, they tried to blame the clandestine service's weaknesses on congressional cuts. But Tenet had helped preside over every step of the service's decline during three consecutive administrations -- Bush, Clinton, Bush -- in a series of key intelligence jobs for the Senate, the National Security Council and the CIA. Only 9/11, it seems, convinced Tenet of the importance of a large, aggressive clandestine service to U.S. security.
Like self-serving earlier leaks seemingly from Tenet's circle to such reporters as Ron Suskind and Bob Woodward, "At the Center of the Storm" is similarly disingenuous about Tenet's record on al-Qaeda. In "State of Denial," Woodward paints a heroic portrait of the CIA chief warning national security adviser Condoleezza Rice of pending al-Qaeda strikes during the summer of 2001, only to have his warnings ignored. Tenet was indeed worried during the so-called summer of threat, but one wonders why he did not summon the political courage earlier to accuse Rice of negligence, most notably during his testimony under oath before the 9/11 commission.
Scheuer describes Tenet as the sort of lightweight who goes whichever way the prevailing winds call upon him to go. Tenet gave comfort to his underlings and was the quintissential "yes man" for three administrations--administrations of both parties. It's not hard at all to see why Tenet didn't blame Rice during his Congressional testimony. He would have been laughed off the dias.
Why does Tenet bring this up now? As Scheuer says,
But as with Rice and the warnings in the summer of 2001: Now he tells us. At this late date, the Bush-bashing that Tenet's book will inevitably stir up seems designed to rehabilitate Tenet in his first home, the Democratic Party. He seems to blame the war on everyone but Bush (who gave Tenet the Medal of Freedom) and former secretary of state Colin L. Powell (who remains the Democrats' ideal Republican). Tenet's attacks focus instead on the walking dead, politically speaking: the glowering and unpopular Cheney; the hapless Rice; the band of irretrievably discredited bumblers who used to run the Pentagon, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith; their neoconservative acolytes such as Richard Perle; and the die-hard geopolitical fantasists at the Weekly Standard and National Review.
They're all culpable, of course. But Tenet's attempts to shift the blame won't wash. At day's end, his exercise in finger-pointing is designed to disguise the central, tragic fact of his book. Tenet in effect is saying that he knew all too well why the United States should not invade Iraq, that he told his political masters and that he was ignored. But above all, he's saying that he lacked the moral courage to resign and speak out publicly to try to stop our country from striding into what he knew would be an abyss.
Mostly, the image we get is that Tenet told his masters what they wanted. That's a huge disservice to America.
Captain Ed points out that Tenet's cowardly self-service continues in that he's now giving left-leaning America what it wants.
UPDATE: Larry Johnson has a letter from a group of former intelligence officers to Tenet's publisher.
UPDATE x2: William Kristol at the Weekly Standard points out untruths in Tenet's book.
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