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April 29, 2007

Most of what I know of George Tenet has come from the books I've read about Bush's foreign policy, like Bob Woodward's Plan of Attack, James Risen's State of War, and Thomas Ricks' Fiasco, and the portrait contained therein is not flattering. One gets the impression of an opportunist who quickly saw which way the wind was blowing when a new President came into the Oval Office and began a campaign of ingratiating himself to the new boss. One might say this is simple careerism, leading to the second-longest tenure of a Director of Central Intelligence, but more charitably, Tenet was also trying to make a fresh start that could lead to better use of national intelligence.

Nevertheless, it was this willingness to please Bush that led to an almost total capitulation to the political desires of the Administration, or so the story goes. I watched the 60 Minutes interview tonight looking for anything that would shed new light on this, but I was not impressed.

I suppose there's more to be gleaned from actually reading his new book, but the interview did little to repair Tenet's reputation. On interrogations, Tenet was a broken record, repeating that 'we do not torture,' never engaging the question of what torture is (apparently a semantic point). When Scott Pelley incredulously asked (most of his questions were incredulous) if it was true that Tenet had urged offensive action in Afghanistan months before 9/11, Tenet corrected him: he urged then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice to "consider taking action." When asked why he didn't urge the President directly, with whom he met daily, Tenet blustered on about how the POTUS wasn't the "action officer," whatever that means. He went on to use other interesting word choices. Tenet doesn't have best guesses, he has "operational intuition." He doesn't say he screwed up, he accepts, "my share of responsibility."

When it comes to WMD, that share seems to be rather small in his opinion. Scott Pelley should have pressed him on the National Intelligence Estimate, from which, as Bob Woodward tells it, all uncertainties had been scrubbed before it reached Bush (though Pelley did include some pretty damning footage from Powell's presentation before the UN Security Council). The certainty with which the Administration made claims about Iraqi WMD's had tremendous persuasive power with the American public and Congress, and I'm not so sure the road to war would have been quite so easy had the uncertainties been fully realized. Even so, I believe Tenet when he says that his input made no difference about Bush's desire to go to war in Iraq. The problem is that he told the President what he wanted to hear yet now tries to exculpate himself by focusing all the attention on the 'what he wanted to hear' part. So his best defense is that he's an enabler, not an instigator? What a weasel.

In the end, all his huffing and puffing revealed a man whose regrets are sincere but whose ego has turned contrition into petulance.

Posted by Zach Wendling at April 29, 2007 09:17 PM

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Posted by: philosopher at April 29, 2007 09:50 PM | permalink

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