Tenet: "...history, deception, denial..."

"The job of the director of Central Intelligence is to provide data, not to make policy.... The notion... that we didn't speak truth to power, didn't tell people what we believed in the confines of government.... Look, I was the director of Central Intelligence. My job is to do the best I can to give people the best data possible. Policymakers make their decisions. I know that we acquitted our responsibilities consistent with our values. "
Interview with Wolf Blitzer, CNN 05/02/07

This excuse sounds rather close to "I was just following orders". (I'm not going to discuss his audacity at using the "speaking truth to power" phrase, which sounds like an attempt to appear somehow as David to the Bush Administration Goliath.) As a career administrator Tenet's first impulse was apparently to go along to get along and to do his best to serve his bosses -- that is generally how you get promoted in a bureaucracy. However, he must have been aware that evidence was being skewed and intelligence cherry-picked by Cheney's Pentagon's shadow intel unit which was largely responsible for the October 2002 NIE that didn't exactly make a strong case for going to war with Iraq even though it conveniently left out a lot of intel that called into doubt Saddam's possession of WMD and his ability to make them. The Congressional Democrats had requested the NIE so that they would have more information regarding how much of a threat Saddam actually posed. Based on this NIE the Congress passed the still controversial AUTHORIZATION FOR USE OF MILITARY FORCE AGAINST IRAQ RESOLUTION OF 2002 which Bush used to legitimize going to war against Iraq.

Did Tenet have a moral responsibility to go public with the fact that perhaps the information in the NIE that made a case against Saddam wasn't exactly truthful? Well, he says he spoke "truth to power" but it wasn't up to him to make the decision to go to war; yet in another answer it seems that he is justifying the decision by saying it wasn't the imminent threat of Saddam it was more the possibility that Saddam might have WMD that justified the war: "Well, as I said at Georgetown in 2004, not imminent, but surprise... the question that policymakers grappled with -- would he surprise us in a way that limited our ability to respond? " Interview with Wolf Blitzer, CNN 05/02/07

He wants it both ways: he wants to portray himself as having no part of the decision to go to war -- he was just providing the intelligence but not making the policy -- but yet he is also providing a rationale for why the decision was made as if he was involved in the decision making process.

"[W]e followed Iraq's weapons programs for 10 years. I had followed them in the Clinton administration and in the Bush administration. Our analysts wrote what we believed. We made our best judgments. We made our best assessments. We turned out to be wrong for many reasons that go to the heart of our tradecraft. It's no solace that every other country in the world believed it, as well. " Interview with Wolf Blitzer, CNN 05/02/07

When Tenet sat behind Colin Powell in February 2003, at the U.N. General Assembly, when Powell presented the Bush's Administration case for the Iraq War he had to have known that the intelligence had been doctored to support the administration's position. (He had to have been suspicious of the mobile labs that had no documentation except the word of the questionable source named "Curveball", not to mention the infamous aluminum tubes that NIE claimed had a dual purpose one of which was to construct a nuclear centrifuge when in fact they only had one purpose which was for short-range missiles.) He believed "policymakers" thought that Saddam wasn't necessarily an imminent threat but there was a fear that they didn't know what Saddam had in terms of WMD or what he could do with them. Saddam's history of, as he put it: "history, deception, denial" made him and others fear that he might have the ability to mount some kind of monumental surprise attack against the U.S. despite his claim of having no such capability. It's possible that Tenet actually believed this at the time, but even so, it didn't warrant the skewing of intelligence and using it to mislead people. Using bad intelligence, even if it's intelligence that you know is bad and believe that you are using to justify a good cause is a very risky proposition, a gamble. Going to war against Saddam without solid evidence but only a fear that Saddam might WMD was tantamount to gambling with the lives of U.S. troops and innocent Iraqis.

Most of us have been in situations where we have to guesstimate because we don't have enough information to make an informed decision but we have to make a decision anyway. We have to take the risk. And usually after we make such a decision we monitor the outcome closely so that if it turns out to have been the wrong decision we can hopefully fix it so that we don't have a complete disaster on our hands. There is another way to deal with such a situation, especially in a bureaucracy: once you realize you have made a decision that really hasn't had the outcome you had hoped for you distance yourself from the bad outcome as much as possible and hope that you can find someone else to blame for it. I think the disaster in Iraq is an example of a guesstimate gone wrong and those responsible are now doing their best to avoid responsibility.

Tenet's argument that everyone else in the world thought Saddam had WMD was interestingly enough recently echoed by both Condalezza Rice and Tony Snow. They seem to be laying a foundation for a possible excuse for the Bush administration role in Iraq or maybe they just think that if they appear to be agreeing with Tenet on this issue it takes the sting out of his other accusations against them.

On 04/29/07 Condalezza Rice told Wolf Blitzer: "To the degree that there was an intelligence problem here, it was not just an intelligence problem with George Tenet. It was not just an intelligence problem with U.S. intelligence. It was an intelligence problem worldwide. We all thought -- including U.N. inspectors -- that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. So there's no blame here of anyone. "

And Tony Snow being interviewed by John Roberts on American Morning, CNN, 04/20/07 : "[T]here doesn't seem to be any dispute about the fact that the best intelligence available to the United States, to the intelligence committees on Capitol Hill, to intelligence services around the world, was that Saddam had some weapons of mass destruction and was pursuing further weapons of mass destruction.... The fact is, the best intelligence we had indicated weapons of mass destruction...."

But unfortunately this excuse isn't exactly true either. The world wasn't convinced that Saddam had WMD and that's why the Bush Administration had Colin Powell present their case before the U.N. General Assembly in 2003 in hopes of convincing at least the voting members that a war against Iraq was a better option than more inspections and continued sanctions. The evidence he presented wasn't convincing enough to get a voting majority to support the U.S. resolution for the use of force in Iraq and ultimately it was withdrawn. In March 2003 the U.S. invaded Iraq without U.N. approval and with very limited support from the international community. (Remember "freedom fries" and the general denunciation of anything French because France decided not to support the U.S. in the Iraq War?). I suppose it is possible that the members of the entire international intelligence community believed that Saddam had WMD and the will to use them but, unlike the Bush Administration, the policymakers of their respective countries weren't convinced that the threat he posed warranted an invasion and war.