Niger-gate isn’t over because Tenet fell on his sword

As you surely know, CIA Director George Tenet accepted blame late-Friday for the Niger-gate scandal, saying that the CIA approved false claims made in Bush’s State of the Union and should have had the “misstatements” removed. Though the White House is desperately hoping that Tenet’s carefully-worded statement will end the controversy, I don’t believe it will.

Tenet said, in a statement that the White House almost-certainly wrote for him, “Legitimate questions have arisen about how remarks on alleged Iraqi attempts to obtain uranium in Africa made it into the President’s State of the Union speech. Let me be clear about several things right up front. First, CIA approved the President’s State of the Union address before it was delivered. Second, I am responsible for the approval process in my Agency. And third, the President had every reason to believe that the text presented to him was sound. These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the President.”

The statement clearly avoids direct accountability. Tenet didn’t say that he saw the SOTU, he said the “CIA approved” the speech. Tenet didn’t say that he allowed the false Niger claim to remain in the remarks, he said he is “responsible for the approval process” at the CIA.

Does Tenet’s statement get the Bush White House off the hook for Niger-gate? Not even a little.

The argument against Tenet is, in a nutshell, that he failed to have the Niger claim removed from Bush’s speech. If Tenet knew the charge was unreliable, he should have spoken up. The White House has said if the CIA had expressed doubts about the veracity of the claim, those words would have been stricken. There’s only one problem with this defense: Tenet and the CIA did tell the White House the Niger claim was false, well before the president’s speech.

As the Washington Post reported Saturday, Tenet intervened in October to remove the Niger claim from a speech Bush was going to deliver about Iraq. At the time, Tenet personally told White House officials that the Niger claim was unreliable and shouldn’t be used by the president.

This, of course, came three months before the State of the Union. Tenet told them the claim was bogus but White House officials put the claim in the State of the Union anyway. So why is it Tenet’s fault they included the false charge in the speech? He had already told them it wasn’t true.

The White House is intentionally missing the point by trying to shift the blame to Tenet. Tenet, they say, is responsible because he didn’t fight hard enough to remove the Niger claim from the SOTU. But this is kind of irrelevant. Why was the claim put in the speech in the first place? Who was fighting to keep the claim in? How could the entire intelligence community know the Niger story was bogus but still have people at the highest levels urging the president to repeat the claim?

As the New York Times said over the weekend, “The uranium charge should never have found its way into Mr. Bush’s speech. Determining how it got there is essential to understanding whether the administration engaged in a deliberate effort to mislead the nation about the Iraqi threat.”

Yesterday, Donald Rumsfeld and Condeleeza Rice appeared on multiple political talk shows, trying desperately to say the story is done, the White House is “moving on,” and that there’s nothing else to say.

Not only is this misplaced wishful thinking, it’s utter nonsense. Tenet’s “admission” doesn’t answer any of the important questions surrounding this controversy.