{"id":1209,"date":"2004-02-06T13:42:13","date_gmt":"2004-02-06T18:42:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/1209.html"},"modified":"2004-02-06T13:42:13","modified_gmt":"2004-02-06T18:42:13","slug":"why-im-not-sure-george-tenets-defense-really-matters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/why-im-not-sure-george-tenets-defense-really-matters\/","title":{"rendered":"Why I’m not sure George Tenet’s defense really matters"},"content":{"rendered":"

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a little confused. I’ve read CIA Director George Tenet’s speech<\/a> defending the intelligence community now that the White House and congressional Republicans are holding the agency — and just the agency — responsible for getting Iraq’s WMD completely wrong.<\/p>\n

Part of my confusion is about what, exactly, Tenet hoped to achieve. On the one hand, Tenet seemed to accept some responsibility<\/a> for the series of devastating intelligence mistakes, admitting that the CIA was largely wrong about the status of Iraq’s weapons programs. In this sense, Tenet was conciliatory.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, Tenet was defiant, insisting that the CIA’s information to the White House was tempered by warnings that administration officials ignored<\/a> and that the CIA never claimed that Saddam Hussein represented an “imminent threat.”<\/p>\n

“Let me be clear: Analysts differed on several important aspects of these programs, and those debates were spelled out in the [national intelligence] estimate,” Tenet said. “They never said there was an imminent threat.”<\/p>\n

OK, so maybe Tenet’s point was that there’s plenty of blame to go around and he’ll be satisfied as long as all of it isn’t placed at his feet. Fine.<\/p>\n

But the other area of confusion for me is why Tenet’s defense matters at all. As Paul Krugman noted<\/a> in the New York Times today, the White House didn’t care about the CIA’s perspective on Iraq anyway. Making the agency a scapegoat now is an effort, as Krugman put it, to “rewrite history.”<\/p>\n

Let’s start with the case of the missing W.M.D. Do you remember when the C.I.A. was reviled by hawks because its analysts were reluctant to present a sufficiently alarming picture of the Iraqi threat? Your memories are no longer operative. On or about last Saturday, history was revised: see, it’s the C.I.A.’s fault that the threat was overstated. Given its warnings, the administration had no choice but to invade.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n


\nKrugman, as usual, has it exactly right. Before the war, “regime change” proponents said the CIA wasn’t taking the Iraqi threat seriously enough. Now that the WMD are no where to be found, the administration is blaming the CIA for overstating the Iraqi threat. That’s a convenient, if entirely incoherent, argument.<\/p>\n

As Josh Marshall recently noted<\/a>, uber-hawk Richard Perle suggested the CIA misled our poor, trusting president into believing he had to invade Iraq. “The president is a consumer of intelligence, not a producer of it,” Perle told<\/a> the New York Times. “I have long thought our intelligence in the gulf has been woefully inadequate.”<\/p>\n

Yes, except Perle has “long thought” it was inadequate the other way<\/i> — that the CIA didn’t do more to convince Bush to invade.<\/p>\n

Krugman also notes that the White House largely sidestepped the CIA to rely on intelligence from the Pentagon.<\/p>\n

And don’t forget the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, created specifically to offer a more alarming picture of the Iraq threat than the intelligence professionals were willing to provide.<\/p>\n

Can all these awkward facts be whited out of the historical record? Probably. Almost surely, President Bush’s handpicked “independent” commission won’t investigate the Office of Special Plans. Like Lord Hutton in Britain — who chose to disregard Mr. Jones’s testimony — it will brush aside evidence that intelligence professionals were pressured. It will focus only on intelligence mistakes, not on the fact that the experts, while wrong, weren’t nearly wrong enough to satisfy their political masters.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

If you’re not familiar with the Pentagon’s Office of Special Plans, Mother Jones did a stunning profile<\/a> on the office’s role in gathering Iraq intelligence and how the OSP gave the White House the information it was looking for, but couldn’t find, from the CIA.<\/p>\n

As The American Prospect’s Matt Yglesias recently asked<\/a>, “[W]hy did Dick Cheney need to create an entire parallel intelligence apparatus under Doug Feith dedicated exclusively to explaining why the CIA was underestimating<\/i> Iraq’s WMD capacity?”<\/p>\n

Why indeed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m a little confused. I’ve read CIA Director George Tenet’s speech defending the intelligence community now that the White House and congressional Republicans are holding the agency — and just the agency — responsible for getting Iraq’s WMD completely wrong. Part of my confusion is about what, exactly, Tenet […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1209","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1209"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1209\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1209"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1209"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1209"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}