This is just brilliant. Is there anyone in this administration willing to take responsibility for anything?
Last week it was Doug Feith disavowing responsibility for the pre-war intelligence analysis his Pentagon office produced. He wrote it. He presented it. But that didn't mean that he actually believed it. He was just presenting alternate points of view, after all.
This week its former CIA Director George "Slam Dunk" Tenent working that lame excuse. Tenent is writing a book, and one of his goals is apparently to clear his name. Here, via Andrew Sullivan and courtesy of the NYT, is part of his plan to do that:
In the interview on “Meet the Press,” Mr. Cheney said: “George Tenet sat in the Oval Office and the president of the United States asked him directly, he said, ‘George, how good is the case against Saddam on weapons of mass destruction?’ The director of the C.I.A. said, ‘It’s a slam dunk, Mr. President, it’s a slam dunk.’ ”
Mr. Cheney added, “That was the intelligence that was provided to us at the time, and based upon which we made a choice.”Promotional materials for the book promise that Mr. Tenet will give the “real context” for that episode.
One person who has read early drafts of the book said Mr. Tenet defended himself by carefully parsing the “slam dunk” comment: he said he was not telling Mr. Bush that there was rock-solid evidence that Mr. Hussein had chemical and biological weapons, only that the president could make a “slam dunk” case to the American public about these weapons programs.
Got that? The Director of the CIA claims he wasn't passing judgement on the intelligence analysis itself, he was merely suggesting ways it could be used politically. But let's think this through...
For that to be a defense of his "slam dunk" statement, he would have to be suggesting that although he thought it was a political slam dunk, he did not believe it was a factual slam dunk. The political case, he would have had to believe, was stronger than the factual one. And because he only offered the political interpretation to the president, we would have to assume that he, as the Director of the CIA, believed that the factual case wasn't even important enough to mention.
In presenting the evidence the president used to go to war, the Director of the CIA decided it was politics, and only politics, that mattered.
That's his defense. He had his doubts about the facts, but he kept those to himself. Instead, he told the president how the information could be used politically. And for that the man won the Medal of Freedom.
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