Soccer Dad

Tenets of belief

In Rewriting History, (or here) Charles Krauthammer excoriates Former CIA Chief George Tenet for opportunism.

George Tenet has a very mixed legacy. On the one hand, he presided over the two biggest intelligence failures of this era -- Sept. 11 and the WMD debacle in Iraq. On the other hand, his CIA did devise and carry out brilliantly an astonishingly bold plan to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan. Tenet might have just left it at that, gone home with his Presidential Medal of Freedom and let history judge him.

Instead, he's decided to do some judging of his own. In his just-released book, and while hawking it on television, Tenet presents himself as a pathetic victim and scapegoat of an administration that was hellbent on going to war, slam dunk or not.

The Krauthammer launches into the specifics of his charge with this line.

Tenet writes as if he assumes no one remembers anything.

This has become enough of a problem that Scrappleface joked Former CIA Boss Out of Loop on Parts of His New Book

William Kristol famously pointed out that Tenet couldn't have had a conversation with Richard Perle on Sept 12, 2001 because Perle was stranded in France. Tenet responded by saying that it wasn't necessarily the 12th but was shortly after 9/11. Of course, he wrote that he remembered Perle saying "yesterday," which means that his explanation doesn't hold much water.

THE WEEKLY STANDARD has now learned of a second, more stunning error in Tenet's book (which is due to appear in bookstores tomorrow). According to Michiko Kakutani's review in Saturday's Times,

On the day after 9/11, he [Tenet] adds, he ran into Richard Perle, a leading neoconservative and the head of the Defense Policy Board, coming out of the White House. He says Mr. Perle turned to him and said: "Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility."
Here's the problem: Richard Perle was in France on that day, unable to fly back after September 11. In fact Perle did not return to the United State until September 15.

Did Tenet perhaps merely get the date of this encounter wrong? Well, the quote Tenet ascribes to Perle hinges on the encounter taking place September 12: "Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday." And Perle in any case categorically denies to THE WEEKLY STANDARD ever having said any such thing to Tenet, while coming out of the White House or anywhere else.

My Right Word excerpts part of the book that had appeared in Ynet about Tenet's objection to freeing Jonathan Pollard.

In his book, Tenet, who was part of security negotiations between Israel and the Palestinians, reveals, for the first time, the events of the Wye Plantation summit before the signing of the Hebron agreement, and the pressure placed on him to include Pollard in the deal.

The drama reached its peak on Thursday, October 22, 1998, the night before the agreement was signed at the White House. The senior American staff, including Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and National Security Advisor Sandy Berger was present.

Berger told Tenet that then Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu put the Pollard matter on the table.

Upon hearing this, Tenet stormed out of the room, telling Berger that he was wrong and that Pollard was not on the agenda, calling the idea ridiculous and insisting that the Pollard issue had nothing to do with the talks taking place at Wye.

If Ynet is reporting what was in Tenet's book correctly, there's a fundamental error here. The October 1998 talks were not the Hebron Accords that were concluded in January 1997, but the Wye Accords.

Finally there's the matter of what the media focuses on. The media who think their job is to question everything President Bush does, apparently missed an important observation that Tenet made. Mediacrity writes

As reported in the Jerusalem Post today, Tenet "places most of the blame for the breakdown of the security plan bearing his name and other efforts to stop the violence after the outbreak of the second intifada on Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat."

"Almost always, that last impenetrable barrier to peace had the same name: Arafat," he writes in his 576-page memoir, of which an entire chapter is devoted to the late PA chairman. . . . "Arafat always wanted one more thing, and one more thing was never enough because what he really wanted was for the peace process to be ever-active and eternally unresolved," according to Tenet.

Imagine for a moment that Tenet had said that Israel was the biggest obstacle to peace in the Middle East. Do you think that the media would have put aside some of their Bush bashing to have at Israel? (That's a rhetorical question.)

Jack Kelly wrote a nice piece questioning Tenet's lack of concern about Saddam's WMD program.

One of the reasons why the invasion of Iraq was a mistake, former CIA Director George Tenet told CBS' Scott Pelley, is because the CIA didn't think Saddam Hussein would have a nuclear weapon until 2007.

Er, George, it's 2007. To a born again dove like Mr. Tenet, the five years that has passed since President Bush decided Saddam must go was an eternity justifying inaction. But if President Bush hadn't done what he did when he did it, Saddam might today have the bomb, and however bad you may think the situation in Iraq is today, it would be very much worse. That's important to keep in mind as we relive these events through Mr. Tenet's blinkered hindsight.

In the end Tenet looks like he's burnishing his own image at the cost of the truth. He knows that today, if one wishes to become a wealthy author, all he needs to do is write a critical kiss and tell book about the administration. The publication of the book will be followed by plenty of free advertising; an above the fold front page story in the NYT, a full segment on 60 minutes and, if you're lucky, maybe even a glamorous photoshoot in Vanity Fair. (No matter the difficulties with his story, he will be instantly feted as a brave truthteller who bucked the ideological driven adminstration.) It's nice work, if you can get it.

George Tenet