Tenet Still Supports Bush

by Steve

The New York Times obtained an advance copy of Tenet's book and has read it already, and finds that Tenet uses it to settle some scores with Cheney and his cabal, and Rice. We hear for example that Cheney and the gang were talking about Iraq and not Al Qaeda even after 9/11, and that whether or not Iraq posed an imminent threat was irrelevant inside the administration.

“There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” Mr. Tenet writes in a devastating judgment that is likely to be debated for many years. Nor, he adds, “was there ever a significant discussion” about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.

From this sketchy NYT account, there may be nothing in this book remotely surprising to many of us, perhaps except the finding that to this day Tenet cannot bring himself to utter a negative word over the president. And yet Tenet holds Bush blameless for presiding over an intentional disinformation campaign against the American people to convince them of an imminent threat that the administration itself never debated and seemingly didn't care about. He sat by and never challenged directly the "smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud" propaganda because he wanted to please his boss, and his boss knew it.