How Tenet Betrayed the CIA on WMD in Iraq

[babylonsister]

http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2008/08/10/10920/

How Tenet Betrayed the CIA on WMD in Iraq
by Gareth Porter


Journalist Ron Suskind’s revelation that Saddam Hussein’s intelligence chief was a prewar intelligence source reporting to the British that Saddam had no weapons of mass destruction (WMD) adds yet another dimension to the systematic effort by then Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) Director George Tenet to quash any evidence — no matter how credible — that conflicted with the George W. Bush administration’s propaganda line that Saddam was actively pursuing a nuclear weapons programme.

snip//

The disappearance of all that credible evidence reflected a deliberate decision by Tenet. The White House Iraq Group had just rolled out its new campaign to create a political climate supporting war in early September, and Tenet knew what was expected of him. As an analyst who worked on the NIE told Bob Drogin of the Los Angeles Times, ‘The going-in assumption was that we were going to war, so this NIE was to be written with that in mind.’ That means Tenet’s account of the CIA’s role in the WMD issue in his 2007 memoirs completely ignored the credible evidence from Habbush, Sabri and the former Iraqi specialists that there was no active program, as well as his own role in suppressing it.

Tenet even brazenly claimed that a ‘very sensitive, highly placed source in Iraq’ about whom ‘little has been publicly said’ had ‘reported that production of chemical and biological weapons was taking place’. The reporting from the source, continuing through the NIE and beyond, ‘gave those of us at the most senior level further confidence that our information about Saddam’s WMD programmes was correct.’

Tenet was clearly referring to the reporting coming from the Sabri debriefings, but his description of them was a prevarication. As Blumenthal reported, they had written a report on Sabri’s intelligence spelling out his view that there was no active WMD programme, but they later discovered that it had been rewritten and given an entirely new preamble asserting that Saddam already possessed chemical and biological weapons and was ‘aggressively and covertly developing’ nuclear weapons.

Tenet — who was a political operator rather than an intelligence professional — had betrayed the CIA’s mission of providing objective analysis, instead choosing to serve the interests of the Bush administration in preparing the way for war. It is not difficult to imagine how he would have meekly carried out whatever was asked of him by the White House — even forging a document and leaking it to the media, to buttress the administration’s case for war.



Gareth Porter is an investigative historian and journalist. The paperback edition of his latest book, ‘Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the Road to War in Vietnam‘ was published in 2006.

[Deny and Shred]

1. Heckuva job, Georgie. Here's the Medal of Freedom.

[truedelphi]

3. That about sizes it all up! n/t

[truedelphi]

4. Tenet was just protecting the American way of life

Or at least the American way of life regarding our big oil companies and their needs:
http://www.coastalpost.com/02/01/03.htm

[The Backlash Cometh]

2. Team player from hell, that Tenet.