CLARIFICATION: WHAT CIA DIRECTOR
TENET KNOWS BUT ISN’T SAYING

I looked at my last WMD FAIRIES entry last night and it didn’t appear to make as much sense as I’d like. To clarify:

1. Last week, during Congressional hearings, some “new” information was revealed that a special intelligence unit inside the Pentagon was briefing the White House during the run up to the Iraq invasion about the defenseless but evil nation’s supposed weapons of mass destruction. Tenet claimed that this revelation came as a surprise.

2. It seems strange to me that this surprised Tenet. I’ve personally known about at least one alternative intelligence gathering operation inside the Pentagon since last summer, as the Common Dreams article from last May shows. If I knew because of this article, then Tenet obviously knew what was going on himself.

3. Why wouldn’t Tenet have automatically blamed this other intelligence operation (which was reporting that Iraq had WMDs even while the CIA was reporting that it didn’t) the moment he came under fire for the intelligence failure?

4. ANSWER: Tenet is clearly trying to keep his job. He knows that the “intelligence failure” wasn’t his fault. The CIA reported the truth last spring, that Iraq was not a threat. Because this isn’t what Rumsfeld and Cheney wanted to hear, the White House chastised the CIA and relied on “intelligence” from this other operation inside the Pentagon. Now, they’re trying to make Tenet take the fall for their own duplicity, and no one’s mentioning this other office. Tenet obviously realizes that if he is too quick to blame the Bush administration for its own folly, he’ll face the wrath of Rove or Rumsfeld or whatever other Darth Vader figures inhabit the White House these days. He also knows that if he allows himself to be their sacrificial lamb, Congress and the press will roast him on a spit.

So there you have it. Tenet pretends to be surprised at what he already knows because of some sort of high-stakes power-poker game being played out while all we can do is watch. I don’t blame Tenet for playing fast and loose with the truth—I think that if I were in his position, I’d do the same thing. The thing that really gets me, however, is that this kind of Machiavellian maneuvering shows just how ineffective our democracy really is these days. America is controlled by power brokers.

And that really sucks.

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