Tenet Moves to Cover His Ass

But just how good a job are we going to let him get away with on this? As he does his best on 60 Minutes tonight, and in his recently published book to paint his role in the Iraq war debacle as misunderstood (I didn't want us doing this. My warnings went unheeded. They did it, I didn't.), there are some who remind us that Tenet is far from innocent in all of this.

In today's WaPo Outlook section, Michael Scheuer reminds us that Tenet was hip deep in the roll out for war in his piece, "Tenet Tries to Shift the Blame, Don't Buy it."

Scheuer, who worked with Tenet, notes more than a few worrisome "inconsistencies" in this recent book. For instance, the possibility of hunting down bin Laden before 9/11:

But what troubles me most is Tenet's handling of the opportunities that CIA officers gave the Clinton administration to capture or kill bin Laden between May 1998 and May 1999. Each time we had intelligence about bin Laden's whereabouts, Tenet was briefed by senior CIA officers at Langley and by operatives in the field. He would nod and assure his anxious subordinates that he would stress to Clinton and his national security team that the chances of capturing bin Laden were solid and that the intelligence was not going to get better. Later, he would insist that he had kept up his end of the bargain, but that the NSC had decided not to strike.

Since 2001, however, several key Clinton counterterrorism insiders (including NSC staffers Richard A. Clarke, Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon) have reported that Tenet consistently denigrated the targeting data on bin Laden, causing the president and his team to lose confidence in the hard-won intelligence.

And the march to war in Iraq?

At this late date, the Bush-bashing that Tenet's book will inevitably stir up seems designed to rehabilitate Tenet in his first home, the Democratic Party. He seems to blame the war on everyone but Bush (who gave Tenet the Medal of Freedom) and former secretary of state Colin L. Powell (who remains the Democrats' ideal Republican). Tenet's attacks focus instead on the walking dead, politically speaking: the glowering and unpopular Cheney; the hapless Rice; the band of irretrievably discredited bumblers who used to run the Pentagon, Donald H. Rumsfeld, Paul D. Wolfowitz and Douglas J. Feith; their neoconservative acolytes such as Richard Perle; and the die-hard geopolitical fantasists at the Weekly Standard and National Review.

They're all culpable, of course. But Tenet's attempts to shift the blame won't wash. At day's end, his exercise in finger-pointing is designed to disguise the central, tragic fact of his book. Tenet in effect is saying that he knew all too well why the United States should not invade Iraq, that he told his political masters and that he was ignored. But above all, he's saying that he lacked the moral courage to resign and speak out publicly to try to stop our country from striding into what he knew would be an abyss.

Know thyself is good advice for Mr. Tenet, who is betting that by playing to the national and international disgust with the Bush administration and disguising his own culpability he can make us forget his role in this self-made disaster.

Don't bet on it.