From the
Washington Post.
It looks like they're preparing to crucify Tenet.
The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence is preparing a blistering report on prewar intelligence on Iraq that is critical of CIA Director George J. Tenet and other intelligence officials for overstating the weapons and terrorism case against Saddam Hussein, according to congressional officials.
The committee staff was surprised by the amount of circumstantial evidence and single-source or disputed information used to write key intelligence documents -- in particular the October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate -- summarizing Iraq's capabilities and intentions, according to Republican and Democratic sources. Staff members interviewed more than 100 people who collected and analyzed the intelligence used to back up statements about Iraq's chemical, biological and nuclear weapons capabilities, and its possible links to terrorist groups.
Like a similar but less exhaustive inquiry being completed by the House intelligence committee, the Senate report shifts attention toward the intelligence community and away from White House officials, who have been criticized for exaggerating the Iraqi threat. At stake as the presidential political season approaches, said committee sources and intelligence figures, is who gets blamed for misleading the American public if weapons of mass destruction are never found in Iraq -- the president or his intelligence chief.
I always say that if one side tells you one thing and another side tells you another, the truth lies somewhere in the middle.
It's fair enough to criticize Tenent and the Intelligence community for failing to properly assess the threat, or lack thereof. However, we should not automatically exonnerate the White House because fault has been found with the CIA.
There are two camps, split largely down party/idological lines. The Republicans/conservatives want to blame the CIA and the Democrats/liberals want to blame the White House. The former says that the intelligence was faulty and that therefore the White House should be excused for having made the push for war. The latter says that the White House pushed for war and therefore the intelligence was faulty.
What we should be looking at, instead of pointing fingers and trying to find a scapegoat, is where the lines of communication broke down...or whether those lines were ever up to begin with. If the CIA's ability to gather accurate intelligence has been compromised, then we need to take a long, hard look at that agency and see where corrections need to be made. If the White House hyped the intelligence, making it fit its war goals, or, even if it found that intelligence didn't fit its war goals and pushed it forward as if it did, then we need to take a long, hard look at how trustworthy our nation's Executive branch has become.
But regardless, we need to figure out why the White House and the CIA aren't playing well together, and correct the disconnect, so something like this doesn't happen again. It is unlikely that the blame lies soley with the White House or soley with the CIA, and, while the implications of a compromised CIA or a hype-crazy White House are serious, they are not as serious, in the long run, as a communication breakdown between the brain (White House) and the senses (CIA) of our government.