Michael Gawenda, Washington
April 28, 2007
GEORGE Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, has lashed out against the Bush Administration in a new book, accusing it of pushing the country to war in Iraq without conducting a serious debate about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat.
The former CIA director labelled the Bush Administration's use of his now notorious "slam dunk" description of the evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction as despicable and dishonourable.
With his book At the Center of the Storm on his years as CIA director from July 1997 until July 2004 to be released on Monday, Mr Tenet, in excerpts released by CBS of an interview to screened on Sunday night, does not deny that he used the term.
But he says Administration officials, particularly Vice-President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, have used it to pin responsibility for President George Bush's decision to invade Iraq on him. In the process, he says they have distorted what really happened.
Mr Tenet says that the CIA did believe that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but that when he used the "slam dunk" phrase in a meeting with Mr Bush and senior officials, he was referring to the CIA's ability to make a case for the existence of WMD in Iraq.
The book is the first detailed account by a member of the President's inner circle of the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the decision to invade Iraq and the failure to find the weapons that were a key justification for the war.
The "slam dunk" comment, which Mr Tenet used in the December 21, 2002, meeting, was leaked to Washington Post investigative reporter Bob Woodward after the invasion when the Administration was under pressure as it became increasingly clear that Iraq's WMD, the key reason for the war, were non-existent.
"It's the most despicable thing that happened to me," he says. "You don't do this. You don't throw somebody overboard just because it's a deflection. Is that honourable?"
Mr Tenet says it is nonsense to suggest that his comment was decisive in the decision to go to war.
He says he is particularly furious with Mr Cheney and Dr Rice who continue to misuse the "slam dunk" comment to shift blame for the war onto the CIA and onto him in particular.
"And the hardest part of all this has been just listening to this for almost three years, listening to the Vice-President … say, 'Well, George Tenet said slam dunk', as if he needed me to say slam dunk to go to war with Iraq," he says.
"I was a talking point. 'Look at the idiot who told us and we decided to go to war,' they were saying. Well, let's not be so disingenuous."
There have been no leaks of other revelations that might be in Mr Tenet's book, but it is believed he is scathing of Mr Cheney and his staff and their intelligence-gathering operations in the lead-up to the war, and of Dr Rice, whom he says he warned of the possibility of an al-Qaeda attack in the US months before September 11.
In the 60 Minutes interview, Mr Tenet defends the CIA's use of "enhanced" interrogation techniques in the "high value detainee program" against what he describes as senior al-Qaeda operatives. But he insists that these techniques did not amount to torture.
"I know that this program has saved lives," he says. "I know we've disrupted plots. I know that this program alone is worth more than the FBI, the CIA and the National Security Agency put together have been able to tell us."
According to Mr Tenet, the alleged 9/11 mastermind, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, initially told CIA interrogators, "I will talk to you guys when you take me to New York and I can see my lawyer."
Instead, he was was transferred to an undisclosed location where he faced "enhanced" interrogation techniques, including water boarding.
According to Mr Tenant, he gave up vital information about terrorist threats. Mohammed, now held at Guantanamo, has claimed he was tortured by CIA interrogators.
Mr Tenet said the interrogation techniques were necessary because "these are people who will never, ever tell you a thing" but they are people who "know who's responsible for the next terrorist attack and who wouldn't blink an eyelash about killing you, your family, me and my family and everybody in town".
The book is sure to cause the Administration heartburn, though it is almost certain that there will be no official response to any allegations he makes against officials.
Instead, White House officials are likely to point to the fact that Mr Tenet, in December 2004, accepted the Medal of Honor from Mr Bush, a move that was widely criticised and that was widely regarded as a reward for him copping the blame for the faulty intelligence on Iraq's weapons threat.
With NEW YORK TIMES
