Reply #33: Oh yeah, for anyone informed on the subject he was terrible and self serving. [View All]

[Garbo 2004]

Tenet was still pushing the lie about Iraq: we believed but were mistaken. The Iraq NIE Key Judgments were a consensus of the CIA/intel community. (Of course the decision to attack Iraq was made before there was an NIE but Tenet made it sound like the decision was based on the NIE. As we know the NIE was only prepared at the request of Congress while the IWR was pending.) And Tenet got quite huffy at being questioned about waterboarding etc and repeatedly stated "We do not torture."

Oh, and although Tenet met daily with Bush during 2001 and the summer of "chatter," he claimed he never told Bush of his concerns and the need to urgently do something regarding the Al Qaeda threat and warnings of attacks against the US. It wasn't his job to tell the Pres about "action items." He told Rice in July 2001 and it was her fault the message of urgency didn't get transmitted to the President.

Somehow, I put more faith in Richard Clarke's and others' version of that July 2001 meeting with Rice, Tenet and others to discuss the chatter and threats against the US. Tenet was not inclined to think the threat was domestic but at US interests/targets overseas. And when Rice turned the conversation to the upcoming conference in Italy where Bush would be present, Tenet followed. That was when they made sure they had anti-aircraft batteries out of a concern that terraists would crash an airplane into the conference. ("No one could have imagined" Rice said later that terraists would crash airplanes into buildings, but they sure did imagine that in July.)

Given the slanted self-serving presentation he gave in his interview, in my mind at least he won't have that much cred when it comes to his version of other events. I'd prefer other, less tainted sources.