http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/05/10/AR2007051001808.htmlHow the CIA Failed America
By Richard N. Perle
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Tenet insists on equating two statements that are not at all the same: that Iraq was responsible for Sept. 11 -- which I never said -- and that removing Saddam Hussein before he could share chemical, biological or nuclear weapons with terrorists had become an urgent matter, which I did say. He continues to assert falsely that the president's decision to remove Hussein was encouraged by lies about Iraq's responsibility for the Sept. 11 attacks.
Understandably anxious to counter the myth that we went into Iraq on the basis of his agency's faulty intelligence, Tenet seeks to substitute another myth: that the decision to remove Saddam Hussein resulted from the nefarious influence of the vice president and a cabal of neoconservative intellectuals. To advance that idea, a theme of his book, he has attributed to me, and to others, statements that were never made.
Careful readers will see at once that what Tenet calls "corroboration" is nothing of the sort. But Tenet is not a careful reader -- a serious deficiency in a CIA director and a catastrophe for an intelligence organization. Indeed, sloppy analysis and imprecision with evidence got Tenet and the rest of us stuck in a credibility gap that continues to damage our foreign policy.
For years the American intelligence establishment has failed to show meticulous regard for the facts that are essential to its mission. The CIA's assessment that Hussein possessed chemical and biological weapons was only the most recent damaging example. The president, the vice president, Congress and others relied on intelligence produced by Tenet's CIA -- and repeated CIA findings that never should have been presented as fact.
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