http://www.suntimes.com/output/brown...s-brown14.html

Blame Tenet? He's just trying to please his boss

July 14, 2003

BY MARK BROWN SUN-TIMES COLUMNIST

You almost wonder if you should feel sorry for CIA Director George Tenet,
who is taking the blame for President Bush's little pre-war fib to the
American people about Iraq trying to buy uranium from Africa, theoretically
for use in nuclear weapons.

After all, with all the hooey the Bush administration was spreading around
in those days, how was Tenet supposed to know that this was the one
questionable assertion where somebody would draw the line?

From what we read, this one wasn't even Tenet's fib. He is being blamed
because he didn't red flag it after somebody else wrote it into the
president's State of the Union address, even though he'd blocked its use in
another speech three months earlier.

Instead of demanding that the statement be pulled from the State of the
Union message, though, the CIA suggested some rewording.

What Bush ended up saying in his address was that "the British government
has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of
uranium from Africa."

Attributing the information to the British helped get around the fact that
our own intelligence had already concluded we had no sound basis for making
such a claim ourselves--our experts even going so far as to openly dispute
its veracity.

Tenet, a holdover from the Clinton administration, may have thought he was
being the good team player in approving an accusation that, in retrospect,
was so artfully weasel-worded that it could have been written by Clinton
himself.

It's a slippery slope for a newspaper columnist sitting back here in the
Midwest to pretend to be an expert on such matters when he has no sources
other than the same published materials available to you. So I'm no expert,
just a concerned citizen trying to make sense of what happens in Washington
through the experience of observing other dysfunctional systems.

From that viewpoint, it certainly seems possible to me that Tenet was just
another guy trying to please his bosses, as he did again Friday by stepping
up and taking responsibility.

The decision to go to war already had been made. The president and his more
hawkish advisers were determined to find ways to sell it to the public.
Sometimes in a situation like that, a bureaucrat knows better than to step
in front of the train, although you hope for more from a director of central
intelligence.

Last week's act of contrition did not exactly require Tenet to fall on his
sword. The president made clear over the weekend that the CIA boss still has
his complete confidence--and his job. Bush said he considers the matter
closed.

I'll bet he does.

While the British have been beating themselves bloody for weeks in
questioning the assumptions that led up to the war, Americans and their
elected leaders have been happy to sit back and bask in the glow of the big
"victory."

The war that was sold on the basis of Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass
destruction hasn't produced any more evidence of them than did Hans Blix and
the merry band of United Nations weapons inspectors that we treated as a
national joke.

A key part of the president's sales job on the weapons of mass destruction
was to convince us that Saddam Hussein was trying to reconstitute Iraq's
nuclear weapons program, a particularly frightening threat when coupled with
the assertion that his government was linked to the terrorist threat of
al-Qaida.

Four months after the start of the war, however, we have yet to see any
credible evidence in support of either claim.

Was this allegation about the attempted uranium purchase the piece of
information that tilted American public opinion in favor of the war?

No. Obviously not. I'll bet most people don't even remember that Bush said
it. My only recollection was that I found it noteworthy at the time that he
was attributing information to the British.

They might remember the president's accusations about Iraq's attempts to buy
high-strength aluminum tubes for use in enriching uranium for nuclear
weapons, another piece of intelligence now considered to be dubious.

Or those Scud missiles Iraq had? Never found any.

Strangely enough, the British, who have fessed up to a lot of the baloney
that Tony Blair's government was feeding his people before the war, still
say that the attempted uranium purchase is true.

And after leaving Tenet hung out to dry last week, the Bush administration
still couldn't bring itself to admit that the president had misled us, even
unintentionally.

"What we have said is it should not have risen to the level of a
presidential speech," Bush press secretary Ari Fleischer said. "People
cannot conclude that the information was necessarily false."

I guess that means that unless we can prove that it's false, it still might
be true, even though the people we pay to assess these matters don't believe
it is.

In dismissing the importance of the uranium flap, Condoleezza Rice, the
president's national security adviser, told CBS' "Face the Nation": "The
president took the nation to war to depose a bloody tyrant who had defied
the world for 12 years, who was building a weapons of mass destruction
program and had weapons of mass destruction."

I'm sure someday they'll produce some proof of the latter. But who's
necessarily going to believe it?



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"If this were a dictatorship, it'd be a heck of a lot easier, just so
long as I'm the dictator." - GW Bush 12/18/2000.

"To announce that there must be no criticism of the president, or that
we are to stand by the president right or wrong, is not only unpatriotic
and servile, but is morally treasonable to the American public."
---Theodore Roosevelt

"Feels Good!"
---George W. Bush on the Brink of Declaring War on Iraq.