Thursday, February 05, 2004

I'm baaack--and Tenet's in a groove.

Okay, after weeks (seems like years) of hassling about a switchover to cable hookup from DSL, I'm finally in business bigtime. My posts will accordingly be potent, incisive and, most tellingly, constant. Starting with my observations about Tenet's speech today at Georgetown (one of my alma maters, BTW).
This guy's a stump-speaker, no doubt. Actually, a car salesman, presenting a tick-list of items with flair and verve. His bottom line (a phrase he used repeatedly): The pre-war assessment ("Estimate") by his minions was right on, or close enough, including his concession that there was no evidence of an "imminent threat" to the US from any of this.
It will take some time to sort through his assertions, but for me the bottom line is this. It wasn't the fault of the intelligence community that we ended up with egg on our face and blood on our hands. It's absolutely clear that the fault lies with Bush/Cheney, that they'd made up their minds to take over Iraq and weren't going to be swayed by the equivocations and uncertainties of the intelligence professionals' report.
Thus, the task of any new inquiry into the "intelligence failure" should include the misuse of intelligence by the politicians, not just lapses in the gathering and presentation of data by the spooks.
After all, it was Bush who launched this war. It's his desk where the buck stops.

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