No, he’s not. The CIA’s assessment of the WMD issue was more evenhanded than the one the administration presented. (For example, in the famous ‘sixteen words’ flap.) I’m not sure who’s responsible for Abu Ghraib, but I doubt it’s Tenet. And the CIA never liked Chalabi- the Pentagon did. He’s involved as far as he’s in the government, but if we have to pick scapegoats for these things, I don’t think Tenet would be the guy. You could probably blame him for September 11th more than any of those things, but there’s no way he’s quitting or being kicked out for that at this date.
This doesn’t really change my point. More evenhanded or not, they still (to date, at least) turned out to be wrong. And they had been the selling point of a very serious decision, a war, about which many people have doubts. The CIA was present in Abou Ghraib. Personnally, I do think that Tenet was at least roughly aware of what was going on there, but anyway, it doesn’t matter since he was heading the CIA hence should have known.
Indeed it seems there’s a difference in the way responsability is envisionned here and in the USA. “Others were more wrong” or “he wasn’t personnally implicated in what his subordinates did” don’t really fly as a defence for high profile political positions over here. Though political convenience is generally the most important factor in “resignations” : you became a political burden for the prime minister/president, so you “resign”.
Someone pointed out that this difference is logical given that the US don’t use a parliamentary system, but it doesn’t seem to me to be a real explanation. These people being for the most part picked up by the president who is the only one to has a real political legitimacy, it should ensue that he could fire them at will and it could at the contrary result in the opposite situation : them being asked to “resign” more often than in parliamentary systems where they generally have a significant political weight and some popular legitimacy, instead of being mere “super civil servants”.
They were the selling point to the public. The decision-makers had made up their minds long before. Knowing that - and noting the way they twisted information that even some of us on the StraightDope knew was weak - I can’t see my way to blaming Tenet for it.
I don’t think there’s a difference between Europe and America here. People do sometimes get blamed for the shortcomings of the people under them, even if the old ‘buck stops here’ thing is pretty dead. I just don’t think Tenet is to blame for the decisions and spins people made with the information his agency provided. The information was wrong, but he’s not the one who decided what to do with it (or the one who gathered it). The Iraq invasion seems to have been based largely on information from Chalabi’s people. The CIA didn’t trust them to begin with, so why should Tenet hang because members of the Bush administration did? That failure is on Rumsfeld and the Pentagon from my perspective.
I think the point people are trying to make here is that it’s ludicrous to think that Tenet led Bush into the war, when Bush was obviously the instigator of the policy, and in many cases went further than what the CIA was telling him, and even went so far as to ignore Tenet’s counsel on the unreliability of the yellowcake uranium information. Many people suspect, and I think rightfully so, that Bush pressured the CIA to come up with something - anything, to justify an invasion that he was already set on going though with. That’s why the idea that Tenet had to convince Bush that it was a “slam dunk” raises a lot of eyebrows, because that characterization is totally at odds with the picture of the Bush administration painted by Richard Clarke and others, where Bush was dead-set on Iraq no matter what.
Nah - it looks more like the order to rough-up Iraqi prisoners came straight down from Rumsfeld. I haven’t heard any indication that Tenet had anything to do with it.
Well as we’ve seen several times now, U.S. politicians will usually ‘take one for the team’ as long as they still have their jobs, but once they’ve decided to resign, the gloves tend to come off. It will be interesting to see if Tenet does any talking once he’s out of his job. If Bush is going to try to blame everything on Tenet, I’m just not buying it.
Naw, I bet he keeps quiet, and not only because he’s spent his career in a culture of secrecy. Tenet has plenty of major blunders on his record that he can’t blame on others, and that will prevent him from any kind of self-praising or even self-excusing book or TV tour.
The “slam dunk” line is troubling, but Clarke’s account has not been contradicted in any significant fact on other matters - and he was, in fact, there. I’d attribute it to perhaps the same motives Powell had for his UN speech - a willingness to believe the story is true in its fundamentals even if the evidence is shaky, combined with a desire to be part of the team making the war decisions once the big decision was already made, perhaps a belief that it would turn out for the best and therefore that the reasons for starting it would be overlooked. They may never admit it, though, or explain what they did think.
Hey, mine too! It’s like that “personal reasons” stuff triggered mass monkey butt flyings!
I just thought y’all may be interested in this:
Forgive me for being suspect of the CIA.
I’m sorry, your point is…?