Bush's War Part1 (57 of 71)

Bush's War

In the end, some thought he had harmed his own reputation.
Well, I thought that this wasn't a man who was strong enough to stand up to the president of the United States and say, "Mr.President, you are about to make a very serious mistake." But one week later, Tenet surprised his critics by standing up to the White House.
The occasion was a presidential speech in Cincinnati.
The threat comes from Iraq.
It possesses and produces chemical and biological weapons.
It is seeking nuclear weapons.
Designed to be the equivalent of a declaration of war, the speech was supposed to include a passage about yellowcake.
Tenet lobbied for it to be removed.

George Tenet actually went out of his way to put some pressure on the National Security Council to have them take that out of the- out of the speech.
I would assume that Dick Cheney was furious that this was pulled out of the October speech because, again, this is the key to the "The smoking gun shouldn't be a mushroom cloud." That's what all of this was about.
And the emphasis on the Niger documents was about relevance to make the case to go to war.
But after this moment, Tenet seems to have backed away from the battle.
But that was the very last time George Tenet ever fought a battle to have something taken out of a speech at the White House.
Amidst a clamor to release the classified NIE, Tenet had passed out a sanitized version known as "the white paper." And one of the surprising things about it was it was of a very high production level- graphs, photographs in color.
It was an advocacy piece.
What does it say to you? Oh, it says to me that the decision had been made that we're going to go to war with Iraq, all of this other was just window dressing, and that the intelligence community was being used as almost a public relations operation to validate the war against Saddam Hussein.
Paul Pillar, a veteran high-ranking CIA analyst, was one of the primary authors of the white paper.
He now disavows it.
It was clearly requested and published for policy advocacy purposes.
This was not informing a decision.
What was the purpose of it? The purpose was to strengthen the case for going to war with the American public.
Is it proper for the intelligence community to publish papers with that purpose? I don't think so.
And I regret having had a role in that.