[Unwiseevove]

May 1, 2007

NYC

A Slam-Dunk of a Book Tour Comes to Town

By CLYDE HABERMAN

George J. Tenet, originally of Little Neck, Queens, returned to his hometown yesterday to peddle a book and, not coincidentally, himself.

Most human pursuits have their rituals. In New York, the country’s publishing capital, there are honored rituals for selling new books. They almost amount to sacraments.

One is the rollout interview. Few rites are more blessed than an appearance on the “Today” show. If “Today” goes hand in hand with an interview on “60 Minutes,” an author has as close to a ticket to heaven as he can hope for. That one-two combo — with, for added measure, a go-round with Larry King late last night — could make the prospect of success a slam-dunk.

Mr. Tenet understands slam-dunks.

He used to be the director of central intelligence, until he stepped down in 2004. He now has a book to market, “At the Center of the Storm,” published by HarperCollins. It is his version of how we ended up with some 3,000 Americans murdered on 9/11 and with more than 3,000 servicemen and women — plus many times that number of Iraqis — killed in a war of shrunken popularity.

For “Today,” Mr. Tenet went yesterday to the NBC studios in Rockefeller Center. The usual early-morning crowd had already gathered, a congregation of screamers praying for the cameras to catch them in full cry and with homemade signs held aloft: “It’s my birthday” and “Hey, Mrs. Steinberg.”

Some of the shriekers carried paraphernalia for a comic-book superhero. They had not turned out for retrospections of the national agony. They were waiting for the stars of a new Spider-Man film.

From 7:09 to 7:17, after teasers for later segments on dieting and on full frontal nudity in a “Simpsons” movie — a cartoon! — the nation’s former spymaster fielded questions. It was a low-key interview, done live by Tom Brokaw. Both men seemed as under-caffeinated as those at home trying to keep up while brushing their teeth or getting the kids off to school.

There was nothing like the coiled tension of Mr. Tenet’s taped interview with Scott Pelley of “60 Minutes,” broadcast on CBS the previous evening. In an introduction, Mr. Pelley described Mr. Tenet with words like “passionate,” “combative,” “apologetic” and “defiant.” After the show, some viewers might have tossed in “petulant” and “defensive.”

“People don’t understand us, you know,” Mr. Tenet said of intelligence gatherers. “They think we’re a bunch of faceless bureaucrats with no feelings, no families, no sense of what it’s like to be passionate about running these bastards down.”

“Hindsight is perfect,” he said at another point, after questions about pre-9/11 intelligence failings and his use of “slam-dunk” in connection to Saddam Hussein’s nonexistent stockpile of illicit weapons. “Walk a mile in my shoes.” “I wish I could reel the tape back.” “The only people that stand up and tell the truth are who? Intelligence officers.”

Another ritual of publishing requires that a controversial book be characterized as “tell-all” even if, as in this case, a more accurate description might be “tell-some.” As a fillip, there is, with Mr. Tenet, an unavoidable question of “tell when.”

He is the latest in a long line of government officials who built careers on the taxpayers’ nickel and then turned their résumés into multimillion-dollar book deals. All but lost is the fact that any information they possess belongs to the public; they were nothing more than temporary custodians.

A full-page newspaper advertisement for HarperCollins on the weekend said of Mr. Tenet that “the one man in a position to know what really happened has been silent.”

EXACTLY. He was silent even though his taxpayer-owned information might have influenced the elections of 2004 and 2006. Mr. Brokaw asked him about that silence.

“Well, Tom,” Mr. Tenet replied, “I chose to do my job in a way where you stay inside the system.” Until he had a book contract, that is.

Tell-all or not, his is unlikely to remain the last word. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice hinted as much on Sunday, telling CNN that she will get her turn “when I have a chance to write my book.”

Great. We can then go through the rituals all over again. They might include another sacrament of publishing that we almost forgot: the book party. For Mr. Tenet, or Ms. Rice, the menu need not be elaborate. A simple pastry would do. Like yellow cake.

E-mail: haberman@nytimes.com


Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company

[AlistDakisa]

A Loser's History

George Tenet's sniveling, self-justifying new book is a disgrace.

By Christopher Hitchens

Posted Monday, April 30, 2007, at 11:37 AM ET

It's difficult to see why George Tenet would be so incautious as to write his own self-justifying apologia, let alone give it the portentous title At the Center of the Storm. There is already a perfectly good pro-Tenet book written by a man who knows how to employ the overworked term storm. Bob Woodward's 2002 effort, Bush at War, was, in many of its aspects, almost dictated by George Tenet. How do we know this? Well, Tenet is described on the opening page as "a hefty, outgoing son of Greek immigrants," which means that he talked to Woodward on background. Further compliments are showered upon him. We discover that his main protector on Capitol Hill, Sen. David Boren, who represented Oklahoma until 1994, had implored President-elect Bush to retain this Clinton-era head of the CIA and if he had any doubts, to "ask your father":

When the younger Bush did, the former President George H.W. Bush said: "From what I hear, he's a good fellow," one of the highest accolades in the Bush family lexicon. Tenet … later led the effort to rename CIA headquarters for Bush, himself a former DCI.

No need to draw a very complex picture here: Tenet knows how the kiss-up and kiss-down game is played. And, for a rather mediocre man, he did well enough out of the arrangement while it lasted. Woodward was even willing to describe him as one who "had developed an understanding of the importance of human intelligence, HUMINT in spycraft." But let's not get ahead of ourselves. I only mean to say that it was a very favorably disposed chronicler who wrote this, in describing Tenet's reaction on the terrible morning of Sept. 11, 2001:

"This has bin Laden all over it," Tenet told Boren. "I've got to go." He also had another reaction, one that raised the real possibility that the CIA and the FBI had not done all that could have been done to prevent the terrorist attack. "I wonder," Tenet said, "if it has anything to do with this guy taking pilot training."

Notice the direct quotes that make it clear who is the author of this brilliant insight. And then pause for a second. The author is almost the only man who could have known of Zacarias Moussaoui and his co-conspirators—the very man who positively knew they were among us, in flight schools, and then decided to leave them alone. In his latest effusion, he writes: "I do know one thing in my gut. Al-Qaeda is here and waiting." Well, we all know that much by now. But Tenet is one of the few who knew it then, and not just in his "gut" but in his small brain, and who left us all under open skies. His ridiculous agency, supposedly committed to "HUMINT" under his leadership, could not even do what John Walker Lindh had done—namely, infiltrate the Taliban and the Bin Laden circle. It's for this reason that the CIA now has to rely on torturing the few suspects it can catch, a policy, incidentally, that Tenet's book warmly defends.

So, the only really interesting question is why the president did not fire this vain and useless person on the very first day of the war. Instead, he awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom! Tenet is now so self-pitying that he expects us to believe that he was "not at all sure that [he] really wanted to accept" this honor. But it seems that he allowed or persuaded himself to do so, given that the citation didn't mention Iraq. You could imagine that Tenet had never sat directly behind Colin Powell at the United Nations, beaming like an overfed cat, as the secretary of state went through his rather ill-starred presentation. And who cares whether his "slam dunk" vulgarity was misquoted or not? We have better evidence than that. Here is what Tenet told the relevant Senate committee in February 2002:

Iraq … has also had contacts with al-Qaida. Their ties may be limited by divergent ideologies, but the two sides' mutual antipathy toward the United States and the Saudi royal family suggests that tactical cooperation between them is possible, even though Saddam is well aware that such activity would carry serious consequences.

As even the notion of it certainly should have done. At around the same time, on another nontrivial matter, Tenet informed the Senate armed services committee that: "We believe that Saddam never abandoned his nuclear weapons program." It is a little bit late for him to pose as if Iraq was a threat concocted in some crepuscular corner of the vice president's office. And it's pathetic for him to say, even in the feeble way that he chooses to phrase it, that "there was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat." (Emphasis added.) There had been a very serious debate over the course of at least three preceding administrations, whether Tenet "knew" of it or not. (He was only an intelligence specialist, after all.) As for his bawling and sobbing claim that faced with crisis in Iraq, "the administration's message was: Don't blame us. George Tenet and the CIA got us into this mess," I can say, as one who has attended about a thousand postmortems on Iraq in Washington, that I have never, ever, not once heard a single partisan of the administration say anything of the kind. The White House may have thought that it could count on the CIA to present some sort of solidity in a crisis but, as Sept. 11 had already proved, more fool the White House.

In the post-Kuwait-war period, there was little political risk in doing what Tenet had always done and making the worst assumption about anything that Saddam Hussein might even be thinking about. (Who but an abject idiot would ever make a different assumption or grant the Baathists the smallest benefit of the least doubt?) But we forget so soon and so easily. The problem used to be the diametrically opposite one. The whole of our vaunted "intelligence" system completely refused to believe any of the warnings that Saddam Hussein was about to invade and occupy Kuwait in 1990. By the time the menace was taken seriously, the invasion itself was under way. This is why the work of Kenneth Pollack (this time titled The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq) was received with such gravity when it was published in 2002. Pollack had interpreted the signals correctly in 1990—and been ignored—and was arguing that another final round with Saddam was inevitable. His book did more to persuade policy-makers in Washington than anything ever said by Ahmad Chalabi. To revisit these arguments is to be reminded that no thinking person ever felt that the danger posed by a totalitarian and aggressive Iraq was a negligible one. And now comes Tenet, the man who got everything wrong and who ran the agency that couldn't think straight, to ask us to sympathize with his moanings about "Iraq—who, me?"

A highly irritating expression in Washington has it that "hindsight is always 20-20." Would that it were so. History is not a matter of hindsight and is not, in fact, always written by the victors. In this case, a bogus history is being offered by a real loser whose hindsight is cockeyed and who had no foresight at all.

[Arexytece]

As so many have said and written, if this guy was a true "patriot" and wanted to serve this country with honr and distinction, these little details would not be coming to loight in a book after the fact. He didn't do his job, he was silent when he should have spoken up, and he is a disgrace. It's getting tiresome reading useless thoughts from all these ex-offiicios about what should have been done on their own watch.

[Uojeyak]

Is Tenet the dimmest man in all of DC? His performance on Larry King last night could easily lead one to believe that.

With Tenet we see evidence that GWB (not such a bright bulb himself) fills the room with semi-morons so that the POTUS (as Lewis Black has pointed out) can honestly lay claim to being the smartest man in the room.

Hitchens nails this idiot ...

A Loser's History

George Tenet's sniveling, self-justifying new book is a disgrace.

... No need to draw a very complex picture here: Tenet knows how the kiss-up and kiss-down game is played. And, for a rather mediocre man, he did well enough out of the arrangement while it lasted.

... the only really interesting question is why the president did not fire this vain and useless person on the very first day of the war. Instead, he awarded him a Presidential Medal of Freedom! Tenet is now so self-pitying that he expects us to believe that he was "not at all sure that [he] really wanted to accept" this honor.

... it's pathetic for him to say, even in the feeble way that he chooses to phrase it, that "there was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat."

... In the post-Kuwait-war period, there was little political risk in doing what Tenet had always done and making the worst assumption about anything that Saddam Hussein might even be thinking about. (Who but an abject idiot would ever make a different assumption or grant the Baathists the smallest benefit of the least doubt?)

... now comes Tenet, the man who got everything wrong and who ran the agency that couldn't think straight, to ask us to sympathize with his moanings about "Iraq—who, me?"

A highly irritating expression in Washington has it that "hindsight is always 20-20." Would that it were so. History is not a matter of hindsight and is not, in fact, always written by the victors. In this case, a bogus history is being offered by a real loser whose hindsight is cockeyed and who had no foresight at all.

[gabbaman]

Rewriting History

By Charles Krauthammer
Friday, May 4, 2007

George Tenet has a very mixed legacy. On the one hand, he presided over the two biggest intelligence failures of this era -- Sept. 11 and the WMD debacle in Iraq. On the other hand, his CIA did devise and carry out brilliantly an astonishingly bold plan to overthrow the Taliban in Afghanistan. Tenet might have just left it at that, gone home with his Presidential Medal of Freedom and let history judge him.

Instead, he's decided to do some judging of his own. In his just-released book, and while hawking it on television, Tenet presents himself as a pathetic victim and scapegoat of an administration that was hellbent on going to war, slam dunk or not.

Tenet writes as if he assumes no one remembers anything. For example: "There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat."

Does he think no one remembers President Bush explicitly rejecting the imminence argument in his 2003 State of the Union address in front of just about the largest possible world audience? Said the president, " Some have said we must not act until the threat is imminent" -- and he was not one of them. That in a post-Sept. 11 world, we cannot wait for tyrants and terrorists to gentlemanly declare their intentions. Indeed, elsewhere in the book Tenet concedes that very point: "It was never a question of a known, imminent threat; it was about an unwillingness to risk surprise."

Tenet also makes what he thinks is the damning and sensational charge that the administration, led by Vice President Cheney, had been focusing on Iraq even before Sept. 11. In fact, he reports, Cheney asked for a CIA briefing on Iraq for the president even before they had been sworn in.

This is odd? This is news? For the entire decade following the 1990 invasion of Kuwait, Iraq was the single greatest threat in the region and therefore the most important focus of U.S. policy. U.N. resolutions, congressional debates and foreign policy arguments were seized with the Iraq question and its many post-Gulf War complications -- the weapons of mass destruction, the inspection regimes, the cease-fire violations, the no-fly zones, the progressive weakening of sanctions.

Iraq was such an obsession of the Clinton administration that Bill Clinton ultimately ordered an air and missile attack on its WMD installations that lasted four days. This was less than two years before Bush won the presidency. Is it odd that the administration following Clinton's should share its extreme concern about Iraq and its weapons?

Tenet is not the only one to assume a generalized amnesia about the recent past. One of the major myths (or, more accurately, conspiracy theories) about the Iraq war -- that it was foisted upon an unsuspecting country by a small band of neoconservatives -- also lives blissfully detached from history.

The decision to go to war was made by a war cabinet consisting of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld. No one in that room could even remotely be considered a neoconservative. Nor could the most important non-American supporter of the war to this day -- Tony Blair, father of new Labor.

The most powerful case for the war was made at the 2004 Republican convention by John McCain in a speech that was resolutely "realist." On the Democratic side, every presidential candidate running today who was in the Senate when the motion to authorize the use of force came up -- Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd-- voted yes.

Outside of government, the case for war was made not just by the neoconservative Weekly Standard but -- to select almost randomly -- the traditionally conservative National Review, the liberal New Republic and the center-right Economist. Of course, most neoconservatives supported the war, the case for which was also being made by journalists and scholars from every point on the political spectrum -- from the leftist Christopher Hitchens to the liberal Tom Friedman to the centrist Fareed Zakaria to the center-right Michael Kelly to the Tory Andrew Sullivan. And the most influential tome on behalf of war was written not by any conservative, let alone neoconservative, but by Kenneth Pollack, Clinton's top Near East official on the National Security Council. The title: "The Threatening Storm: The Case for Invading Iraq."

Everyone has the right to renounce past views. But not to make up that past. It is beyond brazen to think that one can get away with inventing not ancient history but what everyone saw and read with their own eyes just a few years ago. And yet sometimes brazenness works.

letters@charleskrauthammer.com