Former Undersecretary of Defense Douglas Feith had a review of George Tenet’s just released At the Center of the Storm in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal. The piece is now publicly available at Feith’s personal website, dougfeith.com. Feith says that “the problem with George Tenet is that he doesn’t seem to care to get his facts straight. He is not meticulous. He is willing to make up stories that suit his purposes and to suppress information that does not.” With regard to Tenet’s invented account of running into Richard Perle at the White House on the morning of September 12, 2001–which was first reported at THE DAILY STANDARD–Feith says that “the date, the physical descriptions, the quotation marks are all, in the words of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Mikado,” ‘merely corroborative detail, intended to give artistic verisimilitude to an otherwise bald and unconvincing narrative.'” In addition to the inaccuracies of Tenet’s account, Feith notes several omissions, the significance of which he explains thusly:
I stress these omissions because Mr. Tenet is doing in his book just what my office had criticized the CIA for doing in its prewar analysis: omitting information that contradicts preconceived arguments. It’s a form of cherry-picking, a charge that Mr. Tenet throws at others on several occasions.
Eventually, in a have-it-both-ways concession, Mr. Tenet explains that there actually was a “solid basis” for “concern” about the relationship between Iraq and al Qaeda with respect to “safe haven, contacts and training.” He winds up confirming the essence of what the CIA’s critics had said — that there was worrisome information about Iraq’s ties to al Qaeda that deserved to be presented to policy makers. But he never admits that those critics were correct. He doesn’t even acknowledge that they acted in good faith.
Ultimately Feith accuses Tenet of writing a self-serving account of the run up to the Iraq war, in which Tenet himself was a major player, and to which he apparently had few objections at the time:
Mr. Tenet’s point here builds on the book’s much-publicized statements that the author never heard the president and his national-security team debate “the imminence of the Iraqi threat,” whether or not it was “wise to go to war” or when the war should start. He paints a distorted picture here.
But even if it were true that he never heard any such debate and was seriously dissatisfied with the dialogue in the White House Situation Room, he had hundreds of opportunities to improve the discussion by asking questions or making comments. I sat with him in many of the meetings, and no one prevented him from talking. It is noteworthy that Mr. Tenet met with the president for an intelligence briefing six days every week for years. Why didn’t he speak up if he thought that the president was dangerously wrong or inadequately informed?
One of Mr. Tenet’s main arguments is that he was somehow disconnected from the decision to go to war. Under the circumstances, it seems odd that he would call his book “At the Center of the Storm.” He should have called it “At the Periphery of the Storm” or maybe: “Was That a Storm That Just Went By?”
This last criticism–that Tenet didn’t speak up when it might have mattered, and that doing so now seems disingenuous and self-serving–has been echoed by commentators across the political spectrum. It might seem odd that both Arianna Huffington and Doug Feith were attacking George Tenet this week for, in Huffington’s words, “portraying himself as a poor, hapless victim,” but no one seems to find Tenet’s version of events very credible, except Tenet.
