Feith on Tenet

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.