[Mb-civic] Guardian Unlimited: Ex-CIA chief eats humble pie

[harry.sifton at sympatico.ca]

hs spotted this on the Guardian Unlimited site and thought you should see it.

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Ex-CIA chief eats humble pie
Suzanne Goldenberg in Washington
Friday April 29 2005
The Guardian


A chastened former CIA director, George Tenet, says he regrets telling the White House that it was a "slam dunk" that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, an assertion that provided the Bush administration with its prime justification for the war.


Seven months after the weapons inspectors of the Iraq Survey Group concluded that Saddam Hussein did not have a lethal weapons cache on the eve of the invasion, Mr Tenet admitted: "Those were the two dumbest words I ever said."


Mr Tenet stepped down as CIA chief in July last year, days 
 before a report from the Senate savaged his seven years in office. Under his stewardship, the report said, the CIA was blinkered by "group think" about Saddam's arms programme, and suffered from a broken corporate culture and poor management.


Subsequent reports attributed the CIA's intelligence failures to an over-eagerness to please its political masters.


Mr Tenet delivered his now notorious assessment of Iraq's weapons capabilities to President George Bush in December 2002, and the confidence of his "slam dunk" assertion was crucial to Washington's justification of its decision to invade.
 

But Mr Tenet has undergone a change of heart. He told an audience at Kutztown University in Pennsylvania on Wednesday that the CIA had failed to deliver an accurate assessment of Saddam's weapons capabilities.


"We didn't get the job done, and we understood it before any commission report," Mr Tenet said, blaming budget cuts and congressional restrictions for the CIA's failure. "The atrophy was tremendous," he said. "We were nearly bankrupt."


But he denied that the agency had skewed its assessment on Iraq "for political reasons or a craven desire to lead the country to war".

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