In a truly surreal event, CIA Director George Tenet told the Senate Armed Service Committee that intelligence agencies may have made misjudgments in their prewar assessments of Iraq.
May have?
But that was only the beginning. He also, the Times says, "insisted again ... that it was too soon to draw firm conclusions about the extent to which intelligence agencies erred," apparently unable to find a word that describes a concept beyond "totally."
He also claimed with a straight face that the White House did not misrepresent facts to justify the Iraq war even though he also claimed that
he had privately intervened on several occasions to correct what he regarded as public misstatements on intelligence by Vice President Dick Cheney and others and that he would do so again.(That from Daily News Online.)
Meanwhile, the International Herald Tribune notes that Tenet acknowledged that analysis on whether Iraq had sought African uranium was "wildly inconsistent." He also admitted not knowing until last week that Douglas Feith, head of the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans, which cherry-picked intelligence to justify the war, had given briefings to the NSC and the Vice-president's office. Despite that, he still insisted that his voice was the chief one on intelligence.
He wrapped up what in retrospect can be recognized as a brilliant piece of performance art by refusing to speculate on the risks of civil war in Iraq
but warned that former Saddam Hussein loyalists and foreign terrorists "continue to pose a serious threat," as illustrated by the devastating bombings last week in Baghdad and Karbala.Exactly why loyalists of the secular "infidel" Saddam Hussein would want to set up an Islamic state was left for the audience to determine.
"They hope for a Taliban-like enclave in Iraq's Sunni heartland that would be a jihadist safe haven," he said, with the ultimate goal of creating "an Islamic state."
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