What happened, it seems to me, was that prior to the invasion, Tenet was acting the part of a politician and policy maker, enabling a dumb project with bogus justifications. He was a participant in a fraud. Everybody was on board. Why would any CIA Director be at an Oval Office brainstorming session, trying to make the case for a preemptive war, and proclaim that the effort should be a “slam dunk”? Under any context, this remark is out of context for a CIA director. Afterward, to hear him tell it, he took on the traditional CIA Director’s role as an impartial intelligence gatherer, and reverted to the facts. Quite a change. Did he expect his former co-conspirators to respect the truth and reality post invasion, when they had been consumed with mendacity pre invasion? The same characters were in place and running the show.
The lead-in to an eye-opening article about the war in Iraq. I remember thinking when Woodward's last book came out that finding Kissinger's fingerprints on the war was the worst news for this country in the 6 1/2 years of Bush's presidency. Didn't work out so well for Iraq either.
