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<DIV><A
href="http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-tenet27apr27,0,3341545.story?track=ntothtml">http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-tenet27apr27,0,3341545.story?track=ntothtml</A><BR>
<DIV class=body><I>From the Los Angeles Times</I></DIV>
<H1>Tenet says he's a scapegoat on Iraq 'slam-dunk'</H1>
<DIV class=storysubhead>The former CIA director lashes out at the White
House.</DIV>By Greg Miller<BR>Times Staff Writer<BR><BR>April 27,
2007<BR><BR>WASHINGTON — Ending two years of silence on his role in the Iraq
war, former CIA Director George J. Tenet is using a new book and a barrage of
upcoming television appearances to accuse the White House of making him a
scapegoat and of ignoring early CIA warnings that Iraq was sinking into
chaos.<BR><BR>In a taped interview scheduled to air Sunday on CBS, Tenet said
President Bush had made up his mind to invade Iraq long before the CIA director
made his infamous Oval Office remark that it was a "slam-dunk" case that Saddam
Hussein's government had banned weapons.<BR><BR>Tenet was even more forceful in
his criticism of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza
Rice, saying that the two had destroyed his reputation by repeatedly using the
"slam-dunk" line to pin blame on him for the decision to go to war.<BR><BR>"It's
the most despicable thing that ever happened to me," Tenet said in the "60
Minutes" interview, according to an excerpt CBS released Thursday.
<BR><BR>Speaking about the December 2002 meeting in which he sought to assure
President Bush that the evidence against Iraq was solid, Tenet said: "I'll never
believe that what happened that day informed the president's view or belief of
the legitimacy or the timing of this war. Never." <BR><BR>Tenet's comments
represent a new and potentially politically damaging source of fire in the
ongoing battle among Bush administration officials over blame for the Iraq war.
Tenet's entry is remarkable because he previously had been seen even by many of
his supporters as excessively loyal to the Bush White House, which awarded him
the Presidential Medal of Freedom when he left the CIA in 2004.<BR><BR>Tenet's
book, "At the Center of the Storm," is to be released Monday. <BR><BR>The book's
publisher, HarperCollins, has not issued advance copies. <BR><BR>But colleagues
of Tenet and former CIA officials who have read all or portions of the 576-page
book said it offers a detailed account of the CIA's role — as well as the
agency's increasingly dysfunctional relationship with the White House — through
a tumultuous period including the Sept. 11 attacks and the aftermath of the Iraq
invasion.<BR><BR>Former officials said the book makes a compelling case that
Cheney and other administration hawks pressured the CIA to find nonexistent
links between Iraq and the Al Qaeda terrorist network, and often were hostile to
post-invasion assessments that portrayed conditions in Iraq as
deteriorating.<BR><BR>"The administration is not going to be happy," said Mark
Lowenthal, a former senior aide to Tenet at the CIA who said he reviewed
portions of the book. "But the administration is not happy with George anyway.
This administration and the intelligence community became estranged in 2004 to
the point where the administration was convinced the CIA was actively working to
elect John Kerry." <BR><BR>A spokesman for the White House National Security
Council said administration officials had not seen the book or Tenet's
interview, but he defended the decision to invade Iraq. <BR><BR>"The president
made the decision to remove Saddam Hussein for a number of reasons, mainly the
National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq and Saddam's own actions," the spokesman,
Gordon Johndroe, said. <BR><BR>Lowenthal declined to discuss details of the
book, saying he had promised to keep its contents under wraps until its release.
Other officials discussed aspects of the book on the condition that they not be
identified because they were not authorized to disclose its
contents.<BR><BR>Cheney has continued to suggest there was an IraqAl Qaeda
connection in interviews and speeches, despite congressional findings and other
investigations that have concluded that Hussein and Al Qaeda did not collaborate
and were wary of each other. <BR><BR>"George is going to talk not so much about
Cheney the person but about what Cheney's actions caused," a former CIA official
said. "We spent thousands of man-hours trying to prove this case." <BR><BR>As it
became clear after the invasion that Iraq did not have weapons of mass
destruction or close ties to Al Qaeda, Tenet initially defended the Bush
administration, saying the CIA was not pressured into reaching conclusions
before the war. But a former senior CIA colleague of Tenet said there was a
difference in how the White House approached the two issues.<BR><BR>"We've
always drawn a distinction between the way the administration dealt with us on
WMD and the way the administration dealt with us on the issue of Saddam's
potential or possible links to 9/11," said the former colleague. "On WMD, they
asked a lot of questions and they pushed the evidence as far as they could…. On
the other issue, we developed the belief early on there was not a close
connection between Saddam and Al Qaeda that could be called operational. It's
not really much of a secret that the administration kept looking for one."
<BR><BR>Two former CIA officials said the part of the book with the most new
information focuses on post-invasion warnings. The book "plowed some new ground
as far as agency views and comments on the situation on the ground in Iraq," one
official said.<BR><BR>In particular, the readers said, the book describes
warnings from the CIA station in Baghdad that were greeted with dismay and
mounting suspicion within the White House, including a November 2003 assessment
that described the situation as an insurgency. <BR><BR>After that assessment was
leaked to the press, Bush summoned Tenet and other CIA officials to the White
House and warned that he didn't want anyone in his administration to use the
term "insurgency," according to the officials.<BR><BR>"There's a lot of stuff in
the book that paints a picture of an administration wrapped in its own beliefs,
not being able to handle information that was contrary to those beliefs," said
the former official who commented about Tenet's view of Cheney. <BR><BR>The
official said the book is also critical of Rice. <BR><BR>Tenet "has a strong
belief that Condoleezza Rice has been a failure as a national security advisor,
and that's one of the themes," the official said.<BR><BR>Tenet, who served as
CIA director for seven years, engages in some hairsplitting over his role in
certain controversies. He acknowledges having used the term "slam-dunk," for
example, but in his interview with "60 Minutes" he insisted he had not meant
that the evidence was unequivocal that Iraq possessed banned weapons — only that
he had believed the government could make a compelling case to the
public.<BR><BR>Former officials said the book also examines the "16 words"
controversy surrounding the CIA's efforts to warn the White House against
including in Bush's 2003 State of the Union address the allegation that Iraq had
sought uranium from Africa.</DIV></BODY></HTML>