Ex-head of CIA accuses Bush over rush to war

By Rupert Cornwell in Washington
The Independent

"The row over how President Bush went to war in Iraq has re-erupted with a charge by George Tenet, the former director of the CIA, that a coterie of top officials pushed America into the conflict with no real debate as to whether Saddam Hussein actually posed an imminent threat to the US.

Mr Tenet's angry indictment of his colleagues is the first of its kind from a top ranking member of Mr Bush's once-vaunted national security team, and was instantly rebutted by the White House......

Thus it has been with Mr Tenet, in his 549-page At the Center of the Storm, due to be published on Monday, but whose juiciest segments appeared in the US press yesterday. This time, however, the consequences could resonate far more widely, given the unfolding disaster Iraq has become and that Mr Tenet is confirming from the inside what has long been suspected by most outsiders.

"There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat," he writes, nor "a significant discussion" about whether Saddam might have been kept in check without an invasion.

This last point will only strengthen criticism that Mr Bush did not give diplomacy a chance, nor the UN weapons inspectors enough time, to establish what after the invasion quickly became evident: that Iraq did not possess WMD.

Instead, Mr Tenet paints a picture of a small group, centred on Vice-President Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon, who had made up their minds that Saddam Hussein's regime must be removed within weeks of the September 2001 terrorist attacks. Its members include Mr Rumsfeld's former deputy Paul Wolfowitz - now fighting to keep his job as World Bank president - and Douglas Feith, the Pentagon's top policy planner.


Mr Tenet is also plainly furious at how Condoleezza Rice, then Mr Bush's national security adviser, made him designated scapegoat for the debacle of the "16 words" that appeared in the President's January 2003 State of the Union, claiming that Saddam had sought to buy uranium in Niger. The row made inevitable his resignation in mid-2004.

But nothing enrages Mr Tenet more than the infamous "slam dunk" episode, at a White House meeting in December 2002, three months before the invasion. In his 2004 book, Plan of Attack, The Washington Post's Bob Woodward claimed that Mr Tenet had assured the President that the evidence that Saddam had WMD was a "slam dunk" - a sure thing, in basketball parlance. Mr Tenet now plainly believes the leak to Mr Woodward was another set-up to pin responsibility on the CIA. In his version, he uttered the two words with which he will forever be associated in reference to a strategy of improving public presentation of the evidence, not to the strength of the evidence itself. Since then both Mr Cheney and Ms Rice have publicly used his "slam dunk" statement to excuse their own pre-war belief Iraq had WMD....."