George Tenet on the staircase with the neocons

In his book and on TV, former CIA Director George Tenet remembers all the things he should've said before we invaded Iraq but didn't.

By Juan Cole
Salon.com

"Apr. 30, 2007 | The French call it "the spirit of the staircase" (l'esprit d'escalier), the clever reply to someone that comes to you on your way up to the bedroom after a cocktail party. In his new book, released Monday, former CIA Director George Tenet has delivered himself of hundreds of pages on the staircase, imagining what he should have said or could have said to Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and the other neoconservatives who marched the country to war in Iraq using the pretext of Sept. 11. In his April 29 interview with "60 Minutes" touting the book, Tenet came across as a spectacularly tragic Walter Mitty, daydreaming about how things would have been different if only he had spoken up, if he'd only been a James Bond-style spymaster instead of a timid, fawning bureaucrat. But of course, when it really mattered, at the critical juncture of his seven-year tenure as CIA chief, Tenet said nothing......

Is that really what Tenet should have been thinking to himself? Just, "What the hell is he talking about?" Perle was then the chairman of the civilian Defense Policy Board, which had great influence over Pentagon policy, and he was intimately linked to Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the No. 2 and 3 men at the Department of Defense. He was also close to Cheney and to the latter's chief of staff, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby. Perle had coauthored with Feith and others a 1996 white paper for Israeli politician Bibi Netanyahu and his right-wing Likud Party, advocating a war against Iraq. Perle believed that the Saddam Hussein regime posed a dire threat to Israel and that overthrowing it would enhance Israel's security. If Tenet had been as street savvy as he likes to pretend -- what with being a Greek from Queens and all -- he should have been thinking, "Aha! So that is how the neoconservatives are going to play this thing. How can I head them off at the pass?"......

Tenet reports having been deeply disturbed by the speech, which went substantially beyond what the CIA could certify as factual. But he does not appear to have weighed in at that time. Bush administration officials were allowed to invoke the phantasmagoric mushroom cloud again and again, and members of Congress have repeatedly said that the threat of Saddam's nukes persuaded them to vote for the war. Six months after Cheney's speech to the VFW, on the eve of the invasion itself, Tenet finally was able to intervene......Surely, however, it hardly mattered at that point, since Cheney's propaganda technique of linking Saddam to bin Laden had been intended to foment a war with Iraq and the war was on. It is rather pitiful that Tenet must now dredge up this minor victory, as he daydreams on the staircase about stopping the Iraq war in its tracks by shooting down Cheney's lies......

Tenet comes across as a toady who could never stand up to the powerful. But he could order people less powerful than himself, like the helpless prisoners of his war on terror, to be tortured. His subsequent pitiful denial that he ever commanded torture, at the same time that he clearly was attempting to justify it, recalls all the worst excesses of the administration he enabled. Some elements of petty revenge on the perpetrators for having so humiliated Tenet with their sneak attack peek out from the edges of his righteous anger.......

In the end, Tenet exhibits all the symptoms of an abused spouse. He praises Bush and even has good things to say about Cheney. He never could pick up the phone and call the police in the midst of being beaten up. He never cared enough about the fate of the country to stand up and say that the country was being driven to war on the basis of obvious falsehoods and a tissue of lies. Even now, his high dudgeon concerns affronts to his own reputation, and that of his agency, rather than the deaths of more than 3,300 U.S. troops and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. Some of his last words in the "60 Minutes" interview were among the most revealing, but not in the way he implied. "You know, at the end of the day, the only thing you have is trust and honor in this world. It's all you have. All you have is your reputation built on trust and your personal honor. And when you don't have that anymore, well, there you go." You can imagine him mumbling those words over and over again as he walks up the stairs to go to bed. "