People do stupid things all the time, but most people aren’t the Director of Central Intelligence and the things aren’t stuff like forgetting to write an intelligence assessment on a country you don’t think is much of a threat but that your employers seem intent on invading. So when George Tenet says that’s what he did, I suspect he’s painting himself as a moron to avoid being painted by others as something worse: a coward. I don’t think it’s working; I think he’s just coming off as a cowardly moron, someone who failed to protect his country from the Doctors Strangelove in the White House and was stupid enough to try to rationalize the failure in print.

Brent Budowsky suggests that Tenet’s book tour should be conducted under oath, a reference to the recent invitation extended Tenet by House oversight committee chairman Henry Waxman. It’s a good idea. The first few paragraphs of a Washington Post story about the book offer enough self-contradicting or nonsensical excerpts to guarantee riveting, if not expository, theater.

The most obvious flaw in the narrative as described by the Post story arises from Tenet’s unsurprising revelation about the administration’s early focus on invading Iraq. Tenet says that he never questioned the threat posed by Saddam, only whether or not it was imminent, but he also says that whatever threat Iraq posed was so far off the radar that it wasn’t even mentioned in the CIA threat briefings provided to the incoming administration in November and December of 2000. He says that although the administration, in particular Dick Cheney, signaled before they even took office that invading Iraq was a serious priority, he, Tenet, didn’t think updating the National Intelligence Estimate on the country was necessary until Congressional Democrats demanded it before the October,2002, vote on authorizing the invasion, nearly two years after he recognized the administration’s determination to pull the trigger.

Underestimating the stupidity of appointed officials is always a risky undertaking, but Tenet’s professed failure to recognize the need for a comprehensive assessment of the state of affairs in Iraq mere months before the US was to launch a war against the country isn’t even in the same universe as stupid; it would never occur to anyone with the intellectual capacity to button their own shirt not to do that. No: he was simply afraid to get in the way, something he demonstrates vividly in the description of his reaction to Cheney’s assertions that Saddam was developing nuclear weapons.

A speech by Cheney in August 2002 “went well beyond what our analysis could support,” Tenet writes. The speech charged, among other things, that Hussein had restarted his nuclear program and would “acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon . . . perhaps within a year.” Caught off-guard by the remarks, which had not been cleared by the CIA, Tenet says he considered confronting the vice president on the subject but did not.

The early reactions to Tenet’s book from former CIA employees are not pleasant. Larry Johnson, who was as prominent a critic of the pre-war intelligence process as could be found, wants Tenet drummed out of the species.

Sorry George. Too little and way too damn late. You had ample opportunity to blow the whistle on the Bush bullshit but you played ball. I do not give a damn whether you did or did not say the case for war was a “slam dunk”. You signed off on Colin Powell’s presentation to the United Nations. You, more than any other U.S. Government senior official, were in the unique position to know that the Secretary of State was selling a pack of lies. And you sat behind him nodding affirmatively like a bobblehead doll.

Michael Scheuer, the former head of the agency’s bin Laden unit who hails from far to the political right of Johnson, is perhaps even less charitable in his Washington Post op-ed piece.

At day’s end, his exercise in finger-pointing is designed to disguise the central, tragic fact of his book. Tenet in effect is saying that he knew all too well why the United States should not invade Iraq, that he told his political masters and that he was ignored. But above all, he’s saying that he lacked the moral courage to resign and speak out publicly to try to stop our country from striding into what he knew would be an abyss.

Powell has also been blasted for being a good soldier during the march to war rather than quitting in protest. The Bush administration would have been hurt by Powell’s resignation, but it might not have stopped the war. But Tenet’s resignation would have destroyed the neocons’ Iraq house of cards by discrediting the only glue holding it together: the intelligence that “proved” Saddam Hussein guilty of pursuing nuclear weapons and working with al-Qaeda. After all, the compelling briefing that Powell, with Tenet sitting just behind his shoulder, gave the U.N. Security Council in February 2003 could never have been delivered if Tenet had blown the whistle.

I suggested in 2004 that the country could do much worse than to replace the CIA with Knight Ridder’s (now McClatchy’s) Washington Bureau because it seemed then, as it had for the better part of two years, that the company’s team of Jonathon Landay and Warren Strobel were considerably better informed about Iraq-related intelligence than anyone in the administration including, apparently, Tenet. But the book seems set to confirm that, as Johnson and Scheuer say, what distinguishes the two reporters from Tenet was not information but the courage to use it. Had Tenet done so, he might not have gotten his Medal of Freedom but he might have saved hundreds of thousands of lives and ended up with an even sweeter book deal than the one he got, and it would surely have been a better book.

Justice might not be wholly served if Tenet’s book sales are torpedoed because he’s testifying about its contents under oath in front of Waxman’s committee, but she might at least be pleased by the nod in her direction. Here’s hoping.

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