Flashback: Tenet's 'Screw You' to the WH

Swopa and Josh Marshall both flag the following from a Wash Post piece about the White House's counter-attack against Joseph Wilson:

Behind the scenes, the White House responded with twin attacks: one on Wilson and the other on the CIA, which it wanted to take the blame for allowing the 16 words to have remained in Bush's speech. As part of this effort, then-national security adviser Stephen J. Hadley spoke with Tenet during the week about clearing up CIA responsibility for the 16 words, even though both knew the agency did not believe Iraq was seeking uranium from Niger, according to a person familiar with the conversation.

It reminded me of Tenet's actual "apology," which is something of a classic. Tenet takes the fall in the first paragraph, concluding it, "These 16 words should never have been included in the text written for the President." Then Tenet takes remaining dozen paragraphs to stick a shiv in the White House's back.  For instance:

In October, the Intelligence Community (IC) produced a classified, 90 page National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on Iraq's WMD programs. There is a lengthy section in which most agencies of the Intelligence Community judged that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program. Let me emphasize, the NIE's Key Judgments cited six reasons for this assessment; the African uranium issue was not one of them.

Or this:

An unclassified CIA White Paper in October made no mention of the issue, again because it was not fundamental to the judgment that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons program, and because we had questions about some of the reporting. For the same reasons, the subject was not included in many public speeches, Congressional testimony and the Secretary of State's United Nations presentation in early 2003.

This is mostly just a fun run down memory lane, but there's a media angle to this all. Reporters should stop being--or playing--stupid: Tenet's apology wasn't really one. To simply call it one--rather than give a nod to the fact that it was half-hearted at best (and  actually implicates the WH)--is...lame.

Comments

[Zathras]

With all sympathy to your point about reporters, Eric, I have to say I'm a little tired of discontented officials veiling whatever scores they think they are settling and counting on reporters to figure out what they are really saying.

George Tenet is never going to get another job with this administration, probably would not want another job with this administration and is unlikely to get or want a position commensurate with his record and experience in any subsequent administration. So he makes a gesture toward keeping the goodwill of the Bush White House, and includes in the gesture some language suggesting to other people that he didn't really mean it. So what? What does this get him, and what cause does this advance?

Tenet as a creature of Washington knows as well as anyone that burying disclaimers in the body of a lengthy statement is an excellent way to ensure that most people never read them, and further that no policy, procedural or personnel changes are likely to result from them. It's not that I expected more of Tenet; I understand what he did was no more than SOP in Washington today. It just didn't do the country any good, and I thought someone should mention that.

[eric umansky]

Joseph,

You make a good point. I wish Tenet had simply resigned loudly in protest too and not played along. But instead he pulled this half-hearted thing--as you point out SOP in D.C.

I would only add that whatever Tenet's motiviation in writing such a (non)-apology, he didn't bury his point *that much.*

The reason I wrote this post is that I rememebered reading Tenet's "apology" two years ago and being struck by how the great majority of it was focused on implicating the WH. And that's really the part that gets me about the media missing it. Tenet's knife was *so darn obvious*, I've always been surprised that the media missed and/or ignored it. (As I recall, the story came out on a Sat. so... that might explain something.)

[!]

So, what reporters did was key in on the admission that he, Tenet, took the blame and that he admitted inclusion of the 16 words was a "mistake." Given, at that particular point in time, noone was pushing for any administraion admissions of mistakes, but, even back then, it wasn't something characteristic of an administration official to use the "m" word.
At the time, in July of '03, the only one doing soul searching and admitting to doing so was the NYT ( because of Judy's Wonderful Mastery of Deception stories. )

So, reporters grabbed a sound bite and nothing more. Like they were gnoshing at a summer picnic.

My question is what of the recent NYT story alleging that Rove and Libby helped craft the Tenet speech? Wrong info, hyped-up misleading info, rumor or was there just a crafting of sound bite friendly portion of the mea culpa?

The speech itself is rather dense and the plain spoken portions are all something even Bush could utter without messing it up. So, were those likely the portions where spin doctoring took over?

If Rove and Libby did indeed help craft the speech what of the "shiv" portion? Surely, they would've read that...if they indeed vetted the speech prior to delivery.

I do agree that many journalists missed and do miss the big pictures on stories like this one. Perhaps the print journos forget about it the important minutia and the general thrust of stories and instead focus on primping their hair post deadline and pre-pundit tv time.

Plus, on Tenet:
don't forget that Tenet gave a speech at Georgetown after he resigned last year....

[Reuben]

SHIPPENSBURG -- Shippensburg University senior forward Dave Rostad called it a "fairy tale." That's probably as good of a description as you could get.
http://mj6.pressdepend.com/map-3.html