Checkmate, CIA?

[Brotherjohn]

Perhaps it's early, and only time will tell. But I think Tenet’s testimony has, in fact, harmed Bush much more than we know, and much more than the initial revelation by David Kay that Iraq had no WMDs. I also think the two might have been orchestrated.

Here's why. Dr. Kay’s admission obviously hurt Bush and raised a fuss, because many people who had taken it on faith that Hussein at least had something were now forced to face the proposition that the war may not have been as necessary as they once thought.

But there was no blame attached to that. There was still the possibility, and the actual statement by Kay, that “we were all wrong”. The White House could, and did, echo this. The White House obviously thought that, even though they initiated a war based on faulty premises, they could get away with it as an “honest mistake”.

But in essentially blaming bad intelligence, Kay (and the White House) forced Tenet’s hand. Tenet then testified that the intelligence was NOT faulty, and that Iraq was NOT considered an imminent threat by the CIA. Despite couching his testimony in language that appeared to validate the war and defend Bush (and even held out the desperate hope that WMDs might still be found), the implication is clear. If the evidence was NOT faulty, and if we now know that there were no weapons, then the evidence can be made to jibe with this lack of weapons. If that is the case, then Bush misled when he said repeatedly that there DEFINITELY WERE WMDs and that immediate war was necessary. This was not explicitly mentioned by Tenet, but defending the CIA’s position of “no imminence”, and stating that the WMD evidence was qualified with many caveats, implicitly implicated the White House for all statements made to the contrary.

Although seemingly defending the CIA and the White House both, some have described Tenet’s testimony as “a warning shot” across the bow of the White House that they not lay the blame on the CIA.

Follow this with David Kay’s statements yesterday after Tenet’s speech (http://www.nola.com/iraq/index.ssf?/newsflash/get_story.ssf?/cgi-free/getstory_ssf.cgi?a0604_BC_Iraq-Intelligence&&news&emergency):

“David Kay, the former CIA adviser for the Iraqi weapons search, said Thursday that the commission should look into whether political leaders manipulated intelligence data. ‘I think that is an important question that needs to be understood,’ he said at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.”

And from the BBC, he specifically refers to the contradiction between the CIA’s claim of no imminence and the White House’s repeated statements implying an imminent threat (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/3464807.stm):

“Mr Kay said the apparent contradiction ‘raised the possibility that the intelligence community had been telling the White House one thing and the White House had been hearing something else.’”

One wonders if this hasn’t all been orchestrated by the CIA, with David Kay playing a part (after all, he does work for them) to bring the issue to the fore that today’s AP article now calls “a top campaign issue: Did the Bush administration accurately describe that intelligence in making the case for war?”

I realize that the “imminence” issue came up some weeks ago, when Bush and his gang started saying “we never said ‘imminent’. But now that the Dr. Kay has testified that there were no WMDs, it moves beyond that. Now the White House has to claim not just that they didn’t “say imminent”, but that they were going off of bad intelligence regarding Iraqi WMDs and the threat posed by them (however they described it). In reality, it was the White House hand that was forced. Saying "we were going off of bad intelligence" is a lot more damaging than saying "we never said imminent". The CIA then says that, no, the intel was good, leaving anyone paying attention to draw the obvious conclusion.

Imagine a game of chess:

Move – CIA (Kay): No WMDs

Move – White House: We were all wrong. Oops! Honest mistake. Move on.

Move – CIA (Tenet): The evidence was sound. We never said the threat was imminent. But the war was still justified.

Move – White House: See! The war was justified!

Move – CIA (Kay): So… if the threat was not imminent… if our evidence did not say with 100% assurance that Iraq had WMDs (and indeed was highly qualified)… then why did you repeatedly say otherwise? Perhaps we weren’t “all wrong" after all.

Checkmate? If for no other reason than the fact that possible White House deception on Iraq has now become "a top campaign issue"?