A bit of humility would serve Tenet better

Sometimes it’s better to keep your mouth shut and have people wonder if you’re an idiot than to open your mouth and remove all doubt. Such is the case with George Tenet. Tenet has written a book to get out from under the “slam dunk” comment he admits making.

Lex has said a number of times that sometimes the best way to avoid controversy, is to sail right into it. Like Imus saying, “Hey I just repeated what I hear on radio all day” or Alberto Gonzales saying, “Hell yes we fired the attorneys for political reasons, after all they were hired for political reasons. What of it?” Now we have George Tenet.

What Tenet might have said:
“Yeah, Sadam and WMD was a slam dunk. Every credible intelligence agency in the world to include the U.N. knew Sadam had WMD and was pursuing nukes. George H.W. Bush believed that was the case. Bill Clinton believed that was the case. Sadam used these weapons on his own people and the Iranians. So yeah, it was a slam dunk. The question that has yet to be answered or even forcefully asked is what happened to them?”

But Tenet didn’t say that. Instead he tries to make the case that his “slam dunk” comment was taken out of context. Then that comment, sans Tenet’s accurate context, was used to relieve the Bush Administration of culpability for the failure to produce WMD. That seems pretty absurd to me. First because, absent Divine intervention, there is nothing that will keep the lunatic left from blaming Bush for everything from the WMD fiasco to little Johnny’s poor spelling grade.

Next, so what if the CIA got it wrong? So did everyone else. What are the chances of that? Zero in my opinion. Where did the WMD go? I mean, the lefties are saying the debate on global warming is over because there is consensus among scientist. Well there was a great deal more consensus among intelligence agencies that Sadam had WMD than there is among scientists on global warming. So given leftie logic, shouldn’t the left declare the debate on WMD over and demand Syria give up Sadam’s WMD?

Tenet is probably a decent guy who did a reasonable job managing an unmanageable agency. But good God man, you presided over not one but two of the biggest intelligence failures in history. You should be displaying a bit of quiet humility not making the rounds to the TV talkers hawking a book.