Slamming Tenet

Somewhere out there, there must be someone defending George Tenet. I'm just having trouble finding that person (or persons).

Let's see: Liberals are ticked off. Conservatives feel betrayed. Ex-CIA types are angry. White House officials are playing defense. That pretty much runs the gamut, doesn't it?

I can't get beyond the following: Whatever Tenet's strengths and weaknesses as CIA director, he quit three years ago. He accepted a presidential medal of freedom and then remained silent--until now, when he's peddling a book. If he felt so strongly about these intelligence issues, about the rush to war in Iraq, about the way he says he's been besmirched, why didn't he speak out before now? How does he justify having remained silent?

It's fine for Tenet to attempt to set the record straight. But it's a slam dunk that he would have won more respect had he done it long ago. The Iraq issue, after all, has consumed the country for the last three years as the war has gone from bad to worse. And Tenet was MIA.

Until his big "60 Minutes"/Time/Brokaw/Gibson/Larry King rollout this week.

Tenet says he needed time to get his thoughts together. A lot of time, apparently.

National Review is aggravated with Tenet:

"Tenet shouldn't be so offended when people quote his words, since they reflect an essential truth -- that he indeed had no doubt that Saddam had WMDs. But Tenet is now engaged in a classic instance of self-serving Beltway memoir-writing, settling scores against Dick Cheney and the 'neocons' who were allegedly impervious to the facts so diligently assembled by the CIA.

"Tenet says that the war wasn't really about weapons of mass destruction. It's true that the case for war wasn't built entirely on Saddam's possessing WMDs -- as the war's supporters have long pointed out. But this was certainly the most important element in the case . . .

"In the end, it was a mistake for President Bush to keep George Tenet on as CIA director after he took office in 2001, let alone award him a Medal of Freedom. Tenet was primarily a political player who didn't understand what it took to revive the CIA. He presided over two debacles -- 9/11 and the flawed intelligence about Iraq -- and contributed to the administration's dysfunction with his internal bureaucratic warfare. If he seemed defensive in his 60 Minutes interview, it was because he has a lot to be defensive about."

Bill Kristol says the book should perhaps land in the fiction section:

"According to Michiko Kakutani's review in Saturday's New York Times,