George J. Tenet, head of the C.I.A., today stated to a Senate committee that he has, on several occasions, corrected faulty public statements on intelligence made by President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney

Tenet’s motivation in making such statements could be to save his already damaged hide. Tenet has recently been under enormous scrutiny for his agency’s ability or lack thereof to gather, process and interpret intelligence. The 9/11 attacks produced in the collective American consciousness not only a sense of devastation and vulnerability but also a stunned horror at the intelligence community’s ability to prevent such attacks. I wondered if heads were going to roll, and if Tenet’s would be leading the pack.  

Tenet’s statements, which certainly could not have endeared him to Bush and Cheney, were nevertheless evasive.

Tenet was asked whether he had attempted to correct statements made by the Bush administration in the days leading up to the Iraq war, such as the claim that Iraq’s weapons stock included what could cause a “mushroom cloud.” In a particularly vapid statement, Tenet responded by claiming:  

“I’m not going to sit here today and tell you what my interaction was and what I did or what I didn’t do … You have the confidence to know that when I believed that somebody was misconstruing intelligence, I said something about it. I don’t stand up in public and do it. I do my job the way I did it in two administrations.”

While it may be the case that Tenet is trying to salvage the bruised reputation of the intelligence community and particularly the C.I.A., it is at least heartening to see that the intelligence community is beginning to at least correct, if not censure, politicians who bandy about questionable or disputed intelligence to the public as if it were fact.  

Mimi Hanaoka