Today I was watching The Chris Matthews Show, and on Matthew’s panel was Anne Kornblut from the Washington Post. The topic was former CIA Director George Tenet’s new book, At the Center of the Storm, and, of course, Tenet’s infamous “slam dunk” comment. Kornblut said something that kind of surprised me, since she is from the Post, about how we don’t know where the “slam dunk” comment originated. Well, actually, we do. It came from a 2004 book called Plan of Attack by the Washington Post’s own Bob Woodward. Here’s a little taste of Woodward’s book from the Post back in 2004:
McLaughlin’s version used communications intercepts, satellite photos, diagrams and other intelligence. “Nice try,” Bush said when the CIA official was finished, according to the book. “I don’t think this quite — it’s not something that Joe Public would understand or would gain a lot of confidence from.”
He then turned to Tenet, McLaughlin’s boss, and said, “I’ve been told all this intelligence about having WMD, and this is the best we’ve got?”
“It’s a slam-dunk case,” Tenet replied, throwing his arms in the air. Bush pressed him again. “George, how confident are you?”
“Don’t worry, it’s a slam dunk,” Tenet repeated.
Tenet later told associates he should have said the evidence on weapons was not ironclad, according to Woodward.
Now, if Kornblut is saying that we don’t know who Woodward got the comment from, and that makes it suspect because Woodward can’t tell when he’s being lied to and used as a political pawn, I guess the title of this piece should have been: “Ann Kornblut from The Washington Post Thinks Bob Woodward from The Washington Post is an Idiot,” instead.
And, I’m confused, are we all supposed to look towards Tenet as some fountain of good information now that he’s attacking the Bush Administration? Let’s face it, when it really counted and American lives were on the line (9/11 and the Iraq War for example), his agency was caught with their collective finger up their…nose.
Basically, Tenet is saying that his comment was taken out of context by, of course, the usual suspects, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, etc….
A former U.S. spy chief accused President Bush’s administration of ruining his reputation by misusing a “slam dunk” comment he made during a White House meeting ahead of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq.
Former CIA Director George Tenet told CBS Television’s “60 Minutes” that the administration leaked his comment as opposition to the war grew when no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq….
Tenet said his comment did not refer to whether Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, but related to what information could be used to make a public case for the war.
The “slam-dunk” comment first surfaced in journalist Bob Woodward’s 2004 book, “Plan of Attack,” which portrayed Tenet as assuring Bush that finding weapons of mass destruction in Iraq would be a virtual certainty.
“We can put a better case together for a public case. That’s what I meant,” Tenet told “60 Minutes.”
What? So what Tenet really said in that meeting was that the CIA could put together a “public case” for the American people about why we needed to go to war with Iraq, risking American lives and the bloodshed that comes with war, and that “public case” would be so convincing that it was a “slam dunk” Americans would buy it. Yeah, that’s much better.
And I love this quote from Tenet:
“And the hardest part of all this has been just listening to this for almost three years, listening to the vice president go on ‘Meet the Press’ on the fifth year of 9/11 and say, ‘Well, George Tenet said ’slam dunk,’ as if he needed me to say ’slam dunk’ to go to war,” Tenet said.
I think I hear the world’s smallest violin in the background. No wonder the CIA was so screwed up. Still is. I would imagine it will take a few decades of work to bounce back from lame leadership like that.
What Cheney and the Administration needed, Mr. Tenet, was a functioning CIA with good intelligence and a real leader running it, not some useless “yes” man.
It’s apparent that Tenet is trying to salvage a shred of something from his career in the CIA, and somehow he thinks that saying his “slam dunk” comment was “out of context” will make up for the agency he ran having it’s head up it’s butt for years. Think about all of the huge intelligence failures we had with Tenet at the helm: The 9/11 attack planning and the attack itself…failing to get Bin Laden through the Clinton and Bush years…blowing up a Sudanese aspirin factory, or blowing up a Sudanese VX nerve gas factory and not having the necessary male parts to stand up and say it was the right thing to do….the missile missing Saddam Hussein the first night of the Iraq War in March of 2003….the USS Cole bombing…Iraq’s WMD…I’m going to get the Carpal Tunnel Syndrome typing this list….
Nadja Merino-Kalfel describes herself as a “witness to history.” At 95, she’s lived through WWI and WWII, escaping the wrath of Hitler and ending up in New York City as a fashion illustrator for the New York Times. 
