Political Cortex: Brain Food for the Body Politic

One of the most remarkable rhetorical feats of the Bush administration after the Iraq war was how it managed to a large extent to place the blame on the CIA for faulty Iraq WMD intelligence, when in reality the CIA was cautious and reluctant to make any claims about such intelligence, but was brow-beat by the Administration into putting forth some heavily qualified claims which were blown up by White House speechwriters into the spectre of an imminent mushroom cloud.

The Bush administration has wielded a number of propaganda tools for communicating this ass-backwards storyline, many of which they continue to wield to this day.  For example, they convinced the Senate Intelligence Committee to divide their investigation of the WMD fiasco into two parts: (1) the intelligence communities failures on the Iraq WMD issues; and (2) the Bush Administration's failures, and then, through their apparatchik Senator Pat Roberts, completed phase 1 and put off phase 2 indefinitely.

Another propaganda tool was the impotent Silberman-Robb Commission, which only had the power to investigate the Intelligence Community failures, but didn't have the power to investigate White House actions.

But the biggest tool of all was the use of their White House stenographer, Bob Woodward.  In his War on Iraq book, "Plan of Attack," Woodward places the blame for the WMD fiasco squarely on George Tenet's shoulders, quoting him in a December 21, 2002 meeting as telling Bush and Cheney with regards to intelligence on Iraq's WMD: "Don't worry, it's a slam dunk!" Plan of Attack at 249.

Woodward then has Bush  Bush telling Tenet, not once, but "several times," that he should "[m]ake sure no one stretches to make our case."  Plan of Attack at 250.

When that "slam dunk" phrase entered the media bloodstream, the press was quick to credit it as proof that intel fiasco was all the CIA's fault, and the poor White House was victimized by an unscrupulous and incompetent agency.

According to Woodward, Tenet reassured the president that "it's a slam dunk case" that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction.

In his CBS interview, Woodward said he "asked the president about this, and he said it was very important to have the CIA director, 'slam-dunk' is as I interpreted it, a sure thing, guaranteed."

Well, now Suskind has reconstructed the events that led to that particular publication in Woodward's book, and it is, I'm sad to say, not so flattering to Bob Woodward.  In fact, this reconstruction points to two conclusions: (1) Tenet never said Iraqi WMD intelligence was a slam dunk; and (2) Woodward wrote about the "slam dunk" meeting after receiving a memo the White House had sent him shortly before his personal meeting with George Bush, a memo based on the "collective" recollections of the White House officials at that meeting, which Woodward tells us, consisted of George Bush, Dick Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, and Andy Card.  Plan of Attack at 247.  All interested witnesses, to say the least.

Given the importance of this passage from Suskind's book, I'll exercise my typing fingers and quote this excerpt at length:

Bush then turned to Tenet and said, "I've been told all this intelligence about having WMD and this is the best we've got?"

Tenet, according to Woodward's account, then rose, threw up his arms in the air, and said, "It's a slam dunk case!"

The account of the meeting, which ended with Bush telling Tenet to "make sure no one stretches to make our case," was provided to Woodward by White House officials not long before the reporter's final, December 11, 2003, interview with Bush for Plan of Attack, due out the following April.

The President, who was extensively briefed before his sit-downs with Woodward, then told the veteran reporter, emphatically, that Tenet's reassurance "was very important."

Indeed, it was.  In fact, it provided a firewall for the President on the most serious charge history might level at him: taking the country to war under false pretenses.  It was Tenet's fault.  The SLAM DUNK sign would forever hang from around Tenet's thick neck and be in the first sentence of his obituary.

Tenet and [deputy CIA director John] McLaughlin don't remember the meeting very well.  Tenet, although outnumbered by what the President and other advisers claim they heard, doesn't actually remember ever saying "slam dunk."  Doesn't dispute it.  Just doesn't remember it.  McLaughlin said he never remembered Tenet saying "slam dunk" either.  He doesn't recall Tenet ever, in any context, jumping up and waving his arms.  He and Tenet have both told close friends that it was a marketing meeting, not about the actual research, but about the presentation.  This may be a fine point of distinction, but when so much weight is placed on two words, context is important.  The President's question, McLaughlin recalled, was "whether we could craft a better pitch than this - a PR meeting - it certainly wasn't about the nature of the evidence."

The One Percent Doctrine at 188.

Woodward, of course, misses this entire subtext, and apparently didn't see fit to interview Tenet and McLaughlin on this issue before hanging these two damning words around Tenet's neck. Instead, as the tool and White House Stenographer he has become, he uncritically published perhaps the most singularly compelling piece of propaganda in the White House's war on the CIA, the public, and the truth.  It's embarrassing really.  I'm embarrassed for Woodward.  I'm cringing, actually, at thinking of how far Woodward has fallen.

And the truth, of course, is that the "slam dunk" phrase will be in the first sentence of Tenet's obituary.  And the White House brazenly dishonest attempt to blame the CIA for Iraq WMD intelligence fiasco continues.