Cannistraro and Tenet

By now you probably know that several members of VIPS (Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity) wrote a letter to Tenet demanding he return the Medal of Freedom. No surprise that among the five were Ray McGovern and Larry Johnson, or as CNN reminds us, Johnson is a former CIA intelligence official and registered Republican who voted for Bush in 2000.. Johnson is perhaps the most quoted ex-CIA employee in history.

Their letter stated the following:

"You betrayed the CIA officers who collected the intelligence that made it clear that Saddam did not pose an imminent threat. You betrayed the analysts who tried to withstand the pressure applied by Cheney and Rumsfeld.

This is part and parcel of the revisionist history game being played by some members of the CIA, which apparently included Valerie Plame through her husband Joe Wilson.

The key word in that letter was "imminent", more on that later.

Another name on the list was Vincent Cannistraro. By the way, this post isn't an effort to demonize the man, only point out some of his stated opinions leading up to this letter. Here's one, from a wide-ranging interview done by Frontline a few years ago:

With terrorism, we have basically arrested all the perpetrators in the bombings of our embassies in East Africa in 1998. But these are secondary parts. They're replaceable tools. The leadership, the sponsorship, is beyond law enforcement. That's the problem with the law enforcement response. It isn't sufficient. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't prosecute people who commit crimes. Killing people and bombing is a crime. Sure. But it's not an effective total response to terrorism itself.

And that's the bottom line with all of this back and forth--we're dealing with opinions, judgment and assessments of analysts.

That's why the 180 on Iraq is so compelling. There is a war between sides to write history and right now the "Saddam was never a threat" side is winning. This 180 largely developed after 9/11 when some analysts realized Bush might actually be serious about finishing off the monster they'd helped create. If we return back in time to 1999 and the now infamous ABC News Sheila MacVicar report (about the possible links between Saddam and bin Laden) notice that Vince Cannistraro was an intergral part of that interview.

This is not to say the debate over Iraq is illegitimate or that Bush didn't cherry pick some of the worst assessments to help his case. That's otherwise known as accepting and acting on the worse-case scenario based on Saddam's past behavior. For years the detractors were satisfied in using the "cherry-picked" rubrick but are now going for the full Monty by suggesting it was conventional wisdom in 2003 that Saddam was no threat. Such a premise leaves the conclusion that Bush lied, and the letter-writers have now included Tenet.

From the above, the key word was imminent. Bush specifically said Iraq was a "gathering" threat, as did Bill Clinton before him. 9/11 created the paradigm that acting on such a threat had become prudent, but this is where the grand canyon was created. Argue with lefties and they'll claim that by mentioning 9/11 and Saddam in the same paragraph Bush was linking the two. Yes, but not as Saddam being the author of the attack, only as someone who had a long history of supporting terrorism. That's why this revisionism is important, because if Saddam can be removed from suspicion of acting in concert with terrorists it removes any conceivable imminent threats sans the bubbling vats of WMDs.

In hindsight perhaps we could have dealt differently with the Butcher but any hindsight discussions should include the following key points. One, the only way he agreed to more UN inspections was under the threat of the 150,000 combat troops massing on his periphery. Had we allowed Blix to declare him "disarmed", which is the possible result of protracted inspections, he would have lobbied the UN to remove the sanctions, something the US would have been hard-pressed to stop. Both Duelfer and Kay speculated what his intentions would have been under such a scenario.

On the other hand, had we not massed forces in 2003 Saddam wouldn't have allowed the inspectors back in, leaving the threat discussed in the MacVicar interview--ie, the passage of WMD technology or materials to terrorists. That's why the Congress voted as they did.

Perhaps maintaining the no-fly zones indefinitely and trying to force the UN to unravel the Oil for Food scandal would have been better, who knows. Nobody can deny we're now trapped between Iraq and a hard place and that our escape options are all fraught with peril.

But the attempt by people like Tenet, Cannistraro, Scheuer and others to re-write the history of the intelligence assessments about Saddam in order to repair reputations, soften legacies or gain political advantages better describes Tenet's parting remark in the book--'you are entitled to your own opinions but not your own set of facts'.