Editorial: Hardly a ‘slam dunk’

Sunday, April 29, 2007 | 7:26 a.m.

F ormer CIA chief George Tenet is leveling damning charges at the White House in a book due out Monday, saying administration officials never held a "serious debate" on whether Saddam Hussein posed a serious threat before attacking Iraq.

That, unfortunately, is not a surprise, but Tenet's account offers a detailed, troubling picture of how the White House rushed into Iraq and the misleading arguments for doing so.

The New York Times obtained a copy of the book, "At the Center of the Storm," and quoted from it in a story Friday. "There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat," Tenet writes. Nor, he writes, "was there ever a significant discussion" about containing Iraq without invading.

Tenet does not shy from the blame, admitting that his agency provided bad intelligence on Iraq's weapons program and that he even believed Saddam had unconventional weapons. But he objects to being made the scapegoat, as the White House has sought to do, with the administration saying his faulty intelligence was the key to the decision to go to war.

Administration officials leaked word that Tenet had called the evidence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq a "slam dunk," but Tenet says he was taken out of context. He says that during a December 2002 meeting in the Oval Office, when the White House was preparing to make a public case for going to war, the president wanted the CIA to "add punch" to a proposed public presentation. Tenet says strengthening the presentation would be a "slam dunk."

Instead, Tenet's words were twisted, as were the facts, by the administration - and the United States went to war. This administration made a practice of relying on shaky intelligence and distorting facts to make its case to invade Iraq. The consequences have been horrific, as more than 24,000 American troops have been injured and more than 3,300 have lost their lives.