Tenet’s whining is hilarious.
Tenet says it was a passing comment, made well after major decisions had already been made to mobilize the nation for war….
“I’ll never believe that what happened that day informed the president’s view or belief of the legitimacy or the timing of this war. Never!”
“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 [anniversary] of 9/11 and say, ‘Well, George Tenet said slam dunk’ as if he needed me to say ‘slam dunk’ to go to war with Iraq,” he tells Pelley.
The point of invoking the “slam dunk” phrase is that it is illustrative of how the CIA read the intel. Sure, the decision had already been made to mobilizing for war — based in part on intelligence gathered and analyzed by the agency that Tenet was in charge of. Heaven forbid that Tenet ever admit to himself that he’s in any way responsible for that.