The administration's statements, he said, reflected a prewar intelligence consensus that Saddam had stockpiled chemical and biological weapons and was pursuing nuclear bombs.1. There was no reversal, the reporter is being mischievious. The existence or not of weapons or their precursors is different than the bureaucratic legalistic wrangling of "threat" and how to define the threat. As to what the dispute about "threat" was, we don't know, and aren't told. The "imminent" debate? If someone "misconstrued" intelligence...so what? Were they corrected? Did others disagree? Did they say it in public? What exactly, if anything, does Tenet disagree with that was said publicly? All we have here is the post-war two mobile labs claim and the "characterization" of a report.But under sharp questioning by Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., Tenet reversed himself, saying there had been instances when he had warned administration officials that they were misstating the threat posed by Iraq.
"I'm not going to sit here and tell you what my interaction was ... and what I did and didn't do, except that you have to have confidence to know that when I believed that somebody was misconstruing intelligence, I said something about it," Tenet said. "I don't stand up publicly and do it."
"In building the case for war, Bush, Cheney and other top officials relied in part on assessments by the CIA and other agencies. But they concealed disputes and dissents over Iraq's weapons programs and links to terrorists that were raging among analysts, U.S. diplomats and military officials."Couldn't have been written bette by teh DNC itself. Every government operation has diverse opinions behind it, against it, in the middle. How was this concealed? We were treated to it daily.
It's going to be a long election...