by TChris

So which George is in trouble here? Tenet or Bush?

The Senate Intelligence Committee will soon release a report blaming Tenet for the claim that Iraq possessed chemical and biological weapons.

The committee report criticizes Tenet and the CIA for consistently seizing on the worst-case scenario of the Iraq threat and overriding the views of intelligence agencies in areas where those agencies had expertise.

Different agencies made conflicting intelligence assessments, but "poor coordination at the top" only contributed to the confusion of policy makers, says the report.

The Bush administration would love to keep the focus on Tenet, and the report furthers that aim by failing to address the administration's complicit demand for any intelligence, however questionable, that served its political needs.

Fortunately, there are people who have longer attention spans than the president, and those people will remember that the administration manipulated intelligence to its own ends. Those people will not stop with the conclusions reached by the Intelligence Committee but will continue to insist that the buck move farther up the chain of command.

This editorial in the Virginian-Pilot, for instance, adds up the evidence and concludes that "hawkish administration officials, intent on invading Iraq, went around Tenet and grasped at any shard of intelligence they could find to bolster their case." One of those hawkish officials, Donald Rumsfeld, put together a "personal intelligence team" that "briefed the National Security Council and Vice President Dick Cheney’s staff, channeling information to the top, without Tenet’s knowledge."

So as much as the administration might like to see Tenet blamed for intelligence failures, blame goes all the way to the top -- to the other George, and to Rumsfeld and Cheney for cutting Tenet out of the loop.