Retrospect is not something that officials that once held high ranking positions within an intelligence community should be able to lean on after the fact, especially when hundreds of thousands of innocent lives are lost in the process. While ex-CIA Director George Tenet’s recent book and television appearances lend credence to the fact that the administration’s case for going to war in Iraq was immensely unsubstantiated from an intelligence perspective, it should not be overlooked that Tenet said next to nothing at the time, nor did he break faith with the administration immediately following his dismissal, something that he could have done by conveying his knowledge to the likes of the New York Times or other publications of public record.

There were, of course, those at the CIA that did raise vastly important concerns, voices that were silenced or disregarded by a growing partisan element within the organization, especially with regards to the information given then Secretary of State Powell for his presentation to the United Nations, a presentation at which Tenet sat directly behind him.

Like the FBI’s now defunct COINTELPRO program that was exposed in the 1970’s, the CIA has also, and despite its mandate, conducted operations to influence foreign and domestic media, an operation referred to as Mockingbird by Deborah Davis in her book Katharine the Great. While there is no evidence that exists that the operation was ever termed as such, Cord Meyer, who worked at the CIA from 1951 to 1977, later substantiated the existence of the program, though claimed that it was never given an official name.

The most important reality of any national intelligence program is that it exists to provide intelligence that is not necessarily wholly objective, but one that placates national security directives at the time. Were that not the case, the Central Intelligence Agency would have served from its inception as a primary factor in the deterrence of actions undertaken because of unsubstantiated information – that it to say, intelligence that is wholly objective and presented as such to those in power from which to base decisions. That has, throughout the CIA’s history, never really been the case. And as Tenet has pointed out in both his book and on television, ‘best guess’ estimates were largely the stock and trade of his organization in the post 9/11 environment, even despite the fact that he was deeply troubled by the attitudes of men such as Richard Pearle, Dick Cheney, and others regarding Iraq.

As Juan Cole points out in a piece for Salon today…

“The French call it “the spirit of the staircase” (l’esprit d’escalier), the clever reply to someone that comes to you on your way up to the bedroom after a cocktail party. In his new book, released Monday, former CIA Director George Tenet has delivered himself of hundreds of pages on the staircase, imagining what he should have said or could have said to Richard Perle, Dick Cheney, Condi Rice and the other neoconservatives who marched the country to war in Iraq using the context of Sept. 11. In his April 29 interview with “60 Minutes” touting the book, Tenet came across as a spectacularly tragic Walter Mitty, daydreaming about how things would have been different if only he had spoken up, if he’d only been a James Bond-style spymaster instead of a timid, fawning bureaucrat. But of course, when it really mattered, at the critical juncture of his seven-year tenure as CIA chief, Tenet said nothing.

Tenet has revealed for the first time that he encountered Pentagon advisor Richard Perle on the day after the Sept. 11 attacks. As Tenet recounted the story on “60 Minutes,” Perle “said to me, ‘Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday; they bear responsibility.’” Tenet told interviewer Scott Pelley that he was startled at the allegation. “It’s September the 12th,” said Tenet. “I’ve got the manifest with me that tells me al-Qaida did this. Nothing in my head that says there is any Iraqi involvement in this in any way, shape or form, and I remember thinking to myself, as I’m about to go brief the president, ‘What the hell is he talking about?’”

Is that really what Tenet should have been thinking to himself? Just, “What the hell is he talking about?” Perle was then the chairman of the civilian Defense Policy Board, which had great influence over Pentagon policy, and he was intimately linked to Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, the No. 2 and 3 men at the Department of Defense. He was also close to Cheney and to the latter’s chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby. Perle had coauthored with Feith and others a 1996 white paper for Israeli politician Bibi Netanyahu and his right-wing Likud Party, advocating a war against Iraq. Perle believed that the Saddam Hussein regime posed a dire threat to Israel and that overthrowing it would enhance Israel’s security. If Tenet had been as street savvy as he likes to pretend — what with being a Greek from Queens and all — he should have been thinking, “Aha! So that is how the neoconservatives are going to play this thing. How can I head them off at the pass?”

Tenet’s experience was nearly identical to that of former terrorism czar Richard Clarke. In his own “60 Minutes” interview three years ago, and in his 2004 book, “Against All Enemies,” Clarke said that he met Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld on Sept. 12, 2001, and Rumsfeld was pushing for an attack on Iraq in response: “We have to bomb Iraq,” he is alleged to have said. Clarke was so surprised that he said he at first thought Rumsfeld was joking.

Tenet encountered the same skepticism or unconcern about al-Qaida in high Bush administration officials as had Clarke. He confirmed that the CIA had ongoing covert operations in Afghanistan from 1999, but that he could not get the go-ahead from either President Clinton or President Bush to attempt to overthrow the Taliban and kill or capture Osama bin Laden. He maintains that in the summer of 2001, he sought a meeting with National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice at which he presented a briefing. As he recalled to “60 Minutes,” “Essentially, the briefing says, there are gonna be multiple spectacular attacks against the United States. We believe these attacks are imminent. Mass casualties are a likelihood.” He told “60 Minutes” that his message to her was: “We need to consider immediate action inside Afghanistan now. We need to move to the offensive.” Rice has denied that she received any such specific information or suggestions from Tenet.

In his interview on April 29, Tenet alleged that Rice delegated the issue of immediate action in Afghanistan to “third-tier officials.” When pressed as to why he did not go straight to the president, Tenet implied that he did not have the ability to put things on Bush’s agenda, while Rice did. In the cliquish Bush White House, he was perhaps not the insider he had thought he was. Or perhaps he did not want to risk Bush’s ire and was pressing Rice to take the heat for urging on the lackadaisical Bush a covert operation he had already once refused to consider.

CBS’s Pelley implicitly criticized the ex-CIA chief for not pressing Bush on his innuendo about Saddam Hussein and al-Qaida’s being in cahoots. Pelley read Tenet a passage from a Bush speech: “The president, in October of 2002, quote: ‘We need to think about Saddam Hussein using al-Qaida to do his dirty work.’ Is that what you’re telling the president?” Tenet shot back, “Well, we didn’t believe al-Qaida was gonna do Saddam Hussein’s dirty work.”

Pelley pressed the point: “January ‘03, the president again, [said] quote: ‘Imagine those 19 hijackers this time armed by Saddam Hussein.’ Is that what you’re telling the president?” Tenet denied ever suggesting a link between 9/11 and Iraq to Bush, and said the connection was nonexistent. “In terms of complicity with 9/11, absolutely none,” insisted Tenet. “It never made any sense. We could never verify that there was any Iraqi authority, direction and control, complicity with al-Qaida for 9/11 or any operational act against America. Period.”

Among Tenet’s major targets is Vice President Dick Cheney. Three years after leaving the CIA, Tenet finally seems eager to take on the stovepiper of intelligence, now that he is a widely disliked lame duck. Cheney, of course, was among the major proponents of alleged links between al-Qaida and Saddam. Now Tenet complains that Cheney kept alleging things for which there was no good evidence.

Prior to the invasion of Iraq, in his speech at the Veterans of Foreign Wars’ 103rd National Convention on Aug. 26, 2002, Cheney said, “We now know that Saddam has resumed his efforts to acquire nuclear weapons … Many of us are convinced that Saddam will acquire nuclear weapons fairly soon.” In fact, Tenet says now, the CIA estimate was that even if Saddam had such a program, it was years away from success. Cheney concluded, “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam Hussein now has weapons of mass destruction.”

Tenet reports having been deeply disturbed by the speech, which went substantially beyond what the CIA could certify as factual. But he does not appear to have weighed in at that time. Bush administration officials were allowed to invoke the phantasmagoric mushroom cloud again and again, and members of Congress have repeatedly said that the threat of Saddam’s nukes persuaded them to vote for the war. Six months after Cheney’s speech to the VFW, on the eve of the invasion itself, Tenet finally was able to intervene. The New York Times, which got hold of an advance copy of Tenet’s book, revealed on April 27 that Tenet nixed a Cheney speech “because its claims of links between al-Qaida and Iraq went ‘way beyond what the intelligence shows.’” Tenet said that he went to Bush on the issue, saying, “Mr. President, we cannot support the speech and it should not be given.”

On that occasion, Tenet won and Cheney was reined in. Surely, however, it hardly mattered at that point, since Cheney’s propaganda technique of linking Saddam to bin Laden had been intended to foment a war with Iraq and the war was on. It is rather pitiful that Tenet must now dredge up this minor victory, as he daydreams on the staircase about stopping the Iraq war in its tracks by shooting down Cheney’s lies.”

If Tenet’s current actions are to achieve anything, they will hopefully embolden more Americans to take a closer look at the propaganda that they were fed prior to the invasion and those in government that orchestrated it. There is little question in my mind that the Vice President, if not others, should, at the very least, be asked to resign their positions, if not, in the case of Dick Cheney, impeached.