tenet, kamel

Perhaps the most glaring example of this can be found in Tenet's February 2004 speech at his alma matter, Georgetown University. In a rambling defense of the CIA's pre-war estimate on Iraqi WMD capabilities, Tenet hedged on his agencies' earlier assertions. For the most part, he provided little or no substance to back up his remarks. But midway through his presentation, Tenet mentioned the 1995 defection of Saddam Hussein's son-in-law, Hussein Kamel, who had controlled Iraq's biological weapons program.
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"Only then was the world able to confirm that Iraq indeed had an active and dangerous biological weapons program," Tenet said. "Indeed, history matters in dealing with these complicated problems."

The irony of this statement by Tenet is that he, of all people, should have known it to be false. During the course of Hussein Kamel's debriefings with the CIA, British MI-6 and with UNSCOM, he repeatedly talked about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction programs, and his role not only in their manufacture, but also in their destruction following the onset of UN weapons inspections in Iraq in the summer of 1991.

"Nothing remained," Kamel told UN inspectors. "I ordered destruction of all chemical weapons. All weapons - biological, chemical, missile, nuclear - were destroyed."

Tenet knew this was the case. As deputy director of the CIA in August 1995, he was directly involved with the CIA's debriefing of Hussein Kamel.

As director of the CIA in February 2004, he had total access to the debriefing documents in order to refresh his memory. That he chose to misrepresent the defection of Hussein Kamel during his presentation at Georgetown University only underscores the personal culpability that Tenet bears when it comes to deceiving the president, Congress and the people of the United States about the threat posed by Iraq's WMD.