Tenet on 60 Minutes

Something interesting struck me watching George Tenet on 60 Minutes last night. He recounted how the infamous 16 words got into the fateful State of the Union address. In previous speeches, Tenet had objected to the claim and gotten it removed. But for this speech, Tenet was busy and handed the speech to subordinates to evaluate, and those subordinates didn’t object to the claim. The interesting part of that story is that it was the 3rd time the president’s speech writers and advisers had tried to get the claim into a speech. They knew the claim had been debunked by CIA (which is why Bush credited the British with it, not his own intelligence agency) and that Tenet had on multiple occasions gotten it removed. But they kept trying to make the claim anyway. I find that quite illuminating of the forces at work in the White House leading up to the war.