Reports misconstrue George Tenet's Reports misconstrue George Tenet's "no imminent threat" comments speech at Georgetown University. comments speech at Georgetown University.

Feb. 6, 2004: PoliSat .Com's Political Satire/ Commentary* Daily Update # 01·· ™©·2004·(Home)·
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Reports misconstrue George Tenet's "no imminent threat" comments speech at Georgetown University.·

Many, if not most, news reports about George Tenet's speech yesterday conveyed the false impression that Tenet's assertion that the CIA never described Saddam Hussein as an "imminent threat" had somehow contradicted what Bush had said. The opposite is true. In the pre-war State of the Union address, Bush explicitly said the threat was not yet "imminent" but that Saddam remaining in power-- especially without compliance with U.N. weapons sanctions-- constituted a gathering danger that could suddenly become "imminent" in the future. That is the clear gist of what Tenet said yesterday.

So why didn't most reporters correctly construe his speech as unequivocally supporting the standard that Bush had articulated for military action against Iraq? (I listened to the same speech and found what Tenet's speech described has having been the gist of the pre-war majority view in the intelligence community to have comprised compelling support for Operation Iraqi Freedom.) The answer is that most reporters share the same faith in the UN as an instrument of "international law" as is prevalent among so many Ivy League experts who tend to view problems such as enforcement of sanctions against Iraq and broader problems such as combating terror as law-enforcement tasks rather than overt (or covert) military tasks to defend modern civilization from medieval barbarity.

Can anyone seriously doubt that a sociopathic dictator who before 9-11 attempted to assassinate Bush 41 would somehow be less likely after 9-11 to seize opportunities to covertly furnish WMD materials to terrorist groups such as al Qaeda for use against our forces and/or allies in the Middle East and/or targets within the United States? To assume he would foreswear such opportunities would be as naive as to assume that Hitler would have foresworn opportunities to covertly collaborate with enemies sharing his hatred for Jews or for Milosevic to have foresworn opportunities to covertly collaborate with enemies that shared his goals for cleansing.

Not only did Tenet's speech support the standard articulated by Bush (while conceding that some of the conclusions from analysis of twelve years of dots begging to be connected may ultimately be proved incorrect), it made clear that for the intelligence community to have embraced the dismissive views of a minority of analysts would have been to ignore the weight of the available information in favor of allowing more time for Saddam Hussein to make more progress toward becoming able to pose an imminent threat. As Rumsfeld stated so succinctly in pre-war testimony to the Senate, when the risks of underestimating the dangers are so great, and given the intrinsic inability of our intelligence services to be able to predict the precise time beyond it would be unsafe to wait, it's better to act too soon than too late.

Reports on what Tenet meant on what wasn't "imminent."·

Reports say the CIA's Tenet meant
the "threat from Saddam wasn't imminent"
as though Dubya's words
had somehow diverged
from saying the threat wasn't "imminent."

In pre-war addresses the sentiment
expressed by the Dubya to implement
a war in Iräq
defined it to stop
the threats from maturing to "imminence."

The gist of what Tenet described
did not imply Dubya had lied
but rather supported
his view that abortive
enforcement leaves threats on the rise.

In pre-war addresses the sentiment
expressed by the Dubya was "imminence"
had not yet arrived
but war would comprise
a tool for preventing such imminence.

So why do "reports" convey sentiments
implying that Bush labeled "imminent"
the danger to stop
by war in Iräq
instead of the pathway to "imminence"?

The answer is reas'nably clear
in views such reporters hold dear--
That Dubya eschews
the Ivy League views
to wait 'til the danger is near.

--Jim Wrenn, Editor@PoliSat.Com.
·

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