Joe Conason (Salon) - Spy vs. spy: Tenet fingers a Bush security official

[Dudley_DUright]

Tony Blair spoke with great passion and power Thursday, and was embraced with enthusiastic ovations -- and yet he might well have wished for a more auspicious moment to address the United States Congress. Only hours before the prime minister arrived in Washington, the furor over alleged misuse of intelligence during the drive toward war in Iraq again intensified -- as news emerged about CIA director George Tenet's secret testimony before the Senate Intelligence Committee. What the senators wanted to know, of course, was how a questionable British intelligence claim about Iraq's attempts to obtain African uranium got into the president's State of the Union address.

According to Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., who sits on the committee, the penitent Tenet testified that a White House official had insisted on including the disputed (and since discredited) information about Iraq's attempts to purchase uranium yellowcake from Niger. Durbin disclosed that Tenet "certainly told us who the person was who was insistent on putting this language in which the CIA knew to be incredible, this language about the uranium shipment from Africa."

"The more important question is who is it in the White House who was hellbent on misleading the American people and why are they still there?" Durbin said.

"Being a member of the Intelligence Committee I can't disclose that, but I trust that it will come out," he went on. "But it should come out from the president. The president should be outraged that he was misled and that he then misled the American people."

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http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2003/07/17/tenet/index.html