AP Special Correspondent Charles J. Hanley has a readable, accessible summary of the Iraq WMD debacle in the Guardian.
Hanley opens with an anecdote that I haven’t seen before:
Beneath the giant dome of a Baghdad palace, facing his team of scientists and engineers, George Tenet sounded more like a football coach than a spymaster, a coach who didn’t know the game was over.
“Are we 85 percent done?’’ the CIA boss demanded. The arms hunters knew what he wanted to hear. “No!’’ they shouted back. “Let me hear it again!’’ They shouted again.
The weapons are out there, Tenet insisted. Go find them.
Veteran inspector Rod Barton couldn’t believe his ears. “It was nonsense,’’ the Australian biologist said of that February evening last year, when the then-chief of U.S. intelligence secretly flew to Baghdad and dropped in on the lakeside Perfume Palace, chandelier-hung home of the Iraq Survey Group.