Ducking the Blame

If you've been at all following the news lately, you can't have missed former CIA director George Tenet and his "Don't Blame Me" book and tour. Tenet's been trying to shift blame and avoid responsibility about the lead up to the Iraq invasion, portraying himself as a convenient scapegoat. I guess a Presidential Medal of Freedom doesn't go quite as far as you'd expect. I tend to think the Michael F. Scheuer, the one-time anonymous author of Imperial Hubris, had it right in a piece for last Sunday's Washington Post:

[H]e lacked the moral courage to resign and speak out publicly to try to stop our country from striding into what he knew would be an abyss.

Tenet seems to have been pretty much discredited by all this, and his book has done him no favors. If he had all this to say, it might've been a bit more significant if he'd mentioned it a little sooner. But the whole thing proved a useful springboard for Frank Rich this week to talk about Condi Rice. She apparently made the rounds of three Sunday talk shows last week (I don't get up early enough on a Sunday to know) to debunk Tenet before he made his case on 60 Minutes. Rich wants to know, "Is Condi Hiding the Smoking Gun?"

Of all the top-tier policy players who were beside the president and vice president at the war's creation, she is the highest still in power and still on the taxpayers' payroll. She is also the only one who can still get a free pass from the press. The current groupthink Beltway narrative has it that the secretary of state's recidivist foreign-policy realism and latent shuttle diplomacy have happily banished the Cheney-Rumsfeld cowboy arrogance that rode America into a ditch.

Thus Ms. Rice was dispatched to three Sunday shows last weekend to bat away Mr. Tenet's book before "60 Minutes" broadcast its interview with him that night. But in each appearance her statements raised more questions than they answered. She was persistently at odds with the record, not just the record as spun by Mr. Tenet but also the public record. She must be held to a higher standard - a k a the truth - before she too jumps ship.

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Of the Sunday interviewers, it was George Stephanopoulos who went for the jugular by returning to that nonexistent uranium from Africa. He forced Ms. Rice to watch a clip of her appearance on his show in June 2003, when she claimed she did not know of any serious questions about the uranium evidence before the war. Then he came as close as any Sunday host ever has to calling a guest a liar. "But that statement wasn't true," Mr. Stephanopoulos said. Ms. Rice pleaded memory loss, but the facts remain. She received a memo raising serious questions about the uranium in October 2002, three months before the president included the infamous 16 words on the subject in his State of the Union address. Her deputy, Stephen Hadley, received two memos as well as a phone call of warning from Mr. Tenet.

It amazes me how Rice has mostly been allowed to stay aloof from all of this. She's as much in the middle of it as anyone else is. That may change as the Bushies get more and more discredited for their whole misadventure. And, of course, these days there's always the Democratic Congress to pick up some of the slack left by the mainstream media.

That Ms. Rice feels scant responsibility for any of this was evident in her repeated assertions on Sunday that all the questions about prewar intelligence had been answered by the Robb-Silberman and Senate committee inquiries, neither of which even addressed how the administration used the intelligence it received. Now she risks being held in contempt of Congress by ducking a subpoena authorized by the House's Oversight Committee, whose chairman, Henry Waxman, has been trying to get direct answers from her about the uranium hoax since 2003.

Ms. Rice is stonewalling his investigation by rambling on about separation of powers and claiming she answered all relevant questions in writing, to Senator Carl Levin, during her confirmation to the cabinet in January 2005. If former or incumbent national security advisers like Henry Kissinger, Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski could testify before Congress without defiling the Constitution, so can she. As for her answers to Senator Levin's questions, five of eight were pure Alberto Gonzales: she either didn't recall or didn't know.

No wonder the most galling part of Ms. Rice's Sunday spin was her aside to Wolf Blitzer that she would get around to reflecting on these issues "when I have a chance to write my book." Another book! As long as American troops are dying in Iraq, the secretary of state has an obligation to answer questions about how they got there and why they stay. If accountability is ever to begin, it would be best if those questions are answered not on "60 Minutes" but under oath.

The Bushies sidestep accountability because no one's yet been willing to hold them accountable. Maybe, finally, someone will.