Christopher Hitchens slurs out his contempt for George Tenet. Far be it from me to defend Tenet, who is clearly a weasel. But then far be it from me to fail to note that Hitchens sports a fine tooth and tail himself. Take this bit:
As for his bawling and sobbing claim that faced with crisis in Iraq, "the administration's message was: Don't blame us. George Tenet and the CIA got us into this mess," I can say, as one who has attended about a thousand postmortems on Iraq in Washington, that I have never, ever, not once heard a single partisan of the administration say anything of the kind.
Maybe he was only listening to the "would you like another glass, Mr. Hitchens?" parts of these discussions. Because he seems to have missed stuff like, say, the notorious 2004 Senate Select Committee on Intelligence's report on the rather spectacular intelligence failures in regards to Iraq (the no WMD business, for instance). Because, see, as USA Today put it:
The Bush administration clearly hopes that the Senate committee's yearlong investigation will make the CIA, not the White House, look responsible for the mess.
This wasn't exactly a secret. Hitch, though, is pretty deeply invested in the notion that if you supported this stupid war based on the stupid justifications given for it by people who seemed pretty stupid, you weren't necessarily an idiot. Quaint notion, that.