Ex-CIA officials accuse Tent of hypocrisy for questioning Bush's Iraq war decision

Former intelligence officials in the US have condemned former CIA chief George Tent's assertion in his book At The Centre Of The Storm, that US President George Bush went to Iraq war without a proper debate within the country.

London, May 1 : Former intelligence officials in the US have condemned former CIA chief George Tent's assertion in his book "At The Centre Of The Storm", that US President George Bush went to Iraq war without a proper debate within the country.

The former CIA officials accused Tent of hypocrisy for publishing his memoir.uggesting that Tent had deployed a "highly selective memory", they said that that he had failed to speak out against the White House's push to invade Iraq on earlier occasions.

In his book, Tenet writes: "The true tragedy of Iraq is that it didn't have to be this way. We were dismissive about the capacity of Iraqis to control their own future. We have struggled ever since."

Tenet says there was no connection between Iraq and al-Qa'eda, as claimed by the Bush administration. "There was none at all," he told NBC's Today Show yesterday, and added former US Vice-president Dick Cheney misrepresented his famous remark that the evidence that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction was a "slam dunk case".

He also accuses Cheney and other officials of agitating to take America to war while "failing to consider whether Saddam Hussein was an imminent threat".

Tenet, who was CIA director during the 9/11 attacks, played a prominent public role during the months preceding the Iraq invasion. His book is the most controversial of its kind so far about the decision to invade Iraq in March 2003.

Six former CIA officials, including former senior terrorism experts, called on Tenet to return his presidential Medal of Freedom award for failing to speak out in 2002 and 2003 as the administration pressed the case for war based on flawed intelligence. "We also call for you to dedicate a percentage of the royalties from your book to the US soldiers and their families who have been killed and wounded in Iraq," the officials said in a letter.

They added: "By your silence you helped build the case for war."

Tenet, who now lectures at George Washington University, also came under fire from Michael Scheuer, a former CIA analyst, who headed the agency's hunt for bin Laden. In an article in the Washington Post, Scheuer wrote: "We shouldn't buy his attempts to let himself off the hook. He's saying that he lacked the moral courage to speak out publicly to stop our country from striding into what he knew would be an abyss."

ANI