It doesn’t seem to have mattered enough to Mr. Tenet, however, for him to fact-check the first page of his newly published book.

Mr. Tenet’s memoir, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, opens on a significant date: Sept. 12, 2001. Walking to the West Wing, Mr. Tenet purportedly encounters neocon mastermind Richard Perle coming the other way.

“Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday,” we are told Mr. Perle asserted. “They bear responsibility.”

Mr. Tenet, in a characteristic formulation, states that though he said nothing, he was inwardly “stunned.”

In the days since Mr. Tenet’s version of the story was made public, Mr. Perle has pointed out that he was not in the country on Sept. 12, much less the White House. On Monday, Mr. Tenet admitted to NBC’s Tom Brokaw that he “may have been off by a couple of days.”

Saturday’s New York Times noted another problematic vignette. In his book, the erstwhile spymaster relates a meeting at which a “naval reservist,” Tina Shelton, allied with controversial former Under Secretary of Defense Douglas Feith, announced that the linkage between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein’s Iraq was “an open-and-shut case.”

Ms. Shelton told The Times that she was never a Navy Reservist, in fact having served as a Defense Intelligence Agency analyst for 22 years, and that she never made the remark Mr. Tenet attributed to her.

Mr. Tenet must be dismayed at how his campaign for rehabilitation is going so far.

Perhaps he could have anticipated attacks from the likes of Maureen Dowd and Christopher Hitchens. More wounding, surely, are the brickbats that have rained down upon him from former comrades.

The founding head of the C.I.A.’s Bin Laden unit, Michael Scheuer, wrote in The Washington Post that the former director is “a man who never went from cheerleader to leader.”

A letter to Mr. Tenet from several former C.I.A. officers called on him to return his Medal of Freedom.

In Mr. Tenet’s defense, he admits some shortcomings with surprising candor. He writes of being told by Congressman Norm Dicks that “you let us down” by producing a severely flawed National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq in late 2002. “It was one of the lowest moments of my seven-year tenure,” Mr. Tenet recalls, “because I knew he was right.”

But if Mr. Tenet’s detractors have been reluctant to acknowledge such frankness, they have also been slow to seize on other episodes that illustrate precisely the weaknesses they have long ascribed to the former C.I.A. director.

Mr. Tenet is a very poor witness in his own defense, often relating damning details in an avuncular or shoulder-shrugging “what could I do?” style. If Dick Cheney is the Niccolò Machiavelli of the push for war, Mr. Tenet sometimes sounds like its George Costanza.

One of the most persistent charges thrown Mr. Tenet’s way is that he wanted to be liked more than he wanted to tell the truth. Here is Mr. Tenet relating the meeting addressed by Ms. Shelton (the “naval reservist” who wasn’t):

“I listened for a few more minutes, trying to be polite, before saying, ‘That’s very interesting’ …. What I was really thinking was, ‘This is complete crap, and I want this to end right now.’”

What he was really thinking and what came out of his mouth were, conveniently but dangerously, very different things.

Another common accusation is that Mr. Tenet was too deferential towards political figures. In his memoir, this is denied in the abstract, but the specifics tell a different story.

At one point, he laments speaking with a New York Times reporter at Condoleezza Rice’s request, insisting that it “certainly wasn’t my intention” to give “the impression that I was becoming a partisan player.”

But he did it nonetheless.

Even more troubling is a hazily explained episode from late 2002. Mr. Tenet describes Ms. Rice reacting with horror to unexpectedly equivocal assessments of Saddam’s W.M.D. capabilities from a senior C.I.A. officer.

In Mr. Tenet’s account, Ms. Rice noted that the level of confidence the officer was expressing was “a heck of a lot lower than we’re getting from reading the [Presidential Daily Briefings].”

Mr. Tenet admits that “we had in fact been much more assertive in what we were writing for the president on some issues.” But the discrepancy is not explained further, and there is no sense that Mr. Tenet even grasps its importance.

These details have received relatively little attention in the days since the release of Mr. Tenet’s book. Presumably that is because they do not fit especially neatly into anyone’s preferred narrative. They reflect dismally on the administration’s competence, yet they also fail to support many of the claims made by the war’s loudest opponents.

They suggest that the nation was marched into war at least as much as a consequence of sloppiness as skullduggery, that the overall pattern was one of cock-ups as much as conspiracies.

The phrase “the banality of evil” was coined to describe events beside which even the horrors of Iraq pale. Mr. Tenet’s book is testament to the evils of banality. It paints a picture of momentous historical decisions emerging from the same messy dynamics that are at play in every office in the land, with those more junior in rank straining facts to please their bosses, and swallowing misgivings in public even as they carp in private.

It is a depressing picture from which no one emerges with credit—least of all, despite his best efforts, Mr. Tenet himself.

History will absolve none of them. With thousands of Americans and Iraqis dead, hundreds of billions of dollars squandered, and the national honor permanently tarnished, there is more than enough blame to go around.

As a group of former intelligence officers observed in a letter they sent to Mr. Tenet upon the publication of At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, his supposed outrage over the misleading propaganda that led to the war is belated and utterly self-serving. During the critical months between September 2002 and March 2003, in the midst of that White House campaign, he was nothing but the useful tool of those he now criticizes.

From the beginning, Mr. Tenet knew that his colleagues in the White House and the National Security Council were concocting a case for war that went far beyond any reliable intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s arsenal and intentions. He knew that his best field officers and most competent analysts didn’t believe the warnings about an Iraqi “mushroom cloud.” He also knew that they had no convincing evidence of ties between Saddam and Al Qaeda.

Yet while Mr. Cheney and Ms. Rice lied dramatically and repeatedly on national television, persuading the majority of Americans that Iraq was indeed behind the 9/11 attacks, Mr. Tenet maintained a discreet silence—except when he was enabling them.

Now, however, Mr. Tenet hopes to be seen as the truth-teller among those prevaricators. Promoting his book on 60 Minutes on Sunday evening, he vehemently denounced the White House spinning of 9/11 to justify the war. At one point, CBS correspondent Scott Pelley suggested that he should have pushed back harder against that spin, reading from a speech in which the President warned that “we need to think about Saddam Hussein using Al Qaeda to do his dirty work.” Mr. Pelley then asked: “Is that what you [were] telling the President?”

The former C.I.A. chief replied indignantly. No, he said, “we didn’t believe Al Qaeda was going to do Saddam Hussein’s dirty work.” Why, then, did he emphasize the alleged connections between Al Qaeda and Iraq when he testified before the Senate Intelligence Committee in February 2003? Why did he ominously warn the Senate that Iraqi intelligence had given “safe haven” to Al Qaeda operatives? The answer is that he knew what the White House wanted, and he delivered the message that helped to sell the war.

Mr. Tenet played the stooge over and over again during those months. In October 2002, he signed the National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq, a fatally skewed assessment of the dangers posed to us by that ruined country. In January 2003, he let the White House pretend that Iraq was seeking to obtain uranium from Africa. And in February 2003, as Mr. Powell presented a series of bogus assertions to the United Nations and forever disgraced himself and his country, Mr. Tenet sat behind him in silent, nodding confirmation of those falsehoods. All of those acts betrayed the C.I.A.’s mission, and the people who had faithfully served the agency, by permitting their work to be dismissed and distorted. He owed them—and us—much better.

Perhaps the most pitiful argument mustered by Mr. Tenet to defend himself today is his attempt to rebut the “slam-dunk” anecdote. President Bush and other members of the administration have said that the C.I.A. director assured them that the intelligence proving the existence of Saddam’s terrible arsenal was unassailable—and that they went to war on that basis. He whines that his basketball cliché has been misinterpreted, because he was only promising the President that a strong argument could be made, not that the information itself was perfect. More plausibly, he also notes that the decision to invade had been reached long before that little warmongering pep rally in the Oval Office.

But so what? Mr. Tenet sat and listened as the President told us, untruthfully, that no such decision had been reached and that war would only be waged as a “last resort.” He doesn’t deny encouraging Mr. Bush in his war salesmanship, even though he doubted the wisdom of that policy and the process that had led to it. His fitful protests against the worst lies uttered by Mr. Cheney and Ms. Rice had no effect because he refused to risk his own position for truth and honor.

Bleating about his damaged reputation, Mr. Tenet sounds much like Mr. Powell, whose loyalty to the President overruled duty to the country. Mr. Tenet got a medal and a multimillion-dollar book contract. But he forfeited his honor, and that cannot be retrieved.

On Katrina:

Then, Kerry ended on this note:

—Nicole Brydson

Maybe the biggest jaw-dropper comes in Chapter 4, “The Hunt for WMD.” It’s about Dr. Sawsan Alhaddad, a woman in her 50’s, now living in Cleveland, Ohio, who escaped Saddam’s Iraq 27 years ago. In May 2002, a C.I.A. agent tracked her down and asked her to go back to Baghdad and do a little espionage. Her brother, who still lived there, had worked in Saddam’s nuclear-weapons program in the 1980’s and early 90’s. The C.I.A. wanted her to ask him a series of questions about the program’s current status and to offer him refuge in the United States. Bravely, she made the trip, asked the questions (usually on long walks, at night) and learned that the program had been dead for a decade. She went back to the States and told her case officers the news. But the C.I.A. waved it off; her brother, they said, was obviously lying.

Then Mr. Risen adds the kicker. The C.I.A. had persuaded the exiled relatives of 30 Iraqi weapons scientists to make the risky trip back to their homeland. All of them came back with the same story: Iraq had no nuclear program. This was an amazing treasure trove of intelligence at a time when the C.I.A., which had no spies on the ground, was straining to learn all it could about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. And yet the information was dismissed, ignored. Nothing about the 30 relatives was ever passed on to the State Department, the Pentagon or the White House. Nor were their findings incorporated into the C.I.A.’s own National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s W.M.D., written a mere month later, which concluded, on nothing particularly solid, that Iraq “is reconstituting its nuclear program.”

Mr. Risen lays out a dozen similar instances of reality slamming into Team Bush’s assumptions—and the assumptions emerging unruffled. Time and again, officials who raised doubts were flung to the sidelines, while those who got with the program and clamped on their blinders won promotions.

Another amazing story along these lines dates from June 2003, after U.S. forces in Iraq captured Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein’s personal secretary. This was such a huge find—Mr. Hamid had been designated the “Ace of Diamonds” in U.S. Central Command’s deck of 52 most-wanted Saddamites—that the C.I.A. assigned its best Arabic speaker to conduct the interrogation. Mr. Hamid revealed two key things: First, Saddam had not been at Dora Farms the night that President Bush, acting on Mr. Tenet’s urgings, launched a cruise-missile strike on the farm, starting the war a bit earlier than planned, in hopes of decapitating the regime from the get-go. Second, there was no W.M.D. program. The C.I.A. bosses concluded that Mr. Hamid was lying, blamed their top-notch interrogator for going too easy on him and replaced her.

Another episode: In November 2003, the Baghdad station chief sent a special cable to Langley, warning that an insurgency was stirring and that the U.S. was in danger of losing the war that the President had declared we’d already won. Headquarters started distributing inflammatory memos, accusing the station chief of personal misconduct. He quit the agency in disgust.

Mr. Risen blames George Tenet for the climate of incompetence, groupthink and political kowtowing that enshrouded Langley in those crucial months leading up to war. In Plan of Attack (2004), Bob Woodward revealed that the C.I.A. director had assured President George W. Bush that the intelligence on Iraq’s W.M.D. was a “slam dunk.” Mr. Risen provides the back-story: He notes that, after the 2000 election, Mr. Bush nearly replaced Mr. Tenet, who was after all a holdover from the Clinton administration; Mr. Tenet won him over through persistent ingratiation and some lobbying with the President’s father (who still had some influence over his boy). When, after 9/11, the President resisted widespread calls for a clean sweep at Langley, Mr. Tenet felt he owed him big time. Mr. Risen reveals that at two conferences of regional station chiefs—one in Rome in April 2002, another in London the following November—senior C.I.A. officials made it clear that the President was going to war, that the agency had to jump onboard, that the second-guessing and criticizing must come to an end.

All of this raises the question: How much did George W. Bush know, and when did he know it? In the extremely unlikely event that the President sat down and read this book, would any of it surprise or outrage him? Like countless other chronicles, this book tells of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld running rings around the entire bureaucracy. Were they also running rings around the Oval Office? Mr. Risen recounts one episode in which Mr. Rumsfeld simply ignored the President’s orders. (Mr. Bush, upset that the new Afghan government that he’d helped install might be turning into a “narco-state,” wanted to destroy the new Afghan government’s poppy fields; Mr. Rumsfeld brushed the directive aside.) It’s indisputable at this point that the intelligence community was responding to pressure from the White House throughout the year leading up to the war. But how much of that pressure came from Mr. Bush and how much from his sneering No. 2 down the hall? More to the point, if Mr. Bush had known everything that James Risen has subsequently discovered, would he have gone to war?

Probably he would have. Wars rarely have single causes, and everyone in Team Bush, the captain included, seems to have had his own reasons for toppling Saddam Hussein (and his own set of assurances that the war would be a cakewalk). Still, it’s stunning to realize that, nearly three years after the fact—and despite dozens of books and hundreds of incisive newspaper and magazine articles—we don’t yet know why this war took place. I suspect we may never fully know, unless Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld or one of their secretaries was taking notes or running a dicta-belt during their many phone conversations from the summer of 2002 through the spring of 2003.

Mr. Risen doesn’t help us out on this score, either. Then again, he doesn’t pretend to. His sources (several of whom he names, by the way) tend not to rank high enough to be privy to such matters—and, on balance, that’s for the best, since those who are in the know wouldn’t tell him or any other reporter, anyway. (Mr. Woodward, for all his access, did no better on the big questions in his tome, and he got wind of almost nothing that State of War uncovers.)

That said, I do wish there were more to this book. It reads like a string of magazine articles rather than a cohesive work. The author’s just-the-facts-ma’am approach is refreshing, to a point (we’ve probably had enough color-for-its-own-sake accounts of what Dick Cheney was eating at a crucial lunch), but one yearns for a bit more flesh, a few scene-setters, some style. Still, one has little cause for complaint. The book, though dry, is at least short, lucid and ceaselessly revelatory. Mr. Risen constructs more—and more hair-raising—skeletons with his bare-bones stories than any number of meatier, you-are-there wind-wheezers.

Fred Kaplan is the national-security columnist for Slate.

Maybe the biggest jaw-dropper comes in Chapter 4, “The Hunt for WMD.” It’s about Dr. Sawsan Alhaddad, a woman in her 50’s, now living in Cleveland, Ohio, who escaped Saddam’s Iraq 27 years ago. In May 2002, a C.I.A. agent tracked her down and asked her to go back to Baghdad and do a little espionage. Her brother, who still lived there, had worked in Saddam’s nuclear-weapons program in the 1980’s and early 90’s. The C.I.A. wanted her to ask him a series of questions about the program’s current status and to offer him refuge in the United States. Bravely, she made the trip, asked the questions (usually on long walks, at night) and learned that the program had been dead for a decade. She went back to the States and told her case officers the news. But the C.I.A. waved it off; her brother, they said, was obviously lying.

Then Mr. Risen adds the kicker. The C.I.A. had persuaded the exiled relatives of 30 Iraqi weapons scientists to make the risky trip back to their homeland. All of them came back with the same story: Iraq had no nuclear program. This was an amazing treasure trove of intelligence at a time when the C.I.A., which had no spies on the ground, was straining to learn all it could about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. And yet the information was dismissed, ignored. Nothing about the 30 relatives was ever passed on to the State Department, the Pentagon or the White House. Nor were their findings incorporated into the C.I.A.’s own National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s W.M.D., written a mere month later, which concluded, on nothing particularly solid, that Iraq “is reconstituting its nuclear program.”

Mr. Risen lays out a dozen similar instances of reality slamming into Team Bush’s assumptions—and the assumptions emerging unruffled. Time and again, officials who raised doubts were flung to the sidelines, while those who got with the program and clamped on their blinders won promotions.

Another amazing story along these lines dates from June 2003, after U.S. forces in Iraq captured Abid Hamid Mahmud al-Tikriti, Saddam Hussein’s personal secretary. This was such a huge find—Mr. Hamid had been designated the “Ace of Diamonds” in U.S. Central Command’s deck of 52 most-wanted Saddamites—that the C.I.A. assigned its best Arabic speaker to conduct the interrogation. Mr. Hamid revealed two key things: First, Saddam had not been at Dora Farms the night that President Bush, acting on Mr. Tenet’s urgings, launched a cruise-missile strike on the farm, starting the war a bit earlier than planned, in hopes of decapitating the regime from the get-go. Second, there was no W.M.D. program. The C.I.A. bosses concluded that Mr. Hamid was lying, blamed their top-notch interrogator for going too easy on him and replaced her.

Another episode: In November 2003, the Baghdad station chief sent a special cable to Langley, warning that an insurgency was stirring and that the U.S. was in danger of losing the war that the President had declared we’d already won. Headquarters started distributing inflammatory memos, accusing the station chief of personal misconduct. He quit the agency in disgust.

Mr. Risen blames George Tenet for the climate of incompetence, groupthink and political kowtowing that enshrouded Langley in those crucial months leading up to war. In Plan of Attack (2004), Bob Woodward revealed that the C.I.A. director had assured President George W. Bush that the intelligence on Iraq’s W.M.D. was a “slam dunk.” Mr. Risen provides the back-story: He notes that, after the 2000 election, Mr. Bush nearly replaced Mr. Tenet, who was after all a holdover from the Clinton administration; Mr. Tenet won him over through persistent ingratiation and some lobbying with the President’s father (who still had some influence over his boy). When, after 9/11, the President resisted widespread calls for a clean sweep at Langley, Mr. Tenet felt he owed him big time. Mr. Risen reveals that at two conferences of regional station chiefs—one in Rome in April 2002, another in London the following November—senior C.I.A. officials made it clear that the President was going to war, that the agency had to jump onboard, that the second-guessing and criticizing must come to an end.

All of this raises the question: How much did George W. Bush know, and when did he know it? In the extremely unlikely event that the President sat down and read this book, would any of it surprise or outrage him? Like countless other chronicles, this book tells of Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld running rings around the entire bureaucracy. Were they also running rings around the Oval Office? Mr. Risen recounts one episode in which Mr. Rumsfeld simply ignored the President’s orders. (Mr. Bush, upset that the new Afghan government that he’d helped install might be turning into a “narco-state,” wanted to destroy the new Afghan government’s poppy fields; Mr. Rumsfeld brushed the directive aside.) It’s indisputable at this point that the intelligence community was responding to pressure from the White House throughout the year leading up to the war. But how much of that pressure came from Mr. Bush and how much from his sneering No. 2 down the hall? More to the point, if Mr. Bush had known everything that James Risen has subsequently discovered, would he have gone to war?

Probably he would have. Wars rarely have single causes, and everyone in Team Bush, the captain included, seems to have had his own reasons for toppling Saddam Hussein (and his own set of assurances that the war would be a cakewalk). Still, it’s stunning to realize that, nearly three years after the fact—and despite dozens of books and hundreds of incisive newspaper and magazine articles—we don’t yet know why this war took place. I suspect we may never fully know, unless Mr. Cheney, Mr. Rumsfeld or one of their secretaries was taking notes or running a dicta-belt during their many phone conversations from the summer of 2002 through the spring of 2003.

Mr. Risen doesn’t help us out on this score, either. Then again, he doesn’t pretend to. His sources (several of whom he names, by the way) tend not to rank high enough to be privy to such matters—and, on balance, that’s for the best, since those who are in the know wouldn’t tell him or any other reporter, anyway. (Mr. Woodward, for all his access, did no better on the big questions in his tome, and he got wind of almost nothing that State of War uncovers.)

That said, I do wish there were more to this book. It reads like a string of magazine articles rather than a cohesive work. The author’s just-the-facts-ma’am approach is refreshing, to a point (we’ve probably had enough color-for-its-own-sake accounts of what Dick Cheney was eating at a crucial lunch), but one yearns for a bit more flesh, a few scene-setters, some style. Still, one has little cause for complaint. The book, though dry, is at least short, lucid and ceaselessly revelatory. Mr. Risen constructs more—and more hair-raising—skeletons with his bare-bones stories than any number of meatier, you-are-there wind-wheezers.

Fred Kaplan is the national-security columnist for Slate.

I wonder what bitter pills Choire Sicha has had to swallow in his own personal life that would give rise to such acidic, below-the-belt, mean-spirited, hypercritical comments and have them flow from his pen [“Wales Beached Here,” Nov. 7].

If the royals visiting the United States are irrelevant, then his article about Camilla’s clothes is even more so.

Perhaps if he would put a dollop of honey in his tea in the morning, he might develop a sweet taste in his mouth, which just might lead him to being a bit more charitable.

Mr. Sicha has a way with words—a real talent. It would be lovely to read something he has written that is pertinent and uplifting. It might do his own heart some good as well.

Elizabeth Tomelleri

Springfield, Mo.

Choosing Between O.J. and Plasma TV’s

To the Editor:

Re Nicholas von Hoffman’s “Watch the Housing Market, and Fear for Your Country!” [The National Observer, Nov. 7]: I was a trader on the Chicago Board of Trade for many years. I’m so right-wing that I think Rush Limbaugh is a little liberal sometimes. When the Consumer Price Index would come out up x percent excluding food and energy, it would drive me nuts. What does it mean to somebody if the price of orange juice and gas goes up but the price of computers and plasma TV’s goes down?

Bill Pearlman

Manhattan

Bush’s Bogus Honor

To the Editor:

Glad to see Chris Lehmann bring up the matter of George Tenet being awarded the Medal of Freedom [“The White House’s Agency: That Tenet Doctrine Lingers!”, Oct. 31]. That very strange incident hasn’t received enough attention in the press. I recall being mystified at the time that George W. Bush pinned the medal on Mr. Tenet: The administration was blaming Tenet’s C.I.A. for all the lousy intelligence on Iraq, while it gives him one of the nation’s highest honors? It didn’t add up, and for me this fawning treatment of George Tenet is a very strong indicator that the administration was desperate to keep a lid on all the shenanigans that took place in the run-up to the Iraq war.

Why in the world isn’t stuff like this more apparent to mainstream journalists, and why didn’t it get any notice at the time it happened? Why was there almost no discussion of the bizarre nature of Mr. Tenet’s award in our national press? I would be curious to hear if Mr. Lehmann has any insights on what made our media go into the tank for the Bush administration to the extent that it has?

Keep up the good work.

Peter Jung

Hudson, N.Y.

From Watergate to Wilson

To the Editor:

Re Ron Rosenbaum’s “Frenzy of Judyism May Augur the Dawn of New Neural Age” [The Edgy Enthusiast, Oct. 31]: Well, O.K., no doubt the blogosphere has changed the way our minds perceive things, even if, for us non-media types, it’s only a small perturbation.

But the central absurdity—the Bushheads’ concern over what Joseph Wilson might say—equates quite nicely to the central absurdity of Watergate: the Nixonian paranoia about what Larry O’Brien might know about Howard Hughes. Plus ça change ….

Keep up the good work.

Charles F. Schmidt

Brownsville, Texas

Pursuing Purse Perfection

To the Editor:

Thanks so much for Simon Doonan’s H.A.G.S. column [“Ladies! Open Up Your Purses,” Simon Says, Oct. 31]. It was a relief to have my disorder recognized and named! (I have 40 or so bags, and none of them are exactly right. Would love to see a future column in which Mr. Doonan discusses what is the minimum number of bags any woman should have for a streamlined life, and what kind he recommends …. )

I love Simon Says, and it’s just about the only reason I read The Observer. I’ve depended on Mr. Doonan’s humor and good sense for years—thank you so much!

Maxine Frost-Lenzi

Portland, Ore.

Columbia Director Responds

To the Editor:

Jason Horowitz was correct to write that the National Arts Journalism Program was cut loose by Columbia University’s School of Journalism [“Did Lee Bollinger Abandon Commitment to Columbia’s Culture?”, Oct. 24]. But regardless of whether or not that action was reasonable—I think it was—Mr. Horowitz stretches logic when he implies that the dean’s decision establishes the president’s indifference.

The real problem with his piece, however, is that it left out the most pertinent fact: Within days of the J-school’s decision, the Columbia Arts Initiative, which was created by Mr. Bollinger, offered the NAJP a home. (I know this to be true, because I made the offer.) This may not have been a perfect solution; the National Arts Journalism Program would have become the National Arts Journalism Program. Perhaps this is why the NAJP’s director declined refuge. In any case, an offer to work in a shop reporting directly to Mr. Bollinger was on the table. Including this information would have turned Mr. Horowitz’s story on its head and led to the headline “NAJP Declines Bollinger’s Offer to Increase Arts Emphasis.”

The omission is unfortunate, but not grave, because anyone paying attention to the issue knows that Lee Bollinger’s commitment to the arts is demonstrably unsurpassed.

Gregory Mosher

Director, Columbia University Arts Initiative

Manhattan

In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald’s entire investigation all leads back to the vigorous Bush administration putsch for the Iraq invasion. “Without intending to,” said intelligence historian Thomas Powers last week, “the investigators have stumbled into the whole case for going to war. And once you start looking into that, it’s not going to be pretty.”

The original aim in sneakily revealing Valerie Plame Wilson’s C.I.A. affiliation, after all, was apparently to discredit the campaign of her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, to publicize the news arising from his trip to Niger. (That news was that Saddam Hussein hadn’t acquired uranium yellowcake from the African nation.)

But what, as Mark Felt famously said to Bob Woodward, of the “overall”? “All this talk of independence from the President, that doesn’t describe what they really do. They work for the President,” Mr. Powers said of the C.I.A.’s senior brass.

Still, by the Bush administration’s lights, there’s working for the President and working for the President—and the C.I.A. was clearly not on board with the program early on.

“The C.I.A. kept looking and saying, ‘We’re not finding any evidence,’” said James Bamford, the author of A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies. “And the Pentagon was angry that this was coming out of the agency. And so that’s why they had this special unit. That’s why [David] Wurmser was in there—to become the anti-C.I.A.”

Mr. Wurmser, Vice President Cheney’s Middle East advisor, was recruited by Under Secretary for Defense Policy Douglas Feith to create the Office of Special Plans, a policy group in the Pentagon formed to cherry-pick information that would provide the casus belli for invading Iraq. Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, famously referred to the unit’s handiwork as “a Chinese menu,” offering a readymade connoisseur’s choice of reasons to topple the Hussein regime in Iraq.

“It started within Feith’s Special Plans group,” said a former senior White House official who requested not to be named. “That’s where you first see this business of taking one’s animosity toward Langley and the agency and finding intelligence that would support one’s own position. There was a very direct effort to send out people to come back and report that very thing. You had people going to open-source reports and coming to different conclusions, in many cases, than the authors of the reports themselves did.”

Even though—or perhaps because—the Office of Special Plans was custom-ordering its case for war, it began throwing its weight conspicuously around the rest of the White House. “I went to a White House Situation Room meeting, and [Mr. Feith] took over the meeting, and [then–Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen] Hadley let him,” said Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff for Colin Powell. “It was not challenged by any of the intelligence people. It was clear to everyone in the room—not only to people like me, who were consumers of intelligence for many decades, but senior intelligence people themselves—that this guy didn’t know what he was talking about.”

At such moments, Mr. Wilkerson says, the gauntlet was thrown. “If you’re arrayed at the back of the room, and if you don’t see anyone at the table who speaks out, then you say, ‘Well, I’m not going to speak up either.’”

The Plame leak is in itself evidence of how Bush administration officials failed to apprehend the most basic operations of intelligence. “I’ve talked with a number of people who knew [Valerie Plame Wilson] and worked with her,” said Burton Hersh, the author of The Old Boys, the groundbreaking study of the C.I.A.’s Cold War career. “And the whole idea that she [or] her undercover status was not that important is ridiculous. She was key to the effort to contain nuclear proliferation in the Third World. Once she’s taken out, her whole network of people can be exposed. That shows you a disconnect across the board. This was a network trying to keep jihadists from acquiring nuclear weapons …. You know, it’s hard enough to keep these people undercover. To lift that cover for short-term political advantage—that’s indefensible. And to punish Joe Wilson like this—it’s suicidal.”

LONGTIME STUDENTS OF INTELLIGENCE TURF WARS note that such tactics hark back to the darkest days of the Nixon White House. “Nixon politicized the C.I.A. when he went to—this is very important: In the infamous ‘smoking-gun’ tape, he talks about going to [C.I.A. director] Richard Helms to tell [F.B.I. director] Pat Gray he’s got to stop the Watergate investigation,” said historian Stanley Kutler, author of The Wars of Watergate. “The idea was to tell Gray his investigators ‘were impinging on C.I.A. assets.’ That was the first time in our history that the C.I.A. became involved in ideological, partisan politics.”

But in the Plame case, C.I.A. director George Tenet, who resigned in July, 2004, appeared to hand over a sensitively positioned asset to the Vice President on a platter. “This marks the second major indiscretion by Tenet, together with his ‘slam-dunk’ statement on W.M.D.’s,” said Loch K. Johnson, a former aide to the 1975 Church Committee inquiry into C.I.A. abuses and now a Regents professor at the University of Georgia. “The major difference is that the C.I.A.’s skirts were comparatively clean during Watergate, except for giving a wig and disguise to [break-in burglar] Howard Hunt. Now, as Richard Helms would say, the agency is up to its scuppers in culpability with this.”

“Tenet had this Hobson’s choice to make,” said Mr. Bamford. “And instead of backing his own people—who were right all along—he didn’t want to lose his face time with Bush.” Indeed, the notion of a slam-dunk was apparently more than simply a metaphor for Mr. Tenet. The C.I.A. director “walked around with a basketball under his arm in the halls of Langley,” said Mr. Hersh. “Here you have someone directing the agency, who you’re supposed to take seriously, bouncing a basketball in the halls.” Was Mr. Tenet just working up to the “slam-dunk” flourish? “No,” Mr. Hersh replied. “The idea apparently was that he saw himself as a jock, and as a team player.”

Mr. Tenet’s fealty to the Bush team has already produced prestigious dividends. “Tenet’s Medal of Freedom was obviously a quid pro quo,” said Mr. Kutler, “in exchange for not writing a book. It was quite clear to me that they were greasing the skids for him.”

“You have to understand, the war was beginning to go badly in July 2003,” said Mr. Bamford. “You have the world coming down on Bush. You have these people who are the ultimate spinmeisters for both Bush and Cheney; they call up all their friendly people [in the press]. How are you going to discredit this thing? You say, ‘Well, this thing was all cooked up by [Mr. Wilson’s] wife. This wasn’t serious. This was a wife trying to get her husband a job.’”

And that’s where one might violate the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. “It was a tripwire they stumbled across,” Mr. Bamford said.

Mr. Wilkerson, who recently went public with explosive charges that the administration’s foreign policy had been hijacked by a “cabal” of ideologues, said that analysts and officers touting the pro-invasion line purposely ran interference against any information that threatened the Office of Special Plans’ delicately assembled case for the invasion of Iraq. “The fundamental problem was group-think,” said Mr. Wilkerson. “The group-think was basically, ‘If you disagree with me on anything, I’ll put you in a footnote.’”

EVEN AFTER ALL OF THE INTRIGUE AND HIGH-STAKES ANGST over the Plame investigation, the much bigger black box concerning the elaborate put-up job on W.M.D. remains largely untouched and unopened. And there’s a sickly sense in Washington that, even if the special prosecutor’s office returns a boatload of indictments, that’s where things will stand. After all, the Senate Intelligence Committee still has yet to deliver its follow-up report on who was chiefly responsible for fouling up the W.M.D. case. The committee’s chairman, Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, announced last year that the inquiry had been scheduled too uncomfortably close to the November 2004 elections—and hasn’t taken it up since then.

Given that Congress—the strongest body to provide intelligence oversight—clearly brings its own political agenda to the table these days, even if the Senate Intelligence Committee were to reconvene its inquiry, agency watchers aren’t expecting it to meet the standard set by independent investigations such as the 1975 Church Committee hearings.

“The Congress will sit there till hell freezes over listening to people explain the details of the aluminum tubes,” Mr. Powers said. “But the aluminum tubes were never about the administration proving the threat that justified our going to war; they were just the administration’s way of persuading the country of the need for going to war. And the thing is, they know that in Congress. And they know that this means you have to accuse the President of being dishonest—and dishonest in a way that cost the lives of American boys. Congress won’t do that, and the Democrats won’t do that, since they voted—very foolishly—to proceed with the war.”

All these recondite and dismal calculations are poor competition indeed for the much-advertised “moral clarity” of the Cheney retinue of war makers. They deftly sidestepped the adverse intelligence reports, even as they assembled their own appetizing Chinese menu of rationales for invading Iraq. Their creed, said Mr. Wilkerson, is “conform or die.”

In fact, Mr. Fitzgerald’s entire investigation all leads back to the vigorous Bush administration putsch for the Iraq invasion. “Without intending to,” said intelligence historian Thomas Powers last week, “the investigators have stumbled into the whole case for going to war. And once you start looking into that, it’s not going to be pretty.”

The original aim in sneakily revealing Valerie Plame Wilson’s C.I.A. affiliation, after all, was apparently to discredit the campaign of her husband, former ambassador Joseph Wilson, to publicize the news arising from his trip to Niger. (That news was that Saddam Hussein hadn’t acquired uranium yellowcake from the African nation.)

But what, as Mark Felt famously said to Bob Woodward, of the “overall”? “All this talk of independence from the President, that doesn’t describe what they really do. They work for the President,” Mr. Powers said of the C.I.A.’s senior brass.

Still, by the Bush administration’s lights, there’s working for the President and working for the President—and the C.I.A. was clearly not on board with the program early on.

“The C.I.A. kept looking and saying, ‘We’re not finding any evidence,’” said James Bamford, the author of A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America’s Intelligence Agencies. “And the Pentagon was angry that this was coming out of the agency. And so that’s why they had this special unit. That’s why [David] Wurmser was in there—to become the anti-C.I.A.”

Mr. Wurmser, Vice President Cheney’s Middle East advisor, was recruited by Under Secretary for Defense Policy Douglas Feith to create the Office of Special Plans, a policy group in the Pentagon formed to cherry-pick information that would provide the casus belli for invading Iraq. Mr. Cheney’s chief of staff, I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby, famously referred to the unit’s handiwork as “a Chinese menu,” offering a readymade connoisseur’s choice of reasons to topple the Hussein regime in Iraq.

“It started within Feith’s Special Plans group,” said a former senior White House official who requested not to be named. “That’s where you first see this business of taking one’s animosity toward Langley and the agency and finding intelligence that would support one’s own position. There was a very direct effort to send out people to come back and report that very thing. You had people going to open-source reports and coming to different conclusions, in many cases, than the authors of the reports themselves did.”

Even though—or perhaps because—the Office of Special Plans was custom-ordering its case for war, it began throwing its weight conspicuously around the rest of the White House. “I went to a White House Situation Room meeting, and [Mr. Feith] took over the meeting, and [then–Deputy National Security Advisor Stephen] Hadley let him,” said Lawrence Wilkerson, the former chief of staff for Colin Powell. “It was not challenged by any of the intelligence people. It was clear to everyone in the room—not only to people like me, who were consumers of intelligence for many decades, but senior intelligence people themselves—that this guy didn’t know what he was talking about.”

At such moments, Mr. Wilkerson says, the gauntlet was thrown. “If you’re arrayed at the back of the room, and if you don’t see anyone at the table who speaks out, then you say, ‘Well, I’m not going to speak up either.’”

The Plame leak is in itself evidence of how Bush administration officials failed to apprehend the most basic operations of intelligence. “I’ve talked with a number of people who knew [Valerie Plame Wilson] and worked with her,” said Burton Hersh, the author of The Old Boys, the groundbreaking study of the C.I.A.’s Cold War career. “And the whole idea that she [or] her undercover status was not that important is ridiculous. She was key to the effort to contain nuclear proliferation in the Third World. Once she’s taken out, her whole network of people can be exposed. That shows you a disconnect across the board. This was a network trying to keep jihadists from acquiring nuclear weapons …. You know, it’s hard enough to keep these people undercover. To lift that cover for short-term political advantage—that’s indefensible. And to punish Joe Wilson like this—it’s suicidal.”

LONGTIME STUDENTS OF INTELLIGENCE TURF WARS note that such tactics hark back to the darkest days of the Nixon White House. “Nixon politicized the C.I.A. when he went to—this is very important: In the infamous ‘smoking-gun’ tape, he talks about going to [C.I.A. director] Richard Helms to tell [F.B.I. director] Pat Gray he’s got to stop the Watergate investigation,” said historian Stanley Kutler, author of The Wars of Watergate. “The idea was to tell Gray his investigators ‘were impinging on C.I.A. assets.’ That was the first time in our history that the C.I.A. became involved in ideological, partisan politics.”

But in the Plame case, C.I.A. director George Tenet, who resigned in July, 2004, appeared to hand over a sensitively positioned asset to the Vice President on a platter. “This marks the second major indiscretion by Tenet, together with his ‘slam-dunk’ statement on W.M.D.’s,” said Loch K. Johnson, a former aide to the 1975 Church Committee inquiry into C.I.A. abuses and now a Regents professor at the University of Georgia. “The major difference is that the C.I.A.’s skirts were comparatively clean during Watergate, except for giving a wig and disguise to [break-in burglar] Howard Hunt. Now, as Richard Helms would say, the agency is up to its scuppers in culpability with this.”

“Tenet had this Hobson’s choice to make,” said Mr. Bamford. “And instead of backing his own people—who were right all along—he didn’t want to lose his face time with Bush.” Indeed, the notion of a slam-dunk was apparently more than simply a metaphor for Mr. Tenet. The C.I.A. director “walked around with a basketball under his arm in the halls of Langley,” said Mr. Hersh. “Here you have someone directing the agency, who you’re supposed to take seriously, bouncing a basketball in the halls.” Was Mr. Tenet just working up to the “slam-dunk” flourish? “No,” Mr. Hersh replied. “The idea apparently was that he saw himself as a jock, and as a team player.”

Mr. Tenet’s fealty to the Bush team has already produced prestigious dividends. “Tenet’s Medal of Freedom was obviously a quid pro quo,” said Mr. Kutler, “in exchange for not writing a book. It was quite clear to me that they were greasing the skids for him.”

“You have to understand, the war was beginning to go badly in July 2003,” said Mr. Bamford. “You have the world coming down on Bush. You have these people who are the ultimate spinmeisters for both Bush and Cheney; they call up all their friendly people [in the press]. How are you going to discredit this thing? You say, ‘Well, this thing was all cooked up by [Mr. Wilson’s] wife. This wasn’t serious. This was a wife trying to get her husband a job.’”

And that’s where one might violate the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. “It was a tripwire they stumbled across,” Mr. Bamford said.

Mr. Wilkerson, who recently went public with explosive charges that the administration’s foreign policy had been hijacked by a “cabal” of ideologues, said that analysts and officers touting the pro-invasion line purposely ran interference against any information that threatened the Office of Special Plans’ delicately assembled case for the invasion of Iraq. “The fundamental problem was group-think,” said Mr. Wilkerson. “The group-think was basically, ‘If you disagree with me on anything, I’ll put you in a footnote.’”

EVEN AFTER ALL OF THE INTRIGUE AND HIGH-STAKES ANGST over the Plame investigation, the much bigger black box concerning the elaborate put-up job on W.M.D. remains largely untouched and unopened. And there’s a sickly sense in Washington that, even if the special prosecutor’s office returns a boatload of indictments, that’s where things will stand. After all, the Senate Intelligence Committee still has yet to deliver its follow-up report on who was chiefly responsible for fouling up the W.M.D. case. The committee’s chairman, Republican Senator Pat Roberts of Kansas, announced last year that the inquiry had been scheduled too uncomfortably close to the November 2004 elections—and hasn’t taken it up since then.

Given that Congress—the strongest body to provide intelligence oversight—clearly brings its own political agenda to the table these days, even if the Senate Intelligence Committee were to reconvene its inquiry, agency watchers aren’t expecting it to meet the standard set by independent investigations such as the 1975 Church Committee hearings.

“The Congress will sit there till hell freezes over listening to people explain the details of the aluminum tubes,” Mr. Powers said. “But the aluminum tubes were never about the administration proving the threat that justified our going to war; they were just the administration’s way of persuading the country of the need for going to war. And the thing is, they know that in Congress. And they know that this means you have to accuse the President of being dishonest—and dishonest in a way that cost the lives of American boys. Congress won’t do that, and the Democrats won’t do that, since they voted—very foolishly—to proceed with the war.”

All these recondite and dismal calculations are poor competition indeed for the much-advertised “moral clarity” of the Cheney retinue of war makers. They deftly sidestepped the adverse intelligence reports, even as they assembled their own appetizing Chinese menu of rationales for invading Iraq. Their creed, said Mr. Wilkerson, is “conform or die.”

Twice within a single week, in a telling coincidence, the administration displayed its dogged commitment to concealment. On April 15, the State Department admitted that it plans to withhold the data on terrorist incidents compiled for the annual, Congressionally mandated report, Patterns of Global Terrorism, which the department must release at the end of the month. And on April 22, the Army celebrated the first anniversary of the exposure of the Abu Ghraib scandal by announcing that an internal investigation had "exonerated" four senior officers responsible for military prisons in Iraq, despite previous findings of culpability.

In neither instance was the government's soothing voice believable. In both instances, independent voices spoke out almost instantly to discredit the government's bland assurances. In a free society, lying still incurs at least that much risk.

The Army's effort to limit prosecution to a group of enlisted personnel-and to discipline only a single officer, Brig. Gen. Janis Karpinski-was thoroughly rebutted by a new report from the diligent, nonpartisan monitors at Human Rights Watch. Their detailed, 95-page report-titled Getting Away with Torture?-was released on April 24. It's well worth reading in its entirety (www.hrw.org reports/2005/us0405/), but its essential message is that while justice is brought to bear on the miscreants at the bottom, a "wall of impunity" protects those at the top.

"Evidence is mounting that high-ranking U.S. civilian and military leaders-including Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, former CIA Director George Tenet, Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez, formerly the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and Major General Geoffrey Miller, the former commander of the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba-made decisions and issued policies that facilitated serious and widespread violations of the law," the report charges. "The circumstances strongly suggest that they either knew or should have known that such violations took place as a result of their actions. There is also mounting data that, when presented with evidence that abuse was in fact taking place, they failed to act to stem the abuse."

Generals Sanchez and Miller are among the officers whom the Army inspector general just exonerated; and, of course, the President has publicly praised (and rehired) Mr. Rumsfeld, while awarding the Medal of Freedom to Mr. Tenet. To restore honor and integrity, Human Rights Watch recommends appointment of a special counsel and independent commission to investigate torture, apportion responsibility, report findings and prosecute when warranted.

As for State's annual terrorism report, which has been issued every year for decades, the department's spokespersons insist that Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice omitted the usual numbers about incidents and casualties for purely bureaucratic reasons. Those numbers will henceforth be compiled and analyzed by the National Counterterrorism Center. But the spokespersons couldn't say when or whether those figures will ever be released to the public and the press.

The real reason for withholding the numbers, according to independent experts, is that they don't support the boasts of the Bush administration. Larry C. Johnson, a former counterterrorism official at the C.I.A. and the State Department, reported on his Web log that the raw data already has leaked out-and didn't look very good.

What the State Department terms "significant incidents" rose from 175 attacks in 2003 to 655 in 2004. Nearly one-third of those incidents occurred in Iraq, but that total only includes attacks on foreign aid workers and American civilians-not on Iraqi civilians or U.S. military personnel.

As Mr. Johnson explained, the State Department "didn't want to have to explain to the press why they're 'winning' the war on terror, but the numbers are the highest ever in the 37 years since they've been reporting the data. If terrorist incidents had dropped 50 per cent, do you think they'd be eliminating the report?"

Last year, the same State Department report hailed the administration's triumphs against terrorism. Ranking officials held a special press conference, with colorful charts and graphs, to announce its cheery findings. Unfortunately, the report turned out to be so badly marred by wrong statistics and false conclusions that then-Secretary Colin Powell withdrew the document and had it rewritten. The real numbers were considerably less uplifting-which seems to be true this year, too. So now the government will simply withhold the data.

The Bush administration clearly doesn't believe that the American public can handle the truth about terror and torture. What we have to ask ourselves is why they're so confident that we will accept anything less.