Tenet's the scapegoat

George Tenet took the fall for Bush on the Niger doc scandal. Bush now thinks the case is closed. That's wishful thinking; more likely, this is just the tip of the iceberg.

After all, the deceptions on Iraq don't begin and end with the Niger docs.

In the run up to war, the administration and its minions did everything they could to scare people in this country into accepting the need to attack Iraq. There was an elaborate, willful effort -- a marketing campaign, as Andrew Card called it -- to conjure evidence, no matter how tenuous, which suggested that Iraq was ready to plunge a dagger at America, or pass off the means to do so to other parties more willing to the task. They eschewed contingency, doubt, and whatever caveats were attached to intelligence; they leaned on intelligence analysts; they made wanton accusations and dropped "assertions of fact" which were unsupportable. In short, they engaged in a propaganda campaign that dragged a nation into war on false pretenses, precisely because they had decided on a war months, if not years, ago.