The U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence Report on the U.S. Intelligence Community’s Prewar Intelligence Assessments on Iraq, delivered July 7, 2004, “put the greatest portion of the blame for the intelligence disaster on the doorstep of CIA Director George J. Tenet, who decided, after having viewed drafts of the Senate report the month before, to announce his resignation. …But eventually Tenet changed course. Instead of championing the views of his analysts to officials inside the White House, he ended up championing the President’s [Bush’s] war inside the CIA. The Senate committee harshly criticized Tenet for his failure to halt the stream of bogus sources, exaggerated reports, and misjudgments that eventually led to his confirming the administration’s charge that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction and posed a near-term danger to the United States. …Ultimately Tenet lost sight of his role. Instead of the country’s apolitical eyes and ears around the world, a spymaster charged with telling the President the bad as well as the good, he simply became the President’s cheerleader, shouting slam dunk when he should have been asking for a time-out.”
– James Bamford, A Pretext for War, Pages 383, 385