The new George Tenet memoir that launches today was reviewed by Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times yesterday in a piece called "An Ex-C.I.A. Chief on Iraq and the Slam Dunk That Wasn't".

Kakatuni called it both "withholding and aggrieved, earnest and disingenuous" and "is interesting less for any stunning new revelations than for fleshing out a portrait of the Bush White House already sketched by reporters and former administration members."

The book describes a White House entitled to its own set of facts as the former director of central intelligence lashes out at Vice President Dick Cheney and other Bush administration officials, saying they pushed the country to war in Iraq without ever conducting a serious debate about whether Saddam Hussein posed an imminent threat to the United States.

Elsewhere in the book, Tenet defends his now infamous "slam dunk" comment about the case for going to war in Iraq. I found the Sunday TIME Magazine interview that runs down his side of the story plus a few other choice tidbits:

TIME: Slam Dunk? What were you thinking? (read more)

Intelligence 2.0

Just a few short years ago the U.S. National Intelligence Community couldn't even get Internet access for their analysts because of the risk of a security breach - or so admin said. Today they fight an uphill battle of a different sort deploying the latest tools for social computing that today's MySpace Generation has longsince come to consider commonplace.

Indeed, "Intelligence 2.0" as some have called it has been slow to accrue among the agencies that now report to national intelligence czar, John Negroponte. But the office of the DNI has been quick to embrace these tools even as the "iron majors" of middle management have found the new tools more a security risk than a collaboration enabler.

However, as the centerpiece of the 9/11 Commission's legislative reforms, intelligence sharing among old agency silos is so high a priority, it can no longer be ignored. In truth, however, I must suspect any reluctance to embrace cheap, simple tools like blogs, wikis and podcasts to be far more driven by turf-control than real security risk, as was the old argument about giving analysts access to the Internet a decade ago. Methods evolve.(read more)