While Britons are savoring the vindication of Prime Minister Blair and the scandal of the BBC’s attempts to portray him as having lied about pre-war intelligence on Iraq, the Bush administration could do a lot worse than to unleash the director of central intelligence, George Tenet, whom President Bush kept on from the Clinton administration. One of the most remarkable things about our own war, after all, is that the President Bush who led this war and the United States Congress that authorized the war, the Republicans who voted for the war and the Democrats who voted for the war but are now going wobbly, all relied on the same intelligence. The first phase of the war is over. The backbone of the enemy has been broken. Why not bring out Mr. Tenet and give him a chance to let the American people hear the kinds of things our leaders were hearing?

If anything, President Clinton’s first director of central intelligence, James Woolsey, was even more hawkish than Mr. Tenet when it came to the threat from Saddam Hussein. Howard Dean complained last night, “Vice President Dick Cheney went to the CIA on at least one occasion, and maybe more, sat with middle-level CIA operatives and berated them because he didn’t like their intelligence reports.” Senator Kerry, at the same debate, accused the administration of “clear misleading, clear exaggeration,” with respect to “the linkage to Al Qaeda”and the claim of “aerial vehicles to be able to deliver materials of mass destruction.”

But it wasn’t Mr. Cheney or mid-level operatives, it was Mr. Tenet himself — Mr. Clinton’s DCI — who testified before Congress on February 11, 2003, that “Iraq’s BW program includes mobile research and production facilities that will be difficult, if not impossible, for the inspectors to find” and that “Iraq has established a pattern of clandestine procurements designed to reconstitute its nuclear weapons program.”And that “We are concerned that Iraq’s UAVs can dispense chemical and biological weapons.” It was Mr. Tenet who said in that same testimony that “this information is based on a solid foundation of intelligence. It comes to us from credible and reliable sources. Much of it is corroborated by multiple sources. And it is consistent with the pattern of denial and deception exhibited by Saddam Hussein over the past 12 years.”