Tenet's medal.

Byline: The Register-Guard

Maybe it's old-fashioned, but shouldn't the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor, have something to do with extraordinary achievement or even an act of physical or moral courage?

Granted, there are no formal guidelines on eligibility. Since President Truman established it at the end World War II, the honor has been bestowed on politicians, scientists, business leaders, artists, scholars and clerics. If there's been a common thread, it's that of exemplary accomplishment that has benefited the American public.

So it seems more than a little surprising that President Bush on Tuesday presented the Medal of Freedom to George W. Tenet for his contribution to the war on terrorism and to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Yes, the same George W. Tenet who presided over the Central Intelligence Agency during the time it was responsible for two of the most catastrophic intelligence failures in U.S. history.

Tenet was one of three who received medals. The others were retired Army Gen. Tommy Franks and L. Paul Bremer, head of the now-disbanded Coalition Provisional Authority that ran Iraq after the U.S. invasion. A reasonable case can be made for Franks, who won wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and retired before the occupation turned into a deadly quagmire. The same can be said for Bremer, who juggled 10,000 sharp knives during his 14-month tenure and forged the tenuous consensus that produced the current interim government and plans to conduct national elections next month.

But a medal for Tenet defies justification. In "Plan of Attack," Bob Woodward's insider account of the Bush administration's decision to wage war on Iraq, Tenet told the president that the weapons of mass destruction case against Saddam Hussein's regime was a "slam dunk." Nearly two years after the invasion, U.S. troops have failed to find any such weapons. David Kay, the CIA official who led the lengthy search after the invasion, later told Congress that "We were almost all wrong."

Tenet also was at the CIA's helm when al-Qaeda operatives bombed the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and the USS Cole in 2000. Despite these and other early warnings, the agency failed to detect the terrorist network's plot to attack the World Trade Center and Pentagon in 2001. The 9/11 commission later determined that the agency's poor coordination and tunnel vision caused it to miss numerous warnings that terrorists were planning to use hijacked planes as weapons. The commission's chairman, Tom Keane, characterized the final report as "an indictment" of Tenet's agency.

Despite these failures, Bush was lavish in his praise of Tenet at the medal ceremony. The president described the former director as "one of the first to recognize and address the threat to America from radical networks" and credited him with having a ready plan for attacking al-Qaeda "within days" after the Sept. 11 attacks.

President Bush may have been on the mark when he praised Tenet as "a fine public servant and patriot." He once pledged to resign if the first of his two bosses, President Clinton, pardoned a convicted spy whose case was being reviewed. That suggests that Tenet was a man of integrity and conviction who was capable of putting principle over position and power. But his performance - and failures - at two of the most critical moments in this nation's history suggest that he did not merit the nation's highest civilian honor.