George Tenet: Revenge of the Nerd
Another Bush Administration castoff has resurfaced. Who will be next? Don Rumsfeld? First it was Paul D. Wolfowitz, ex-Deputy Director of the Pentagon, now it’s George J. Tenet, ex-CIA Director. Both were intimately involved in dragging Uncle Sam into the Iraq quagmire, the former as an advocate, the latter as an enabler. We all know where “neocon” apparatchik Wolfowitz is coming from. While one is justified in feeling revulsion when contemplating such discredited “neocon” luminaries as Wolfowitz, Libby, Perle and Feith, all of whom are directly responsible for the Iraq war and the aftermath, it is a different story with ex-CIA Director George Tenet. A Bill Clinton carryover, Tenet appears to be little more than an ambitious functionary who lost his way in the heady, dishonest world of Washington, and decided to go with the flow, no matter what. I realize that Dante said “The hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in times of great moral crises maintain their neutrality,” but Dante was exaggerating.
In the context of railroading American into an unnecessary war, one can almost sympathize with Tenet’s predicament. He was surrounded by “neocons” and their fellow travelers. At the time please take into account that most of official Washington, with very few exceptions--Capitol Hill as well as the White House--was agog for war, so well had the propaganda of the “neocons” and the pressure tactics of the Israel Lobby worked. If Tenet had been diligent and done his homework, he could have informed Cheney and Bush, “Hey, this is crazy. The CIA possesses no indication, much less hard evidence, of WMD in Iraq. The country has been disarmed and neutered by a ten-year embargo of military supplies. Comprehensive economic sanctions have spread malnutrition and disease, killing off as many as 500,000 children. Iraq has been under lock down, and we control its airspace. Iraq is a shell of its former self, and is certainly no conceivable threat to the United States. As for the connection between Saddam and Bin Laden, there is none.” Or words to that effect, which facts Cheney and Bush did not want to hear.
If we were expecting George Tenet to do something like that amidst the hysteria prevailing in Washington and in the country at large during the 2002-2003 run-up to “Operation Iraqi Freedom,” clearly we were expecting too much. Tenet would have been viciously slammed as soft on terrorism, soft on national security and as a defeatist in the “neocon” manufactured contest known as the “clash of civilizations.” Tenet would have been out of a job. On the positive side, maybe he could have derailed the rush to war, even stopped it. We will never know. As it turns out, Tenet is being ridiculed now for good reason, after losing his precious job. In terms of ridicule, one has only to read Maureen Dowd’s NY Times column “More like an Air Ball” to see that Tenet is an outsized target, thanks to his new book, At the Center of the Storm, and deservedly so.
Does Tenet believe he can rehabilitate himself at this point by writing a kiss-and-tell-all book, in which he criticizes Dick Cheney? He can’t. In a word, impossible. Cheney’s ratings and credibility are next to zero, where they should be. It’s a cake-walk now to eviscerate Cheney. His policies are a disaster. The Vice President of the United States belongs either in a monastery, doing penance, or in a federal penitentiary, doing time. Tenet claims that what set him off was Bob Woodward’s 2004 book Plan of Attack. The White House strategy session at which Tenet uses the now infamous phrase “slam dunk” is described in some detail. Having leaked it to Woodward, Cheney then used the incident on “Meet the Press” to offload the blame for the war to the CIA, implying that Tenet’s “slam dunk” findings necessitated the invasion. Only complete fools or professional purveyors of “neocon” agitprop like Rush Limbaugh, Bill Kristol and Fred Barnes could possibly have believed such nonsense, to wit, that warnings from the CIA were the basis for invading Iraq. Still, it was the apotheosis of hypocrisy and falsehood, and Tenet took umbrage, or says he did.
As we know, the policy came first, then, almost as an afterthought, came the “intelligence” to justify the policy. Dick Cheney was in charge of both, not the CIA or G.W. Bush. It was Cheney who determined what the intelligence was, not Tenet. It was Cheney who believed, or who pretended to believe, the Feith-based blarney coming out of the Lie Factory in the basement of the “neoconized” Pentagon. Please understand, my non-elitist friends, that it was at the Pentagon, not the CIA, where the true “intelligence” could be found. One had to accept as trustworthy the Feith-based “intelligence”, because Douglas Feith, Esq. was such an unbiased, objective information gatherer. That was clear from Feith’s previous articles on the subject of Israel and the Middle East, wasn’t it? In short, one can only wonder what George Tenet was doing and thinking when Douglas Feith and his fellow “neocon” apparatchiki were fabricating “intelligence” for the Vice President.
Well, it appears that Tenet was busy briefing G.W. every day, and doing errands on his behalf. Like stepping over to the UN to help out the Administration’s other arch-enabler, Colin Powell, to sell bogus intelligence to the UN Security Council. With Tenet and Powell, we are talking about team players and frontmen above and beyond any conceivable rationale known to rational men, other than just wanting to be part of the scene at any cost. Perhaps you can remember watching that UN showdown in February, 2003. Powell was solemnly delivering his bilge to the Council, with the aristocratic French foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, observing Powell and listening to the presentation with a perplexed expression which strongly hinted that, insofar as de Villepin was concerned, Colin Powell had lost his mind. Seated directly behind the hapless Powell were CIA Director George Tenet and career Washington factotum, UN Ambassador John D. Negroponte, about whom the less said the better.
Negroponte wisely kept his head buried in papers. Ditto for Tenet. Was he embarrassed? No doubt he was. But from time to time, Tenet would look up, and sheepishly gaze over the magnificent room and at its distinguished occupants. With his ironic smile, Tenet proclaimed softly but clearly, “Are we actually going to get away with this?” In his just-released book, Tenet now states, “That was about the last place I wanted to be. It was a great presentation, but unfortunately the substance didn’t hold up.” Indeed, it didn’t. But the CIA Director put that misinformation together for Powell to deliver, didn’t he? One can only wonder if George Tenet strongly suspected, as he sat there in the shadows, that what was coming out of Colin Powell’s mouth was so much flapdoodle. Perhaps Dante was right after all.
Comments
The network that lied us into war is far far bigger than Tenet. In fact, it’s even bigger than the neocons. As demonstrated by the Downing Street Memo saga, it is so big it extends to include the entire mainstream monomedia.
The Downing Street “Memo” is actually the minutes of a meeting, transcribed during a gathering of many of the British Prime Minister’s senior ministers on July 23, 2002. Published by The Sunday Times on May 1, 2005 this document was the first hard evidence from within the UK or US governments that exposed the truth about how the Iraq war began. As originally reported in the The Sunday Times, May 1, 2005:
SECRET AND STRICTLY PERSONAL - UK EYES ONLY
DAVID MANNING
From: Matthew Rycroft
Date: 23 July 2002
S 195 /02
cc: Defence Secretary, Foreign Secretary, Attorney-General, Sir Richard Wilson, John Scarlett, Francis Richards, CDS, C, Jonathan Powell, Sally Morgan, Alastair Campbell
IRAQ: PRIME MINISTER’S MEETING, 23 JULY
Copy addressees and you met the Prime Minister on 23 July to discuss Iraq.
This record is extremely sensitive. No further copies should be made. It should be shown only to those with a genuine need to know its contents.
John Scarlett summarised the intelligence and latest JIC assessment. Saddam’s regime was tough and based on extreme fear. The only way to overthrow it was likely to be by massive military action. Saddam was worried and expected an attack, probably by air and land, but he was not convinced that it would be immediate or overwhelming. His regime expected their neighbours to line up with the US. Saddam knew that regular army morale was poor. Real support for Saddam among the public was probably narrowly based.
C reported on his recent talks in Washington. There was a perceptible shift in attitude. Military action was now seen as inevitable. Bush wanted to remove Saddam, through military action, justified by the conjunction of terrorism and WMD. BUT THE INTELLIGENCE AND FACTS WERE BEING FIXED AROUND THE POLICY [MY EMPHASIS]. The NSC had no patience with the UN route, and no enthusiasm for publishing material on the Iraqi regime’s record. There was little discussion in Washington of the aftermath after military action.
End quote.
The sentence “but the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy” is the smoking gun. When the memos leaked out, the whole world saw it on their TV and in their press. Except us. I found out about it reading radical left websites like indymedia and counterpunch because our media blacked it out.
That tells you all you need to know regarding a) our media’s independence, trustworthiness and, evidently, coordination and b) our media’s role in supporting, maintaining and now covering up the war’s pretences and lies.
So while we watch Tenet take the heat like a good fall guy, the important elements of the pro-war apparatus, such as the mainstream monomedia, get away scott free to drag us into war another day.
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Bob’s Riddle
All anti-white racists agree that it’s ok for whites to become minorities in their own countries. All anti-white racists also agree that a Japanese person who wants to become a minority in his own country is either a traitor or clinically insane. Therefore, what is an anti-white racist? Answer
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TO: George Tenet
FR: America
RE: CIA Service Record
Mr. Tenet,
It’s too late to say you’re sorry.
Please go away quietly and contemplate
your future.
Sincerely,
Every American that has ever lived.
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In case you haven’t seen it, Bill Moyer’s documentary on PBS “Buying the War” is available for download. It’s about media complicity in the Iraq debacle.
http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/btw/watch.html
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Kudos to Mr. Foy for another excellent contribution – and for digging out one of Dante’s best. So apropos.
But just as Tenet has blood on his hands for (in the least) remaining neutral, so do most of us. Edmund Burke said: “All that is required for evil to prevail is for good men to do nothing.” Me first: guilty as charged (writing dissenting comments on Neocon blogs quite isn’t enough.), I stood by and let what I knew to be evil go forward with little more than lament and cavil.
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All in all, a sound indictment of a guilty party (if not the main perp), and rather loud crybaby, Mr. Tenet. One correction though. The “clash of civilizations” is no “neocon sponsored contest”. Unlike “Islamo-fascism,” it’s quite real. In fact, it’s the neocons who deny the entire concept. They denounce its principal inventor, Samuel Huntington, as something close to a racist. Why? Because Huntington asserts that people and cultures are different, and not easily changeable. This challenges the very foundation of the neocon democracy project: that everyone is the same and all cultures are malleable to western, democratic standards. All we need do is bombard our little brown, or black, or yellow brothers with enough cruise-missiles, ipods, rap music, feminism and U.S. taxpayer dollars. That, and a few thousand (million?) American lives should make the world safe for democracy, or at least for Israel.
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What is keeping Mr. Foy form calling a spade a spade in this piece? Tenet clearly lacks even the basic qualities of character required for public service. A man who will allow the most horrendous, easily refuted lies to pass unchallenged simply because he fears for his job is beneath contempt. A man who will knowingly allow his country to be dragged into a criminal war of agression when he is in a position to challenge the traitors who are engineering that war is a coward, and should be considered complicit in the crimes of the current administration.
Sorry, Mr. Foy, but I do not agree that Tenet behaved in an understandable or forgivable fashion. He is a war criminal just as Bush, Cheney and their crew are. American war criminals do not face trial, are never indicted and are usually made out to be heroes after they leave office.
Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Madeleine Allbright and Wesley Clarke prove this point. They’ve never been called to account for the crimes against humanity committed in Iraq and Serbia by that administration.
Tenet will be no exception, but will be given a minor place among the “heroes” because his were simply cowardly crimes of omission rather than the brazen crimes of the two primaries in the plot.
Speak plainly, Mr. Foy. Tenet is a criminal. Identify him as a war criminal when you write about him and you’ll feel better about it later.
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After all that has happened over the past six years if another 9/11 type attack were to occur I supect people around the world (and not only Moslems) would dance with joy that America was finally getting it’s just deserts.
Such is the extent to which the neo-cons, AIPAC, and “liberal hawks” have fostered the feeling that America now is a gangster state run by a pack of thieves, looters, warmongers, and murderers.
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I don’t think Tenet’s role can be understood only within the AIPAC framework. There is reason to believe that Tenet was mainly ‘working’ with the Saudi lobby, in particular Bandar: “
George Tenet, appointed as CIA director in 1997, develops close personal relationships with top Saudi officials, especially Prince Bandar, the Saudi ambassador to the US. Tenet develops a habit of meeting with Bandar at his home near Washington about once a month. But CIA officers handling Saudi issues complain that Tenet doesn’t tell them what he discusses with Bandar. Often they are only able to learn about Tenet’s deals with the Saudis later and through Saudi contacts, not from their own boss. Tenet also makes one of his closest aides the chief of the CIA station in Saudi Arabia. This aide often communicates directly with Tenet, avoiding the usual chain of command. Apparently as a favor to the Saudis, CIA analysts are discouraged from writing reports raising questions about the Saudi relationship to Islamic extremists. [Risen, 2006, pp. 185]” In “The Prince”, her essay on Bandar published in the New Yorker, Elsa Walsh also mentions what appears to be a close relationship between Tenet and Bandar. Now when one considers the close relationship that BANDAR had with AIPAC, it all comes together. I would predict that when Bandar succeeds in becoming king of the Saudis that George Tenet will receive his fair share of gratitude from the new king.
http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/832361.html
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Mr. Martin comments:
“All in all, a sound indictment of a guilty party (if not the main perp), and rather loud crybaby, Mr. Tenet. One correction though. The “clash of civilizations” is no “neocon sponsored contest”. Unlike “Islamo-fascism,” it’s quite real. In fact, it’s the neocons who deny the entire concept. They denounce its principal inventor, Samuel Huntington, as something close to a racist. Why? Because Huntington asserts that people and cultures are different, and not easily changeable. This challenges the very foundation of the neocon democracy project: that everyone is the same and all cultures are malleable to western, democratic standards. All we need do is bombard our little brown, or black, or yellow brothers with enough cruise-missiles, ipods, rap music, feminism and U.S. taxpayer dollars. That, and a few thousand (million?) American lives should make the world safe for democracy, or at least for Israel.”
I believe that Mr. Martin overlooks the Straussian framework of esoteric Neo-Con beliefs versus their exoteric prescriptions and denunciations.
The universalist/democratizer prescription is the outward propaganda for the Liberals and Libertarians, who may want to spread American “modernity”.
The “Clash of Civilizations” perspective is the inward one, of and for the racists, *both* neo-con Zionist and anti-Semitic, who favor chaos and/or genocide in the region.
The one is promoted - the other, denounced - both serve the common source.
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