Joseph A. Palermo: Open Letter to George Tenet (HuffPost)

[marmar]

Joseph A. Palermo


04.29.2007
Open Letter to George Tenet (7 comments )

April 29, 2007

Dear Mr. Tenet:

The Bush years have been a boon for "public servants" such as yourself, Paul Bremer, and others, who sign obscenely lucrative book deals after leaving the Bush administration like rats jumping from a sinking ship. As the former Director of Central Intelligence, who will forever be known as "Slam Dunk," you have become the latest co-conspirator of the Iraq war to produce a "tell all" book that will no doubt resound throughout the Beltway.

You have greedily snatched up a $4 million advance to write the most self-serving "memoir" since the publication of Henry Kissinger's, The White House Years. Your publisher, the Rupert Murdoch-owned HarperCollins, took out an expensive full-page advertisement in today's New York Times, pitching it with all the subtlety of a carnival barker. Your cliché title, At the Center of the Storm: My Years at the CIA, should be entitled: Pointing the Finger: My Attempt to Blame Everybody Else for Iraq and Make Four-Million Dollars in the Process.

Mr. Tenet, if you had one iota of integrity you would donate the $4 million to charity and give the trinket, the "Medal of Freedom," that President George W. Bush delicately clasped around your neck, to one of the 20,000 severely wounded Iraq war veterans. Better yet, you could give the $4 million and any other royalties from the book to the families of the nearly 3,500 American troops who have died in a bloodbath that you helped create.

Mr. Tenet you are playing what the Republicans call "the blame game." You absolve yourself of any wrongdoing, as if you were an innocent bystander during the run up to the Iraq War. And although you were the DCI when several high-profile terrorists slipped into the United States to demolish the World Trade Center on your watch, you are blameless for being asleep at the switch.

...(snip)...

Finally, Mr. Tenet, if you knew for a fact that your hero Bush and his VP had already decided to launch an illegal war on Iraq, which is exactly what the Downing Street Memo says they did, (i.e. "fix" the intelligence to create a pretext), then why would a man of your self-proclaimed integrity and judgment stay on as a water carrier for such an administration?

Mr. Tenet your book is pulp fiction. Seeing Condoleezza Rice denounce it is the first time I found myself ever agreeing with Ms. Rice on anything, though for totally different reasons. Your self-serving "memoir," Mr. Tenet, is nothing but excrementitious agit-prop. ........(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/joseph-a-palermo/open-letter-to-george-ten_b_47210.html

[theoldman]

1. Listening to Tenet is like listening to the Germans after WWII.