A Man for No Season:George Tenet

[cal04]

W. Patrick Lang

(Note from Larry Johnson: Pat is not some Johnny-come-lately in dealing with George Tenet. As the head of Defense Humint Services and responsible for the U.S. military's "spies", Pat dealt fairly regularly with Tenet. My response to Pat, AMEN!)

George Tenet - he was on "Meet the Press" today. What a pitiful spectacle. This is not a man. This is a whining, sniveling, political bureaucrat; a spoiled child who, in his own mind, is never to blame for anything, never really takes responsibility for his failures of judgment and action, and spins, and spins and spins.

George's "admissions" of responsibility are always carefully couched in words that do not actually say things like, "I was wrong," "I failed," "The war was a mistake," "I failed in what I did not do to stop this oncoming disaster." He quibbles. Quibbling is not acceptable in an intelligence officer, certainly not in the BOSS intelligence officer. I wonder if the Society of Jesus is happy when Tenet cites the principles that he thinks they taught him as justification for his way of doing things.

Major points, George:

* You were appointed to produce finished intelligence products that were CORRECT, that were TRUE, that represented REALITY. A good try is not good enough. Because of the crap that the intelligence community produced under your leadership, tens of thousands have died. Do the honorable thing, George.
* You were supposed to stop being a flunky for whomever was in power when the Senate of the United States confirmed you to be head of the intelligence community. Instead, you participated in a "marketing campaign" to sell the American people a war about which you admit to having qualms. You and your colleagues like Hadley, Mattalin, Libby and Rice did a thorough job. A lot of the simple are still looking for those WMD thingies in the bottom of an Iraqi lake. Do the right thing, George.
* You did not tell the Commander in Chief, (the commander guy) that there was a "problem" with the raw information and the analyzed intelligence? You did not tell him because your bureaucratic timidity and "small timer's" sense of organizational propriety restricted you to dealing with his "followers?" My God! Do the right thing, George."

Do the right thing.

http://noquarter.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/05/a_man_for_no_se.html

[Truthseeker013]

1. A Man for No Season: George Tenet

(applause)

And, as for the "right thing"- enlist, George. *Enlist*...

[ComerPerro]

2. I am not a fan of pieces like this, they attempt to remove any and all blame from Bush

and the "blame the CIA" crowd tries to act like Bush/Cheney were well-intentioned victims

[Garbo 2004]

4. No, Lang & Johnson blame Tenet with playing along with Bush/Cheney to market the war

based on lies. Even now Tenet is still trying to cover his ass by pretending that he didn't know the "intel" he was giving Congress was bs and that real intel that didn't support the Administration's policy was deliberately stifled, and that he played an active role in that. Since Tenet doesn't want to admit his active participation in "fixing the 'facts' to suit the policy," Tenet himself perpetuates the "blame the CIA" for "bad intel," claiming the he, the CIA and intel community "believed" but were mistaken, while trying to absolve himself from culpability.

Lang and Johnson don't give Cheney and Bush a pass, since they were the ones who dictated the policy and made sure they got what they wanted, "intel" built to suit. Lang, Johnson and others take Tenet to task for being an active, willing participant in that process.

Perhaps this excerpt from a letter to Tenet that Lang, Johnson and others signed make that clearer:

You showed a lack of leadership and courage in January of 2003 as the Bush Administration pushed and cajoled analysts and managers to let them make the bogus claim that Iraq was on the verge of getting its hands on uranium. You signed off on Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations. And, at his insistence, you sat behind him and visibly squandered CIA's most precious asset—credibility."

You may now feel you were bullied and victimized but you were also one of the bullies. In the end you allowed suspect sources, like Curveball, to be used based on very limited reporting and evidence. Yet you were informed in no uncertain terms that Curveball was not reliable. You broke with CIA standard practice and insisted on voluminous evidence to refute this reporting rather than treat the information as suspect. You helped set the bar very low for reporting that supported favored White House positions, while raising the bar astronomically high when it came to raw intelligence that did not support the case for war being hawked by the president and vice president.

It now turns out that you were the Alberto Gonzales of the intelligence community--a grotesque mixture of incompetence and sycophancy shielded by a genial personality. Decisions were made, you were in charge, but you have no idea how decisions were made even though you were in charge. Curiously, you focus your anger on the likes of Dick Cheney, Don Rumsfeld, and Condi Rice, but you decline to criticize the President.

http://noquarter.typepad.com/my_weblog/2007/04/letter_to_georg.html#more

[valerief]

3. Each time I see him on teevee, he comes off as a Hollywood "heavy"

straight from film noir Central Casting.

[Eurobabe]

5. A spoiled child, who is never to blame for anything - which George are we referring to?

Sounds like Asshat.

"What a pitiful spectacle. This is not a man. This is a whining, sniveling, political bureaucrat; a spoiled child who, in his own mind, is never to blame for anything, never really takes responsibility for his failures of judgment and action, and spins, and spins and spins."

[tinfoilinfor2005]

6. My husband calls him Timtimtim.

During MTP this morning, he kept saying, Tim Tim Tim, every time he was up against a wall.

But he wants to keep his medal. Made that clear.:freak:

[aint_no_life_nowhere]

7. I saw him on Wolf Blitzer this morning

I think it was a rerun from an interview earlier in the week. Blitzer asked Tenet point blank why he didn't speak up when he knew ChimpCo was using bad evidence in their case for war. Tenet said it was not his place to make policy. Blitzer pressed a little harder, saying that pointing out the ways ChimpCo was misusing the evidence, casting it in a false light is not a matter of policy, it's a matter of truth. Tenet got uptight and began rambling and would not answer the question. Blitzer gave him a chance to apologize to the American people, and Tenet said he had nothing to apologize for.

The man's filth, he's shit, he's a traitor, he should be stripped of his American citizenship and sent to downtown Baghdad.