Vicious Rants of an Angry Yellow Man

I saw George Tenet on t.v. couple times recently, plugging his book. Journalists like to interview him because he is criticizing the Bush administration. Basically he said that while the intelligence for the war was not very accurate, the Bush administration had decided to go to war regardless of the intelligence. I would agree with that assessment as I have always felt that Wolfowitz, Cheney and Rumsfeld had convinced Bush to go to war right after 9/11. The Bush administration did make a scapegoat out of Tenet. Whatever happened to "the buck stops here"? Nevertheless, from watching the interviews, I feel that I have very little respect for Tenet.

While he acknowledged that the intelligence was flawed, he said that he warned the administration not to go to the public with them. Of course, he claimed that he had not read the state of the union address ahead of time where Bush said that Hussein was building nuclear weapons. When pressed by the reporter about his estimate for WMDs, he said that since he said it was an estimate that they were not wrong. Well, that is nonsense. In medicine when we put a drop of urine under the microscope and can see one single bacterium, then we can estimate that there are more than 100,000 bacteria per ml of urine, indicating a significant infection. If we don't see any, we can't estimate anything. Since there was no WMDs found at all, how can they come up with any estimation?

Tenet sat behind Colin Powell while Powell embarrassed himself at the UN with false intelligence. All Tenet would say is that he has talked to Powell about that incident but would not say that he apologized or what exactly did he say to Powell. He also flatly denies that the U.S. has tortured any prisoners at Guatanomo Bay or elsewhere. Common, when Russia and China denied torturing people, did anyone believed that? I don't have problem with torturing known terrorists. But I don't think all the the people incarcerated at Guatanamo all dangerous terrorists. So if Tenet had said that there were a few al qaeda operatives that we had to get information out of by any means necessary, it would be believable. Zero torture? I don't think so.

Tenet accepted the Medal of Freedom from Bush. This is obviously a bribe for him to go away quietly. To make Tenet a scapegoat and then tell the nation what a great job Tenet did was dispicable. If Tenet is a real man he would have tell Bush where he can shove his medal. But Tenet gleefully accepted the bribe, er, medal. Now couple of years later he is trying to make a few bucks and clear his name by blasting away at the Bush administration in his book. I can only be thankful that he is no longer running the CIA.