Posted on 05/03/2007 12:16:07 PM PDT by USFRIENDINVICTORIA
WHEN someone described Herbert Morrison, a minister in Britain's 1945-51 Labour government, as his own worst enemy, his fellow-minister, Ernest Bevin, growled: “Not while I'm alive he ain't.” You might have thought that George Tenet, a former head of the CIA, is his own worst enemy for producing a whingethon of a book, “At the Centre of the Storm” (HarperCollins). But it turns out that there are legions of Bevins around to prove you wrong. The book has been thoroughly slammed and dunked since its publication on April 30th. And Mr Tenet's book tour is turning into a nightmare; every time he goes on television to complain that the administration mistreated and misquoted him, he looks more and more snivelling. It's time for him to cancel the tour and reconnect with his ancestral home in Greece.
Conservatives have gleefully leapt upon the book's errors. On the first page the great spy reports that he visited the West Wing on September 12th 2001, only to run into Richard Perle, a neocon grandee, who said, unbidden, that “Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility.” The only problem is that Mr Perle was in France at the time. (Mr Tenet now says he may have got the date wrong.) Liberals have accused Mr Tenet of acting as George Bush's whore. Why didn't he resign when he realised that Dick Cheney and his allies were distorting the intelligence? His resignation would surely have derailed a war effort based on the idea that Saddam possessed WMD. And everyone—left, right and centre—has accused him of being both whiny and self-serving.
Mr Tenet blames everybody but himself for America's intelligence and foreign-policy mess. He claims he told Condoleezza Rice that he was convinced Osama bin Laden was planning a spectacular attack, and that America should go after him in his lair in Afghanistan, but that she did nothing. But why would he only tell Ms Rice when he talked to Mr Bush every morning?
The CIA failed to keep the FBI informed about the presence of known terrorists in America. Mr Tenet allowed Mr Cheney to twist intelligence in order to build a case for attacking Saddam. He sat behind Colin Powell during his ill-fated presentation to the United Nations in order to add credibility to his claims. And there's more: during the 1980s and early 1990s, first as a staffer on Capitol Hill and then at the National Security Council, he enabled the running-down of the CIA's human resources. He repeatedly discouraged Bill Clinton from trying to liquidate Mr bin Laden.
Mr Tenet couples all this blame-shifting with relentless complaints about how badly he was treated. Mr Cheney bullied him! Paul Wolfowitz criticised him! Bob Woodward lied about him! (In every interview, Mr Tenet argues that he used the phrase “slam dunk” to describe how easy it would be to make the case for war, not the quality of the intelligence itself—as if anybody cares.) And all he got for his troubles was the Presidential Medal of Freedom!
Mr Tenet comes across as one of those familiar figures—a time-server who discovers he has backed the wrong horse and quickly sets about rewriting the record. He made his career as a Democrat—first as an intelligence specialist on Capitol Hill and then as Mr Clinton's CIA director. He kept his job in the new Republican world by telling his new masters what they wanted to hear. Michael Scheuer, the founding head of the CIA's bin Laden unit, depicts him as a regular Vicar of Bray in his dealings with Messrs Clinton and Bush—“denigrating good intelligence to suit the former's cowardly pacifism and accepting bad intelligence to please the latter's Wilsonian militarism”.
Good in parts That said, Mr Tenet's book is worth reading for a couple of reasons. The first is that it provides vivid details of an administration in the grip of war fever. Douglas Feith, a Cheney crony in the Defence Department, told a military official on September 12th 2001 that the campaign against al-Qaeda should be directed at Baghdad. Paul Wolfowitz and “Scooter” Libby, other key cronies, were never content with CIA intelligence that clashed with their deeply held beliefs about the Saddam-al-Qaeda link (Mr Wolfowitz once wrote a blurb for a book arguing that Saddam was behind the 1993 World Trade Centre bombing).
Neocon-inspired freelancers repeatedly pop up. Michael Ledeen, who was deeply involved in the Iran-contra affair, appeared in Italy on a rogue mission and claimed to have evidence that Saddam had buried enriched uranium deep beneath a river bed. Ahmed Chalabi and a band of his followers were flown into Iraq without the CIA knowing. The Centcom command tried to stop their hare-brained military mission, but Mr Wolfowitz gave them the green light. Mr Tenet comments, in one of the better passages in the book, that it was often more difficult to guess what the Americans were up to than the Iraqis.
The second reason is that the book provides yet more evidence of the opportunity cost of the Iraq war. The CIA enjoyed some dramatic successes after September 11th, reversing years of decline. The agency helped to bring down the Taliban in one of the best-organised military campaigns in recent history (CIA operatives on horseback directed airpower to choice targets). It rolled up A.Q. Khan's nuclear-proliferation network. It killed or captured hundreds of al-Qaeda operatives. And it forged successful relations with intelligence services around the world.
But now the agency is in perhaps the worst funk in its history. Requests by agents to publish books are running at 100 a month. Congress has hopelessly botched intelligence reform. And the public has almost no confidence in intelligence reports. Mr Tenet's book would have had a better reception if he had spent less time justifying a phrase and more time explaining how to repair his damaged agency.
I really like the term "whingethon" -- it could apply to a lot of media products today.
"Requests by agents to publish books are running at 100 a month." It seems that the CIA operatives are only covert when it suits them.
“But why would he only tell Ms Rice when he talked to Mr Bush every morning?”
Rice is the target of convenience for white male DC bureucrats.
Richard Clarke started the tradition.
Why is this compelling, if I even believe the number which I don't? It would basically mean that nearly everyone who works at the CIA wants to write a book.
But forgetting the lack of credibility behind such a claim, why if it were true is it somehow damning? When 60 Minutes and just about every other news program out there will give a willing and unquestioning forum to any Clinton bathtub ring CIA employee left over from the 1990s, who wouldn't rush to cash in on writing a book? No matter how questionable the content, you'll have a compliant news media willing to help you peddle your book with millions in free and fawning publicity garnering you an instant willing audience of 250,000 or more Bush hating loons who will then be bamboozled into buying your pap. This should be no surprise to anyone that CIA employees are writing books in this super-charged industry of cleaning up on bashing the Bush administration.
It's a case of just cashing in when it looks like there's money to be made, as well as a prime opportunity to vent a clear partisan bias. Where were these same authors during the 90s to write books about the evisceration of the CIA and its budgets on Clinton's watch? They didn't a willing media to help them to sell books, nor of course any willingness to embarrass their incompetent hero Bill Clinton.
Incredible graphic...
Ummmm....
Ramzi Yousef (1993 WTC) and Terry Nichols (OKC)crossed paths in the Phillipines. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (9/11) was Yousef's uncle. It is interesting to note that Yousef entered the United States on an Iraqi passport and had been known among the New York fundamentalists as "Rashid, the Iraqi". Another name that could be thrown into the mix is Abdul Rahman Yasin, a U.S. citizen who moved to Iraq in the 1960's and returned to the U.S. in 1992. After the 1993 WTC bombing, Yasin fled to Iraq and was given monthly salary and housing by Saddam Hussein's regime.
Nah, nothing to be seen here. Move on. Wolfowitz was clearly just imagining things /sarc off.
For a $4 million paid book job, I’d say “it wasn’t my fault” too.
Was there a woman that wrote a book some years ago investigating the middle east link and Terry Nichols but the FBI said there wasn’t a link. This poor woman was vilified for her investigations. I seem to remember something like that. Do you know anything about it? Frankly, I believed the woman.
Not to mention telling that to Clinton in the three years he served his Administration. Whingethon - great!
I believe it was Jayna Davis. Thanks!
Thank you.
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