Tenet's Timidity May Prove Suicidal

http://antiwar.com/deliso/?articleid=2124

To put it simply, George Tenet is confusing us. The beleaguered CIA director has become a veritable sphinx regarding his knowledge, or lack thereof, of the neocon OSP cabal’s remarkable ability to filter bogus intelligence from its self-proclaimed "Batcave" in the Pentagon to the White House’s corridors of power. And this ambivalence may have fatal results for the remarkably long-lived CIA chief.

A Plethora of Contradictions

This whole long affair has been frustratingly confused. First of all, last summer, Tenet fell on his sword regarding the faulty data that was used to back up the Iraq war. He took "full responsibility" for the controversial assertions that wound their way into George W. Bush’s fateful 2003 State of the Union Address, and Colin Powell’s grave speech at the UN, both of which were patchworks of grandiose, imaginative fear-mongering, all stitched together with errors and lies. Yet now Tenet is also contradicting himself, claiming that he both knew about and objected to the OSP’s work at the time. Which is it, George?

A Mystifying Reticence

This reticence is especially dismaying considering that Tenet’s position should be bolstered by the turbulent trajectory of events since the "outing" of CIA employee Valerie Plame to the press. The past nine months have seen the neocons put under the hot glare of public criticism, and now a grand jury investigation. As the Iraq occupation has dragged on with no end in sight, and as the revelations of a massive deception continue to grow in number, Tenet has come under the gun again. After CIA chief weapons inspector David Kay admitted in January to having been "almost all wrong" regarding Iraq's WMD capabilities, Tenet was "immediately blamed" for the intelligence imbroglio.

Tenet looked even worse last month when, says Jim Lobe, he made "a rousing defense" of the CIA’s professionalism: "…Tenet boasted to students at Georgetown University that he and only he was the sole purveyor of intelligence information to the president."

Whoops! One marvels that Tenet would say such a thing, considering all that has emerged regarding the neocons’ role in disseminating faulty intelligence, directly to the president, vice-president, and secretary of defense.

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