I Knew George Tenet Way Back When...........

The extremely agile little fellow named Scheuer
accurately says in the Washington Post:

"It's impossible to dislike Tenet, who is smart, polite, hard-working, convivial and detail-oriented. But he's also a man who never went from cheerleader to leader."

Then Scheuer, who has wrote a book supporting Bush on Iraq in 2002 and since issued a second edition of his book with a rewritten screed AGAINST the war, accuses Tenet of moral cowardice! Talk about being called ugly by a frog!

But Tenet did have a lotta 'splainin' to do, especially because a book is coming out this week.

Did George explain that the CIA's hands were tied when the two hijackers were detected in San Diego because Jamie Gorelick and Ogress Reno at the DOJ said terrorism was a crime to be FBI turf, not a national security concern on CIA turf? [This was the over-lawyered view from the tag-team of lawyers inhabiting the White House named Clinton and Clinton.] No

Did George note that the internecine rivalry between his Agency and the FBI might have something to do with the news of two known terrorists arriving in San Diego ending up in a CIA file unseen by the FBI, who by the DOJ eff-up, was in charge of domestic terrorism? Nope, that dog-fight continues and GT doesn't mention it.

Does he even note the fib when CBS far-left stooge Pelley says the White House outted Plame even though it was Armitage in the State Dept? Nope, George goes with the flow....

Pelley is an objectionable little fart who could smell up a waste management facility, but George only responds when it comes to loyalty issues---not to issues having to do with competence or attribution of blame.

I learned about loyalty from George back in the early '80s when he attended my wedding. George had worked for my wife at the Hellenic Affairs Council and been fired by a maniac named Gene Rossides, landing in a girl's dorm at Mt. Vernon where his lovely wife Stephanie was a house-mother. They had a very young baby boy. George got a job with Senator Heinz, then worked for Sen. Leahy after Heinz's death. Then worked for the Senate Intelligence Cte, where Sen. Boron of Oklahoma picked him out of the back row to be chief of staff. George and Stephanie would come to our house occasionally and he was an avid sports fan, attending all Georgetown basketball games and backing the NY Giants fanatically. When I suggested that I supported the Redskins after long allegiance to the Packers, George went apoplectic---accusing me of high treason. He used to bounce Middle East stuff off me and I turned him on to Fouad Ajami, whom I used to hang out with when a bachelor and whose work is great.

After I moved to Chicago with a good job in foreign affairs with Amoco, I used to have lunch with him up at the Mykonos Restaurant on Capitol Hill. He would buy me lunch and give me a cigar for afterwards. After about three years of episodic lunches, George who by then was in the Clinton NSC, gave me his resume, telling me that he hated DC and the inside-the-Beltway b***shit and would move to Chicago if that was what it took to get a job with Amoco and get out of the DC septic tank. [Chicago has the largest population of ethnic Greeks in the US.]

After GT took over at the CIA, I interviewed with John McLaughlin for the job of Chief Press Officer, but an insider at the Agency got the job. To be expected. Then George fell out of touch except for Xmas cards.

George is right about the dishonorable conduct of Cheney/Perle. And he demonstrates why the working stiffs at Langley liked him so much, and why loathesome maggots like Larry Johnson don't.

Tenet's biggest lapse if true is what Scheuer accuses him of when GT was informed that Scheuer's Bin Laden unit had ObL cornered and Tenet said back that the NSC nixed the activation of the para-military units involved. Did Tenet back his own people or did he downplay the possibility? Here is Scheuer:

Since 2001, however, several key Clinton counterterrorism insiders (including NSC staffers Richard A. Clarke, Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon) have reported that Tenet consistently denigrated the targeting data on bin Laden, causing the president and his team to lose confidence in the hard-won intelligence....The hard fact remains that each time we acquired actionable intelligence about bin Laden's whereabouts, I argued for preemptive action. By May 1998, after all, al-Qaeda had hit or helped to hit five U.S. targets, and bin Laden had twice declared war on America. I did not -- and do not -- care about collateral casualties in such situations, as most of the nearby civilians would be the families that bin Laden's men had brought to a war zone. But Tenet did care. "You can't kill everyone," he would say. That's an admirable humanitarian concern in the abstract, but it does nothing to protect the United States. Indeed, thousands of American families would not be mourning today had there been more ferocity and less sentimentality among the Clinton team.

When Tenet blames Rice for not activating a giant pre-emptive attack on Afghanistan in July 2001 during a period that he saw President Bush every morning and could have quietly lobbied to have emergency preventive measures taken, is simply beyond credibility. Why attack Afghanistan? Why not take immediate emergency steps here in the USA?

Which is sad, because Tenet also says that an attack on the NYC subway system was called off at the last minute in 2004 by Zawahiri. Any connection with the Presidential elections that year?

And there WAS evidence that Al Qaeda and Saddam's Iraq were in contact in numerous ways, but the artful language of Tenet and others denies documentary evidence recently come to light from translations of documents found in 2003.

And the evidence that Saddam shipped the thousands of barrels of WMD to Syria just before the war just as Saddam had flown his air force to Iran in 1991? Bashar Al-Assad presumably wasn't asked by Grandma Pelosi about that during her trip to Damascus.

The media will froth about this coming to its pre-determined conclusions as this country thrashes out its demons---demons from both sides of the ideological firewall.