Revolutionary Moderation

The other side



Hesoid is not the only person in the world of blogs to be much more critical than I have been toward George Tenet, but he's one:

Note to George...why the hell are you sticking your neck out for these lying assholes? It certainly cannot be for the good of the country, or for national security reasons.

Because it's his job. If he wants to resign, and then start criticising the current administration, fine, but he works for these lying assholes. And I want to point out again, he didn't admit to more than he needed to. To paraphrase: The text was factually accurate [with the whole British government caveat]. The bar of truthfulness should have been higher.



What do I take from that? What doesn't he say, that I think is implied here? If it is the case that there was pressure to build a case against Iraq, when the CIA didn't percieve any real threat (and I happen to believe that's exactly what happened), would a word of George Tenet's statement contradict that? Not at all.



As the head of the CIA, Tenet can't go around calling his boss a liar. Neither should Tenet be lying to cover for the President. In his statement, he did neither. Nothing George Tenet said should be ending the questions around the State of the Union address. Quite the opposite: I think his statement successfully begs a series of questions that need to be asked, but are not his responsibility to answer. Who wanted this case built? Who thought "strict truthfulness" was a high enough bar, presuming that the CIA had the conversation with the Administration that I imagined in my previous post? Why was the CIA asking the British to drop the Niger uranium accusation, while the US administration wasn't publically correcting themselves?



These are all good and important questions. These are questions that Tenet doesn't answer, or attempt to answer. All he says is that he and his agency should have tried harder to stop the President from making this ridiculous implication. As well he should. The fact that he hasn't resigned as part of his apology should tell us everything we need to know. He aand we both know the real responsibility for this unnecessary war lies elsewhere.