As the Bush administration implodes, the accusations fly

by angryindian | May 11, 2007 at 11:29 pm

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It's funny, ennit? The happily go-lucky Dominionist folks who gave you
911, Afghanistan and the sunshine democratic state of Iraq are behaving
like members of an organised criminal organisation aren't they? One
after another are stabbing at each other in the media following George
Tenet's hawking of his new book on the morning chat shows.

The entire
American intelligence community is sorting itself out into camps either
loyal to the president or just the other thing. Adding to this tension
is the considerably dark cloud looming over the justice department and
its dutiful attorney general. To put in mildly, the current U.S.
political environment represents little more than foul weather made
worse by a certain forecast of more of the same.

To make a long
story short, the situation Iraq is "Blowback," a CIA term for
operations set up by the agency that in turn come back to haunt the
nation as a whole either politically such as in U.S. administration
policy or as in the case of 911, the loss of human life and property at
the hands of former agency “assets.” Osama Bin-Laden was under the
direction of the CIA during the Afghanistan civil war primarily because
the country was used as a proxy battlefield between the U.S. and the
former Soviet Union which supported the nation’s left-wing parties.

He
was also employed by the Clinton administration to work in Bosnia
during the U.S. actions there to dismantle opposition to the new
European Union economic plan that offered Yugoslavia marginalisation as
an inter-European banana republic. I personally remember watching then
President Bill Clinton addressing the media on CSPAN 2 making clear
that Milosevic was a threat to U.S. economic interests in the new EU
and the administration sent al-Qa'ida. Then Bin-Laden attacked the
U.S.S. Cole and other U.S. military installations using the very same
training his received from the CIA.

So, what does the crack
U.S. intelligence do when warned of an “imminent threat” by U.S.
trained terrorist operatives planning to hijack commercial airliners to
employ against American targets within the continental United States as
reported to the White House by the FBI on August 6th 2001? National
Security Advisor Condi Rice tells the 911 Commission that while the
title of the memo said 'in' the US, she insisted that the communication
was a “historical document” quite different than a specific forewarning
of actual attacks on American soil. As reported by the Washington Post,
then advisor Rice admits reading the document but mounts a defence of,
"But no one told us we needed to DO anything."

Enter CIA
Director George Tenet. In his new book, “At the Centre of the Storm: My
Years at the CIA,” Mr. Tenet lays out a story of neglect and inaction
in a White House unwilling to listen to anything other than their own
agenda. After appearing on the chat circuit to promote his book, the
intelligence community began to close in on itself and flooded the news
media with former intelligence officials flatly contradicting not
Tenet’s assessment of the Bush administration’s inability to get it
right on Iraq, but why he waited so long to go public with his opinions
earlier. Among this group is Ray McGovern, former analyst for the CIA
and personal friend of George Herbert Walker Bush who has publicly
called for Tenet to not only come clean on why he stalled revealing
this information when it was critical to preventing the catastrophe
that is Iraq, but to return the Medal of Freedom he received from The
Decider.

McGovern has also told John Pilger of the BBC that the crowd
surrounding Bush the Younger is exactly the same people that Bush the
Elder “Kept at arms length,” (“Breaking the Silence,” BBC June 2005)
H.W. Bush, a veteran of Naval intelligence and the CIA as well as one
of the few ex-presidents who exercises his right to receive
intelligence briefings in retirement, worked well with, but did not
allow himself to be managed by Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz, Donald
Rumsfeld nor John Negroponte.
The basis for this argument? Go back
and review the heavy-handed criticism Bush the Elder earned for not
going full-bore into Baghdad during the first Gulf War.

Everyone from
the media-savvy generals involved to the right-wing media shills called
H.W. Bush “resistant,” “uncommitted” and “cowardly” for not
aggressively invading, occupying and governing Iraq with the oilfields
as the spoils of conquest. Unlike his greedy compatriots, Bush the
Elder was a trained intelligence man and knew the obvious, invade urban
Iraq at your own peril. A quick study of Algiers and why the French
eventually left despite their willingness to do whatever it took to
maintain the colony illustrates his point. So does Vietnam in the late
fifties.

However the Bush administration seems to disregard the
study of history as a guideline of what not to do in dealing with other
nations. Ignoring pleas from the military that the U.S. was not
prepared to invade an urbanized hostile environment without more troops
and material, the Bush crew forged ahead and successfully overturned
the government of Iraq and replaced it with a rapid succession of
military governors finally formed a government that was again reformed
and finally after another sequence of judges, lynched its deposed
leader, Saddam Hussein. The “mission” was accomplished the president
said following his eventful entrance to the massive press conference
aboard a flattop ship symbolizing American military power and
domination over the entire planet.

Only he was wrong. The war, if we can truly call it that, was just beginning.

It’s
not as if Bush Co. did not anticipate resistance. They, like
Eisenhower, Nixon, Kissinger and a now sheepishly repentant Robert
McNamara before them simply could not envisage people they had no
respect for as human beings would, or would, mount such fierce
defiance. Review any of the over-simplified predictions of flowers in
the streets for American service personnel and how the Iraqi’s will
come to “Love America and its way of life” and you can smell the total
lack of respect for the self-determination of these people and others
similarly regarded as either assets or interference.

As the house
of cards that Bush has erected around himself dismantles, blame and
responsibility for Iraq, the Taliban’s return to power in Afghanistan,
worsening relations with Iran and the apparent fact that Bin-Laden is
still able to operate in the Afghan mountains and plan hits on American
representatives when they visit the country will be re-directed towards
other people. As Tenet and Rice lob darts at each other with others
such as ex-CIA operative Bob Baer entering the discourse, it seems
evident that the Bush administration was willing to risk it all in
their bid to gain access to that nation’s oil resources. And in the
process, more than one million Iraqi’s have lost their lives with more
dying every day caught in the middle of sectarian theological violence.

In a nation that under its last leader executed radical Islamic
terrorists, it has now become a breeding ground for anti-American
terrorism of the worst kind. Every person eligible for a blue passport
is in actuality a marked individual guilty only of association with a
government that condones the torture of Arabs, political or not,
seeking to finally free themselves of both imperialistic as well as
direct totalitarian rule from their own leaders.

And while we are at it
let us not forget the more than 3,300 dead American service personnel
and the widows, orphans and grieving relatives of those who either felt
they had a duty to serve or in a last-ditch effort to feed their
families or themselves, joined the military as an honourable way to
earn a living. Imperialism was the last thing on their minds.

The
people this republic places their trust in to represent and defend the
United States from ill will have shown themselves to be lacking in one
critical component of effective statesmanship, the ability and maturity
to say to your populace you’ve made a grievous error in judgement.
While we can present a damn solid argument in favour of a more
accusatory suggestion of culpability and complicity in such taboo
subjects as war crimes, torture and illegal aggression towards other
nations, let’s stick to the “We’ve made some mistakes” defence floating
around the Capitol.

Conspiracy theories aside, The fact that they were
warned of the 911 attacks and did nothing to prevent them points to
incompetence at the highest levels of government and the sorry
responses to national disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and the
recent tornado wreckage of an entire town in Kansas display nothing but
ineptitude from the top down.

And here is Tenet battling it out
with his former co-workers over who is to blame for everything that has
gone wrong with Iraq with everyone pointing fingers at everyone else
except the man who sits in the Oval Office. The Goldwater Republican is
extinct. The sort of president who would place a title on his desk that
said: “The Buck Stops Here,” will never be seen again. Accountability
from our leaders for what happens during their administration of the
affairs of this country has been eroded from the inside fed by the cult
of greed and xenophobic entitlement that the U.S. symbolizes for so
many around the world. People unfortunate enough to be born on the side
without the power see the world much differently than those peering
through the blinders of the American Dream in America.

Now, Richard
Perle takes his stab at Tenet with this article ridiculing the
assertion in his book that they had a discussion about invading Iraq on
September 12th 2001 when Tenet claims Perle declared to him in person
that "Iraq had to pay for the attack," (911) While this information
morally supports the conspiracy theory allegations, the main problem
with Tenet’s charge lies in the fact that Perle was still in Paris and
did not return to Washington D.C. until the 15th three days later. Not
that I feel that Perle is a lamb amongst these wolves, quite the
contrary. But it apparently proves my contention that since it is clear
that the U.S. has loused up its bid to occupy Iraq with minimal effort,
someone needs to take the fall. But no one as of yet is willing to fall
on their sword.

Understandable in light of the World Court and
their willingness to request Henry Kissinger to come for tea and share
chat over Chile, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Cuba whenever he is ready
to visit The Hague. I truly wonder if this president goes to sleep each
night asking himself how everything turned out so bad. Tenet did and
he’s doing everything in his power to shine any responsibility for this
tragedy away from him. He sees the proverbial axe about to fall and
he’s moving defensibly to avoid it.

I wish everyday Iraqis and American service people had the same latitude.

- The Angryindian

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George Tenet sets the stage in his memoir by recalling a conversation
he claims to have had with me on Sept. 12, 2001: "As I walked beneath
the awning that leads to the West Wing[, I] saw Richard Perle exiting
the building just as I was about to enter. . . . Perle turned to me and
said, 'Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear
responsibility.' I looked back at Perle and thought: Who has [he] been
meeting with in the White House so early in the morning on today of all
days?"

But I was in Europe on Sept. 12, 2001, unable to get a
return flight to Washington, and I did not tell Tenet that Iraq was
responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks, not then, not ever. That should
have been the end of the story: a faulty recollection, perhaps
attributing to me something he may have heard elsewhere, an honest
mistake.

So I was surprised when, having been made aware of his
error, Tenet reasserted his claim, saying: "So I may have been off on
the day, but I'm not off on what he said and what he believed."

The
greatest intelligence failure of the past two decades was the CIA's
failure to understand and sound an alarm at the rise of jihadist
fundamentalism.

On Meet the Press last Sunday, Tenet argued that
his version "seems to be corroborated" by a comment I made to columnist
Robert D. Novak on Sept. 17 and a letter to President Bush that I
signed, with 40 others, on Sept. 20. But my 10-word comment to Novak
made no claim that Iraq was responsible for Sept. 11. Neither did the
letter to the president, which said that "any strategy aiming at the
eradication of terrorism and its sponsors must include a determined
effort to remove Saddam Hussein from power."

Tenet insists on
equating two statements that are not at all the same: that Iraq was
responsible for Sept. 11--which I never said--and that removing Saddam
Hussein before he could share chemical, biological or nuclear weapons
with terrorists had become an urgent matter, which I did say. He
continues to assert falsely that the president's decision to remove
Hussein was encouraged by lies about Iraq's responsibility for the
Sept. 11 attacks.

Understandably anxious to counter the myth
that we went into Iraq on the basis of his agency's faulty
intelligence, Tenet seeks to substitute another myth: that the decision
to remove Saddam Hussein resulted from the nefarious influence of the
vice president and a cabal of neoconservative intellectuals. To advance
that idea, a theme of his book, he has attributed to me, and to others,
statements that were never made.

Read on...