Truemors
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tells the 911 Commission that while the title of the memo said 'in' the US, she insisted that the communication was a “historical document” quite different than a specific forewarning of actual attacks on American soil.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
---------------------------------------------------------------- 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...
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