It is only fitting and proper that from George Bush's elite inner circle of privilege and perfidy, a former player should now emerge to tell the "truth" -- but only at a personal profit of millions.
I have no doubt that George Tenet, the bumbling go-along-to-get-along ex-CIA chief, weaves an abundance of truth into the fabric of his new tell-all. The particulars of his narrative -- that Dick Cheney, Lewis Libby, Paul Wolfowitz and Doug Feith, among others, "never seemed satisfied with our answers" that between al Qaeda and Iraq there was no "symbiotic relationship," so they created one -- square all too nicely with the scores of others' narratives.
But would any honorable superspook have waited five years to tell it? Would he have watched American troops march into what his own agency had predicted would be a prolonged maelstrom of gruesome, urban-guerrilla warfare without first revealing to Congress and the public what he knew?
If he's a former member of Bush's elite inner circle of privilege and perfidy, of course he would have. The foreseeability of it all may sicken the soul, yet that very foreseeability also lessened the physical nausea. Few would have expected anything else of Mr. Tenet.
We did deserve and expect something far nobler from Senator Richard Durbin, however.
Of the two bombshells that dropped this week, Durbin's was packed with far greater lethality -- both the self-destructive and outwardly offensive type. To say that Wednesday I sat slackjawed watching his belated catharsis on the Senate floor would be an understatement. I was incensed -- not to mention thoroughly befuddled that any man capable of rising to the Senate's #2 slot could be so incredibly politically stupid.
Did Mr. Durbin actually think he'd receive partisan kudos and backslaps for revealing five bloody years too late that he knew all along and for a provable fact the White House was bamboozling the public? That as a member of the intelligence committee he had been looking at specific, on-paper evidence of it?
"The information we had in the intelligence committee was not the same information being given to the American people. I couldn't believe it," said Durbin.
Well gee, Dick, we couldn't believe it either. But we lacked the hard evidence that you happened to be staring at and could have damn well released. Doing so could have been Plan A, and perhaps would have been Plan A by any honorable lawmaker about to vote authority to go to unprovoked war.
But here was your pathetic and literally unbelievable excuse for taking the dishonorable route of silence: "Frankly, I couldn't do much about it because, in the intelligence committee, we are sworn to secrecy. We can't walk outside the door and say the statement made yesterday by the White House is in direct contradiction to classified information that is being given to this Congress."
Like hell you couldn't have. Such a statement would have violated not one dotted "i" or crossed "t" of any national security oath. Not one. You could have made clear then precisely what you made clear Wednesday -- simply, "The statement made yesterday by the White House is in direct contradiction to classified information that is being given to this Congress." And you could have left it right there.
That would have impelled minority demands for declassifying the documents and would, at the very least, have ignited a firestorm of controversy and debate -- the crucial but largely lacking debate that you sabotaged under the cover of a charlatan's oath, one taken by a hide that obviously valued its own safety and security more than that of 3300 Americans and at least 100,000 Iraqis.
Senator, compared to you, George Tenet looks like Nathan Hale.
The whole lot of them - wish we could send them out to sea and elect honest men and women.
Posted by: cyberboston | April 28, 2007 at 09:34 PM