Pat Lang, a cosigner of the letter to George Tenet calling for him to donate a portion of the proceeds from his book to the soldiers and their families who have been killed or wounded in Iraq, weighs in on Tenet's whining.
George Tenet -- he was on Meet the Press today. What a pitiful spectacle. This is not a man. This is a whining, sniveling, political bureaucrat; a spoiled child who, in his own mind, is never to blame for anything, never really takes responsibility for his failures of judgment and action, and spins, and spins and spins.
George's "admissions" of responsibility are always carefully couched in words that do not actually say things like, "I was wrong," "I failed," "The war was a mistake," "I failed in what I did not do to stop this oncoming disaster." He quibbles. Quibbling is not acceptable in an intelligence officer, certainly not in the BOSS intelligence officer. I wonder if the Society of Jesus is happy when Tenet cites the principles that he thinks they taught him as justification for his way of doing things.
- You were appointed to produce finished intelligence products that were CORRECT, that were TRUE, that represented REALITY. A good try is not good enough. Because of the crap that the intelligence community produced under your leadership, tens of thousands have died. Do the honorable thing, George.
- You were supposed to stop being a flunky for whomever was in power when the Senate of the United States confirmed you to be head of the intelligence community. Instead, you participated in a "marketing campaign" to sell the American people a war about which you admit to having qualms. You and your colleagues like Hadley, Matalin, Libby and Rice did a thorough job. A lot of the simple are still looking for those WMD thingies in the bottom of an Iraqi lake. Do the right thing, George.
- You did not tell the Commander in Chief, (the commander guy) that there was a "problem" with the raw information and the analyzed intelligence? You did not tell him because your bureaucratic timidity and "small timer's" sense of organizational propriety restricted you to dealing with his "followers?" My God! Do the right thing, George."
Do the right thing.