Robert Scheer: After Thousands Have Died, Tenet Comes Clean

[babylonsister]

http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/tenet_comes_clean/


After Thousands Have Died, Tenet Comes Clean
By Robert Scheer

The three short sentences at the beginning of Chapter 17 of former CIA Director George Tenet’s memoir, “At the Center of the Storm,” tell it all: “The United States did not go to war in Iraq solely because of WMD. I doubt it was even the principal cause. Yet it was the public face that was put on it.”

Consider the deep cynicism of that statement, playing as it does on the gravest threat to humanity’s survival—an apocalyptic nuclear conflagration—to exploit the fears of a nation raw from the 9/11 attacks. The “mushroom cloud” over Manhattan that now-Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Dick Cheney warned against was nothing more than a cheap rhetorical trick to justify an agenda of imperial intervention in the Middle East that long preceded the 9/11 attacks. The goal was to bamboozle Americans into supporting the restructuring of the politics of the Mideast to accord with the fantasies of a small band of neoconservative rogues who had insinuated themselves into the highest levels of the U.S. government.

That they were rogues was known to the chief of the Central Intelligence Agency, a man rewarded by President Bush with the Medal of Freedom precisely because he provided respectable cover for the chicanery that drove the Iraq debacle. Pity that it took a $4-million book contract for Tenet to come clean.

While Tenet remained silent, he observed the neocon coup d’état up close. His most devastating revelations center on the antics of that neocon cabal in the Pentagon and its hit squad, dubbed “Team Feith” for Douglas Feith, a protégé of former Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz and, through him, former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Cheney.

Team Feith’s main task was to create and maintain the fiction of a connection between Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden when no solid evidence supported that assertion. The intelligence unit Feith headed set about discrediting the conclusions of every other intelligence operation while cherry-picking evidence to support the invasion of Iraq as a logical response to 9/11. Tenet’s high crime—and it is just that—was that he knew of this treachery from the start, yet never exposed it to Congress or the public.

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[bluerum]

1. He has not come clean. He has simply put another coat of crap over the

fact that the administration orchestrated a transfer of wealth to the oil and arms industries (aka corporate welfare) in the guise of global wars on terror.

Oh, and little george really really really wanted to lynch Saddam Hussein.

[progressoid]

2. I like Sheer!

He even answered an email I sent him a long time ago.

[babylonsister]

3. Me, too, and Sheer is not giving Tenet a pass in this article. nt