Once again I ask, how has Tenet avoided responsibility?

[ThomWV]

George Tenet, Geoge Bush's CIA Director, has a lot to answer for and hasn't been asked a thing. Why?

[elleng]

1. He seems to have left at an opportune moment!

With tears!

[ThomWV]

3. June of 2004, so he was no flash in the pan.

[KharmaTrain]

2. Maybe Cause No One Has Asked Him...

He's been extremely below the radar since he either bailed on or was pushed out of the booosh regime. Other than writing a book, I've never seen him called to testify about his involvement...probably because he would cite "confidential" his knowledge. Also, unfortunately, Congress has been timid, as usual, in pushing to investigate the lies and crimes of the booosh regime. A part of this was the massive stonewall effort by the booosh regime (executive privilidge on steroids), but now the real truth is starting to come forward...Congress and the DOJ no longer have conjecture, they're seeing direct evidence that needs to be investigated.

A sidenote is the love/hate game played between the booooshies and the CIA. There were many reports of the agency resenting the pressure being put on them by cheney. The bastard went to Langley in person to ride and intimidate the agency. I'm also certain that programs like the illegal wiretapping and waterboarding were leaked from the CIA to innoculate themselves and hope to put the heat back on cheney.

I think it could be quite interesting to see what Mr. Tenet has to say...under oath and with nothing held back. While I would prefer this to be held in open session, I'll take a solid grilling behind closed doors by the House Judiciary committee...especially if he gives up evidence that leads to the prosecution of boooosh, cheney and the other war criminals.

[leveymg]

4. Because "they're all honorable men."

If anyone thinks any of this is new, just go back a few years to the Golden Age:

(6) Carl Oglesby, The Secret State, speech to the Massachusetts Libertarian Party (19th December, 1991)

1953: Operation Ajax: The CIA overthrew Premier Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, complaining of his neutralism in the Cold War, and installed in his place General Fazlollah Zahedi, a wartime Nazi collaborator. Zahedi showed his gratitude by giving 25-year leases on forty percent of Iran's oil to three American arms. One of these firms, Gulf Oil, was fortunate enough a few years later to hire as a vice president the CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt, who had run Operation Ajax. Did this coup set the clock ticking on the Iranian hostage crisis of 1979-80?<7>

1954: Operation Success: The CIA spent $20 million to overthrow the democratically elected Jacabo Arbenz in Guatemala for daring to introduce an agrarian reform program that the United Fruit Company found threatening. General Walter Bedell Smith, CIA director at the time, later joined the board of United Fruit

1954: News Control: The CIA began a program of infiltration of domestic and foreign institutions, concentrating on journalists and labor unions. Among the targeted U.S. organizations was the National Student Association, which the CIA secretly supported to the tune of some $200,000 a year. This meddling with an American and thus presumably off-limits organization remained secret until Ramparts magazine exposed it in 1967. It was at this point that mainstream media first became curious about the CIA and began unearthing other cases involving corporations, research centers, religious groups and universities.

1960–61: Operation Zapata: Castro warned that the United States was preparing an invasion of Cuba, but this was 1960 and we all laughed. We knew in those days the United States did not do such things. Then came the Bay of Pigs, and we were left to wonder how such an impossible thing could happen.

1960–63: Task Force W: Only because someone still anonymous inside the CIA decided to talk about it to the Senate Intelligence Committee in 1975, we discovered that the CIA's operations directorate decided in September 1960: (a) that it would be good thing to murder Fidel Castro and other Cuban leaders, (b) that it would be appropriate to hire the Mafia to carry these assassinations out, and (c) that there would be no need to tell the President that such an arrangement was being made. After all, was killing not the Mafia's area of expertise? It hardly seemed to trouble the CIA that the Kennedy administration was at the very same time trying to mount a war on organized crime focusing on precisely the Mafia leaders that the CIA was recruiting as hired assassins.

1964: Two weeks after the Johnson administration announced the end of the JFK Alliance for Progress with its commitment to the principle of not aiding tyrants, the CIA staged and the U.S. Navy supported a coup d'etat in Brazil over-throwing the democratically elected Joao Goulart. Within twenty-four hours a new right-wing government was installed, congratulated and recognized by the United States.

1965: An uprising in the Dominican Republic was put down with the help of 20,000 U.S. Marines. Ellsworth Bunker, the U.S. ambassador, Abe Fortas, a new Supreme Court justice and a crony of LBJ's, presidential advisors Adolf Berle, Averill Harriman and Joseph Farland were all on the payroll of organizations such as the National Sugar Refining Company, the Sucrest Company, the National Sugar Company, and the South Puerto Rico Sugar Company - all of which had holdings in the Dominican Republic that were threatened by the revolution

1967: The Phoenix Program. A terror and assassination program conceived by the CIA but implemented by the military command targeted Viet Cong cadres by name - a crime of war. At least twenty thousand were killed, according to the CIA's William Colby, of whom some 3,000 were assassinated. A CIA analyst later observed "They assassinated a lot of the wrong damn people".

August 1967: COINTELPRO. Faced with mounting public protest against the Vietnam War, the FBI formally inaugurated its so-called COINTELPRO operations, a rationalized and extended form of operations under way for at least a year. A House committee reported in 1979 that "the FBI Chicago Field Office files in 1966 alone contained the identities of a small army of 837 informers, all of whom reported on antiwar activists, political activities, views or beliefs, and none of whom reported on any unlawful activities by (these activists)".

October 1967: Two months after the PBI started up COINTELPRO, the CIA followed suit with MH/Chaos, set up in the counterintelligence section run by a certifiable paranoid named James Jesus Angleton. Even though the illegal Chaos infiltration showed that there was no foreign financing or manipulation of the antiwar movement, Johnson refused to accept this, and the operation continued in to the Nixon administration. By 1971, CIA agents were operating everywhere there were students inside America, infiltrating protest groups not only to spy on them but to provide authentic cover stories they could use while traveling abroad and joining foreign anti-war group. Chaos was refocused on international terrorism in 1972, but another operation, Project Resistance, conducted out of the CIA Office of Security, continued surveillance of American domestic dissent until it was ended in June 1973.

It just goes dormant for a while, before springing back up again. Like any sleeper cell.