The question I've always had about George Tenet -- seen this evening on "60 Minutes" getting feisty with Scott Pelley -- is this: How exactly did he, a Clinton-appointee running the goddam CIA, pass muster with Dick Cheney and hang on into the Bush 43 administration? I mean, here was a crowd gone obsessional with doing everything the opposite of Bill Clinton. North Korea? No talking and no deals! Measured fiscal prudence? Gargantuan tax cuts for the Top 1%! And every disposable FOB anywhere in Washington ... overboard! But they leave Clinton's guy running the CIA? The Coast Guard, maybe. But the CIA is one job where you want an unequivocal Kool-Aid partisan, like, uh, Porter Goss.
From what I've read Tenet plays the man's man game pretty well. He is cocksure and smokes a good cigar. But someone like Cheney had to have some kind of deep assurance that Tenet was not going to be a problem, either with him or with the Richard Perle-Paul Wolfowitz crowd squeezing the Iraq alarm even before 9/11, to survive the Clinton cauterizing going on everywhere else in the federal bureaucracy.
But here is Tenet now selling his version of history. Granted, it is a version pretty much lacking in surprise and neatly in step with everything else we've learned -- and Condoleeza Rice, Cheney and Bush continue to deny, to their further utter marginalization.
I'm all for public officials stepping up and admitting they screwed up -- even if they do it by way of fulfilling a $4 million book contract -- but the primary strike against Tenet, which maybe he'll answer better when he testifies before Congress, is why he didn't step up and scream, "Bullshit!" two years ago, when he realized that either Cheney, Bush, Rice or Andy Card had sold him out to Bob Woodward.
If he stays as combative as he was with Pelley it'll be one of the more interesting book tours in recent years. (Must check to see if he's doing Stewart).
He, like the lot of 'em, is a virtuoso kiss ass.
This reference to Tenet from Woodward's book when Tenet's main protector on Capitol Hill, Sen. David Boren, who represented Oklahoma until 1994, had implored President-elect Bush to retain this Clinton-era head of the CIA and if he had any doubts, to "ask your father":
When the younger Bush did, the former President George H.W. Bush said: "From what I hear, he's a good fellow," one of the highest accolades in the Bush family lexicon. Tenet … later led the effort to rename CIA headquarters for Bush, himself a former DCI.
Well, whadya' know. Apparently not much of a spirited debate about Tenet's bonafides as head spook, sorta' like the paucity of rigorous dicussion during the fait accompli run up to the war. Too bad they didn't follow the same procedure: "I dunno'. Ask yer Dad." '41 would've told 'em NOT to invade.
Not exactly a meritocracy they have going there in D.C. What this country needs is a WAR ON ERROR.
I like Tenet's non-denial denial over torture. What a consummate liar he is. Also - he said he became head of CIA at 44? Only an unbelievable political climber would make it that high at that age. I'm with you Brian - what did he tell Bush 43 to keep him on? Or, what did they have on him?