Posted on 05/01/2007 8:54:33 PM PDT by Live free or die
It's difficult to see why George Tenet would be so incautious as to write his own self-justifying apologia, let alone give it the portentous title At the Center of the Storm. There is already a perfectly good pro-Tenet book written by a man who knows how to employ the overworked term storm. Bob Woodward's 2002 effort, Bush at War, was, in many of its aspects, almost dictated by George Tenet.
How do we know this? Well, Tenet is described on the opening page as "a hefty, outgoing son of Greek immigrants," which means that he talked to Woodward on background. Further compliments are showered upon him. We discover that his 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. No need to draw a very complex picture here: Tenet knows how the kiss-up and kiss-down game is played. And, for a rather mediocre man, he did well enough out of the arrangement while it lasted. Woodward was even willing to describe him as one who "had developed an understanding of the importance of human intelligence, HUMINT in spycraft." But let's not get ahead of ourselves. I only mean to say that it was a very favorably disposed chronicler who wrote this, in describing Tenet's reaction on the terrible morning of Sept. 11, 2001: "This has bin Laden all over it," Tenet told Boren. "I've got to go."
(Excerpt) Read more at politics.slate.msn.com ...
bttt
A highly irritating expression in Washington has it that "hindsight is always 20-20." Would that it were so. History is not a matter of hindsight and is not, in fact, always written by the victors. In this case, a bogus history is being offered by a real loser whose hindsight is cockeyed and who had no foresight at all.
“In this case, a bogus history is being offered by a real loser whose hindsight is cockeyed and who had no foresight at all.”
Says it all.
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.
No need to draw a very complex picture here: Tenet knows how the kiss-up and kiss-down game is played....."
Now I get why Dubya didn't fire Tenet in the first place, HW vouched for him. Bad mistake!
So it was, I did a search of Chrish Hitchens and found nothing...ugh!
The search function is for title and not author...
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