George Tenet's Betrayal

PBS Frontline's episode on Darth Vader, "The Dark Side", was a little disappointing in that it tells us little about Cheney we didn't already know. The main story, and I don't think it's been told this well before, is about George Tenet and his failures. He was the only real bridge between what the intelligence community knew and what the Cheney adminstration could get away with saying. He lost the fight against Cheney and Rumsfeld over Afghanistan, which could have been the CIA's moment of glory. But then he sold out on WMD's. He knew all the facts, and lied about it extensively to Powell and everyone else. Slam Dunk! Now we all know that this war was a con from the start, that Bush and the policy makers are completely responsible. But they needed Tenet to be their bitch, someone who could give Congress and Powell an excuse for their capituations to the White House. If Tenet had chosen courage and honesty, things would have been very different. I think the war would have happened one way or another, but it would have been more overtly dictatorial and probably less popular.

Tenet is an image of the corrupted civil servant, willing to sell the country in order to curry favor in Washington. We might have expected more from that great hero Colin Powell, but Tenet was the one person who really knew everything and had the most authority to stand up to the president. What a disgrace. The sad thing is that he doesn't seem to have particularly wanted war, unlike Judith Miller and most of the media establishment. It looks like he told all his lies simply in order to keep his player status in Washington. In a way that is more evil than warmongering, because it implies a total lack of faith in anything--neither America the war machine, nor America the democracy. Tenet is the ultimate careerist bureaucrat, willing to sell his country for personal gain.