Cats are mewing around at the feet of George Tenet right now.

These lovable furry pets are marveling that Clinton appointee Tenet appears to have more than the nine lives that they do.

David Kay has politicians and pundits and media personalities all commenting incessantly about “intelligence failures” being responsible for the U.S. going to war under false pretenses. The idea is that if there are no weapons of mass destruction (WMDs), then there is no justification for having gone to war [see note].

But the supposedly independent Kay is now seen carrying George W. Bush’s water in doing some buck-passing to minimize the White House’s responsibility for these failures in competent leadership. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Kay thought Bush was blameless and that members of the intelligence community should be stretched on the rack for this falsehood upon which more than 500 U.S. soldiers and thousands of innocent Iraqis have given their lives. These members of the intelligence community are supposedly the spooks and analysts that gather and make sense of the data, respectively, about the things that happen on this dangerous planet we inhabit.

Certainly if there are failures at the intelligence agencies, then those are failures in leadership as well at those intelligence agencies.

So unless buck-passing and scapegoating allow the leaders in government to place fully and squarely the blame of all this on the shoulders of some lowly greenhorn analyst working in a poorly lit cubicle, why does George Tenet, Director of Central Intelligence and Clinton appointee, still have his job?

Indeed, why does Tenet still even have his head? Why hasn’t it been served on a platter smeared in Crawford’s special barbecue sauce?

The reason is simple. Tenet can blow the whistle on all this.

He can report how President Cheney personally involved himself in operations at Langley and how Cheney guided the development of the wild speculation from British bureaucrats—speculation based on forged documents about nonexistent transactions involving an African country (an obvious counterintelligence operation designed to sniff out moles)—to the production of rumor that gave rise to exaggeration which, when drafted as a position paper, is formalized to the status of myth. And then myth became “intelligence” when it was countersigned by Rumsfeld, Rice, Cheney, Rove, and team player Powell. Bush was brought into the loop only on a need-to-know basis naturally.

Of course Tenet was privy to all of this. His view was from the catbird seat.

And that’s why Tenet’s head will never will roll. In an economy having lost millions of jobs and regaining none, the man with the greatest job security in all of Washington and of the nation is that of the present Director of Central Intelligence. This Clinton holdover has even more job security than does Bush. Largely because he has the goods on Bush.

There will be no investigation into this tawdry affair by a Republican-controlled Congress. This corruption goes unpunished because Tom DeLay and Bill Frist take their orders from the White House, and the last thing the White House wants is Tenet or any of his staff testifying under oath.

Tenet and everyone else at Langley have been told as well that they will not volunteer any information unless they want to be hanging from their thumbs at Guantanamo. Secrecy laws and the Patriot Act together make it possible for the Bush mafia to hold anyone they want incommunicado until the Bush twins are themselves old enough to deplore the binge drinking and whoring around of their own granddaughters.

So if all this is true, you’re probably wondering why Kay would start the fingerpointing process at the people the Bush mafia would seem most to want to keep out of the public eye.

There could be several reasons.

For one, while Kay is not the most impartial guy, he had to have the appearance of independence, and the one thing that provides that measure of independence is that Kay is not at all part of the inner circle of deceit and corruption. When asked to speak candidly, he did.

Another reason he brought attention to the CIA could be that someone in the White House failed to instruct Kay about testifying before Congress. Namely, in testifying before Congress, the witness should stick to the facts of the report, and when asked to speculate, use the pat response, “Senator, you probably know better than myself about where the fault lies and what remedy to pursue.”

Then again, Kay may have been under explicit orders to steer the blame toward Langley. In employing this scapegoat, the White House defuses the bomb that represents the growing calls for a probe of itself by prominent Democrats in the minority, and it reassures everyone at Spook Central that no names will be named, that no one will be made to walk the plank, and that Congressional Republicans will keep up the rhetoric that this is not really or no longer about WMDs. The White House does not even see this as political crisis management any longer.

The possibility should also not be discounted that Presidents Cheney and Rove want to put a little scare into Tenet as well. Perhaps Tenet has been making noises. Perhaps he’s been wondering out loud whether he really should be a team player for a team whose membership has done enough and knows enough to keep its members in federal prison for several years. By using Kay to warn Tenet that the blame can be directed to him, this may be the way the Bush mafia enforces discipline in the family.

And without doubt, Tenet has been told that if the family goes down, he will go down too.

Tenet must know that when the stakes are high, anything is possible with the Bush mafia. For example, the subtle hint to Tenet that one of his loved ones could be accused of a crime, and although eventually found innocent, the process of going through the process could be unnecessarily traumatizing. Why would Tenet risk putting one so dear to him through such an experience?

All Tenet has to remember is that he and the rest need to keep cool heads, and all of this will blow over, and they’ll all have time to grapple with and heal their consciences, certainly after the re-election, and if such a thing is required.

And certainly Mr. Tenet has been informed that no U.S. laws were really broken, even if it is true that the reasons given to the American people for invading and occupying Iraq were all lies.

After all, Mr. Tenet, who is really the bad guy here, and how grateful are the Iraqi people that this bad guy no longer torments them?

Mavi Gözler
American Patriot

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Actually, Bush and his coterie of moronic supporters are wrong that the possession of WMDs alone is justification for invading Iraq. The only justification for going to war against Saddam is if the United States was either attacked or threatened with attack by Iraq. Iraq was not only no threat to the United States, but it was pretty much defanged so that it was a threat to no one at all. But this tangent off the principal line being drawn in this essay is only to assert forcefully that the United States criminally invaded and occupied a sovereign state and that Bush must be called to account, not so much to the world but to righteously indignant Americans now ashamed of what their nation has done [back to essay].

1 February 2004