Wednesday, May 2, 2007

In Defense of George Tenet


Why do they hate him?

By Justin Raimondo

".......Whether Tenet should or should not have resigned in protest, I'll leave that to CIA insiders to fight over. What matters is that Tenet points an accusing finger at the cabal centered in the vice president's office and the higher civilian reaches of the Pentagon, and rightly so. Except for Scooter Libby, these people have yet to face the music, or any consequences – and yet there are a lot more Scooter types out there, unindicted co-conspirators in the plot to lure us into war under false pretenses. Now they are compounding their crimes, going after their old enemies in the CIA – even as their lie factory begins to crank out a new series of elaborate deceptions aimed at convincing us to go to war with Iran.

Regardless of Tenet's own personal responsibility for the disaster that befell us in Iraq, the story he has to tell is valuable – provided we learn the proper lesson from it. Not that the CIA needs to be "reformed," or that we didn't plan enough for the occupation – nothing could have ameliorated the consequences of a policy that was essentially wrong. No "plan" could have contained the horrific outbreak of "postwar" violence and utter chaos that is now enveloping "liberated" Iraq. The lesson Tenet has to teach us is the relative ease with which it is possible for a very small group of people to seize the reins of government in America. Given the extreme concentration of power in the executive branch when it comes to matters of war and peace, a cabal that has the president's ear can wreak enormous damage on American interests – and the natural resistance of patriots within the government to their dominance can't always be counted on to succeed. This, indeed, is one of the enormous risks of our interventionist foreign policy: coupled with the extreme centralization of policy-making in the realm of foreign affairs, it is a danger not only to our republican institutions, but to the peace of the world."

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