George Tenet is just the latest to join this blame game, which began more than three years ago when his fellow Presidential Medal of Freedom recipient Tommy Franks told Bob Woodward that Douglas Feith, the Pentagon’s intelligence bozo, was the "stupidest guy on the face of the earth" (that’s the expurgated version). Last fall, Kenneth Adelman, the neocon cheerleader who foresaw a "cakewalk" in Iraq, told Vanity Fair that Mr. Tenet, General Franks and Paul Bremer were "three of the most incompetent people who’ve ever served in such key spots." Richard Perle chimed in that the "huge mistakes" were "not made by neoconservatives" and instead took a shot at President Bush. Ahmad Chalabi, the neocons’ former darling, told Dexter Filkins of The Times "the real culprit in all this is Wolfowitz."
And of course nearly everyone blames Rumsfeld.
Millions may be buying Tenet’s book. But few are buying his story. Read his book. Connect the dots. He sat behind Colin Powell during the former Secretary’s presentation of the French Mirage planes and the chemical weapons and precursors and so forth, yet at the time he says he knew most of it was faulty.
Well Georgey, as Michael Scheuer said, rather than resign and alert the press that the weapons weren’t there, you helped to sell the lie. The good news is that both sides seem to largely see Tenet’s bokk for what it is_ a blame game.
So while Condi is writing a book, and Tenet is pointing blame, the carnage goes on in Iraq unabated.
That accounting might well begin with Mr. Powell’s successor, Condoleezza Rice...Thus Ms. Rice was dispatched to three Sunday shows last weekend to bat away Mr. Tenet’s book before "60 Minutes" broadcast its interview with him that night. But in each appearance her statements raised more questions than they answered. She was persistently at odds with the record, not just the record as spun by Mr. Tenet but also the public record. She must be held to a higher standard — a k a the truth — before she too jumps ship.
It’s now been nearly five years since Ms. Rice did her part to sell the Iraq war on a Sept. 8, 2002, Sunday show with her rendition of "we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud." Yet there she was last Sunday on ABC, claiming that she never meant to imply then that Saddam was an imminent threat. "The question of imminence isn’t whether or not somebody is going to strike tomorrow" is how she put it. In other words, she is still covering up the war’s origins. On CBS’s "Face the Nation," she claimed that intelligence errors before the war were "worldwide" even though the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Mohamed ElBaradei publicly stated there was "no evidence" of an Iraqi nuclear program and even though Germany’s intelligence service sent strenuous prewar warnings that the C.I.A.’s principal informant on Saddam’s supposed biological weapons was a fraud.
Even George Stephanopoulos played a clip of Condi on his show in 2003 claiming not to know anything about the Niger documents before the war.
"But that statement wasn’t true," Mr. Stephanopoulos said. Ms. Rice pleaded memory loss, but the facts remain.
Dr, Rice is now stonewalling the Congress which is asking for documents that would indicate what she was doing in the lead up to the war and ask what she knew about the veracity or the weakness of the intelligence used to hoist this war upon us. She is starting to point blame like the rest of the neocons.
"It was an intelligence failure worldwide..."
Like Gonzales, Condi is a liar who has been caught lying not once, but several times. Like Gonzales and Goodling and Scooter Libby, she smokes so much pot I guess that she can’t remember a damn thing.
Particularly when the questioning gets close to the unbearable truth. Like cockroaches caught on the kitchen floor when you turn the lights on: they are all scrambling into the Chips Ahoy Box.
No link tonight. Need a sub anyway.