1115.org

It’s funny what sort of things the compulsion to justify yourself can drive you to. Especially when the behavior you’re trying to justify is beyond all justification. George Tenet has decided to provide a perfect example of this.

This man chose to be complicit in the lies that led us into the Iraq War. All the blood spilled in the Iraq War is on his hands as much as it is on George Bush’s or Dick Cheney’s or Donald Rumsfeld’s or Paul Wolfowitz’s or Richard Perle’s. That’s not just the 3351 American soldiers killed thus far, but the upwards of half a million Iraqis estimated to have died as a result of these men’s war-lust conspiracy. And the untold thousands yet to be killed in the months and years ahead. That, by any standards, is a lot of blood to have on your hands. And, of course, it’s not only on your hands. Whether you are willing to admit it to yourself yet or not, it’s also on your conscience. And, in the long run, there will be no getting away from that. (Assuming, of course, that these men did possess a conscience to start with, and that some of then still do.)

One might have thought that when you reach the point of freely admitting, to yourself and to others, that the road to this war was paved with deliberate lies and distortions, that the case for war was manufactured in cold blood out of whole cloth, one might have thought that you would then have other things on your mind than setting the record straight on exactly what kind of lie you were telling when you went “It’s a slam dunk!” in the Oval Office.

But that’s obviously what’s uppermost on Tenet’s mind. What matters to him more than anything else is setting that record straight. And he obviously expects sympathy from us once we understand what the remark was really all about, he obviously expects some absolution.

So it’s time for us to say to George Tenet, we hear you loud and clear, you pathetic little excuse for a man. When you said it was a slam dunk, you didn’t mean the intelligence case for Saddam possessing WMDs was a slam dunk, you meant that selling that false proposition to the American public and to the UN would be a slam dunk.

Yes, we hear you loud and clear, George Tenet, and you’re still as far beneath contempt in our minds as you were before. As far beneath forgiveness, as far beneath absolution. Because you’re so far from any real repentance for what can only be described as your sins of omission and commission.

Much has been made of all kinds of things Tenet has said in his book, and in his TV appearances to promote the book. To me, the biggest story that no one has focused on yet is what Tenet has implicitly told us about that Oval Office slam dunk meeting.

According to Tenet — who is anxious to portray himself as wronged, because he is the only old-fashioned gentleman in that gang, the only one with any sense of honor among thieves — the only topic of discussion that day was selling a bill of goods to the American public. There was no serious debate about what the intelligence really said. The only issue was: Can we tell a convincing pack of lies to everyone–to the Pollyannas in Congress, to the American people, to the whole damn world? And George Tenet is eager to convince us now that he eagerly embraced his role. You bet we can, Mr. Commander-in-Chief, sir! You just leave it to me. It’s an effing slam dunk, is what it is.

Tenet is cheerfully confessing to his willing role in selling what he now freely admits was a pack of deliberate lies, and what he expects from us in return is sympathy and absolution?

Forget morality, forget conscience. Why, oh bloody effing why, couldn’t we have had just one or two people with a little common sense involved in the conspiracy to commit this war? Maybe common sense would have led someone to, at the very least, insist on having a proper plan for the war? It might even have led someone to the realization that the whole pack of lies would eventually come out, and shame them forever, and besmirch their names for eternity.

George Tenet, distinguished recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, has the blood of hundreds of thousands on his amoral hands, and millions of dollars in blood money in his unprincipled pockets. May every dollar compound the torment he was fated to suffer for every death.

George, you feeling like an effing hero yet? Shall we put on a ticker tape parade for you? With flowers and kisses and all?

(If I ever meet George Tenet, the only reason I’ll spit slightly to one side instead of squarely in his face, is because he’s not trying to claim “I didn’t do it”, he’s only complaining “There’s no honor among this pack of thieves.)