WTF Is It Now?!?

The dubious suicide of George Tenet
Snipped from another great piece by William Pitt:

Things have reached a pretty pass indeed when you apologize for making a mistake, but nobody believes your apology. So it is today with CIA Director Tenet, and by proxy George W. Bush and his administration.

Between Tenet arguing directly to the White House in October of 2002 against the use of the Niger evidence, and Ambassador Wilson's assurances that everyone who needed to know was in the know regarding Niger, it appears the Bush White House has been caught red-handed in a series of incredible falsehoods.

We are supposed to believe that the Bush administration was completely unaware that their Niger evidence was fake. We are supposed to believe George Tenet dropped the ball. Yet the CIA actively intervened with the British government in September of 2002, telling them the evidence was worthless. The CIA Director personally got the evidence stricken from a Bush speech in October of 2002. Intelligence insiders like Joseph Wilson and Greg Thielmann have stated repeatedly that everyone who needed to know the evidence was bad had been fully and completely informed almost a year before the data was used in the State of the Union address.

"Tenet's confession is designed to take the heat off," says [Ray McGovern, a 27-year veteran of the CIA], "to assign some responsibility somewhere. It's not going to work. There's too much deception here. For example, Condoleezza Rice insisted that she only learned on June 8 about Former Ambassador Wilson's mission to Niger back in February 2002. That means that neither she nor her staff reads the New York Times, because Nick Kristof on May 6 had a very detailed explication of Wilson's mission to Niger. In my view, it is inconceivable that her remark this week - that she didn't know about Joe Wilson's mission to Niger until she was asked on a talk show on June 8 - that is stretching the truth beyond the breaking point."

Andrew Wilkie crystallized the issue at hand by stating, "It's not just sixteen words.

"It is just downright mischievous to hear Condoleezza Rice on CNN this morning saying it was just sixteen words. It was worth a hell of a lot more than sixteen words. I can remember that October speech by Bush where he talked about "mushroom clouds" from Iraq. The nuclear story was always played up as the most emotive and persuasive theme. It wasn't just sixteen words."

Many people quail at the idea that the President and his people could have lied so egregiously. What was in it for them? Besides the incredible amounts of money to be made from the war by oil and defense corporations like Halliburton and United Defense, two companies with umbilical ties to the administration, there was an "ancillary benefit to all this," according to Ray McGovern. "Not only did the President get an authorization to make war, but there was an election that next month, the November midterms. The elections turned out surprisingly well for the Bush administration because they were able to use charges of being 'soft on Saddam' against those Democratic candidates who voted against the war."