1 Boring Old Man

At the Center of the Storm, George Tenet‘s book sits on my desk – thumbed, but not really read. I doubt it ever will be. For one thing, it’s boring. For another, one doesn’t have to read very far to get the point of the book – it’s not really Tenet’s fault ["it" in this case refers to anything you can think of]. In the places where mistakes are admitted, they’re honest mistakes – or even heroic mistakes, but not the mistakes of a person sucking up to the President and his friends. Hard to swallow, the parts I’ve thumbed and read.

Then there are the reviews. Seeking Shelter From the Storm, by Judith Miller, in the New York Sun is really quite something. It is Judith Miller’s self-serving critique of Tenet’s self-serving book. In her review, she presents herself as one who was thrown off the path and who wrote a series of collassally wrong articles in the lead up to the Iraq War because the C.I.A. lead her so far off the path of truth. She doesn’t mention that her sources were anything but the legitimate Intelligence community. In fact, she doesn’t mention her sources at all [though we know that a lot of her info came from the masters of sleight of hand – the Iraq National Congress of Amhad Chalabi].

But the winner is Douglas Feith‘s review of Tenet’s book in the Wall Street Journal – Inside the Inside Story. Filled with sarcasm, Feith debunks Tenet’s version of things while venerating his own [must I say "self-serving?"]. He says:

Fairness, evidently, was not Mr. Tenet’s motivating impulse as an author. His book is defensive. It aims low — to settle scores. The prose is humdrum. Mr. Tenet includes no citations that would let the reader check the accuracy of his account. He offers no explanation of why we went to war in Iraq.

…

I sat with him in many of the meetings, and no one prevented him from talking. It is noteworthy that Mr. Tenet met with the president for an intelligence briefing six days every week for years. Why didn’t he speak up if he thought that the president was dangerously wrong or inadequately informed?

Tenet, Miller, and Feith are a quite a trio – each in their own special way playing a role in the Invasion of Iraq – now gnashing at each other at a time when a more appropriate thing for them to do would be to hold a joint Press Conference to apologize, in unison, for the role each played in America’s biggest mistake to date – the Iraq War…