Weekly Analysis – 7/12/03

“Blame Tenet – Not Bush”

By Kirt R. Poovey

CIA Chief George Tenet is the fall guy for President Bush and now Bush wants to move along.  Tenet has taken full responsibility for Bush including in his State of the Union speech the claim that Iraq was trying to buy uranium from Africa for their nuclear program.  It was nice of Tenet to take the blame for something that he had warned the President about three months earlier in October of 2002. 

At that time he advised the President to not use the unsubstantiated information about the African connection in which Iraq supposedly was trying to buy 550 tons of uranium ore in the African nation of Niger.   In an October 7th speech in Cincinnati, President Bush specifically excluded the information as he tried to build up the Iraqi threat of Saddam Hussein.

Even as President Bush tries to “put the incident behind him” (shades of “that’s old news” of the Clinton years) the truth comes out that Bush and his top administration officials along with the CIA’s Tenet all knew that the information was bogus long before the State of the Union speech.  Of course, readers of this column already knew that, but now the administration has actually admitted the obvious, although they are doing it by blaming George Tenet.

Mr. Tenet has now secured his continued reign at the CIA.  Ari Fleischer, the White House spokesman explained it this way, "The president is pleased that the director of central intelligence acknowledged what needed to be acknowledged.  The president has moved on. And I think, frankly, much of the country has moved on as well.”

Not content to admit that the information is totally bogus Fleisher, as Bushie spokesman, said, "What we have said is it should not have risen to the level of a presidential speech.  People cannot conclude that the information was necessarily false.”

Actually, yes, it can be concluded that the information is totally false and fabricated, but that would not look good for the administration to admit that they knowingly used false information, and did so by attributing this new information to Britain so as to deflect any claim that the U.S. was using known forged info.  “After all, the Brits are the ones who gave us this lousy intelligence.  Don’t blame us.  It was the British.”  Kind of reminds me of Clinton and “the buck never even got here”.  “It was (fill-in-the-name) fault.” 

The house of cards that the administration built about the immediate and terrible threat of Saddam Hussein is beginning to tumble, but the administration wants to move on to more important things.

Important things like our troops who are in a shooting gallery in Iraq?  They are literally sitting ducks and they realize it.  Moral is down and could hardly get lower.  They were told they would be the victorious heroes of the Iraqi people and the Iraqi’s would welcome them with open arms and shower them with flowers instead of bullets and Rocket Propelled Grenades.

How much longer will they be sniper targets?  Iraq is still in turmoil and disarray with no normalcy to the life there.  The Iraqis don’t want us there.  We got rid of Saddam, now they want us to vamoose so they can set up their religious government patterned after Iran’s with the Mullahs in control.  We claimed we were going to free the Iraqi people so that they would be free to set up a government of their choice, but now it has changed to a democracy – just not one ruled by the Shiites.  So much for self-determination.

“Absolutely. I've got confidence in George Tenet,” said President Bush.  If Tenet had really left that piece in the speech without notifying Bush about the problem, he’d be canned.  Bush needed that in the speech to help demonize Iraq.  Now Tenet has taken the blame and President Bush will stand firmly beside him.

It’s nice to know that there is still loyalty out there.  I just wish it was to the U.S. Constitution and the Unites States of America.

"We will stand, fight, and die to defend our country; but we will not blindly trust it.  Even our Founding Fathers distrusted a large, centralized, all-powerful federal government -- so should we.  Always be on guard to discern the truth and defend it at all costs."