Monday, April 30, 2007

America: Ex-CIA Officials Speak Out over George Tenet's New Book, and THEY ARE FURIOUS.

Was it Charles Barkley who said of his autobiography when questioned about a typically outrageous quote, I don't know, I haven't read the book?

Read this. It's an open letter from ex-CIA officials taking George Tenet to task for betraying CIA officers and analysts and failing to meet his obligations to the people of the United States and urging him "to return the Medal of Freedom you received from President George Bush [I didn't say that, they did] and "dedicate a significant percentage of the royalties from your book to the U.S. soldiers and their families who have been killed and wounded in Iraq." (But not to Iraqis... I know, it's none of my business)

People seem to be uniformly furious about this. A friend of mine who works in Washington brought it up the other day unbidden, told me he'd never been so angry like this before, and wanted to know what I thought. To save time, I asked him to read my blog.

Harder to fathom, though, is why George Tenet decided to do this in the first place. This is not an O.J. Simpson, or an Apprentice flameout we are talking about here. Is destroying your reputation and cutting your ties to your former colleagues and everybody else that you want to have come to your funeral worth the million dollars, give or take a few (million)? Is he going through a rough divorce? Did he borrow money and put it all on Enron?

And if he blames in on his book agent, tell him there's a couple of bridges in Nigeria I'd like to sell him.

For those of you who get your news exclusively from this blog, I lifted it off this CNN post.

No comments: