George Tenent is still at the Center of the Storm

The man of the moment as we end the month of April is George Tenent who recievd 4 million in Advance for his new book Center of the Storm.

I covered the New York Times Book review in the last post. Here are two short videos that cover the reaction to the book (below).

The MUST SEE is Tenents 60 Minute interview which you can see here over at Crooks & Lyers : http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/04/29/george-tenet-breaks-his-silence/

These other two videos really give such a biased view of this man that when you see him explaining himself it is quiet awakening. He makes his dedication to `his officers' quite plain. He admits mistakes and tries to rationalize what occured from his perspective. He is frighteninglly annimated in this confrontational interview.

How he sees the chain of events.

1. CIA knew about Bin Laden and were activelly trying to attack where he belived Bin Laden was based both during the Clinton Administration and the Bush administration.

2. Bush gave him thge OK to attack Aphganistan. The first US war lead by the CIA- wehich he feels was successful.

3. Bin Laden Escaped.

4> Desperate times called for desperate measures ( why we tortured people)

5. Richard Perle was the first one he heard blame Iraq for 9/11.

6. There was very little debate aboutr attcaking Iraq.

7. Tenent and the CIA knew that Saddamm didnt have nukes and let it be known, and stopped the comment from being used in two Presidential speaches.

8. Tennet did not read (as he should have the President's State of the Union adress- but passed that task down to flunkiew who did not catch the misstatement.

9. The CIA made an educated guess about the Chemical weapons- and they were wrong. Sorry. (Especially to Collin Powell).

10 Joe Wilson wrote his famous editorial about there being no Uranium coming from Africa- and the White House attacked the CIA by outing Wilson's wife Vallery Plame. That was wrong and inexcusable.

11. The bad guys were Condelica Rice and Dick Cheney.

1.. Someone mis-quoted Tenent on the `slam dunk statement" as a set up to Bob Woodward.

13. Bush gave him the meddle of Freedom because of the CIA's work in Afghanistan and not Iraq, and he did question whether or not to take it.

BELOW IS A NEWS VIDEO THAT COVERS THE 60 MINUTE EPISODE - BUT IT IS NOT THE EPISODE)



Keith Olberman interviews Larry Johnson regarding George Tenet's new book, At the Center of the Storm. Covers the White House response to his book. And, interestingly covers Democrat Senator Dick Durben's complicit role as a member of the intelligence committee hiding the truth at the time (because the truth was secret) and then proudly boasting he- who knew more facts than others- voted against the war.

Top aide to Colin Powell :: UN presentation "lowest point in my life"

Former aide: Powell WMD speech 'lowest point in my life'

Tuesday, August 23, 2005; Posted: 10:44 a.m. EDT (14:44 GMT)

(CNN) -- A former top aide to Colin Powell says his involvement in the former secretary of state's presentation to the United Nations on Iraq's weapons of mass destruction was "the lowest point" in his life.

"I wish I had not been involved in it," says Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, a longtime Powell adviser who served as his chief of staff from 2002 through 2005. "I look back on it, and I still say it was the lowest point in my life."

Wilkerson is one of several insiders interviewed for the CNN Presents documentary "Dead Wrong -- Inside an Intelligence Meltdown." The program pieced together the events leading up to the mistaken WMD intelligence that was presented to the public. A presidential commission that investigated the pre-war WMD intelligence found much of it to be "dead wrong."

Powell's speech, delivered on February 5, 2003, made the case for the war by presenting U.S. intelligence that purported to prove that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. Wilkerson says the information in Powell's presentation initially came from a document he described as "sort of a Chinese menu" that was provided by the White House.

"(Powell) came through the door ... and he had in his hands a sheaf of papers, and he said, 'This is what I've got to present at the United Nations according to the White House, and you need to look at it,'" Wilkerson says in the program. "It was anything but an intelligence document. It was, as some people characterized it later, sort of a Chinese menu from which you could pick and choose."

Wilkerson and Powell spent four days and nights in a CIA conference room with then-Director George Tenet and other top officials trying to ensure the accuracy of the presentation, Wilkerson says.

"There was no way the Secretary of State was going to read off a script about serious matters of intelligence that could lead to war when the script was basically un-sourced," Wilkerson says.

In one dramatic accusation in his speech, Powell showed slides alleging that Saddam had bioweapons labs mounted on trucks that would be almost impossible to find.

"In fact, Secretary Powell was not told that one of the sources he was given as a source of this information had indeed been flagged by the Defense Intelligence Agency as a liar, a fabricator," says David Kay, who served as the CIA's chief weapons inspector in Iraq after the fall of Saddam. That source, an Iraqi defector who had never been debriefed by the CIA, was known within the intelligence community as "Curveball."

After searching Iraq for several months across the summer of 2003, Kay began e-mailing Tenet to tell him the WMD evidence was falling apart. At one point, Wilkerson says, Tenet called Powell to tell him the claims about mobile bioweapons labs were apparently not true.

"George actually did call the Secretary, and said, 'I'm really sorry to have to tell you. We don't believe there were any mobile labs for making biological weapons,'" Wilkerson says in the documentary. "This was the third or fourth telephone call. And I think it's fair to say the Secretary and Mr. Tenet, at that point, ceased being close. I mean, you can be sincere and you can be honest and you can believe what you're telling the Secretary. But three or four times on substantive issues like that? It's difficult to maintain any warm feelings."