Intelligence expert on Tenet: 'A whining, sniveling, political bureaucrat'

More and more retired military officers and members of the intelligence services are speaking out about the decisions made by the White House following 9/11. Col. W. Patrick Lang is one of them. From his blog, Sic Semper Tyrannis:

A Man for NO Season

by Col. W. Patrick Lang

George Tenet was on "Meet the Press" today. What a pitiful spectacle. This is not a man. This is a whining, sniveling, political bureaucrat, a spoiled child who, in his own mind, is never to blame for anything, never really takes responsibility for his failures of judgment and action, and spins, and spins and spins.

George's "admissions" of responsibility are always carefully couched in words that do not actually say things like, "I was wrong," "I failed," "The war was a mistake," "I failed in what I did not do to stop this oncoming disaster." He quibbles. Quibbling is not acceptable in an intelligence officer, certainly not in the BOSS intelligence officer. I wonder if the Society of Jesus is happy when Tenet cites the principles that he thinks they taught him as justification for his way of doing things.

The rest is here.

Col. Lang's Sic Semper Tyrannis and The Athenaeum are both excellent reads. For the record, Lang is a retired senior officer of U.S. Military Intelligence and U.S. Army Special Forces (Green Berets). He served in the Department of Defense both as an officer and as a member of the Defense Senior Executive Service.

He was trained and educated by the U.S. Army as a specialist in the Middle East and served in that region for many years. He was the first Professor of the Arabic Language at the United States Military Academy at West Point. In he was the Defense Intelligence Officer for the Middle East, South Asia and Terrorism for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), and later the first Director of the Defense Humint Service. For his service in DIA, he was awarded the Presidential Rank of Distinguished Executive.

A George Tenet Memory Lapse

[Note from Larry C Johnson: I received the following tonight from Tyler Drumheller, a recently retired CIA officer. His book, "On the Brink", is an important contribution to the history of our misguided war in Iraq. Tyler has first hand knowledge of George Tenet's self-delusion and dissembling about his role in helping lead the march to war. It provides an important correction to the spin of George Tenet.]

Correcting the Record

by Tyler Drumheller

As people read through George Tenet's "At the Center of the Storm" I hope the basic errors and misstatements of fact do not detract from the most important point, that the Bush administration came into office with the idea of attacking Iraq and they proceeded to misuse and manipulate intelligence to support their preconceived views, both before and after 9/11.

The problem for George is that he was not a peripheral player, he was"at the center of the storm" but apparently stood by as the Vice President, Secretary of Defense and others led the country into an ill conceived, ill planned war of choice. He was, after all DCI and as such had the responsibility for how intelligence was being used. I will not pretend to understand why he stood by when he knew what was at stake and had his own questions about the entire affair. In the end, although he served in many senior staff jobs, he was ill prepared to deal with the great crisis of his professional career. Taking lines out of individual presidential speeches and stopping one of many questionable speeches by the Vice President, simply does cut it when balanced against standing by as the country moved toward war.

(The rest is here. Thanks to Minnesota Central for the heads up.)

Could Iran be the next Iraq?

The number of vocal opponents to the Bush war policies from former members of the military, State Department and CIA grows seemingly on a daily basis. Some have been speaking out for quite a while. One of these is former CIA officer Milt Bearden:

Wrong war, wrong time

If the United States is to wage war with Iran it should be for sound reasons, not for some sleight of hand manipulation. Such a war, regardless of how it starts, will most certainly have a bad outcome, just as the current adventure in Iraq can have no good outcome.

Milt Bearden
Tuesday, February 6, 2007, International Herald Tribune

As the drumbeat for war with Iran grows more insistent, the search for a "casus belli" compelling enough to calm a newly assertive Congress and convince an increasingly questioning American public intensifies. Themes of justification for such a war fluctuate between fears of a nuclear-armed Tehran and the "smoking gun" of Iranian involvement in America's misadventure in Iraq.

But before Americans get sent off to a third war in a Muslim country, it is worth recalling that in the past century, no nation that has started a major war has ended up winning it. Moreover, in the last 50 years, no nationalist-based insurgency against a foreign occupation has lost — a lesson that I learned personally when, beginning in 1986, I found myself in Pakistan, managing the CIA effort to aid Afghan resistance fighters battling Soviet troops.

The article is here.