George Tenet, where was your voice four years ago?

I don’t know if you caught 60 Minutes last night but, the former CIA director seems to have caught a mild case of honesty and began talking about the run-up to the Iraq War (if you’re interested in seeing the entire interview, you can check it out here). A few things struck me about this as I was watching it. The first is that you have a guy who knew that the decision to go to war was a bad one, based on a desire to attack Iraq, not to fight terrorism, and he silently went along with it. The second thing that struck me was that this guy didn’t take real issue with any of this until he was the one thrown under the bus. Then he spouts off about how “men of honor” don’t stab each other in the back. I have another adage: there is no honor among thieves.

By the time Tenet resigned, we had been a year into the war, hundreds of U.S. soldiers dead, thousands of Iraqi civilians dead, a country in chaos with no plan for order, and a training ground for terrorists.

Now, Tenet wants to act like some innocent victim in all of this. His hands are just a bloody as everyone else who knew better but, went along anyway. If I was in a room when a group of people planned to rob a bank and I went along, I could be labeled a conspirator, also. The same goes for Tenet.

But, let’s be real. If Tenet didn’t have a book coming out, we would have never heard from him. Now, Tenet is speaking his mind after landing his cushy job at Georgetown University and his book deal. So, to get his Amazon listing up, he is telling us about what happened. If he was a real “man of honor”, he would have put his country first and spoken up in 2003.

I am not the only one who believes this. Six former CIA officials are calling Tenet out. They call him a “failed leader” and their letter to him contains a passage that sums up my feelings on this perfectly:

“You were not a victim. You were a willing participant in a poorly considered policy to start an unnecessary war and you share culpability with Dick Cheney and George Bush for the debacle in Iraq.”

They also call on Tenet to give more than half the royalties from his book to the families of wounded and dead Iraq War veterans.

Of course, being the “man of honor” he is, he will do that, right?

Okay, I doubt it, too. But, let’s be candid. He might be telling the truth, now but, where was he when it really mattered?

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