Ex-CIA Director George Tenet is notorious in the annals of atrocity for being an uncool punk with a cold, black heart. But unlike punk rocker Joan Jett and her Blackhearts band, he apparently does give a damn about his bad reputation.
Waterboarding, he has long insisted, was simply a standard deviation, a perk of his exalted station. Like Adolf Eichmann, Tenet was simply following orders and doing his job when he defied the damned Geneva Conventions and ordered as many as 200 of his operatives to torture a whole bunch of people. It was just a terrible time when the elites running the joint experienced a strange bout of the fear normally reserved for the little people. The blowback of the 9/11 attacks blew their minds.
Even so, Tenet fears that he's going to look mighty strange when that long-suppressed and redacted Senate report on CIA torture comes out later this summer. And to that end, President Barack Obama is bending over backward to insure that Tenet and his co-conspirators are getting a chance to whitewash their own public relations disaster before the rest of us get a peek at it. (Because President Drone has already vowed there will be no such thing as a criminal indictment. What's past is past. We must look forward, not backward while bending over backward. It's a brand new hip generation. Above all, the Kill List president is counting on his own successor to continue paying it forward.)
Mark Mazzetti of the New York Times has the scoop:
Just after the Senate Intelligence Committee voted in April to declassify hundreds of pages of a withering report on the Central Intelligence Agency’s detention and interrogation program, C.I.A. Director John O. Brennan convened a meeting of the men who had played a role overseeing the program in its seven-year history.The spies, past and present, faced each other around the long wooden conference table on the seventh floor of the C.I.A.’s headquarters in Northern Virginia: J. Cofer Black, head of the agency’s counterterrorism center at the time of the Sept. 11 attacks; the undercover officer who now holds that job; and a number of other former officials from the C.I.A.’s clandestine service. Over the speakerphone came the distinctive, Queens-accented voice of George J. Tenet.Not surprisingly, Senate Moll Dianne Feinstein helped orchestrate the secret reading sessions for the spies. She apparently quickly recovered from her Senate floor hissy fit earlier this year, when she pretended to be shocked that her CIA buddies were spying on her staffers and hacking into congressional computers. Attorney General Eric Holder, who also never met a thug he didn't like, be they from Wall Street or from Langley, declined to prosecute the Spy vs. Spy imbroglio. Because like banks, the Senate and the CIA are too big to fail.
Over the past several months, Mr. Tenet has quietly engineered a counterattack against the Senate committee’s voluminous report, which could become public next month. The effort to discredit the report has set up a three-way showdown among former C.I.A. officials who believe history has been distorted, a White House carefully managing the process and politics of declassifying the document, and Senate Democrats convinced that the Obama administration is trying to protect the C.I.A. at all costs.
Senator Ron Wyden, the foil in this triangular kabuki drama, is dutifully playing his part of publicly whining that Obama is protecting the CIA branch of the organized crime cartel which poses as a representative democracy. But of course he never mentions that I word (impeachment.) That is reserved for the Republicans, who serve as useful idiots in the fomenting of primitive tribalism and survival of the Obama Victimization Cult. The GOP ignores the real corruption, because they are absolutely complicit in it. They concentrate on petty stuff, like who lied on Page 1,502 of the Affordable Care Act. It keeps Obama smelling like a wilted plastic rose. It keeps his low-40s approval rating artificially high among people fooled into picking between two sides of the same filthy coin.
Meanwhile, it's apparent from the preview of his own pseudo-indictment that the pseudo-disgraced George Tenet is still calling the shots. Although he'd been forced to resign during the Bush administration over faulty Iraq War intelligence, Bush later awarded him the Medal of Freedom. As a fabulously wealthy private surveillance state contractor and partner in a secretive boutique bank catering to the tech and entertainment industries, Tenet is still a valued part of the powerful and permanent Inner Circle, and remains close to Obama drone henchman and current CIA Chief John Brennan. It was Tenet who invented the Orwellian term "disposition matrix" as the go-to euphemism for government murder by Predator drone. So he is definitely owed.
The Defiant Deviant Duo of the Disposition Matrix: Obama and Brennan |
On the other hand....
"I am really good at killing people," he reportedly bragged to aides during his re-election campaign three years and thousands of drone deaths later.
An' I don't give a damn 'bout my reputation
The world's in trouble, there's no communication
An' everyone can say what they wanna to say
It never gets better, anyway.
So why should I care about a bad reputation anyway?
Oh no, not me, oh no, not me.
The world's in trouble, there's no communication
An' everyone can say what they wanna to say
It never gets better, anyway.
So why should I care about a bad reputation anyway?
Oh no, not me, oh no, not me.
Rock on, oh cool crypto-fascist Ship of State.
In related news, a European Human Rights Commission judge apparently did not get the "look forward" message from the Obama administration and defiantly ordered Poland to pay reparations to two torture victims who'd been "renditioned" to a CIA black site prison in that country during the Bush administration. The Obama administration still refuses to even confirm or deny the very existence of such prisons in Europe and elsewhere in the world. Those culpable countries are now vulnerable to prosecution while "the one indispensable nation" is not. Let us hope that the fear factor, if not the ethics factor, inspires Europe to resist calls from the American media-military-industrial complex to enter into World War III for a few drops more of oil and gas.