Links to some recent events – all a bit disturbing, none wholly surprising.
Slam Dunk to Infamy: George Tenet, the former CIA chief who was one of Bush-Cheney’s chief enablers in the criminal invasion of Iraq, is attempting to clean up his own guilty legacy and like all other rats, moving to abandon the sinking ship of the Bush administration. He has written a book, "At the Center of the Storm" where he admits making the now infamous "slam dunk" comment about Saddam Hussein owning WMD (based on faulty intelligence). But he also insists that nothing he said or did not say would have stopped Bush-Cheney from attacking Iraq. Another war criminal trying to wash the blood off his hands.
There was never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraqi threat," Tenet writes in a devastating judgment that is likely to be debated for many years. Nor, he adds, "was there ever a significant discussion" about the possibility of containing Iraq without an invasion.
Tenet described with sarcasm watching an episode of "Meet the Press" last September in which Cheney twice referred to Tenet’s "slam dunk" remark as the basis for the decision to go to war.
"I remember watching and thinking, ‘As if you needed me to say ‘slam dunk’ to convince you to go to war with Iraq,’ " Tenet writes.
Execution at the Border: A very disturbing incident caught on tape showing a US Border Security Agent shooting a Mexican national attempting to cross into US territory, at point blank range. The agent is back at work and the office of the Border Security Patrol is more interested in finding out who leaked the video to the San Diego Union Tribune than investigating the shooting by the agent.
Limbaugh Blames Liberalism for VT Carnage: After any killing rampage by a crazed killer with a gun(s), the NRA and the right wing admonish us that any criticism of easy gun ownership is specious and a violation of the Second Amendment. Yet, after every nerve rattling disaster that befalls us, the right wing attack dogs never fail to lay the blame at the doorstep of liberalism – specifically, un- Christian values like secularism, feminism, homosexuality and even the teaching of the theory of evolution. So it doesn’t come as a surprise at all that Rush Limbaugh has declared with authority what was ailing the severely disturbed Seung-hui Cho, the deranged killer who struck terror at Virginia Tech on the 16th of March. He was a liberal! Of course.
On the April 19th broadcast of Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, the conservative radio host seemed to blame the deadly shooting rampage of Virginia Tech killer Seung-hui Cho on liberals, reports ABC News’ Political Punch blog.
"If this Virginia Tech shooter had an ideology, what do you think it was? " Limbaugh queried. "This guy had to be a liberal. You start railing against the rich and all this other — this guy’s a liberal. He was turned into a liberal somewhere along the line. So it’s a liberal that committed this act."
Limbaugh said that he was not "attacking liberalism" but was merely "pointing out a fact."
Accidental Blogger 
3 responses to “Weekend Links”
So Tenet asserts that his infamous ‘slam dunk’ quote was taken out of context. He says in the book:
“During the meeting, the deputy CIA director, John McLaughlin, unveiled a draft of a proposed public presentation that left the group unimpressed. Tenet recalls that Bush suggested that they could “add punch” by bringing in lawyers trained to argue cases before a jury.
“I told the president that strengthening the public presentation was a ‘slam dunk,’ a phrase that was later taken completely out of context,” Tenet writes.”
So he says he claimed not that the evidence for WMDs was a slam-dunk, just that a better presentation of the case with trial lawyers would make the ‘marketing of the war’ a slam dunk. Seems a little too convoluted.
Wikipedia ( doubtful source, I know) says that in his new book- “Tenet claims he said that conclusive evidence that Iraq possessed WMD would be a “slam dunk” in promoting the case for war, i.e. a conditional statement, not an assertion.”, which isn’t quite the same thing as the IHT article quoting his book above.
Yet more from this CBS news, link where Tenet is supposed to have thrown his hands up and uttered “It’s a slam dunk case”- which he now claims in his book and elsewhere, completely taken out of context and becoming a ‘dishonorable’ epithet as in ‘Slam-dunk George Tenet’ or “Heckuva’job Brownie’.
Wounded vanity or muddied waters?
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Wounded vanity or muddied waters?
Both. Plus insatiable political ambition and opportunism. I wonder if Tenet (he is getting a $4 million advance for writing what we already know?) will apologize to the families of dead and wounded Americans and Iraqis for his role in ruining a nation and countless families. Is he going to give back his tainted Presidential Medal of Freedom for facilitating a criminal war enerprise? Of course not.
Also interesting is the fact that apparently Tenet aims his attack only at Cheney. Why? Could it be because he sees the Bush family with a political future unlike Cheney’s? Who knows which Bush’s ring he might have to kiss down the road – Jeb, his son George P.? What a snake!
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Yikes, will ‘Yo Tengo Futuro” Jeb try to make a comeback? I am so NOT looking forward to that event. Your theory about Tenet’s treading softly on Bush corns makes too much sense. In any case, this may be all the publicity needed for Tenet’s book to sell enough copies to justify his huge advance- nothing like fake mea culpas and ‘I was misquoted’ followed by 2 dozen different renditions of the so-called misquote to push up book sales.
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