How the Tenet revelations explain Plamegate

So many of the scandals of this administration are downright confusing! The "Plamegate" scandal, which is the alleged outing of a covert CIA agent by the White House in order to discredit her husband, is no exception.

I've been promising a Plamegate tutorial, but the fullness of time adds revelations to the story; I'm not sure it's all played out yet. This week, former CIA Director George Tenet reveals even more about the nature of the relationship between the CIA and the White House.

Tenet recently released his new book At the Center of the Storm, and went on a lengthy press tour to promote it, hitting all the Sunday talk shows and 60 Minutes. It's self-aggrandizement at its best. Unlike some of these other "Hey, I've been maligned by this administration!" books, such as former CTU head Richard Clarke's Against All Enemies, or the Ron Suskind / former Treasury Sec Paul O'Neill book The Price of Loyalty, you don't get very far listening to Tenet's drivel before you begin to throw up in your mouth just a little. I went from not caring if he got the Presidential Medal of Freedom to wanting to rip it off his puffing chest and stomp on it. But I digress...

One thing this press tour has taught us is that all was not well behind the curtain in Oz. Before this, we saw Tenet getting that Medal and all this praise from the Pres (a kiss of death, as it turns out, see Brownie- Job, Heckuva) and it seemed like they were thick as theives.

This was noteworthy at the time because there was a story being floated, or more like an impression created by many stories, that there was a rift between the WH and the CIA. I don't remember a specific piece of info, but I remember the general public perception was that the CIA had completely dropped the ball, and the WH could only "do their best with what they had". The only good 9/11 joke I ever heard was, "Now even the crazy people have taken off their tinfoil hats, since clearly the CIA isn't that competent to read their minds" (or something like that, Little Miss Comedienne I'm not). So the WH was saying, "Don't look at us, it was them," and the CIA was somewhat pissed at them for it, or at least, sometimes it seemed that way.

Yet, there was Tenet--Medal, praise, etc.-- and so I thought, "OK, I guess they don't have a rift...?" And very quickly all that rift talk died down. Later, when the Plamegate scandal broke, the WH hinged their explanation on the idea that Joe Wilson was sent to Niger by the CIA to make the President look bad. Why would they do that? "Because the CIA hates the WH." Come again? Medal, praise... What were they talking about?

The Plamegate story is so confusing anyway, when the WH floated that theory and no one understood it, it just got lost in the flotsam and jetsam of the case. Furthermore, the outing of Valerie Plame was so shocking that it quickly eclipsed the "the CIA hates us" story, and so that story is largely forgotten, except on those rare occassions when a pundit will muse, "Why did they even leak her name, what was the point?" and another mentions this floated story, but again, it quickly evaporates because it appears nonsensical.

Ah, but here it all comes tumbling out with Tenet's book. Here we get a tale of an immigrant kid from the wrong side of the tracks who, when a new group of popular kids takes over the school, is invited to sit with them at lunch. He's so happy, so grateful to be at this table, he does whatever they say, fetches their lunches, steals copies of the tests before test day, writes their papers for them. "Slam dunk!" he yells, giddy and a little sweaty with a mix of gratitude and terror.

9/11 happens, and I don't care what Tenet says, he FAILED. Big time. 0 out of 100 points, baby. There is a laundry list of what he could have or should have done but didn't. If you are interested in time travel, there are several key moments where if you popped in from the future right then, you could change it all. One in particular is that in August 2001--after having given dire warnings to Condi Rice about Bin Laden's upcoming spectacular attacks and her doing ABSOLUTELY NOTHING with this information-- Tenet goes to Crawford and ends up riding alone with the Pres in a pickup truck. Does he say anything then? A well-timed, "Mr. President, there is something on my mind... I've tried to follow the chain of command, but I want to make sure that you've been briefed properly, here are my concerns..." Nope, nothing. Feel like ripping off his Medal and stomping on it yet?

And yet for all of his toadying, Tenet was never part of the cool kids. He was never fully accepted, but rather was praised when they wanted to use him for something, and ignored when they didn't. He was alternately Bush's wunderkind and Clinton's leftovers; he was tasked with a critical job of conducting foreign intelligence, and ignored when he reported it, until it contained the magic word, "Iraq". He was given all the credit for the Iraq intelligence, sitting behind Colin Powell at the UN, and then given all the blame (as if the Pres had never believed it in the first place). He was given the Medal of Freedom, and then drummed out of the administration. Heck, you almost can't blame the guy for sounding a little wackadoodle now after being pushed and pulled so.

But, as the Evangelicals learned in 2004, when you plan political machinations, when you kowtow to get power and control but not from an honest disire to create sound public policy, when you get in bed with people you might not bring home to Mother because they promise you the moon-- well, that's how you get the clap.

Then all the predictable things happened:
1. Tenet writes a book.
2. Tenet goes on a press tour and is asked tough questions and starts to sound like a lunatic.
3. The WH discredits him and generally distances themselves, but they don't have to do much because...
4. Tenet's press tour has now made him look like a complete liar, and as I said, the book is very self-flattering, and so he's discredited himself better than the WH could have done.
5. Now no one will listen to even the truths that may appear in the book, and the damage will never really touch the WH. Nice one, guys.

But there is something really interesting here: In the--

Wow, that sounded exciting, didn't it? I wonder what I was going to say. I leave a draft sitting for a couple of weeks and when I go back, it's like someone else wrote it. OK, I do know how to summarize and wrap this up, if I ever think of the really interesting thing, I'll update...

Every single person in this, with the exception of Mr. Wilson and Mrs. Plame-Wilson, comes off untrustworthy. I don't believe for a minute that Mr. Wilson's Niger trip was anything other than a true fact-finding mission, and I don't believe that anyone dictated his findings because "the CIA hates the WH" or any other reason. But as one by one each of the players gets discredited, it leaves us with no one to believe and ultimately an unsolved mystery, because there is no one left to ask.

Well, that worked out nicely for the WH, don't you think? Did they plan it this way? Well, I'll say this: that's why Scooter Libby is facing three years in prison for lying and obstruction of justice. Prosecutor Pat Fitzzgerald said that he was like an umpire trying to call a game while sand is being kicked in his eyes. Everyone but the Wilsons so far has lied, and we caught at least one, but that didn't make him tell the truth, and until the truth comes out, everyone gets off scot-free.

Come to think of it, that's a pretty interesting thing.

So while we did learn that there was something of a rift, which makes the WH rift-claim at least make more sense, we also crossed off another name from the list of people who could enlighten us.

I'll get right on that Plamegate tutorial... watch the skies...