Deep, Down and Dirty with Low-Rent Fanatics

Does the essence of reality exist within the jagged white hum of media coverage and political spin, separate, intransigent, foreign, not inclined to gutter fiction? Or could it be an authentic and important concurrence between what reality is and what becomes our perception? Or have we descended into self-fulfilling language that obliges us to use language only in an attempt to obscure and distort reality - to pervert what really happened - because we fear the furious alternative? The media wants us all to be cowards glued to television screens. We can't come to grip with death and sacrifice and what it all means. But we must face all of these possibilities because they have died in our name. And as a free people with informed minds, we must pay attention to all of the grim details - only because it has been done in our name.

It is a very nasty game that these live-wired, mean-spirited fanatics play. Dubya may be the most powerful man on the planet Earth, but the preznut is still petty enough to be sure that nobody else in the world is going to mess up his party, even by accidental means. And anyone who starts to become giddy with a marked-down version of true geo-political influence should get real familiar, right from jump street, with the definite knowledge that he is going to require some very cruel and ruthless players just to stand up in the morning.

The power of the preznut is so huge that it is perhaps best that the average citizen cannot truly understand the sense of biblical grandeur that arrives with the position - so, in retrospect, it is good that Americans couldn't come to gauge Dubya's true mental state during the campaign, which alternated between fits of addictive megalomania and strains of blood-thirsty, sociopathic desire. There were were moments in Wisconsin and Pennsylvania when even his closest friends and advisers were convinced that the preznut was so vertiginous with fury and vitamin-B shots and delusional splendor that he was two Jim Beam's from serendading Laura to Van Morrison's Brown Eyed Girl on Larry King and locking himself down in the bunker with Dick Cheney to make that last prophetic phone call to the career freaks in the Strategic Air Command out in Omaha, vaporizing 200 million souls or throwing the world off its axis and into universal freefall.

Would the analysts and assistant directors in the hallowed halls of CIA-central refuse a direct order from their commander-in-chief? And how long would it have taken George Tenet and Condi Rice to realize that Dubya has finally gone off the deep end of the ocean? The preznut had spent so much time out of Washington, by then, that nobody else in the administration would have noticed until he failed to show up on Fox and CNN and MSNBC for his nightly disinformation statement, and he would have had ample time to goad the Israelis and Pakastanis into settling a couple of disputes with the tip of a high-grade nuke.

An embattled career spook who found himself in the Director's chair of the CIA, at the time, with over 20 years of fanatical service to God and country alike would chop of his own legs and eat them with fried zucchini tatter tots rather than reject the preznut's direct order to send the missles skyward with streams of vapor trails arching to the heavens - even if he thought that Dubya was a raving lunatic.

Yeah, you see Tenet was playing a double game. He was trying to be all things to all people ... So when he realized that all this hype about Iraq seeking Uranium from Niger, was based, was false on its face number one, it couldn’t happen, and number two it was based on a forgery, he succeeded in getting that out of the president’s speech on October the 7th, the key one that antedated the vote for war by three or four days. He succeeded in that, but at the very same time, he permitted it to be put in [the National Intelligence Estimate] ... he permitted sections in there, several paragraphs which repeated this charade, this crazy story that Iraq was getting Uranium. So he was indirectly responsible for that appearing in the president’s state of the union address. Why? Well because the White House simply called from the estimate. What the White House didn’t realize perhaps, is that the estimate had already been prostituted, had already been corrupted. It’s usually possible to take an estimate, which is the most authoritative view of the director of central intelligence and say, well this is the last word. Well it wasn’t Tenet’s last word. His last word was saying to the president, please don’t say that, it’s spurious. And yet the estimate prepared at precisely the same time and given to the president over George Tenet’s signature, said just the opposite.

The key to this long-winded rationale is a concept that anyone who ever changed identities at the behest of their goverment soon forgets: "The marbel entrance at Langley might say 'The Truth Shall Set You Free,' but don't be on the wrong side of the political fence." Once you've been given over to the beast, you're a spook - and spooks don't go into underground caves for their country without having somebody on the other side who won't cut the rope. If Dubya's warped brain had been bent far enough to let him think he could save his own political future by conjuring up a dead-on-balls air-land invasion of Guatemala, he would not have given the Shock-and-Awe decree to some neo-pacifist intelligence official who might have taken the extra step of checking with Colin Powell for conclusive evidence that the preznut had not leveled off into a spell of psychotic ideation.

No intelligence insider with enough sense to know that the forests of Virginia are pockmarked with the forgotten memories of defiant wonders would take that kind of risk with his life or limb. By the time that the word got out to the White House press corps - or to Powell, for that matter - that Dubya had given the order to attack Guatemala, the entire Central American rainforest would be a firestorm; Panama, Honduras and El Salvador would already have surrendered not knowing what to expect next, and the blistering orange skies above the Gulf of Mexico would be streaked to the ends of the Earth with strategic bombers and fighter jet support looking for the final kill shot.

Well ... that's enough rationale, I suppose. George Tenet was sworn in as the Director of Central Intelligence on July 11, 1997, "following a unanimous vote by both the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and the full Senate. In this position he headed the Intelligence Community (all foreign intelligence agencies of the United States) and directs the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)." He served as the Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (confirmed July 1995). In December 1996, following the departure of John Mark Deutch as DCI, Tenet served as Acting Director.

Tenet's government career includes having previously served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Intelligence Programs at the National Security Council (NSC). At the NSC, he "coordinated Presidential Decision Directives on Intelligence Priorities, Security Policy Coordination, US Counterintelligence Effectiveness, and US Policy on Remote Sensing Space Capabilities. He also was responsible for coordinating all interagency activities concerning covert action.

Prior to serving at the NSC, Tenet served on President Bill Clinton's national security transition team, where he coordinated the evaluation of the US Intelligence Community. Tenet also served as Staff Director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for over four years under the chairmanship of Senator David Boren. "In this capacity he was responsible for coordinating all of the Committee's oversight and legislative activities including the strengthening of covert action reporting requirements, the creation of a statutory Inspector General at CIA, and the introduction of comprehensive legislation to reorganize US intelligence."

Prior to being appointed Staff Director, Tenet "directed the Committee's oversight of all arms control negotiations between the Soviet Union and the United States, culminating in the preparation of a report to the US Senate on The Ability of US Intelligence to Monitor the Intermediate Nuclear Force Treaty." In August 1985, Tenet came to the Committee as designee to the Vice Chairman, Senator Patrick Leahy following three years on the staff of Senator John Heinz "as both a legislative assistant covering national security and energy issues and as legislative director."

So when the word came down tonight that the former DCI had struck a $4 million book deal with Crown Publishing Group (a division of Random House, Inc.) to write his memoirs, everybody even vaguely connected to the Iraqi business began cleaning out their drawers and recalling names as the CIA is about to be publicly flogged once again at all ends of its franchise domain ... while Tenet begins defending the case for connections between Saddam Hussein and al-Qaeda, which most of the red states believe, to this day, to be solid gold truth. That appears to be the central point of his long-awaited book, and the talking heads shows are already speculating. Books by former CIA officials have to be cleared by the agency, but Tenet's former spokesman at the CIA, Bill Harlow, said he was "confident that the director will be able to be candid, without running into any difficulties with the clearance process."

The Truth Shall Set You Free. Right.