The humdinger for the Dix/NJ cell story was this:

“Conducted surveillance of the base while delivering pizzas” — HUH?

What are we doing letting pizza drivers roam a base???
Are they serious?????

Also, Scarecrow, nice post, w/one edit –
it’s Seung-Hui Cho. Gotta get names right, furrin or not.

Thanks for the heads up on the name; I just copied it from some article.

linda @ 18

yo, liberty lee:

BOOOOO! you can crawl back under your bed now…

i am so sick and disgusted by the cowardice as displayed in the comment posted by ll. six years of republican misrule has reduced too many to trembling little pussies.

There is no cowardice in recognizing we face a determined enemy who is trying to destroy Western Civilization as we know it. Franklin said that “vigilance is the eternal price of liberty”….

But but but, we DO recognize the danger the Bush family mafia poses.

“Conducted surveillance of the base while delivering pizzas” — HUH?

What are we doing letting pizza drivers roam a base???
Are they serious?????

Also, Scarecrow, nice post, w/one edit –
it’s Seung-Hui Cho. Gotta get names right, furrin or not.

And as a side bet, how often the Republicans on the committee will mention the arrest the other day as part of their “questioning” of Abu Gonzales over Hatch Act violations under him?

Gonzales – 15

Republicans on committee – 16

And, of course, it’s all just a coincidence that Gonzales’ Justice Department sat on these indictments and arrests for over a year. Not!!

I am about two-thirds through Tenet’s book, and when I finish, I plan to post a review over at The Next Hurrah.

Pieces of the book are interesting, particularly if you have read other versions of the event or argument, and are prepared to do some contrast/comparison. But the book is also full of really stupid errors — no other way to describe them. For instance Tenet has the sequence of which WTC tower was hit first, ass backwards, and you sure don’t have to be in the CIA to get that right. When you find such junk writing in what supposedly is a book vetted by CIA, and filled with acknowledgements as to who helped by reading draft versions, it makes you really wonder if you can trust anything you can’t check.

Realizing that I still have about 150 pages to go — and I am reading with pen in hand, making underlines and marginal notes as I go — meaning it is slow, the two Tenet points I see of value include his casting the “why we invaded Iraq” question as deeply colored by too much dependence on a False Analogy. (he calls it looking through the wrong prisim — I prefer the term from formal logic.) Without really fully understanding 9/11, it was used as an analogue by top policy makers as they looked at Saddam’s regime. Prior to 9/11 the analogy mostly depended on a very superficial understanding of the 1938 Munich Agreement. So I appreciate Tenet making this point, though it really is buried in the text. Had I been his editor, I would have recommended making the Fallacy of the False Analogy a chapter heading, and then selected from his various spy stories, and how they were received by policy makers using the false analogy as a basis for thinking through policy, tactics and strategy. Ron Suskind does this in “The One Percent Solution” — to a much more comprehendable effect. But all taken together the false assumption was that Saddam would act to “surprise” the US and the West much the way bin Laden did. So many of the mistakes, horrors, stupid planning, et. al., flow from that false assumption. As Tenet describes scene by scene, meeting by meeting, this logical problem was common throughout Government, both parties, executive and congress.

Tenet contends, and I think he is correct here, that there never was a true policy debate over whether an invasion of Iraq was the wise course, given any measure of the Problem Saddam presented. He and his deputy sat in on many supposed policy meetings at the highest levels, and they were all hijacked by irrelevant detail. For instance, a supposed meeting about post invasion economic issues got taken over by a debate about how to issue a new currency as fast as possible, so as to get Saddam’s face off the money — whereas the real issue in need of discussion was how to create a central bank that could guide a developing new economy. There is a special kind of insight you get from descriptions of meetings at such a high level (Condi chairing) that devolved into such sillyness. I get more and more evidence for my own thesis about all this — and that is these guys never really studied how the first four years of the German Occupation went so as to comprehend the really big problems they might confront, and plan accordingly. And yes, reconstruction of Germany only began to take off with the founding of the Bundesbank, that would control currency, and match labor and material inputs with productive outputs — and keep the currency regulated as a reflection of this. Tenet supplies a vast number of examples like this, supporting a conclusion that these guys didn’t know what in the hell they were doing.

There is a lot more of course in 500 pages — some new insight into taking down the AQ Khan Nuclear Industry — interesting insight into some of the dealings with Pakistan — I wish there had been far more on Saudi Arabia, particularly more analysis. Tenet devotes considerable space to his efforts to negotiate security issues between Israel and Palestine, beginning with the Wye conference during the Clinton Administration. Much of the detail is new, I think, and it makes me even more pessimistic about that conflict. He comes down pretty hard on some of the administration connected factions that had special agendas — Feith, he really lays into Ledeen and the neo-Iran/Contra folk, and he has little good to say about Cheney’s circle — Scooter et. al.

Anyhow, if people have been reading some of this policy debate all along, I think reading Tenet will be useful, but it is not exactly a pleasant experience. If people haven’t been reading the books all along, it is a piss poor introduction. Thus far, I have found the commentary pretty stupid — I suspect most who are talking about the book haven’t read it yet, and all too many have just a pro or anti Tenet agenda, and are not serious about comprehending what he covers, and what he leaves on the table.

I’ll better develop these ideas when I post a review at Next Hurrah.

He was little threat to Fort Dix. But he has witlessly destroyed his own. Their lives are forever changed.