Decision Making Is Hard Work So He Doesn'

Strange that the 'decider guy' now is "a" decider guy, the official transcript has been changed and all the fun we rabid lambs were having with the image of our national comic book comedian is supposed to be over. If half of the time spent on that misadventure had been put into planning the aftermath of invading Iraq, we'd be far better off.

Now from Tenet's recently published book comes the vision (through an article on the book) of a president who was not the person to go to for the nation's security, either.

During a CBS "60 Minutes" television interview that aired April 29, correspondent Scott Pelley nailed the crucial question that Tenet leaves unanswered in his book "Why aren't you telling the president, 'Mr. President, this is terrifying. We have to do this now'? " Pelley asked Tenet.

"Because the United States government doesn't work that way," Tenet replied. "The president is not the action officer. You bring the action to the national security adviser and people who set the table for the president to decide on policies they're going to implement."

Whoa! That's a startling admission. I'm pretty certain that President Bush or any president, for that matter, would consider himself or herself the action officer when it comes to protecting the country from terrorism. I can already see the 2008 presidential candidates promising, "I will be your action officer on terrorism and security."

The meeting in which Tenet made the fateful 'Slam Dunk' statement is described as '"essentially a marketing meeting" ...to decide what intelligence could be made public to prove Iraq had WMDs.'

The more we find out about the processes used to remove security from the U.S. and call it the GWOT, the more the cabal in the White House shows that it is acting against, not for, the public. That the cretin in chief is playing a supporting role, not a leading one, perhaps is not such a bad thing. The really, really bad thing is that the leaders of the U.S. and of the president are terrible and doing terrible things.