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State of Denial

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Lanya:
 
[......]   [Woodward's] book also reports that then-CIA Director George J. Tenet and his counterterrorism chief, J. Cofer Black, grew so concerned in the summer of 2001 about a possible al-Qaeda attack that they drove straight to the White House to get high-level attention.

    Tenet called Rice, then the national security adviser, from his car to ask to see her, in hopes that the surprise appearance would make an impression. But the meeting on July 10, 2001, left Tenet and Black frustrated and feeling brushed off, Woodward reported. Rice, they said, did not seem to feel the same sense of urgency about the threat and was content to wait for an ongoing policy review.

    The report of such a meeting takes on heightened importance after former president Bill Clinton said this week that the Bush team did not do enough to try to kill Osama bin Laden before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks. Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) said her husband would have paid more attention to warnings of a possible attack than Bush did. Rice fired back on behalf of the current president, saying the Bush administration "was at least as aggressive" in eight months as President Clinton had been in eight years.

    The July 10 meeting of Rice, Tenet and Black went unmentioned in various investigations into the Sept. 11 attacks, and Woodward wrote that Black "felt there were things the commissions wanted to know about and things they didn't want to know about."

    Jamie S. Gorelick, a member of the Sept. 11 commission, said she checked with commission staff members who told her investigators were never told about a July 10 meeting. "We didn't know about the meeting itself," she said. "I can assure you it would have been in our report if we had known to ask about it."

    White House and State Department officials yesterday confirmed that the July 10 meeting took place, although they took issue with Woodward's portrayal of its results. State Department spokesman Sean McCormack, responding on behalf of Rice, said Tenet and Black had never publicly expressed any frustration with her response.
[........]
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/29/AR2006092901593_2.html

Michael Tee:
I find Tenet a pretty ambiguous character.  Partly because he has to be feeling a strong urge to cover his own ass.  If he were presented with an opportunity to shift the blame, or even to make sure it would never light on his shoulders, I feel certain he would have done so at any and every opportunity.  So I have to ask myself, why WOULDN'T this meeting have come to the attention of the commission? 

Right-wingers will go with the obvious answer, that Tenet was covering his own ass  because as the top-ranking expert at the meeting, he had the last word on threat urgency, and obviously did, said or failed to say or do something which would have forced Rice to take appropriate action.

However, there's another possible explanation.   it's also possible that he was shielding someone else - - Rice, for example, either out of personal liking for her or (less likely) perhaps because she had something on him.  It's a little less likely that he's been shielding Cofer Black, because it seems to me there was little that Black could have done at the meeting that he (Tenet) couldn't have overridden.  I kind of think the silence up to now was in fact intended to shield Rice, and that the story is surfacing because of the recent attacks on Clinton for allegedly failing to do enough.  It's always been a mystery to me how the Republicans found it so easy to palm the blame off on the Clinton administration, when they had been in power almost eight full months at the time.

domer:
"State of (continuing) denial" is what Bush is trying to induce, once again, in the electorate. The fear gambit has worked twice; is three times a charm? Contrary to all avalanching evidence from virtually every quarter, Bush persists in denying (and spreading the denial) that Iraq was a monumental mistake, and that the crisis we are faced with is of his own making, not one that would have naturally arisen. Taking up the coward's playbook, instead of meeting the overall situation head-on with fresh thought, fresh strategic thought, Bush claims armegeddon is at hand when a comprehensive analysis and response to the true situation may produce worthwhile insights and policy pathways avoiding an all-out battle for what, as presently constituted, seems to be a lost cause. I ask in all sincerity, shorn of all mendacious attempts to perpetuate the inertia of a fatally flawed policy as Bush is wont to do, can we afford at this juncture not to rethink Iraq and the overall struggle with Islamic radicalism? Are we as a nation stupid, or just limited by our own prior choices. I'm reminded of a Phil Ochs song from the Vietnam era about a platoon of soldiers pushing on in a murky, swollen river to the point they began to drown. The refrain was: "And the big fool said to push on."

Michael Tee:
My memory ain't what it's cracked up to be.  I thought I saw the song performed by the Smothers Brothers on Ed Sullivan.  The ostensible background event of the song was some military training exercise where the recruits were lost in the Big Muddy River when their drill sergeant foolishly persisted on moving forward into rising waters.  Here's what really happened:

<<The Smothers [Brothers] had invited folk singer Pete Seeger as a special guest.  [on THEIR show, not on Ed Sullivan]  While the network expressed no qualms about having the previously blacklisted performer appear on the airways, CBS balked at a song Seeger proposed to sing: "Waist Deep in the Big Muddy." The song was an allegory about Vietnam and contained the following lyrics that CBS found unacceptable: "Now every time I read the papers / That old feelin' comes on / We're waist deep in the Big Muddy / And the big fool says to push on." The network disapproved of the disrespectful reference to the president as a fool and, further, felt political material such as this had no place on an entertainment show. The performance was summarily censored. The network's action led to an avalanche of public criticism of the network's high-handed action. Eventually, CBS relented and allowed Seeger to pay another visit to the Smothers' show later in the season where he was permitted to sing the song in its entirety.>>

What I remember most vividly is seeing the song performed on our old black & white TV in the living room of our apartment (I was in grad school then) and the feeling of exultation I felt that this stuff was finally appearing on network television, a sense that walls were really breaking down.  Nobody who didn't live through the Sixties can appreciate the incredible sense of optimism, of real opportunities for change, for new directions, that were "Blowin' in the Wind" at the time.  There was absolutely no doubt in anyone's mind that a new world was around the corner, and that a New America was going to lead the way.  "My brother is a Chinese peasant and my enemy is Richard Nixon."  (Jerry Rubin, I think)

domer:
I'll defer to your rendition, Tee, but I heard Ochs sing "The Big Muddy" in concert in NYC my first year in law school. It was rousing.

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