If you go here: http://www.cbsnews.com/sections/60minutes/main3415.shtml, you can watch the Sixty Minutes interview with former CIA director George Tenet that aired last night.
I was struck by a couple of things. First of all, despite the image of top CIA men as Yale-educated patricians, Tenet struck me as a rather unpolished individual. It was the first time I had ever heard him speak. Instead of saying "going to", he habitually says, "gonna"--like "We were gonna do what was necessary to stop the terrorists." He has an undergraduate degree from Georgetown and a Masters from Columbia, for what that's worth. I was also amazed to see how ill-prepared he was for some relatively tough questioning. For example, he confessed to not having read George Bush's infamous state of the union speech prior to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. That is pretty fucking amazing. He also told Scott Pelli that nobody was ever tortured or killed in a CIA-controlled prison. When Pelli asked him about water-boarding, he really couldn't 'fess up. If these are the kinds of people who are running our spook show, no wonder we are losing. -- www.marxmail.org
