WORST PERSON ON EARTH

With all due respect to Keith Olbermann's daily "Worst Person in the World" feature (and by the way, Keith is taking that "#1 Rated Talk Show on Cable" title Bill O'Reilly loves to wave around) I think that we need to honor the anniversary of 9/11 by talking about how George Tenet is the worst person currently alive.

I have been of the opinion for quite some time that the 9-11 commission report should be required reading for every adult in this country. Those of you who are regulars to G&T are probably not sure why I would so strongly recommend the work of such a slipshod, biased collection of political tap water. When Lee Hamilton is your big-time liberal on the committee, there are some problems with diversity of viewpoint. Let's leave it at that.

No, the report is a must-read because of the incredible depth of research in the first ten chapters. The "recommendations" and pontificating that make up the last three chapters are beyond useless, and it is a waste of your time to read them. Period. But the intricate trail of hundreds of small, related decisions throughout the 90s and the early W years is incredible. It's both enlightening and infuriating to read it closely and understand just how close the law enforcement and intelligence communities came to averting this disaster. It's a litany of red flags ignored, inter-agency pissing contests, and bureaucratic nonsense which culminates in 3000 dead bodies. The depth of the biographies of the perpetrators and descriptions of their movements in the years prior to the attack are almost eerie.

It's very hard to read the report and not come away wanting to punch Tenet in the cock. Chapter 4 describes, in painstaking detail, an equivocating pansy at the head of the CIA who talked Bill Clinton out of terrific opportunities to kill Osama bin Laden – repeatedly. No matter how many aerial photos or how much human intelligence they had, Tenet was just never "100% certain" that bin Laden was where we thought he was. Now, I'm not exactly a let's-project-American-military-might conservative who advocates solving diplomatic problems with cruise missiles. But bin Laden had already been identified as a major threat who was responsible for multiple terrorist attacks against Americans and others. It was clear to everyone, including Bill Clinton and pre-9/11 George W. Bush, that bin Laden was a serious threat who needed to be eliminated. Had Tenet said the word (without being wishy-washy or couching his words in cautionary disclaimers) he would have been killed.

Fast forward to 2003, and Tenet is called upon by another president to offer his assessment of a specific threat. Suddenly the enormous pussy version of Tenet who served Clinton was gone. The new, I-attended-a-Tony-Robbins-seminar version of Tenet was just 100% dead sure about everything. Iraq? Weapons of mass destruction? SLAM DUNK! Oh man, the intelligence on that simply could not have been any more solid! If Tenet was ever certain of anything, it was this! Hell, the bin Laden intelligence (aerial photos showing bin Laden walking into his sleeping quarters in a terrorist training camp) was paper-thin. But for WMDs in Iraq, we had the best, most solid kind of human intelligence that can be found in this lifetime: third-hand reports from Eastern European intelligence agencies and Ahmed Chalabi's word. You can see why he was so much more confident with Iraq.

Worst of all, Tenet recently released a pathetic, self-serving book in an effort to paint himself as some sort of hero throughout all of this. I was only able to get through about 15 pages before the urge to projectile vomit was too strong. It is probably the most nakedly cynical effort to revise one person's role in history since Robert McNamara's "I was such a big opponent of Vietnam" performance in Fog of War.

So thanks and go fuck yourself, George Tenet, for your years of service to your country! There is nothing wrong with you as a person that pancreatic cancer or a horrible one-car accident couldn't fix.