Sunday, February 08, 2009

In the swimming pool of Prince Bandar bin Bribe

"George Tenet, the former director of central intelligence, also blamed the Jews for many of his troubles, if the extraordinary scene Tyler describes in the book’s prologue is to be believed. He recounts how in 2004 a furious Tenet, dressed in his underwear, drank half a bottle of Scotch, supplied by Prince Bandar bin Sultan at his palace in Saudi Arabia, in a few minutes, while raging at the Bush administration’s duplicity. “They’re setting me up,” he said, but “I am not going to take the hit.” The hit that needed to be taken was for the missing weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, over which the United States had gone to war. The White House, Tyler writes, expected Tenet “to fall on his sword to protect the president.” ­Tenet raged against the “bastards” in the administration and mocked the neoconservatives who supported Israel’s right-wingers as “the Jews.” He then jumped into the swimming pool and did impressions of Yasir Arafat and Omar Suleiman, the chief of Egyptian intelligence."