This Week's Quote

Ray McGovern on Bush's firing of CIA Director George Tenet (snippet):

"....You don’t tell the president what he wants to know. You tell him the truth. And that seems to have been avoided here in Washington these days. What is truth, Pilate’s old question? People don’t seem to have any appreciation of the need to tell the truth. And there’s one place where that’s essential, and that is serving up an objective, unpartisan, unbiased, tell it like it is, intelligence to the president. The president doesn’t like that, but you got to do it anyway. And if he doesn’t like you, you got to quit, or permit yourself to be fired. That’s not what this firing is all about. This firing is simply the first sacrificial victim here. They don’t want to get rid of Rumsfeld or Wolfowitz yet. There’s lots of dirty stuff having to do with CIA interrogations in Iraq as well as military interrogations. So there’s a whole litany of things that George Tenet is very vulnerable on, and I think this is throwing one person in to the fray here and say, well at least we got rid of George Tenet. He’s a tragic figure. I feel sorry for him but I do not defend what he has done to the intelligence community because the folks there are thoroughly demoralized. The ethic that we all worked by, you shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free, you know that’s carved into the marble at the entrance to CIA headquarters. That seems to have been just completely rescinded from under the reign of George Tenet...."