Flip Flopping and Media Watching:

As the semester for UNH draws to a close while picking a topic for my final blog, I stopped at an interesting story former CIA director George Tenet. He while promoting his new book (hint hint) he decides this would be the perfect time to unleash his feelings on the Bush Administration and the case for going to war with Iraq. Vice president Cheney gave a speech on August 2002 where he spoke about how Saddam had restarted his nuclear program, Tenet quickly realized that the assertion went way beyond “what our analysis could support”, but , “Yet, instead of confronting the vice president, he let it slide.” Tenet finally tells bosses what they didn't want to hear, well this is surprising, how many years after we started this war and after he had sat down behind Colin Powell and corroborated the credibility of there being WMD’s in Iraq as of 2001.This is down right unbelievable that a person of his stature after years of great service to the CIA, could allow a ‘slam dunk’ case like he said to George Bush in 2002 to get to the point where he is calling it a simple case of group-think syndrome. Reminder that Tenet worked for the United States of America’s intelligence agency, in case you didn’t hear once again, the CIA of the United States of America; I don’t know about you but I accept only the best from such an organization, Tenet as a civil servant had a job to do and he failed making himself and in this case some left thinking that that America is foolish.

This is undoubtedly plays to the case against the Iraq war, George seems to be playing things to his advantage, when the war was cool he was in, now it is not, so he is speaking up as the reputable guy taking the hit. Nobody outside of Washington can really think that this is face saving; if nothing else it shows his leadership skills are nothing less than horrible. As far as I am concerned this is a media stunt that has obviously done just as other stories that I have covered this semester seem to all have in common, which is using things to your advantage, if it is not George playing the game of politics for the sake of his book, it is the media giving time to people like Anna Nicole Smith or Rosie O’Donnell. The moral of this blog is not a case of for or against Iraq or even the humiliation at the expense of George Tenet, but rather a simple point- the media and its attempts to follow and produce stories that credit the unworthy, as well as the telling and retelling of stories till not them (the media) but we the viewers are blue in the face. George Tenet does not deserve any of America’s sympathy, and the media does not need to sit him down interview after interview and tell us about it. Give me some news, not a “scapegoat” looking for a few dollars after killing his career all by himself, by not speaking up when it still counted.

Intelligence “is the product that results from processing information.”(intelligence - Definitions)This means that all the information that is collected form various ways tv, reporters, spies, newspapers ect., is essentially not anything till it is made useful or deemed inadequate. Needless to say Tenet and TV reporters need to check there information and make sure they are getting it right the first time around and for the right reasons.