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The
Story
August
12, 2003
By Raul Groom
 "You
get the ankles, and I'll get the wrists." - Soul Coughing
It was a Soul Coughing kind of week. There were deadlines
and unexplained oddities and looming crises and, of course,
this pesky full-time job that I seem to wind up at practically
every damn day. I waited in joyful hope for The Story to appear
in its malevolent magnificence and upset the teetering apple-carts
of the imbeciles and bag men and two-bit bookmakers who are
currently dominating every aspect of American politics, most
of all the steroid-crazed caricature of Ronald Reagan inexplicably
transcending his well-earned place in the pantheon of Hollywood
shark jumpers by mounting a whirlwind campaign of photo-opping
and catchphrase uttering in a fool attempt to storm the California
Governor's Mansion. The decisive question, so far unexplored,
is whether Arnie's candidacy will be able to survive the airing
(on the Fox network, no less) of the inevitable "McBain Runs
For Office" episode of The Simpsons. But never mind all that.
Monday and Tuesday passed, and The Story did not surface.
By Wednesday, it was clear that something was amiss. The Washington
Post was running dull and unserious headlines about trivial
issues and showing unmistakable signs of falling down on the
job. The optimists among us became convinced that something
big was in the works, but when Friday rolled around and The
Story was not forthcoming, we started to concede that the
cynics might be right. The Post newsroom had obviously been
swept up, like everyone else, in the oohing and ahhing over
Gore's weird declaration of intent to play Kingmaker in 2004
and the orgy of cliche-hurling masquerading as national media
coverage of the California recall.
I finally gave up on Saturday and headed out to buy a copy
of Ruby Vroom (for therapeutic purposes) and watch the Browns
kick off the preseason against the Tennessee Titans. The Bushies
were going to be let off the hook again, and I was not going
to take it lying down. I was going to get drunk and yell and
go home to listen to a group of nutcases belt out lunatic
rhymes over sugar-free jazz riffs. Under the circumstances,
it seemed like the right thing to do.
The fates were lined up against me even in surrender. DirecTV
broadcasts of preseason games are apparently unreliable, and
the only game the pub had was the Washington v. Carolina game,
which I will care about - on behalf of Stephen Davis, whom
the Redskins heartlessly and brainlessly discarded in the
offseason and who now totes the pill for the Panthers - when
the teams meet again in November, but in which I had no interest
on August 9th. Even for a hard-line gridiron junkie, it's
impossible to watch any team other than your own in a game
that does not count and in which a large percentage of the
players are desperate losers who could easily be selling life
insurance by Halloween.
Sophia and I left the pub to get dinner elsewhere, and the
evening began picking up steam. The food was surprisingly
good, and we stopped by a photography exhibition afterwards
to see some friends who are shipping off to Mali in a few
months. The photographs were spectacular, and the house was
alive with the dissatisfaction and brilliance and apathy that
can only be exuded by a large group of affluent artists. The
wine flowed and the mosquitoes hummed and no one talked about
politics or football or any of the other obsessions that poison
my dreams and heat my motor into the red zone.
The world was a pale yellow glow of satisfaction when I
arrived back at the house, and I decided to give the news
a quick check. I popped over to the Post website to
take in whatever tripe they would be pushing as their Sunday
lead before heading off to bed. As I entered the spare bedroom
where we keep the computer, though, a black-clad group of
bandits and scalawags whunked me over the head with a sack
of pennies and carted me off to a parallel universe.
I have no specific memory of the incident, but that is the
only explanation I can offer for the enormous bombshell that
I saw detonating on the cover of the paper's online incarnation.
It seems Barton Gellman and Walter Pincus spent the week talking
to well-connected people at the CIA, who told them all about
a certain agent who was the front man for the Bush administration's
efforts to convince the United Nations that the overwhelming
majority of world nuclear experts were wrong in their assessment
that Saddam Hussein was using rocket body tubes to produce,
of all things, rockets.
The Official Administration Line, which this dogged spook
- whom the unnamed CIA source has asked the Post to call "Joe"
- faithfully parroted, was that the tubes were part of an
elaborate operation to deceive everyone in the world and produce
a nuclear bomb without acquiring any of the key technology
required for the job by less diabolical nuclear powers such
as the United States. According to the Bush Approved version
of the tale, U.S. nuclear engineers were far behind even mid-level
Iraqi civil servants in their understanding of the refining
and weaponization of uranium. Joe assured the U.N. that the
Iraqis were MacGyver-like in their ability to produce weapons-ready
uranium using spare rocket parts and imaginary yellow cake
from what George W. has occasionally referred to as "the nation
of Africa."
That's a paraphrase, of course. The actual text of his presentation
presumably sounded a little less stupid, although it was not
enough to convince the Security Council or the General Assembly
that a war in Iraq was justified. It did convince the Bush
administration, which is not all that surprising since they
were the ones who made up the story in the first place.
When a journalist - or in this case, a pack of them - pounds
out a piece this monstrous, this earth-shattering, it is incumbent
upon other writers and commentators to stop blathering on
about trivial and inconsequential things and call attention
to The Story. This attitude has clearly not taken strong root
among the charismatic but vacuous pundits who hang out in
studios barking one-liners at one another and showing off
their shiny new suits and straight white teeth to the Sunday
morning TV audiences. Virtually no one was talking this morning
about the Gellmann/Pincus article, Hardball and Face the Nation
having apparently been story-boarded before the Post
hit newsstands with the surefire Pulitzer candidate.
Perhaps the article was simply too long - after all, if
top government officials are no longer required to read key
intelligence reports, I suppose we can hardly expect Chris
Matthews to take a half hour out of his morning blow-dry to
read the most important front-page news story of this generation,
much less to be familiar with its contents and key arguments
in time to actually discuss the matter on his TV program.
But it is of no real consequence. After all, one has only
to read the article for herself to see the magnitude and scope
of the scandal that is suddenly busting out all over Washington,
and I would encourage anyone who has not already done so to
stop wasting your time on this long-winded piece of trash
and immediately go check
it out.
The only thing you might not pick up just from reading the
story, which is indeed quite long but worth every column inch,
is that the real danger for the Bush clan is not what they
said or did, but whom they have pissed off, and whom
they have "misunderestimated." George Tenet was never well-liked
among the rank and file of the agency, but Karl Rove and Dick
Cheney must have assumed that loyalty would keep the spooks
in line when the two settled on the strategy of diverting
as much blame as possible towards the intelligence community.
For a while, the ploy seemed to be working, as they had the
apparent support of the DCIA, but now Tenet finds himself
swinging sickeningly back and forth, his wrists and ankles
in the hands of the very men he betrayed every time he allowed
weak, unpopular arguments to be presented as the best CIA
analysis available.
As Cockburn and St. Clair point out unforgettably in their
excellent book WhiteOut, "The CIA is not a kindergarten."
When the Agency decides to throw a man overboard, the results
are not pretty, and Tenet will be very lucky if the worst
that comes of all this is that he has to slink back to Queens
and ask for his old job back waiting tables in the family
restaurant.
Tenet, unlike almost every other CIA Director in history
(though the elder Bush still claims implausibly that he was
not with the CIA until he was appointed Director) is not a
lifelong CIA man but a political hack and opportunist who
lucked into the job when Tony Lake went belly-up during the
confirmation process. It is not impossible to imagine that
if he continues to show more loyalty to the Bush administration
than to the men and women who toil to gather the intelligence
that he so cavalierly butchers for Rove's Machiavellian ends,
he might meet with a mysterious and unfortunate accident.
On the other hand, Tenet's reputation within the agency may
be so far gone at this point that he has no choice but to
cling to the sinking ship that is Bush/Cheney and hope that
the CIA, an organization that has authored more gruesome murders
than Agatha Christie, decides to let bygones be bygones.
Now that The Story has finally broken, there is little for
the rest of us to do but stand back and watch in awe as the
pieces fall into place. In the coming months, there will be
plenty of opportunity for handicapping different officials'
chances to be around next summer, and lots of side bets on
questions like which die-hard conservative columnist will
be the first to compare the investigation to McCarthyism.
Currently George Will is my favorite in the latter category,
at 5:2 just ahead of Ann Coulter, who would be all chalk laying
1:2 if she hadn't just published a book defending McCarthy
and his strange quixotic excesses.
So, since I've nothing useful to contribute except a couple
hundred words of praise and a link to someone else's story,
I'm celebrating with some fuzzy navels and a new recipe for
baked spaghetti I'm calling "Roast George." Odds are not yet
available on whether the name refers to Tenet or another George
altogether.
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