Letter From Bahrain

It’s about time. CIA Director George Tenet finally ran out of friends. In Washington power circles, a resignation based on spending quality time with family is another lame euphemism for being fired and allowed to save face publicly.

Tenent’s resignation was due September 12, 2001. During his watch, the United States experienced two of the worst intelligence failures of the last 50 years. The first failure resulted in a second Pearl Harbor. The second led to a messy war that now has American soldiers deployed to the wrong place at the wrong time for the wrong reasons.

Other notable screw-ups include Tenet's failure to anticipate India's surprise nuclear tests that inspired Pakistan to follow suit in a series of similar explosions. This was way back in May 1998.

According to journalists Ruper Cornwell and Anne Penketht, Tenet also missed the warning signs of al-Qaeida's attacks on the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania in 1998 and, when the Clinton administration chose to retaliate against targets in Sudan and Afghanistan, it was bad CIA intelligence that led to a pharmaceutical factory in Khartoum to be bombed in the mistaken belief that it was a chemical weapons facility.

The following year, more faulty CIA intelligence led to the accidental bombing of the Chinese embassy in Belgrade.

Ironically, Tenet’s most shining moment is too little too late and that is being responsible for the fall of Iraqi exile Ahmad Chalabi, who is now accused of spying for Iran and disclosing to Tehran that U.S. intelligence had broken a key communications code used by Iran.

Slam-dunk Tenent is the fall guy, and everyone knows this.


When thousands of people attended the third annual Gay Pride parade in Jerusalem Thursday, Ultra-Orthodox mayor Uri Lupolianski required protection from body guards. Members of the ultra-Orthodox community were incensed he allowed the Gay Pride parade to go ahead and held two demonstrations in the last week to protest.

Rabbi David Basri, a prominent kabbalist, said homosexuals were "subhuman" and would be reincarnated as rabbits. This should make Jewish Gays hopping mad.

Farce and tragedy are in a race to the finish line when the "dead or alive" U.S. President displays the last pistol Saddam Hussein ever touched in a White House trophy room.

Who has time to appreciate the fiction of classic literature when reality is so genuinely weird? For instance, according to CNN, approximately 100 Iraqi policemen whom the Americans had just placed in the holy city of Najaf, after a vague agreement with rebel cleric Muktada al-Sadr, have already deserted their posts and left the city.

Sadly, many Americans still accept at face value the misnamed "War on Terrorism," linking Iraq to 9/11. Sadly, many Americans still accept Bush’s stated motivations of “liberating” the people of Iraq and bestowing upon them a full measure of democracy, freedom and other eternal joys fit for high school history books.

In a world of doublespeak, President Bush has tried for over two years to sell Americans on a war with Iraq by alluding to the possibility of a link between Saddam (evil incarnate) Hussein and al-Qaida. It’s frightening to watch a former prep school football yell leader apply a monomaniacal focus on Iraq when the American economy is sputtering badly. It’s been even more frightening that Americans allowed Bush to thoroughly demonize Saddam Hussein, linking him to 9/11 and building him up into a Hitler who could have threatened the world “with a holocaust.”

Of course the reasons for American imperial schemes really predate 9/11. Oil is the sine qua non of the American Middle East policy, yesterday, today and tomorrow; to be in full control of Iraq's vast reserves, with Saudi oil and Iranian oil waiting next door.

Why be shocked that a Pentagon email has allegedly surfaced indicating that the VP's office "coordinated" a major no-bid "Restore Iraqi Oil" contract that went to Cheney's former company Halliburton on the eve of the invasion of Iraq.

Conservative Republicans have wanted Saddam’s head for a dozen years. We should be honest and reorganize our oil companies into the American Central Asia Company, much as the British did during the 18th and 19th centuries, when their empire was at its height.

Like some easy platitude from O’Brien in 1984, the axis of evil has now shrunk solely to Iraq. Iran and North Korea have been put aside with the dismissive comment: "Different threats require different strategies." I contend that all roads to al-Qaida lead to Saudi Arabia, a totalitarian country bloated from decadence and corruption.

The recent events in al-Kohbar, just 30 miles from Bahrain, underscores this once again.

Since Bush assumed power in the U.S. Supreme Court-sanctioned coup d'état of 2000, the world has been blessed with an American leader of quite exceptional imbecility. As if to demonstrate his tenuous relationship with reality, Bush once proudly quipped: “The course of this nation does not depend on the decisions of others.” Never mind the record-breaking, worldwide anti-war demonstrations of February 15, 2003. With that bland encomium, the former prep school football yell leader merely appeared as petulant and misguided as Dick Shawn in “It’s A Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World.”

The functional alcoholic currently domiciled at the White House now makes Ronald Regan seem like a positively refined statesman. Of course that old Borax huckster could easily mask his tabula rasa with glossy recitations from his bygone days with the Hollywood dialogue coaches. However, this once-AWOL Texas Air National Guard pilot seems to simply be improvising from a half-wit’s script, like a man with mismatched dentures.

How did an intellectual pygmy end up in the White House?