Howie, in Mali, sends back an online book preview: "George Tenet, Drunk in Bandar's Pool, Screaming about Jews"

Has the Medal of Freedom become a badge of infamy?

by Ken

Howie writes: "I just arrived in Mali. Now I'm REALLY in Africa."

And with this he sent back the following nugget from HuffPost:

George Tenet Screamed About Jews In Saudi Prince's Pool: Book

The Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg offers an interesting excerpt from " World Of Trouble, a forthcoming book by Patrick Tyler on the White House and the Middle East. In this scene, CIA director George Tenet, drunk on scotch at Saudi Prince Bandar's pool, rants about Bush administration "Jews" who are "setting me up" to take the fall for the false WMD claims:

A servant appeared with a bottle. Tenet knocked back some of the scotch. Then some more. They watched with concern. He drained half the bottle in a few minutes.

"They're setting me up. The bastards are setting me up," Tenet said, but "I am not going to take the hit."

and then:

"According to one witness, he mocked the neoconservatives in the Bush administration and their alignment with the right wing of Israel's political establishment, referring to them, with exasperation, as "the Jews."

For the record, Goldberg adds this:

Tyler reports in a footnote that, when asked, Tenet initially denied staying at Prince Bandar's palace, then denied that he had said anything in the pool. "He disputed the remarks attributed to him and denied that his memory might have been affected by the amount of alcohol he was reported to have consumed on top of a sleeping pill," Tyler reports.

Also, I have to say that a lot of us Jews have taken frequent -- and public -- note of the dispiriting preponderance of Jews among the hard-core neocon "thinkers," generally linking it to their close ties to the hardest-core elements in Israel's Likud Party. And it's a good guess that none of us have been in Prince Bandar's pool.

Nevertheless, this reminds us of poor George Tenet and his Medal of Freedom. Earlier today, while I was cutting and pasting Harold Meyerson's fine column on the role of the UAW in modern U.S. history, with its attention to longtime union leader Walter Reuther, I tried for a while to work in a reference to Reuther being a recipient of the Medal of Freedom. However, I realized that under the current U.S. regime, the Medal of Freedom has been so debased (as witness the famous photo above -- how many times you have seen it, or variations thereof, often including fellow medalists Tommy Franks and Paul Bremer, just on DWT?) that it comes close to being a badge of infamy.

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