The fact that Tenet got a Congressional Gold Medal is perhaps one of the biggest travesties I can imagine. He missed The Big One. Period. In the old Soviet Union, he would have been executed. We spend something like $70 billion on intelligence and all that hardware, all those Ivy League brains proved unable to stop a couple of determined fanatics with box cutters.

As far as I’m concerned, most of these post 9/11 “memoirs” from former government employees are self serving exercises in derriere covering. Perhaps with the exception of Richard Clark (damn him) who, while no doubt a real snot of a person nevertheless recognized the danger of al-Qaeda and tried to do what he could to get the government to confront it. Same goes for FBI counter terror head John O’Neil, who quit the agency and went to work as head of security for the world trade centers - in August of 2001. He died in the attacks.