Sunday, April 29, 2007

George Tenet: Just Another Criminal

Thirty minutes of George Tenet on 60 Minutes was more than enough for me. We learned from Tenet that honesty and truth have little place in his world, only trust and honor do. Sounds like a member of organized crime doesn't it?

What else did we learn from Tenet? The American government in general and CIA in particular does not "torture"; we use "enhanced interrogation techniques." Lying, torturing, murdering, scumbag.

As far as helping to sell the war on Iraq by supporting his bosses' desire to claim that Iraq possessed all sorts of weapons of mass destruction? Tenet's explanation is faith-based intelligence: we believed it. Did they have evidence that would have stood up in criminal court? Nope, maybe, civil court, which means we had some data which we could make look good enough to fool many people. Nevermind that it would be used to murder hundreds of thousands of people.

Tenet's real anger is saved for those in his bosses' inner circle who threw him to the public as the guy who used the phrase "it's a slam dunk" to put together the case for Hussein's possession of WMD. It's not that it was a lie that bothers Tenet, it's that his bosses used it to paint him as the reason they invaded Iraq. They blamed him publicly and in doing so showed Tenet that in this gang of criminals there is no honor, and trust in criminals is for for suckers. Tenet got suckered by his criminal cohorts; George W. Bush, Richard Cheney, Condoleeza Rice, and Andrew Card.

Tough luck, George. They have no honor and neither do you.

Thursday, April 26, 2007

We Believe These People?

Last night on the NBC Nightly News, a talking head made my head clank when he said the speed of light was "186,000 miles per hour." That would be per second unless light had slowed down a great deal and I had missed the reports. I might not have blogged that fact except that less than an hour later, another talking head on a local news spot informed me that the device I was looking at which showed temperature and humidity was "a sling spectrometer." Clank again! A spectrometer is an optical instrument. A sling psychrometer is used to measure and/or calculate very local relative humidity and temperature.

Well, maybe, time had passed me by, but a Google search yielded only a single hit for sling spectrometer and that was in a list of things a college science class would be doing: "calculate relative humidity using a sling spectrometer; calculate the relative humidity in the classroom using data from a sling psychrometer." Most tellingly, at least for me, was: no one in the links provided had a sling spectrometer for sale.

These two items clanked in my mind with what I knew. One of them was definitely false, the other probably false. So, I was left wondering, what about all of the other "facts" these people report for which I have no framework, nothing for these to clank against?

Why do we believe these people? Why do we trust them?

Saturday, April 14, 2007

I Won't Miss Don Imus

Shock jock this, shock jock that. Just another euphemism meant to cover something contemptible: shock jock equals professional hate-monger.

One down. Dozens to go.