frankenlies.com
#13: Franken Bizarro
On page 36 of Truth, in writing about Presidents Bush and the events of September 11, Franken proposes,
"Of course, [CIA Director George] Tenet had been trying to alert Bush to the terrorist threat for months."
Franken's statement is almost bizarre. The truth is that Mr. Tenet met personally with the President nearly every day for the first eight-plus months of the Bush administration.1 If Tenet had anything to say to the President, there was nothing stopping him!
Franken may want to contrast the very intimate Bush-Tenet relationship with that of President Clinton and one of Tenet's predecessors, James Woolsey. Never once during his two-year term atop of the CIA did Woolsey have a one-on-one meeting with Clinton.2 Here is what Mr. Woolsey said of his relationship with President Clinton:
"It wasn't that I had a bad relationship with the president. It just didn't exist."3
Clinton's relationship with his CIA Director was so pathetic that when a small plane crashed onto the White House lawn in September 1994, the joke around town was that it was Woolsey trying to get in to see the President.4
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Notes:
1 Carl Limbacher, "Condi: Bush Met Tenet Every Day (Clinton Didn't)," NewsMax.com (gleaned from a Sean Hannity/Condoleezza Rice radio interview), March 28, 2004. http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2004/3/28/131128.shtml
2 Richard Miniter Losing Bin Laden: How Bill Clinton's Failures Unleashed Global Terror, Washington D.C.: Regnery, 2003, p. 87.
3 Ibid.
4 "David Gergen Interview," Frontline, PBS, 2000. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/clinton/interviews/gergen3.html.