Business As Usual
In a career move best described as "Nyah Nyah," ex-CIA chief George Tenet has been hired as director of QinetiQ, the British Ministry of Defence's mad-scientist division.
"I am especially interested in the capacity of the company's technologies to meet a number of the challenges faced by our nations' military and intelligence personnel," the press release quotes Tenet, who sat on his ass while 9/11 happened and then pushed that whole phony WMD thing so we could occupy Iraq forever.
More slime, after the jump.
Tenet has been strangely quiet since his resignation in June 2004, when he was supposed to be the sacrificial lamb for the "intelligence failures." Bush screwed that up, too, praising Tenet in public and giving him a "presidential medal of freedom" medallion.
MoD sold a third of QinetiQ to (of course) the Carlyle Group in 2003. "One of the world's leading defence technology and security companies," it was converted to a semi-public company in February. The UK government reportedly still owns 24% and Carlyle's share is allegedly down to 12%.
Washington's own little globalist private-equity fund -- or, as the Post says, "the largest private equity manager in the world" -- was chaired by John Major in Europe until last year, while James Baker III allegedly stepped down as Senior Counselor in '05, after a 15-year reign. Bush 41 spent six profitable years on Carlyle's Asia board, and even young George W. was given aCarlyle company board spot when he had no job. (They let him hang around for three years due to his daddy being president, and kicked him out as soon as Clinton took the White House.)
Hilariously, Bush 41 and Baker were having a Carlyle secret conference in Washington with the Bin Ladens on 9/11. (That's why Poppy & Babs were at the White House that morning; Carlyle HQ is literally six blocks down the street at 1001 Pennsylvania Ave.)
The Economist reported in 2003:
You need not be a conspiracy theorist, though, to be concerned about what lies behind Carlyle's success. Can a firm that is so deeply embedded in the iron triangle where industry, government and the military converge be good for democracy? Carlyle arguably takes to a new level the military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower feared might "endanger our liberties or democratic process". What red-blooded capitalist can truly admire a firm built, to a significant degree, on cronyism; surely, this sort of access capitalism is for ghastly places like Russia, China or Africa, not the land of the free market?
Way to go, tin-foil-hat commie nutjobs!
QinetiQ appoints ex-CIA head as non-executive director [QinetiQ]
Ex-CIA chief Tenet joins "James Bond" research firm [Reuters]
The secretive Carlyle Group gives capitalism a bad name [The Economist]