And what he believes is...

... in magic, apparently. In the power of names. We don't call it torture, so it's not.

Who's he? George Tenet. Check this CBS News story chronicling Tenet's appearance on 60 Minutes last night with Scott Pelley:

'The image that's been portrayed is, we sat around the campfire and said, "Oh, boy, now we go get to torture people."' Well, we don't torture people. Let me say that again to you. We don't torture people. Okay?' Tenet says.

'Come on, George,' Pelley says.

'We don't torture people,' Tenet maintains.

'Khalid Sheikh Mohammad?' Pelley asks.

'We don't torture people,' Tenet says.

'Water boarding?' Pelley asks.

'We do not -- I don't talk about techniques,' Tenet replies.

'It's torture,' Pelley says.

'And we don't torture people. Now, listen to me. Now, listen to me. I want you to listen to me,' Tenet says. 'The context is it's post-9/11. I've got reports of nuclear weapons in New York City, apartment buildings that are gonna be blown up, planes that are gonna fly into airports all over again. Plot lines that I don't know -- I don't know what's going on inside the United States. And I'm struggling to find out where the next disaster is going to occur. Everybody forgets one central context of what we lived through. The palpable fear that we felt on the basis of the fact that there was so much we did not know.'

'I know that this program has saved lives. I know we've disrupted plots,' Tenet says.

'But what you're essentially saying is some people need to be tortured,' Pelley remarks.

'No, I did not say that. I did not say that,' Tenet says. . . .

'You call it in the book, "enhanced interrogation,"' Pelley remarks.

' . . . an assumption. Well, that's what we call it,' Tenet says.

'And that's a euphemism,' Pelley says.

'I'm not having a semantic debate with you. I'm telling you what I believe,' Tenet says.

You know what I hate? People who say semantic like it has no meaning except "nitpicky". Semantics means meaning. Tenet doesn't want to discuss the words he uses. He just wants to assert that he doesn't torture people because what he does do, well, it's not torture. And if you call it torture, that's just semantics.

This is what you get when you believe in the great battle between Good and Evil and that you are on the side of Good. Anything you do is therefore Good, and by definition cannot be Bad. And torture, well, that's Bad. So we don't do that. Whatever we are doing, it's something else.

This is typical of the Bush administration - Bush himself is a fervent adherent to this belief. It doesn't work that way. As Neil Young said:

America is beautiful but she has an ugly side.

No one is so Good that they transmute evil into goodness. Torture is torture no matter who does it, or why.

and while we're talking Tenet: Phlip Giraldi, American Conservative columnist and former CIA intelligence agent, just told Keith Olbermann that he believes that Tenet"wrote the book for money. He‘s trying to salvage his reputation. As far as I‘m concerned, his reputation cannot be salvaged, because he keeps referring to himself as a man of honor. There is no honor in what he did."

No kidding. Tenet's basic premise seems to be that he knew that al Qaeda intended to attack us before 2001, and that he knew the war on Iraq was needless and founded on lies - yet he didn't tell anybody besides Condi. He claims that intelligence analysts stand up for the truth - six, seven years later, it looks like, eh? But how can he claim he is "stand[ing] up for the truth" when he waited this long to speak it? (Assuming that he is, of course.) Out of his own mouth he is condemned.