It was so cowardly of both of you not to scream, yell and push back with every fiber of your souls against the Cheney-orchestrated, trumped up run up to war. It is almost as cowardly now to claim that you knew all along that it was a bad idea and that you had wished that the administration had found another way of insuring that Saddam was defanged.

Tens of thousands of lives have been lost, hundreds of billions of dollars spent making us less safe, more hated and the region even more destabilized.

And you write a book to clear your name?

Watching the excellent Bill Moyers report on the lack of opposition to the trail of lies that lead us to war I was again struck by the number of people who knew better but stayed silent. Or, much worse, knew better but parroted the administration’s lies. When Colin Powell spoke before the U.N. and accused Saddam of harboring al-Zarqawi in northern Iraq I remember screaming at the television, “Liar! Northern Iraq is Kurdish controlled and in our no-fly zone. There are already more U.S. Special Forces there on the ground than Iraqi troops.” And yet General Powell has the balls to leak to Bob Woodward that he lobbied to avoid this madness.

Tenet and Powell should worry more about the lives that they helped ruin than their precious reputations. They should march over to Walter Reed and empty bedpans for now legless soldiers, read Tom Clancy novels to now sightless marines. If they were Japanese they would have long ago fallen on their swords.

I do not want that for them, or for anyone. However if these two men truly want to restore honor to their reputations they need to dedicate the rest of their days to atoning for the pointless misery that they helped unleash on our country, on Iraq and the world.