make anything that he does and says suspect.
Tom Kean Sr. is infamous for vetting
The Path to 9/11 which ruthlessly slandered the Bill Clinton administration right before the 2006 elections.
http://www.bluejersey.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=2401 One scene that reporters went back to again and again on the call is the one that depicts a completely fictional account of Sandy Berger supposedly telling CIA operatives on the ground in Afghanistan, with Osama bin Laden practically in their cross-hairs, that they can’t go ahead and take him out. As you all know: Never happened. Jessie McKinley of the New York Times asked Kean, "If it’s not supported by the Commission’s findings, how exactly did it make it into the movie…Did this raise any red flags for you?"
The same source asked how much Kean was paid for signing off on that piece of propaganda.
I think I know how he was paid. He was paid by not having his ass hauled off to jail.
Here is what Kean does for a living now. He sits around at United Healthcare and draws a big salary. Here is a story Salon did around the time of the
Path to 9/11 debacle about United Healthcare's backdated bonus scandal and its problems with the SEC.
http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2006/09/15/kean/ For the past several months, the Securities and Exchange Commission has been investigating the conduct of United Health's management and directors. So have the Internal Revenue Service and prosecutors in the U.S. attorney's office for the Southern District of New York, who have subpoenaed documents from the company. The investigations came to light after a series of probing stories in the Wall Street Journal last May, which exposed the apparent backdating of hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of stock options by United Health management.
Those alleged manipulations, inflating the value of options granted to the company's management, evidently occurred with the connivance of the directors, including Kean, who sat on the company's compensation committee during three crucial years, according to the Journal.
snip
Was Kean gullible, irresponsible, stupid or negligent? Perhaps we will learn when he is put under oath. As financial journalist Andy Serwer said on CNN when the Journal story broke, "These guys just sort of look crooked." Kean never seems to have noticed, and it is worth mentioning that his own compensation as a United Health director in 2004 reached $650,000 -- much higher than average for corporate directors, especially since he missed nearly a quarter of that year's meetings.
Kean doesn't quite seem to comprehend how badly he has compromised himself at United Health, since he continues to behave inappropriately. Last month the Journal reported that several top United Health executives and their spouses donated more than $20,000 to Kean Jr.'s Senate campaign at a fundraiser in Minnesota last May -- held on the same day that Kean Sr. and the other company directors met to consider how they would handle the burgeoning backdating scandal. When the Menendez campaign pointed out this gross conflict of interest, a Kean campaign spokeswoman claimed that the nexus of board meeting and fundraiser was only "a coincidence." The Keans' Republican supporters roared with outrage that anyone would dare to question the former governor's honesty and judgment.
So, what is going to happen to all these crooked CEO's?
http://www.boston.com/business/articles/2007/12/07/ex_unitedhealth_ceo_settles_with_sec/According to this story written just a couple of weeks ago, it looks like the Bush administration has cut a deal. The United execs will have to give back some of their ill gotten gains, but they do not have to admit any wrong doing and no one is going to jail.
Did Tom Kean Sr. buy a
"Get out jail free" card with his vetting of
The Path to 9/11 ? And since the case against United Health is not quite closed, will he say whatever the office of Vice President Dick Cheney wants him to say about the CIA? I don't know, but I would take with a grain of salt anything he says. So, when he says "the agency made a conscious decision to impede the 9/11 investigation" I would read that as "someone told Tom Kean to say that the CIA made a conscious decision to impede the 9/11 investigation".
That is problem with telling lies. Once you start, no one can ever trust anything you have to say again. The same goes for journalists who spread other people's propaganda.