Get ready to have your jaw drop and your blood pressure shoot up. Richard Perle has commented on Tenet's new biography. In an article. In the Washington Post.
And Perle has the effrontery to claim he is the injured party here, and the CIA is the sole architect of war in Iraq. He titled the article...
...wait for it...
How The CIA Failed America.
Tenet insists on equating two statements that are not at all the same: that Iraq was responsible for Sept. 11 -- which I never said -- and that removing Saddam Hussein before he could share chemical, biological or nuclear weapons with terrorists had become an urgent matter, which I did say. He continues to assert falsely that the president's decision to remove Hussein was encouraged by lies about Iraq's responsibility for the Sept. 11 attacks.
Understandably anxious to counter the myth that we went into Iraq on the basis of his agency's faulty intelligence, Tenet seeks to substitute another myth: that the decision to remove Saddam Hussein resulted from the nefarious influence of the vice president and a cabal of neoconservative intellectuals. To advance that idea, a theme of his book, he has attributed to me, and to others, statements that were never made.
Careful readers will see at once that what Tenet calls "corroboration" is nothing of the sort. But Tenet is not a careful reader -- a serious deficiency in a CIA director and a catastrophe for an intelligence organization. Indeed, sloppy analysis and imprecision with evidence got Tenet and the rest of us stuck in a credibility gap that continues to damage our foreign policy. (Washington Post)
Dear God. The effrontery of the man. Only the Prince of Darkness would have the sheer cheek to engage in doublespeak and historical editing of this nature.
I'm sure on his days off Mr. Perle practices his martyrdom in front of the mirror. Can someone tell me why this man hasn't been arrested yet? Or can someone, anyone, tell me what drugs the Washington Post is on, to allow this?
I'm off to find some Tums. I wish I had some in-depth analysis of this, but it's so huge, so glaring, that I just can't find words.