On "60 Minutes" last night, George Tenet fingered Richard Perle as the agonist behind the Iraq War. Tenet said he ran into the prince of darkness on Sept. 12, 2001, at the White House and Perle was already pushing for war with Saddam. On Charlie Rose this afternoon, Tenet’s former chief of staff, John O. Brennan, said that the "disastrous" war plans were formed by "Perle, Feith, Wolfowitz" in the belief that it would be a "cakewalk." He said: "At the end of the day the decision rested with the policy makers." Tyler Drumheller, who served the CIA in Europe, (and authored On the Brink), then echoed Tenet and Brennan, saying that Perle and Feith "made the [determination] long before they came into office" that the U.S. should invade Iraq.
None of this is news. What is news is that prominent former gov’t officials are mainstreaming the critique of the neocons as the authors of the present disaster. The next question is, Why did they do it?
Apparently, Perle was out of the country on the day that Tenet said he ran into him at the White House: Sept. 12, 2001. Ouch!
I am outraged by Tenet. Here was a guy whose job description was to give the President objective intelligence. The job was created to prevent the President from getting biased information. Instead Tenet played a key role in misleading the nation into war, accepted a Medal of Freedom, and now writes that he knew all along the basis for the war was phoney! Why didn't he speak out at the time and try to stop the disaster that followed? The guy has blood on his hands.
true, though i didn't even think about that!
i cant wait for the whole Bush house of cards to fall down now, for charge and countercharge to begin. For Bush to be found praying to paintings in the back corridor.
I also wish people would make more of a strange comment Perle made a couple years ago to a Congressional committee: that we were "sucked in" (as I remember it anyway) to the war by "double agents."