Chutzpah! Richard Perle's got plenty of it by Justin Raimondo
"Utter nerve" – that's how the dictionary defines chutzpah, and that just about sums up, in a single, wonderfully descriptive Yiddish word, Richard Perle's recent suggestion that "heads should roll" in the U.S. intelligence community. We didn't find the "weapons of mass destruction" Perle and his neocon buddies insisted were there in the run-up to the Iraq war, and whose fault is that? CIA Director George Tenet's, says the neoconservative guru and former chairman of the Defense Policy Board:
"George Tenet has been at the CIA long enough to assume responsibility for its performance. There's a record of failure and it should be addressed in some serious way."
Perle, you remember, is the one who assured us that Iraq was crawling with WMD:
"We will find Saddam's well-hidden chemical and biological weapons programs, but only when people who know come forward and tell us where to look. While Saddam was in power, even a hint about his concealment and deception was a death sentence, often by unimaginable torture against whole families. Saddam had four years to hide things. We have had a few weeks to find them. Patience – and some help from free Iraqis – will be rewarded."
But Perle needn't take responsibility: only Tenet, whose Agency debunked cherry-picked "intelligence" that made the case for war, is so burdened.
It was Tenet who fought an unsuccessful battle to keep claims of an Iraqi nuclear program not far from success out of the President's 2003 State of the Union. It was Tenet whose Agency was sidelined by the Office of Special Plans (OSP), a division of the Defense Department set up especially to propagandize for war and "stovepipe" cherry-picked (and unverified) intelligence directly to the White House via the office of the Vice President. When Perle and his cohorts were concocting tall tales of Al Qaeda's "links" to the Iraqi government, and Saddam's mythical quest for Niger "yellowcake," CIA analysts were outspokenly (if anonymously) debunking these fanciful effusions. Even as the CIA was denying it, Perle was busy spreading the fable about an alleged meeting of Mohammed Atta and an Iraqi intelligence agent in Prague that turned out never to have happened. While Perle was confidently concurring with fellow Defense Policy Board member Ken Adelman's prediction that the conquest and occupation of Iraq would be a "cakewalk," a State Department study (shelved by the neocons) accurately foretold the mess we find ourselves in today.
[Full Story: antiwar.com ] |
