In Defense of George Tenet- by Justin Raimondo

Excerpt: The neocons hate Tenet and the organization he headed and still defends – all the more so, now, for anecdotes like this, in which he says he encountered Richard Perle, the day after 9/11, coming out of the White House:

"He said to me, 'Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday, they bear responsibility.' It's September the 12th. I've got the manifest with me that tell me al-Qaeda did this. Nothing in my head that says there is any Iraqi involvement in this in any way shape or form and I remember thinking to myself, as I'm about to go brief the president, 'What the hell is he talking about?'"

I note that in the CBS transcript of the 60 Minutes interview with Tenet there is now a link to Perle's denial, published in the Weekly Standard, in which the neocon "Prince of Darkness" says he was in France at the time and couldn't get back because all aircraft were grounded. Tenet says he may have gotten the timing wrong, but stands by his account of their encounter. One wonders if CBS will also include a link to this clip from CNN, taped five days after 9/11, at the end of which Perle opines that, even if we can't prove it according to the "standards of our civil society that we enjoy," the Iraqis deserve some rough justice because "we do know that Saddam Hussein has ties to Osama bin Laden."

In Defense of George Tenet- by Justin Raimondo