I got so into what I was saying about the ultimate "blame" for the war when I was writing the post about Tenet, I forget to mention the most striking thing from the whole interview! Tenet said that on September 12th, 2001 on his way to brief President Bush about al Qaeda’s involvement in the Twin Trade Tower attack, he ran into Richard Perle in the White House. Perle said something like "Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday." If you don’t know who Richard Perle is – he’s the mother of all neoconservatives. He’s still at it [Perle], going from place to place defending the neoconservative foreign policy and narrating a PBS Special. The neocons are already countering Tenet’s claim in the Weekly Standard. William Kristol says that Perle was in France that day, unable to get a flight to the States and "… Perle in any case categorically denies to THE WEEKLY STANDARD ever having said any such thing to Tenet, while coming out of the White House or anywhere else."
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I don’t know how you felt about watching the so-called big story on “60 minutes” last night but I was extremely disappointed. Tenet seemed all puffy with bravado and no steam, just gas. He should be ashamed of himself for helping the Bush Administration take us to war on lies. I agree with former CIA agents who said that Tenet should return his Freedom medal and give the $ from his book sales to victims of this war who are either survivors of the dead soldiers or those soldiers who will never be the same again. I don’t dare think of the thousands of Iraqi civilians that are dead because of this war.
I felt that way too. It’s so disillusioning to be seeing how easily this thing might have been stopped if there had been a groundswell of opposition at the top. It would have had to have been a screaming roar though. When people like Paul Oniell, Richard Clarke, Joe Wilson finally came forward, they got trashed into oblivion. I got into a discussion with my high school classmates back then on an email list about this. When I opposed the war, I got “slam dunked.” Last summer, I went to a class reunion, and was still greeted with “reserve.” The climate back then was toxic.