A pearl. Lapidary. As Churchill might have said, hypocrisy wrapped in mendacity, bundled up in ridiculousness. A true gem. Richard Perle tells the Times that the CIA did indeed sell the president a bill of goods. âThe president is a consumer of intelligence, not a producer of it,” Perle told the Times. “I have long thought our intelligence in the gulf has been woefully inadequate.”
Right. Perle has long been a staunch critic of the CIA. His argument was that they understated the scope of Saddamâs WMD programs, naively discounted his ties to terrorist organizations and had an overly pessimistic vision of post-war Iraq.
In other words, if the CIA is all wet, Perle is all wet squared. Or probably even cubed.
The skeptical voices in the Intelligence Community — the ones who are now vindicated in spades — were the objects of his greatest derision. And his solution was to give even more credence to the unreliable defector testimony which played such a key role in our bamboozlement.
