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Richard Perle & the Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group:
See No WMD, Hear No WMD
Richard Perle finally finds Iraqi
WMD! (credit: Al-Jazeera.info)
The New York Times ran an expose yesterday, How Pair’s Finding on Terror Led to Clash on Shaping Intelligence, about the Defense Department’s Counter Terrorism Evaluation Group, founded by Douglas Feith (number 2 at the Pentagon under Don Rumsfeld). The Group was created because Richard Perle, Don Rumsfeld and Douglas Feith had no faith in the accuracy or reliability of CIA intelligence analysis regarding Al Qaeda.
I always find the Bushite neocons’ ‘divorce from reality’ to be quite amusing and horrifying at the same time. Perle, for one, provides ample mirth. The article quotes his nasty take on the CIA:
But the effort [to create the Counter Terrorism Group] immediately aroused suspicions at the C.I.A. and the D.I.A. Mr. Feith and his two analysts were closely linked to Richard N. Perle, then chairman of a Pentagon advisory group and a leading neoconservative who had long advocated toppling Mr. Hussein and was a vocal critic of the C.I.A.“I think the people working on the Persian Gulf at the C.I.A. are pathetic,” Mr. Perle said in an interview. “They have just made too many mistakes. They have a record over 30 years of being wrong.” He added that the agency “became wedded to a theory,” that did not leave room for the possibility that Iraq was working with Al Qaeda, and that “they went to battle stations every time someone pointed to contrary evidence.”
Let’s forget about the CIA’s record over the past 30 years and focus on the period between 9/11 and the Iraq War. Those at the CIA who found no connection between Al Qaeda and Hussein and who found no credible evidence of WMD in Iraq–were they wrong or right? They were right. So Perle created the Counter Terrorism Group in order to propound theories about Iraq which have been proved bogus both by opposing US intelligence and by reality on the ground (where’s the WMD?). How can he justify this? I see only wrong intelligence and wrong analysis coming from Feith’s stealth snoops. I’d rate them even more pathetic than the CIA. This guy Perle’s supposed to be a genius but he sounds more like an idiot to me.
