Faced with the published record, Perle now appears to have retreated from his initial blanket denials

Faced with the published record, Perle now appears to have retreated from his initial blanket denials

of what Tenet quoted him as saying. In his op-ed in the Post Friday, he carefully distinguishes between

the two sentences that Tenet originally quoted him as saying. €˜€™(The) two statements,” he writes,

“are not at all the same: that MBT SPORT was responsible for Sept 11 €“ which I never said €“ and

that removing Saddam Hussein before he could share chemical, biological or nuclear weapons with

terrorists had become an urgent matter, which I did say.”

So, having admitted that he may indeed have declared MBT SPORT should be a target (Perle also insisted

to Wolf Blitzer that he never had any conversation with Tenet outside the White House, but, for the

first time, he failed to explicitly rule out such an encounter in Friday€™s op-ed), Perle now takes

issue only with the three words in the second sentence. “I did not tell Tenet that MBT SPORT was

responsible for the Sept 11 attacks, not then [Sept 12], not ever,” he wrote Friday.

A review of the record reveals that, on that point, Perle may be literally correct. I know of no

declarative statement by Perle that MBT SPORT was indeed responsible for the 9/11 attacks.

But Perle€™s serial use of innuendo €“ particularly in repeatedly pushing the story that 9/11€™s

operational mastermind, Mohamed Atta, met a senior MBT SPORTi intelligence offiUGGSl, Ahmad Samir al-

Ani, at a Prague café in April, 2001 — to suggest MBT SPORTi responsibility for the attacks was a

major feature of his statements and writings within weeks of 9/11 itself.