Native Americans had an expression for it.
Forked tongue.
Now we call them liars, backstabbers, dissimulators. People who say one thing and do another. Cheats, double-dealers, hypocrites. Dirty tricks and skullduggery.
For as Mark Twain once quiped, “A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is just putting on its shoes.”
“I think, of course, heads should roll,” yawped the Prince of Dissimulation, Richard Perle. “When you discover that you have an organization that doesn’t get it right time after time, you change the organization, including the people.”
Richard is talking about the CIA, of course, and the bad intelligence on those Iraqi WMD. It’s all George Tenet’s fault.
“The CIA has an almost perfect record of getting it wrong in relation to the (Persian) Gulf going back to the Shah of Iran,” said Perle. “I’d start with the head head.”
Somebody dust off the guillotine. Richard is in the mood for blood. Cast the head head on a tumbrel and drive him through the streets of Washington to the guillotine and off with his head!
Richard Perle is our Charles-Louis Sanson, the official executioner of the French Revolution. Execution, lies, and deceitfulness are easy for the Prince of Darkness.
But wait a minute. Something’s wrong here.
As I recall the CIA was dissing Perle and Cheney and the Neocon Gang that Can’t Shoot Straight for their spurious intelligence, most of it coming from Feith’s Operation of Special Plans.
Cheney and Scooter paid numerous visits to the CIA and put the thumbscrews to them. “They were the browbeaters,” a former defense intelligence told the Washington Post. “In interagency meetings, Wolfowitz treated the analysts’ work with contempt.”
Wolfie treated reality with contempt because it didn’t jive with his game plan, that is the US and Israeli strategy to rule supreme in the Middle East, steal all the oil, and dictate to the Arabs.
Instead of hard evidence, Perle and gang relied on the preposterous fantasies of so-called Iraqi dissidents and the nutcake Laurie Mylroie, adjunct scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, the preeminent hatchery of ding-a-ling neocon theory.
“In what amounts to the discovery of a unified field theory of terrorism, Mylroie believes that Saddam was not only behind the ’93 Trade Center attack, but also every anti-American terrorist incident of the past decade, from the bombings of U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania to the leveling of the federal building in Oklahoma City to September 11 itself. She is, in short, a crackpot,” writes Peter Bergen.
In the Bush White House and Pentagon, crackpots run roughshod.
Oh, and Saddam was behind the anthrax letters, too. Even though the anthrax mailed to two leading Senate Democrats, in October 2001, is biologically identical to bacteria secretly manufactured at the Fort Detrick, Maryland, warfare facility.
So mesmerizing are neocon lies that a large number of Americans believe Saddam is Osama and this amalgamative personality is responsible for the horrors of 9/11.
Remember Perle’s claim one of Saddam’s henchmen, Ahmed Khalil Ibrahim Samir al-Ani, met with alleged 9/11 “mastermind” Mohamed Atta in Prague? Neocon helpmate and right-wing crank William Safire reported this stinker. For some reason the New York Times allowed Perle the Fabulist to publish an op-ed piece claiming this screwy conspiracy theory as fact.
Of course, soon thereafter, the Old Gray Lady looked completely foolish and printed a reversal. It’s not the first time the Times has been flimflamed by reactionary nutbars.
David Ignatius of the Washington Post wrote that the evidence for the meeting was slim to none. Even the Czechs backed away from Perle’s fairy tale.
Safire went into bongo mode and screamed “gullible commentators” were duped by perfidious Europeans, probably all of them cowardly French pantywaists.
Perle says the CIA gave Dubya bogus intelligence, when in fact the CIA was telling the Bushites their OSP intelligence linking Saddam and al-Qaeda was gibberish.
“There isn’t a factual basis for such assertions,” declared a CIA official after Powell trotted out his dog-and-pony show at the United Nations. During his performance, Powell waved around a vial of anthrax for effect. As it turns out, that anthrax was counterfeit — the same way Bush’s whole case against Saddam is counterfeit, a huge and cynical sham contrived by Perle and the Straussian mob.
But it was David Kay, CIA weapons inspector, who really blew Dub’s boat out of the water. “I don’t think [Saddam’s WMD] existed… I don’t think there was a large-scale production program in the ’90s,” he told Reuters January 24.
Throw Kay in the tumbrel with the head head, off with all their heads!
Instead, it should be Perle and the neocons confronting the guillotine of public censure for their premeditated lies and calculated dishonesty resulting in the murder of more than 10,000 innocent Iraqi civilians.
Last July Richard the Maligner admitted he has no idea where Saddam stashed his WMD, although since the neocons have said they are in Syria, an outrageous claim minus evidence.
“We don’t know where to look for them and we never did know where to look for them,” Perle acquiesced.
Recall Donnie “Bunker Buster” Rumsfeld declaring he knew where Saddam’s WMD were and he would grab them. Rumsfeld, of course, knew nothing — it was all a pack of monstrous and murderous lies.
According to Perle, it may take 200 years or more to find Saddam’s illusive WMD, so we best keep the indefatigable Straussian neocons on the case.
Remember: Bush said the war on terror will last generations, eight or more generations if we are to believe the Prince of Darkness.
Naturally, after Iraq’s oil is gone, there will be no need to look for WMD, just as there is no reason to look for WMD in the Sahara Desert. WMD are only a threat in countries chock-full of natural resources. Or in countries selling missile technology to oil-rich countries that are thorns in Israel’s side, viz. North Korea.
In the meantime, however, while there’s still a few billion barrels of oil under the ground in Iraq, the WMD nobody can find remain a threat. I mean, you never know, a bouquet of nukes may turn up (in five minutes or 199 years) concealed beneath a palm grove or squirrled away in Syria.
“It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world’s supply of oil will all be put at hazard,” said Perle and the neocon gaggle in a rare moment of honesty on January 26, 1998, in a letter to Clinton, well before Dubya was enthroned.
Clinton believed the neocons nutcakes, so he ignored them. Clinton was hardly averse to telling lies, but compared to the neocons he’s a rank amateur.
Perle may attempt to slough off his numerous lies on the CIA. But eventually it will turn around and bite him and his boss squarely in the ass.
Recall the CIA’s expertise in fixing elections and instigating coups. Or at least making things uncomfortable for people they don’t like.
But this may not be necessary due to neocon flubbing and the pathological inability to not tell big whopper lies. It now appears the media considers them fair game as Bush meanders toward the election.
However, the more desperate the neocons become, the more dangerous and wigged out they are.
No way are they going down in November, not after four years of hard work on the Greater Israel and Big Oil scheme, a plan more than a decade in the making.
Look forward to an October surprise.
KURT NIMMO is a photographer and multimedia developer in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Visit his excellent no holds barred blog at www.kurtnimmo.com/blogger.html . Nimmo is a contributor to Cockburn and St. Clair’s, The Politics of Anti-Semitism. A collection of his essays for CounterPunch, Another Day in the Empire, is now available from Dandelion Books.
He can be reached at: nimmo@zianet.com