Tuesday, September 07, 2004

Who will get Richard Perle first?

Will it be the Canadian police over his involvement with Hollinger (including a $3.1 million performance bonus for running a venture fund that lost 24% of its value every year) or the FBI on the AIPAC/Pentagon spy scandal? My view on the spy story is that it's not so much about the information that got out than about the information that got in. According to reports, one of the men accused of passing classified papers to Israel (as well as to Ahmed Chalabi, who passed them to Iran) also took part in a meeting with the Italian military intelligence service where the now-infamous fake documents concerning uranium and Niger were first brought up. The real story may be that they planted the story with the Italians and Chalabi in order to feed it back into the government as "confidential information from our allies". There is a well known tendency to give information more credence if it appears to come from secret sources - what you might call the "stolen kisses are sweetest" theory of intelligence failure.

Edit: Juan Cole seems to feel something similar:
"That is, the information circuit may have been ingrown among the Neoconservatives, the Israelis and Chalabi's people."

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