Perle sold nukes to terrorists, is sorry.

* our good friend david rose (who wrote the Sbel/VF piece) has another upcoming piece in VF about the neocons, and he provides a glimpse. go read but here's his summary:

"As Iraq slips further into chaos, the war's neoconservative boosters have turned sharply on the Bush administration, charging that their grand designs have been undermined by White House incompetence. In a series of exclusive interviews, Richard Perle, Kenneth Adelman, David Frum, and others play the blame game with shocking frankness. Target No. 1: the president himself."

it's all very funny, in a mistakes and war are funny kinda way.

This is a classic:

"David Frum: "I always believed as a speechwriter that if you could persuade the president to commit himself to certain words, he would feel himself committed to the ideas that underlay those words. And the big shock to me has been that although the president said the words, he just did not absorb the ideas. And that is the root of, maybe, everything.""

Adelman blames Rumsfeld too:

" I'm very, very fond of him, but I'm crushed by his performance. Did he change, or were we wrong in the past? Or is it that he was never really challenged before? I don't know. He certainly fooled me.""

(i was amazed that Joshua Muravchik called Rummy a 'neocon hero' in FP.)

I was surprised that Perle even met with Rose, after the Sibel article... as an aside, with Perle's recent nuclear-bomb-smuggling concerns, miguel penned this:

RICHARD PERLE: President Bush, you are not taking the threat of terrorists using a nuke on U.S. soil seriously. Something must be done to detect these materials before they end up in New York harbor.

BUSH: Now, now, now Dick. You know very well it is the assessment of U.S. intelligence agencies that nonstate actors such as al Qaeda don't have the capability to develop a real nuclear weapon. That fear is just something that Rumsfeld and Cheney throw out there in order to scare the American people into voting Republican.

RICHARD PERLE: Mr. President, the CIA and DIA are wrong. I have slam dunk evidence that Bin Laden has gotten his hands on major components to make a nuclear weapon.

BUSH: Slam dunk? Really, Dick...you're pulling my leg. Where did you get this information?

RICHARD PERLE: Uh, well, you see Mr. President...I'm sure the terrorists have this material because...uhm...don't know how to tell you this....but I sold it to them.

BUSH (Eyes opening in shock): Good God! This is a crisis.

[calls chief of staff on hotline]: Josh, implement the Terrorist Action Plan. Have DOJ issue 3 more gag orders on Sibel Edmonds. Wiretap all whistleblower groups. Suspend habeus corpus. Retroactively classify all newspaper articles having anything to do with terrorist and nukes. I pray we're not too late.