Where was Perle?

Bill Kristol is raising a stink about Richard Perle's whereabouts on September 11, 2001 (does he need an alibi?) and how he could not have possibly spoken to Tenet personally in the White House as the latter claims.

Loathe as I am to wander into the discussions of three douchebags the path of deceit and lies from these three is sizeable, but still Tenet strikes me as the least deceitful of the bunch (and if that's not condemning with faint praise I do not know what is).

Kristol claims Perle was in Europe until September 15, 2001. This doesn't seem difficult to prove.

But Perle was pretty active in this country for someone that wasn't here.

On the evening of September 11, 2001, he was quoted in the Washington Post:

"This could not have been done without help of one or more governments," Perle told The Washington Post on Sep. 11. "Someone taught these suicide bombers how to fly large airplanes. I don't think that can be done without the assistance of large governments."

On September 16, 2001 he was definitely back in the United States and telling CNN the same thing he is claimed to have been telling Tenet on September 12:

PERLE: Even if we cannot prove to the standards that we enjoy in our own civil society that they were involved. We do know, for example, that Saddam Hussein has ties to Osama bin Laden. That can be documented.

So, on the theory, which seems to be a valid one, that if you support terrorists and they then commit atrocities against Americans, you are responsible.

Unless we hold those countries responsible, we will be chasing terrorists without significant effect...There's something similar going on in Iraq, where there's an opposition to Saddam Hussein. They ought to have our support.

We should be aligning ourselves with the opponents of terrorism where we can find them and we should be taking this war to the heart of the enemy, which is the infrastructure that supports them. Without that infrastructure, there may be a car bomb, there may be a hijacking, but we won't see anything on the scale of the tragedy we've seen now.

Well five and a half years later on the subject of Iraq after we've deposed of Saddam that last part is a telling quote about how much we should ever listen to Richard Perle. 180 degrees removed from accuracy.

Anyway this sounds like a good research project.