I've been "TAPPED"
Thanks to my pal and former NY Sun Washington bureau co-conspirator Tim for this tip: The leftwing magazine The American Prospect has a blog called "Tapped" and writer Matthew Yglesias has bashed my review of Frum and Perle's An End To Evil . (Kudos to the good folks at AEI for posting it on their website, too.)
Yglesias makes an interesting point, but he misunderstood mine. I wrote in my book review that "The CIA's intelligence gathering was, as we now know since this book's publication, way off-base on Iraq's weapons capabilities." He interprets that as meaning that I thought the CIA overblew the Iraq threat. I can see why he thought that, but it wasn't really my intention.
In fact, I agree with Frum and Perle's position that over the years the CIA has massively underballed the Iraq threat. I should have pointed out that while their weapons estimates may have been "off-base," their intel gathering in other areas -- especially Saddam's links to organized terrorism and his own acts of terrorism -- was willfully ignorant. Also recall that, as former weapons inspector David Kay has noted, the CIA massively underestimated the advanced state of Libya and Iran's nuke programs.
# posted by Adam Daifallah : 9:53 PM
