written by group of former CIA and other intelligence officials, urges the former CIA Director “to dedicate a significant portion of his royalties to soldiers and families of those killed or wounded in Iraq.” They write:

Mr. Tenet, you cannot undo what has been done. It is doubly sad that you seem still to lack an adequate appreciation of the enormous amount of death and carnage you have facilitated. If reflection on these matters serves to prick your conscience we encourage you to donate at least half of the royalties from your book sales to the veterans and their families, who have paid and are paying the price for your failure to speak up when you could have made a difference. That would be the decent and honorable thing to do.

In his new book, George Tenet claims that, one day after 9/11, Richard Perle turned to him and said: “Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday. They bear responsibility.” The Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol leaps to Perle’s defense and challenges Tenet’s account:

Here’s the problem: Richard Perle was in France on that day, unable to fly back after September 11. In fact Perle did not return to the United State [sic] until September 15. Did Tenet perhaps merely get the date of this encounter wrong? Well, the quote Tenet ascribes to Perle hinges on the encounter taking place September 12: “Iraq has to pay a price for what happened yesterday.” And Perle in any case categorically denies to The Weekly Standard ever having said any such thing to Tenet, while coming out of the White House or anywhere else.

Defined by most as “likely to occur at any moment; impending.” Condoleezza Rice’s definition: An “imminent threat” is not “if somebody is going to strike tomorrow,” but rather, “it’s whether you believe you’re in a stronger position today to deal with the threat, or whether you’re going to be in a stronger position tomorrow.” FireDogLake and Raw Story have more.

UPDATE: She repeated the line on CNN:

RICE: The question with imminence is, are you in a situation whether you’re better to act now, or are you going to be in a worse situation later? That’s the question that you have to ask in policy.

White House Press Secretary Tony Snow “told fellow alumni at Davidson College that he feels great and plans to return to work Monday.” He has been off work following a March 27 announcement that the colon cancer he was treated for in 2005 had returned and spread to his liver. Snow, who will soon begin chemotherapy, “said the cancer has brought him closer to religion and his family.”

In his new book, former CIA Director George Tenet alleges that there was “never a serious debate that I know of within the administration about the imminence of the Iraq threat,” suggesting the administration had made up its mind to go to war from an early stage.

On CNN’s Late Edition, Condoleezza Rice responded, “We all thought that the intelligence case was strong,” adding that even “the U.N weapons inspectors [thought] Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.” She concluded, “So there’s no blame here of anyone.” Watch it:

Rice would like the public to believe that no one is to blame because everyone was misled by the intelligence. In fact, U.N. weapons inspectors declared weeks before the invasion that Hussein did not possess WMD. The inspectors publicly lambasted consistently false and misleading U.S. intelligence leading up to the war:

[On March 7, 2003], the head of the IAEA, Mohamed El-Baradei, reported that there was no evidence that Saddam Hussein had any nuclear weapons or was in the process of acquiring them. Mr Blix said: “By then, Mohamed ElBaradei revealed that Niger was not authentic.” British intelligence falsely claimed Iraq had been trying to acquire uranium from Niger. [4/28/05]

So frustrated have the inspectors become that one source has referred to the U.S. intelligence they’ve been getting as “garbage after garbage after garbage.” … The inspectors find themselves caught between the Iraqis, who are masters at the weapons-hiding shell game, and the United States, whose intelligence they’ve found to be circumstantial, outdated or just plain wrong. [2/20/03]

Chief United Nations weapons inspector Hans Blix told the U.N. Security Council that his inspection teams had not found any “smoking guns” after visiting some 125 Iraqi sites. [1/9/03]

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