Perle blew up, calling Hersh, a Pulitzer Prize winner, “the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist, frankly.” He told Blitzer, “I don’t believe that a company would gain from a war … . The suggestion that my views are somehow related for the potential for investments in homeland defense is complete nonsense.”39 It was a strange claim. If a venture capital firm that was set up to invest in security and defense companies managed not to gain from a war, it would surely be failing its investors.
