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PNAC member of the week: Richard Perle |
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1-24-04 |
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Richard Perle (U.S.) |
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Richard Perle (ISRAEL) |
| Assistant Sec. of Defense under
Reagan |
"He
was investigated in 1980s for possible ties to the Israeli espionage case
involving Jonathan Jay Pollard." |
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Co-founder, Project for the New American
Century |
Former Director of Jerusalem Post |
| Research Fellow American
Enterprise Institute |
An FBI summary of a
1970 wiretap recorded Perle discussing classified information with someone
at the Israeli embassy. He came under fire in 1983 when newspapers
reported he received substantial payments to represent the interests of an
Israeli weapons company. |
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Board of Advisors, Foundation For Defense
Of Democracy |
| Resigned as chair of the
Pentagon's Defense Policy Board on 3/27/03 due to conflict of interest
scandal, see New
Yorker, 3/27/03. |
1996 Co-authored "A New
Strategy For Defending the Realm" Sponsored by the Institute for
Advanced Studies written for Likud Prime Minister of Israel Benjamin
Netanyahu |
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Member Defense Policy Board to present [01.21.0.4] |
Board of Advisers of The Jewish
Institute For National Security Affairs to present [01.21.04] |
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| After
graduating college and a short stint in working for the
fiercely anti-Communist Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson he went
to work for a private military-consulting firm. The following year
he was appointed Assistant Secretary of Defense in the presidential
administration of Ronald Reagan. During the presidential campaign of
George W. Bush, Perle served as a foreign policy advisor. |
| A veteran
Washington insider, Perle has on occasion been accused of being an Israeli
agent of influence. It has been reported that, while he was working for
Jackson, "An FBI summary of a 1970 wiretap recorded Perle discussing
classified information with someone at the Israeli embassy," writes
Paul Findley (They Dare To Speak Out, Chicago, Ill, Lawrence Hill Books
1989)."He came under fire in 1983 when newspapers reported he
received substantial payments to represent the interests of an Israeli
weapons company. Perle denied conflict of interest, insisting that,
although he received payment for these services after he had assumed his
position in the Defense Department, he was between government jobs when he
worked for the Israeli firm." (1) |
| Like many of
Bush's top whitehouse and pentagon officials, he's a war profiteer who
consulted for the very companies that profited from the illegal invasion
of Iraq and was one of the most ardent supporters of the
invasion. Rummy consulted for Bechtel,
Cheney, of course, had Halliburton. The Carlyle Group had Bush Sr. on
their board and Perle worked for Trireme, a venture capital firm and
defense contractor similar to The Carlyle Group. As pentagon
adviser, Richard N. Perle coauthored an opinion piece this summer praising
a Pentagon plan to lease tanker aircraft -- which had the potential to
steer billions of dollars to Boeing Co. -- 16 months after Boeing
committed to invest $20 million with Trireme. |
| Perle also
serves on the board of directors of Hollinger International Inc., the
media company whose chief executive, Conrad Black, resigned last month
after disclosures that he and other executives collected millions of
dollars payments the company's audit committee determined were
unauthorized. Hollinger disclosed last month that it has invested $2.5
million in Trireme Associates. A special committee of Hollinger's board is
examining that investment and others involving company insiders, a source
close to Hollinger said. (2) |
Trireme also created International
Advisors Inc., a lobbying firm whose main client is Turkey.
Henry Kissinger is a Trireme adviser, and Perle is a managing partner. (3)
Kissinger, who was forced to resign as head of the independent
commission to investigate the 9/11 attacks, has been using his influence
to try to keep the Saudis calm during the buildup to war. New Yorker
investigative journalist, Sy Hersh, criticized Perle's relationship with
Trireme. The award winning journalist wrote in the March 17th issue of
the New Yorker: "There is no question that Perle believes that
removing Saddam from power is the right thing to do. At the same time,
he has set up a company that may gain from a war." (4)
In response, Perle equated columnist Sy Hersh with Osama bin Laden and
Khalid Shaikh Mohammed. "Sy Hersh is the closest thing American
journalism has to a terrorist," Perle told Wolf Blitzer. (5)
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| Like many of
Bush's top whitehouse and pentagon officials Perle is involved with the
Iran-Contra felons who lied to congress, and betrayed the country with
impunity. |
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John Poindexter, Elliott Abrams, Otto Reich,
Richard Armitage, John Negroponte, and Mitch Daniels are all Iran-Contra
alumni who have been appointed to high level government jobs by Bush Jr.
Where does Perle fit in? Meet Adnan Khashoggi. During the Reagan
Administration, Khashoggi was one of the middlemen between Oliver North,
in the White House, and the mullahs in Iran in what became known as the
Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi is still brokering. In January of
this year, he arranged a private lunch, in France, to bring together
Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a Saudi industrialist whose family fortune
includes extensive holdings in construction, electronics, and
engineering companies throughout the Middle East, and Richard N. Perle,
the chairman of the Defense Policy Board.
As stated before, Perle is a managing
partner in the venture-capital company called Trireme Partners L.P.
Trireme’s main business, according to a two-page letter that one of
its representatives sent to Khashoggi last November, is to invest in
companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that are of value
to homeland security and defense. (6)
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| Four members
of the Defense Policy Board told me that the board, which met most
recently on February 27th and 28th, had not been informed of Perle’s
involvement in Trireme. One board member, upon being told of Trireme and
Perle’s meeting with Khashoggi, exclaimed, “Oh, get out of here.
He’s the chairman! If you had a story about me setting up a company for
homeland security, and I’ve put people on the board with whom I’m
doing that business, I’d be had” (7) |
| The
wide-ranging Perle even finds himself involved in Total
Information Awareness technology. He was listed as a speaker at a
March 13 Washington press briefing on 'data mining,' the use of computer
technology to sift out patterns from electronic communications. A fellow
Pentagon official, Admiral John
M. Poindexter an Iran-Contra felon, spurred a political firestorm with
his TIA plans. Congress forbade such technology to be used against
Americans. |
| Perle's
tentacles reached into the press, too, which he manipulated through
careful leaks of sensitive information. He was said to frequently use
Evans and Novak's column to push his agenda and to punish his foes. Later,
Perle would add George Will and the Wall Street Journal's Robert Bartley
to his list of friends in the media. Could Perle have been the "high
ranking official" who leaked the identity of CIA agent Valerie Plame
to Novak in retaliation for her husband's public disproval of Bush's lies
leading us to invade Iraq? (8) |
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| "Basically,
Perle is serving as the ventriloquist's dummy and is making the
administration's case publicly but in a deniable fashion," says John
Pike, a defense policy expert and an old Perle foe. "Donald Rumsfeld
adamantly refuses to talk about blowing up Iraq. Richard Perle talks about
very little else." |
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