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Recent Stories
March 26, 2003
Bruce Jackson
A Battlefield from Hell
Pablo
Mukherjee
Watch Their Lips
David Krieger
Shock But Not Awe
Linda
Heard
Winning Hearts and Minds Bush--------Style
Imad Jadaa
The Beautiful Face of America
Adam
Engel
Buckets of Blood
Patrick Cockburn
Kurds Unimpressed
David
Lindorff
POWs, Torture and Hypocrisy
Robert Fisk
The Coup That Didn't Happen
April
Hurley, MD
A Doctor's Outrage in Baghdad
Gloria Bergen
Chretien's Shame
Reema
Abu Hamdieh
The Smell of Death Surrounds Me
March 25, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Life During Wartime
Gary
Leupp
What Democracy Looks Like: the Streets
of Cairo
Bill and Kathleen
Christison
An Interview with Hanan Ashrawi
Bruce
Jackson
Why Protest? Why Write?
Uri Avnery
Bitter Rice: Thoughts and Warnings on
the War
Jason
Leopold
Blood Indicator: Casualties and the Stock
Market
Ralph Nader
A Pre--------emptive War on a Defenseless Country
March 24, 2003
Alexander Cockburn
Ominous Signs
David
Lindorff
Peacekeepers at Ground Zero
Diane Christian
Blood Sacrifice
Kathy
Kelly
The Morning After Shock and Awe
John Stanton
US Bombs Iran
Wayne
Madsen
How to Live with a Rogue Superpower
Anthony Gancarski
Iraq and the Death of the West
David
Vest
Earth vs. Bush
Ahmad Faruqui
The Liberation of Iraq in Perspective
Robert
Fisk
We Bomb, They Suffer
March 22 / 23, 2003
Edward Said
The Other America
Saul Landau
The Threats of Empire
Kathleen and Bill Christison
On the Road in the West Bank
Joanne Mariner
Suing Seymour Hersh
Ann Harrison
The Battle of San Francisco
Robert Fisk
A Cauldron of Fire
Hani Shukrallah
The Gates of Hell
Chris Floyd
Memory Lane
Kathy Kelly
Imagine Chicago Under This Kind of Attack
Ramzi Kysia
Bombing Away a Chance for Joy
Linda Heard
Baghdad Burns While Bush Does Lunch
Bradley Burston
Could the US be at War for Years?
Salvador Peralta
Mass Murder as Liberation?
Tom Gorman
Now That's a Coalition!
Jorge Mariscal
Johnny Mack, When Are You Coming Back?
Cindy Milstein
The Grassroots Go Global
Josh Frank
Blocking Portland's Bridges
Elaine Cassel
The Case of Elizabeth Smart: Kidnapping and Insanity
Gordon Solberg
Drowning in Niceness: the Lessons of Elizabeth Smart
Tom Crumpacker
Getting to Know the Real Havana
Poets' Basement
Dobie, Guthrie, Alam, Wechsler
March 21, 2003
Ben Tripp
Blood for Oil:
the Exchange Rate
Cathy Breens
Report from Baghdad: Mothers, Kids and Crash Kits
Scott Handleman
Fourth
Generation Protesting: Shutting Down San Francisco
Vanessa Jones
Paint Them
Red
Brian J. Foley
Patriotic Protest
for Professors
Zoltan Grossman
After Saddam, a War on Iraqi Rebels?
Philip S. Golub
Inventing Demons
Richard Lichtman
On the Current Experience of Terror
Milan Rai
Blitz--------Coup
Pepe Escobar
A Cheap Family Farce
Floyd Rudmin
The Nightmare at the Back Door: Nuclear Plant's as Terror Targets
Chris Floyd
See Rome (poem)
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
March 20, 2003
Stephen Banko
I Was a Soldier
Once
Kevin Alexander Gray
How Did We Become
an Outlaw Nation?
Shane Claiborne
Nomadic
Solidarity: Glimpses of Life in Baghdad on the Eve of War
Kathy Kelly
Waiting on the Baghdad Skies to Crack
Anthony Gancarski
Michelle
Makin's "Liberty Shields"
Rahul Mahajan and Robert Jensen
Myths and
Facts About the War on Iraq
Jason Leopold
Cheney's
Lies About Halliburton and Iraq
Ron Jacobs
If War is Business as Usual, There Should be No Business as Usual
Chuck O'Connell
Predictions About the Iraq War
Douglas Herman
US Air Force Veteran on the Coming Air Campaign
Ralph Nader
Come On Democrats,
Stand Up for Peace
William Hughes
War is Theft
Sima Saeedi
Dispatch from
Iran
Hammond Guthrie
John Philip Sousa
Website of the Day
Iraq
Body Count
Hot Stories
Gore Vidal
The Erosion
of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach Bush:
A Draft Resolution
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March
28, 2003
Richard Perle Flies the Coop
The
Enterprising Hawk
By JASON LEOPOLD
Richard
Perle’s resignation Thursday as chairman of the Defense Policy
Board, a Pentagon advisory group, is long overdue. Perle quit the board
because he was hired to help bankrupt telecommunications firm Global
Crossing win approval from the Department of Defense to sell the company
to a Hong Kong billionaire and lawmakers questioned whether Perle’s
dual roles was a conflict-of-interest.
Presumably, Global Crossing hired Perle, who served as assistant secretary
of defense under former President Ronald Reagan, as a lobbyist because
he wields an enormous amount of power around the Pentagon and would
likely get the job done. Perle is a key adviser to Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld and a leading architect in the Bush administration’s
policies toward Iraq.
The Pentagon and the Federal Bureau of Investigation objected to Global
Crossing’s sale to Asian investors last year because the government
uses Global Crossing’s fiber optics networks and a sale would
put the networks under control of the Chinese government. Global Crossing
said it would pay Perle $125,000 and an additional $600,000 if the deal
went through.
Perle denied Thursday that his unpaid advisory role on the policy board
would have interfered with his lobbying on behalf of Global Crossing,
which is mired in shareholder lawsuits as a result of its questionable
accounting practices. But Perle has a long history of using his influential
role as a government adviser to line his pockets.
“Richard Perle…has made a lucrative career out of some bald
conflicts of interest,” wrote Mark Crispin Miller, a New York
University media professor, in the Free Press in 2000. “As an
Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security under Ronald
Reagan, he got in some slight trouble when he wrote a memorandum urging
the department to consider buying equipment from a company that had
paid him a $50,000 consulting fee (as the the New York Times noted back
in 1984). As chairman and CEO of Hollinger Digital (owned by media titan
Conrad Black), Perle maintains his close connections with the military
industries. For example, as a non-executive director of Morgan Crucible,
PLC (UK), which has done business with the Pentagon...”
Moreover, Perle was also a director of Memorex Corp., a defense contractor,
in the 1990s while he was advising then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney
as a member of the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee during the
first Bush administration. At the same time, Perle also was a paid consultant
to a Turkish-hired lobbying firm in Washington and has been both an
adviser to FMC Corp. and a director of an FMC-Turkish joint venture
building military equipment. It should be noted that during Perle’s
tenure in the Reagan administration he was a fierce proponent of aid
to Turkey’s military.
In 1987, the Pentagon’s Office of General Counsel opened an inquiry
into whether Perle’s attempts to write a fictional novel based
on classified intelligence information were a conflict-of-interest.
At the time, Perle was offered a $300,000 advance for the novel, titled
“Memoranda.”
The proposal for the novel described an inside look at the bureaucracy
and promised a plot that seemed a thinly veiled account of Perle's long-running
internecine struggle with former assistant secretary of state Richard
R. Burt. It promised “an array of bureaucratic maneuvers recounted
in the context of actual events altered only enough to make them publishable,
to preserve the fiction in “Memoranda.”
In April of 1987, Sen. Sam Nunn (D-Ga.), the former ranking Democrat
on the Senate Armed Services Committee, wrote an angry letter to Reagan
suggesting that Perle’s book “creates a climate encouraging
disrespect for the protection of classified information” and might
have “a chilling effect on the candor of {officials'} policy analysis
and recommendations.” Nunn also raised questions about the propriety
of the sale of the book during Perle's tenure in office.
In response to the inquiries, Perle resigned his post as assistant secretary
of defense in April 1987 to write the book. The title was later changed
to "Hard Line."
Jason
Leopold is a regular contributor to CounterPunch. He broke
one the Iraq war’s biggest stories for us, the insidious role
of the Project for a New American Century in relentless pushing for
an invasion of Iraq. This story has now been picked up the LA Times,
New York Times, Newsweek and Nightline--though you'll search in vain
for any credit. He can be reached at: jasonleopold@hotmail.com
Yesterday's Features
Pablo
Mukherjee
Watch Their Lips
David Krieger
Shock But Not Awe
Linda
Heard
Winning Hearts and Minds Bush--------Style
Imad Jadaa
The Beautiful Face of America
Adam
Engel
Buckets of Blood
Patrick Cockburn
Kurds Unimpressed
David
Lindorff
POWs, Torture and Hypocrisy
Robert Fisk
The Coup That Didn't Happen
April
Hurley, MD
A Doctor's Outrage in Baghdad
Gloria Bergen
Chretien's Shame
Reema
Abu Hamdieh
The Smell of Death Surrounds Me
Website of the War
Iraq
Body Count
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