Richard Perle

[candy331]

on PBS right now getting beat up by other guest.

[Octafish]

1. Perle is a monster.

The guy recently met with Adnan Khashoggi for a business lunch. Khashoggi is up to his third chin in Bush Organized Crime business. According to Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker, Perle asked Khashoggi to invest millions in Perle's Trireme Partnerships, a new investment firm specializing in homeland security related industries.

From TRUTHOUT:

Editor's Note: This is an incredibly important report from an incredible journalist.  Seymour Hersh first made his name as a reporter by breaking the My Lai story.  In this report, he details the strange life and business relations of Richard Perle, Chairman of the Defense Policy Board.  Perle, when asked about this report, called Hersh a terrorist. - wrp

Lunch with the Chairman
by Seymour M. Hersh
The New Yorker
 
10 March 2003


Why was Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Khashoggi?

At the peak of his deal-making activities, in the nineteen-seventies, the Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi brokered billions of dollars in arms and aircraft sales for the Saudi royal family, earning hundreds of millions in commissions and fees. Though never convicted of wrongdoing, he was repeatedly involved in disputes with federal prosecutors and with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in recent years he has been in litigation in Thailand and Los Angeles, among other places, concerning allegations of stock manipulation and fraud.

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 subsequently claimed that he lost ten million dollars that he had put up to obtain embargoed weapons for Iran which were to be bartered (with Presidential approval) for American hostages. The scandals of those times seemed to feed off each other: a congressional investigation revealed that Khashoggi had borrowed much of the money for the weapons from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International (B.C.C.I.), whose collapse, in 1991, defrauded thousands of depositors and led to years of inquiry and litigation.

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, who is one of the most outspoken and influential American advocates of war with Iraq.

The Defense Policy Board is a Defense Department advisory group composed primarily of highly respected former government officials, retired military officers, and academics. Its members, who serve without pay, include former national-security advisers, Secretaries of Defense, and heads of the C.I.A. The board meets several times a year at the Pentagon to review and assess the country’s strategic defense policies.

CONTINUED...

http://www.truthout.org/cgi-bin/artman/exec/view.cgi?archive=3&num=160

BTW: A hearty welcome to DU, candy331!