Free Republic

Influential former Pentagon official Richard Perle has been exploring going into the oil business in Iraq and Kazakhstan, according to people with knowledge of the matter and documents outlining possible deals. Mr. Perle, one of a group of security experts who began pushing the case for toppling Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein about a decade ago, has been discussing a possible deal with officials of northern Iraq's Kurdistan regional government, including its Washington envoy, according to these people and the documents. It would involve a tract called K18, near the Kurdish city of Erbil, according to documents describing the plan. A...

EXCERPT Though neocons formed a kind of Praetorian Guard around John McCain during his campaign, their truculent approach to foreign affairs sabotaged rather than strengthened McCain’s appeal. The best that Sarah Palin, a foreign-policy neocon on training wheels, could do was to offer platitudes about standing by Israel. It seems safe to say, then, that the neocon credo is ready to be put out to pasture. Or is it? One problem with this line of argument is that it’s been heard before—sometimes from the neoconservatives themselves. In 1988, after George H.W. Bush replaced Ronald Reagan, neocon lioness Midge Decter fretted,...

Listening to neocon mastermind Richard Perle, there's a sense of falling down the rabbit hole. Perle was the ideological architect of the Iraq war and of the Bush doctrine of preemptive attack. But at a forum of foreign policy intellectuals, hosted by National Interest magazine, he created a fantastic world in which: 1. Perle is not a neoconservative. 2. Neoconservatives do not exist. 3. Even if neoconservatives did exist, they certainly couldn't be blamed for the disasters of the past eight years. "There is no such thing as a neoconservative foreign policy," Perle informed the gathering. So what about the...

FOR EIGHT years George W. Bush pulled the levers of government—sometimes frantically—never realizing that they were disconnected from the machinery and the exertion was largely futile. As a result, the foreign and security policies declared by the president in speeches, in public and private meetings, in backgrounders and memoranda often had little or no effect on the activities of the sprawling bureaucracies charged with carrying out the president’s policies. They didn’t need his directives: they had their own.Again and again the president declared “unacceptable” activities that his administration went on to accept: North Korean nuclear weapons; North Korean missile tests;...

World dispatch -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- US thinktanks give lessons in foreign policy Brian Whitaker reports on the network of research institutes whose views and TV appearances are supplanting all other experts on Middle Eastern issues Monday August 19, 2002 A little-known fact about Richard Perle, the leading advocate of hardline policies at the Pentagon, is that he once wrote a political thriller. The book, appropriately called Hard Line, is set in the days of the cold war with the Soviet Union. Its hero is a male senior official at the Pentagon, working late into the night and battling almost single-handedly to rescue...

March 19, 2008, 0:00 a.m. Facts for FeithCPA history. By L. Paul Bremer III A recent article in the Washington Post previewed the forthcoming book by former undersecretary of defense Douglas Feith. In his book Feith apparently alleges that I was responsible for what he calls the single biggest mistake the United States made in Iraq. He claims that I unilaterally abandoned the president’s policy, promoted by Feith and others before the war, to grant sovereignty to a group of Iraqi exiles immediately after Saddam’s defeat. On March 16, Richard Perle of the American Enterprise Institute elaborated on this...

One of the biggest names of the conference never even uttered a word. Lt. Col. Anthony Shaffer is the military intelligence operative who recently went public with a controversial claim that a year before September 11, his top-secret task force "Able Danger" was able to identify the man who later turned out to be the lead hijacker as being connected to al Qaeda. Shaffer is a veteran of top-secret operations against terrorists, including some in Afghanistan, and several of his DIA colleagues have come out publicly to confirm that they remember Mohamed Atta being identified in 2000 as part of...

One of America's most influential neocons says President Bush is prepared to use military force against Iran if he believes it will acquire nuclear weapons. This past Sunday, Richard Perle, speaking in Israel at the Herzliya Conference, said he had no doubt of President Bush's intentions. "President George Bush will order an attack on Iran if it becomes clear to him that Iran is set to acquire nuclear weapons capabilities while he is still in office," Haaretz reported of Perle's remarks. Perle, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, served as chairman of the Bush administration's Defense Policy Board. Perle...

How do you know the Iraq Study Group's suggestion of reaching out to Iran and Syria is in trouble? When even a leading MSM light like Matt Lauer approvingly cites, of all people, leading neo-con Richard Perle to shoot down the idea.The Baker-Hamilton duo were making the TV rounds this morning, and it wasn't long into their chat with Matt that he hit them with this:"Let's talk about this idea of reaching out to the people in the neighborhood - Syria and Iran. Richard Perle said recently that 'talking to Iran about Iraq will be seen throughout the region as...

Editor's Note: On Friday, Vanity Fair issued a press release highlighting excerpts of a piece in their January issue on “neoconservative” supporters of the war in Iraq who today, unsurprisingly, have some negative things to say about how the war is going and how the Bush administration has been handling it. In the wake of the press release – which has gotten considerable play on the Internet – some of those “neoconservatives” highlighted in the article have responded to the excerpts and its misrepresentations, in some cases, of what they said. We collect some of those reactions — including from...

WASHINGTON (AP) -- A leading conservative proponent of the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq now says dysfunction within the Bush administration has turned U.S. policy there into a disaster. Richard Perle, who chaired a committee of Pentagon policy advisers early in the Bush administration, said had he seen at the start of the war in 2003 where it would go, he probably would not have advocated an invasion to depose Saddam Hussein. Perle was an assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan. "I probably would have said, 'Let's consider other strategies for dealing with the thing that concerns us most, which...

Sensing GOP vulnerability, the Democrats' campaign ads focus on voter unhappiness with the Iraq war. The Republicans, in turn, prefer to talk about keeping us safe from terrorism.So eyebrows popped up last week when none other than Richard Perle, former Reagan assistant secretary of defense, former Bush brain-truster on the Defense Policy Board, and a key promoter of the war to find Iraq's weapons of mass distruction, blistered the administration as "dysfunctional" when it comes to stopping someone from bringing "a nuclear weapon or even nuclear material into the United States."

by Mark Finkelstein July 22, 2006 - 05:34 The New York Times op-ed page has a feature today called 'A First Step Back From the Brink.' As the Times describes it: "With chaos threatening to engulf Lebanon, the need to resolve the conflict in the Middle East has rarely seemed so urgent. The Op-Ed editors went to seven experts with experience in the region, asking each of them what should be the first step toward defusing the crisis." Richard Perle is one of the contributors, and makes the case that "Israel must see the current fighting through to a conclusion...

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad of Iran knows what he wants: nuclear weapons and the means to deliver them; suppression of freedom at home and the spread of terrorism abroad; and the "shattering and fall of the ideology and thoughts of the liberal democratic systems." President Bush, too, knows what he wants: an irreversible end to Iran's nuclear weapons program, the "expansion of freedom in all the world" and victory in the war on terrorism. The State Department and its European counterparts know what they want: negotiations. For more than five years, the administration has dithered. Bush gave soaring speeches, the Iranians...

Perle claimed Saudi Arabia was no ally of the United States and that the Saudi royal family had allowed terrorist ideology to flourish within its borders and beyond. He called the U.S. government`s continued friendship with the Middle East nation the result of an intelligence failure worse than that concerning the Sept. 11 attacks. 'It is one of the greatest intelligence failures of the century that the rise of extremist institutions inspired culturally and intellectually by the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia went so unmarked,' Perle told a group at the conservative Hudson Institute. 'This seems to me a far larger...

Thursday July 17, 2003 The Guardian As the CIA director, George Tenet, arrived at the Senate yesterday to give secret testimony on the Niger uranium affair, it was becoming increasingly clear in Washington that the scandal was only a small, well-documented symptom of a complete breakdown in US intelligence that helped steer America into war. It represents the Bush administration's second catastrophic intelligence failure. But the CIA and FBI's inability to prevent the September 11 attacks was largely due to internal institutional weaknesses. This time the implications are far more damaging for the White House, which stands accused of politicising...

WASHINGTON: Soon after the Sept. 11 attacks, a two-man intelligence team set up shop at the Pentagon, searching for evidence of links between terrorist groups and host countries. The men, Michael Maloof and David Wurmser, culled classified material, much of it uncorroborated data from the CIA. "We discovered tons of raw intelligence," said Maloof. "We were stunned that we couldn't find any mention of it in the CIA's finished reports." They recorded and annotated their evidence on butcher paper hung like a mural around their small office. By the end of 2001, they had constructed a startling new picture of...

In the morning of March 11, 2004, Susan Lindauer woke to find five F.B.I. agents at her front door. After reading her her rights, the agents took Lindauer from her home in Takoma Park, Md., to the F.B.I. field office in Baltimore, where she was charged with having acted as an unregistered agent of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government and otherwise having elevated the interests of a foreign country above her allegiance to the United States. ''The only visible sign of stress is that I'm chain-smoking,'' she said when I met with her recently. Forty-one and free on bail, she wore...

Former Chicago Sun-Times publisher David Radler, a lawyer for the newspaper's parent company and a media holding company that was controlled until recently by Conrad Black were indicted on federal fraud charges Thursday for allegedly diverting $32 million through a series of bogus deals. The indictment alleged the three diverted the money through a series of secret deals by disguising it as noncompete fees connected to the sale of newspaper publishing groups. Radler, Mark S. Kipnis, the former top in-house lawyer for Chicago-based Hollinger International, and Toronto-based Ravelston Corp., a private company owned until this spring by Black, were accused...

The 200-mile "Iran Freedom Walk," organized by the Iran Freedom Foundation, concludes today with a rally at noon in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House. The keynote speaker is Richard Perle, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense and a key architect of President Bush's Middle East policy. Also featured is former Ambassador Mike Palmer; Joe Grieboski, founder and president of the Institute on Religion and Public Policy; and "Atomic Iran" author Jerome Corsi, who is leading the walk. The final three-mile stage of the journey, launched in Philadelphia two weeks ago, begins at 10 a.m. in front...

Rep. Walter B. Jones Jr.--a conservative Republican from North Carolina--voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. So it jarred all the more yesterday when Jones turned his fury on Richard N. Perle, the Pentagon adviser who provided the Bush administration with brainpower for the Iraq war. Jones, who said he has signed more than 900 condolence letters to kin of fallen soldiers, pronounced himself "incensed" with Perle. "It is just amazing to me how we as a Congress were told we had to remove this man..... but the reason we were given was not accurate," Jones told Perle...

Ankara The government is close to making its decision on a Washington proposal to use the southern air base of Incirlik as a cargo hub for U.S. forces operating in the region, said a deputy from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). A decision on the issue will be made very soon. I cannot tell you when exactly since I am not in the government but it will be very soon, Murat Mercan, AKP's deputy chairman told a meeting in Washington, called, "Can the U.S.-Turkish Relationship be Repaired" Other attendees of the event, hosted by the American Enterprise Institute,...

Cold warrior Richard Perle - dubbed the "Prince of Darkness" during the Reagan years - is feeling heat from the SEC. Hollinger International director and former Pentagon bigwig Richard Perle might face civil charges for his involvement in the alleged looting of the company by ousted newspaper baron Conrad Black. The SEC has warned Perle — that it is considering filing suit against him........... Perle confirmed he had received a so-called Wells notice — a formal warning that SEC staffers are prepared to bring charges............. If the SEC decides to take action, regulators could seek an order barring Perle...

Richard Perle, a prominent neo-conservative policy intellectual, headed the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board until March 2003 and was an assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration. He spoke with Global Viewpoint editor Nathan Gardels in Washington on Tuesday. Question: Jean Daniel, co-founder of the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur and a pillar of the French left, has said "the election in Iraq changes everything" and now it is time to make sure democracy works there. The impression left by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recent visit to Europe in advance of President Bush's tour is that the split over the...

That's all for now. This should be fun consider it's being held in Wackoland, Oregon.

It just started on C-Span 1

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP)-Howard Dean, the newly minted leader of the Democratic Party, and former Pentagon advisor Richard Perle made clear their opposing views on the war in Iraq during a debate marred by a protester who tossed a shoe at Perle.Perle had just started his comments Thursday when a protester threw a shoe at him before being dragged away, screaming, "Liar! Liar!"

PORTLAND, Ore. Feb 16, 2005 — Howard Dean, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, requested a media blackout of a debate with top Pentagon adviser Richard Perle, then quickly changed his mind Wednesday after news agencies complained. "DNC Chair Howard Dean has declared a news blackout of his appearance and requested the media not quote, record, and/or paraphrase his remarks," event coordinator Gabrielle Williams wrote in an e-mail sent to news agencies Wednesday morning. "We apologize for the late notice, but we were just informed of this request." Less than two hours later, Williams called to say: "We...

In a massive roundup by Iranian security officials, as many as 50 Iranian CIA operatives were exposed and killed, leaving the U.S without any intelligence sources in that critical Middle Eastern nation. The shocking story surfaced on Feb. 2, when former Pentagon adviser Richard N. Perle told the House Intelligence Committee about what he called the "terrible setback that we suffered in Iran a few years ago when, in a display of unbelievable, careless management, we put pressure on agents operating in Iran to report with greater frequency and didn't provide improved communications." He called it an example of the...

WASHINGTON — Dozens of CIA informants inside Iran were executed or imprisoned in the late 1980s or early 1990s after their secret communications with the agency were uncovered by the government, according to former CIA officials who discussed the episode after aspects of it were disclosed during a recent congressional hearing. As many as 50 Iranian citizens on the CIA's payroll were "rolled up" in the failed operation, according to the former officials, who described the events as a major setback in spying on a regime that remains one of the most difficult targets for U.S. intelligence. The disclosures underscore...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

Bobby Muller on their also, says we lost this war and so did Joe Wilson!

US troops in Iraq have captured two former Iraqi army generals in the town of Falluja, US officials have said. Military sources said the pair are believed to have financed and organised anti-coalition fighters in the area, west of Baghdad. The Pentagon, meanwhile, has announced plans to send thousands of additional troops to Iraq early next year. But, defence officials said the number of US troops currently serving in Iraq could be reduced by next May. Falluja raided Military officials said the generals were captured by paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division in an early morning raid in Falluja, about...

Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording 10:15 a.m. Registration 10:30 Panelists: Five Saddam-era Torture Victims Commentator: Richard Perle, AEI Moderator: Michael Ledeen, AEI 12:30 p.m. Adjournment Proceedings: MR. PERLE: Good morning. I'm Richard Perle, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. We are here this morning to learn more than most people know about things that went on during Saddam Hussein's regime. I haven't seen the video that we're now going to see, but I'm told that it is very difficult to watch. Difficult as it is, I expect that it will be easier for Michael, and me and...

In a hot, crowded room in a turn-of-the-century house overlooking Reykjavik harbour, the President of the United States listened intently to his advisers. A few hours earlier, after a day and a half of intense negotiation, Mikhail Gorbachev had agreed to accept American proposals to slash nuclear arsenals - but only if Ronald Reagan would confine his Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) to the laboratory, effectively killing any chance it could be built. The question was whether to accept Gorbachev's offer and abandon SDI, or reject it and return home without an agreement, leaving the US free to continue work on...

WASHINGTON, May 28 — Influential outside advisers to the Bush administration who support the Iraqi exile leader Ahmad Chalabi are pressing the White House to stop what one has called a "smear campaign" against Mr. Chalabi, whose Baghdad home and offices were ransacked last week in an American-supported raid. Last Saturday, several of these Chalabi supporters said, a small delegation of them marched into the West Wing office of Condoleezza Rice, the national security adviser, to complain about the administration's abrupt change of heart about Mr. Chalabi and to register their concerns about the course of the war in Iraq....

A brand name author with many admirers in the military criticized the U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, citing it as proof that "good men make mistakes." That same writer said he almost "came to blows" with a leading war supporter, former Pentagon adviser Richard Perle. The author is Tom Clancy. The hawkish master of such million-selling thrillers as "Patriot Games" and "The Hunt for Red October" now finds himself adding to the criticism of the Iraq war, and not only through his own comments. His latest book, "Battle Ready," is a collaboration with another war critic, retired Marine Gen. Anthony C....

What do we offer the world? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: May 19, 2004 1:00 a.m. Eastern "So, how do we advance the cause of female emancipation in the Muslim world?" asks Richard Perle in "An End to Evil." He replies, "We need to remind the women of Islam ceaselessly: Our enemies are the same as theirs; our victory will be theirs as well." Well, the neoconservative cause "of female emancipation in the Muslim world" was probably set back a bit by the photo shoot of Pfc. Lynndie England and the "Girls Gone Wild" of Abu Ghraib prison. Indeed, the filmed orgies among...

The Talk Shows Sunday, April 11th, 2004 Guests to be interviewed today on major television talk shows: FOX NEWS SUNDAY (Fox Network): L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq; Richard Ben-Veniste, Sept. 11 commission member; former Sen. Slade Gorton, R-Wash. Sept. 11 commission member; Sen. Dick Lugar, R-Ind.; Cardinal Theodore McCarrick, Roman Catholic archbishop of Washington, D.C.MEET THE PRESS (NBC): L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian administrator in Iraq; Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. FACE THE NATION (CBS): Sens. Joe Biden, D-Del., and Pat Roberts, R-Kan. THIS WEEK (ABC): L. Paul Bremer, the top U.S. civilian administrator...

In these intensely polarized and paranoid times, more than a few people are like the obsessed Captain Ahab in Moby Dick, of whom Melville wrote, in one of the supreme passages of American literature: "The White Whale swam before him as the monomaniac incarnation of all those malicious agencies which some deep men feel eating in them, till they are left living on with half a heart and half a lung.... All that most maddens and torments; ... all the subtle demonisms of life and thought; all evil, to crazy Ahab, were visibly personified, and made practically assailable in Moby...

An End to Evil Perle, Richard, Resident Fellow, American Enterprise Institute Mr. Perle talks about the book he co-authored with David Frum, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror, published by Random House. Mr. Perle says the book provides a blueprint for winning the war on terror. The recommendations are divided into four major sections: what must be done domestically to improve safety and security; what must be done abroad, in order to take the war to America’s enemies; what must change in the realm of thought and ideas; and how U.S. institutions must be reformed...

It is being claimed, ever more widely, that neoconservative policies are determined by the advantages they bring, manifest or putative, to the state of Israel. Patrick Buchanan, in the current issue of American Conservative, believes this ardently, while the most quoted advocates of neocon militancy, Richard Perle and David Frum, go further than merely to deny that neoconservatism is an Israel First worldview. They insist that criticism of neocon policies is, at heart, anti-Semitic. Richard Perle, co-author with Frum of "An End to Evil," old acquaintances remember as being for many years on the public scene as an adamant opponent...

FrontPageMagazine.com | February 18, 2004 Frontpage Interview has the pleasure to have Richard Perle and David Frum, the authors of the new book An End to Evil: Strategies for Victory in the War on Terror, as its guests today. David Frum, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributing editor of National Review. Richard Perle, the former assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration, and the former chairman of the Defense Policy Board in President George W. Bush's administration, is a resident fellow at the American...

Since 9/11 a cascade of books purveying instant analysis on the ramifications has hit the bookstores. A deep fault line runs between them. Those with "evil" or "jihad" in the title lie on one side of the divide; those with "empire" or "lies" are found on the other. Their mutually antagonistic readerships snarl at each other across the chasm. So it is with David Frum and Richard Perle's new book An End to Evil: What's Next in the War on Terrorism, in which they reinforce the thesis--now usually described as neoconservative--that American interests and values are best pursued with a...

WASHINGTON - Richard Perle, one of the most outspoken advocates for invading Iraq, has quietly resigned from the Defense Policy Board, an influential bipartisan Pentagon advisory group. Perle informed Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld that he was quitting the board in a letter dated Feb. 18, although a week later a Pentagon list of board members still included him. A copy of the letter was obtained by Knight Ridder. Perle's resignation comes as President Bush, who had hoped to ride popular support for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq to a second term, finds his administration facing a growing...

Perle Resigns Controversial Figure Quits Advisory Panel Post W A S H I N G T O N, Feb. 25— A controversial associate of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has resigned from his seat on a key Pentagon advisory panel, ABCNEWS has learned. Richard Perle, a lightning rod for critics of the Bush administration's national security policies, informed Rumsfeld more than two weeks ago he was quitting the Defense Policy Board. He confirmed the decision in a letter to the defense chief last Wednesday. "We are now approaching a long presidential election campaign, in the course of which issues on which...

Feb. 18, 2004. 01:00 AM DANNY JOHNSTON/AP U.S. President George W. Bush is applauded by the army and National Guard troops during a speech at Fort Polk, La., yesterday in which he defended the U.S. war in Iraq. Fort Polk is home to more than 6,300 troops who are in Iraq. `Heads should roll' over IraqAdviser wants U.S. intelligence chiefs to quit Cites faulty conclusions on Saddam's weapons ERIC ROSENBERGSPECIAL TO THE STAR WASHINGTON—Richard Perle, a chief proponent of last year's U.S. invasion of Iraq, yesterday called for the chiefs of the Central Intelligence Agency and the U.S. Defence Intelligence...

WASHINGTON – Richard Perle, a chief proponent of last year's U.S. invasion of Iraq, called yesterday for the chiefs of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency to step down because of their faulty conclusions that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction. Perle, a close adviser to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, said top officials made no attempt to skew the intelligence about Hussein's alleged weapons arsenal. Instead, he implied, top policy-makers relied in good faith on the conclusions of the intelligence agencies. "George Tenet has been at the CIA long enough to assume responsibility for its performance,"...

CAIRO, 10 February 2004 — Richard Perle, former chairman of the US Defense Policy Board, and George W. Bush’s former speech writer David Frum — co-authors of a book entitled “An end to evil: How to win the war on terror” — outlined their right-wing extremist views on Boston University’s WUBUR radio last Friday. Their message was loud and clear. US global dominance using military might when necessary is the only way forward. After subjecting myself to almost an hour of the Perle-Frum philosophy I quickly came to the conclusion labeling the Zionist ideologues “hawks” is an insult to a...

Violence breeds violence -- but so can nonviolence. This is often forgotten in the debate over terrorism, as illustrated in some reviews of the new book by David Frum and Richard Perle, An End to Evil: How to Win the War on Terror. Perle and Frum lay out a bold plan to defend America. But more important than their specific proposals, they provide insight into how our leaders are confronting -- or not confronting -- the war on terrorism.As a forensic psychologist, what I found most worthwhile about the book was this unapologetic attitude toward terrorists and terrorism. I believe the...