Responding to my own message…
Do these people not even have a sense of their own irony? Are their morals so deeply buried in ambition and self-interest that they can’t see the sheer incongruity of soliciting a confessed dealer in international illegal arms to invest in a Venture Capital fund that provides funding to defense technologies in the US? Especially at a time when the US is about to embark on war with one of Khasshoggi’s best customers, and he himself is the architect of that war?
What is wrong with us that we don’t want to lynch this amoral swine?
-Ian.
On Saturday, March 29, 2003, at 11:09 AM, Ian Andrew Bell wrote:
> Richard Perle, whom I am sure will somehow now become a “consultant”
> to the White House, has resigned amid accusations that he had illegal
> dealings with shady Saudi arms dealers and had financial ties to
> companies servicing the Homeland Security effort through personal
> investments and a venture capital firm with which he worked. Many
> people believe that he is the chief architect of the Bush
> Administration’s current policy on the Middle East.
>
> -Ian.
>
> ——–
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A38776-2003Mar27.html
> Key Rumsfeld Adviser Resigns His Post
>
> By ROBERT BURNS
> The Associated Press
> Thursday, March 27, 2003; 6:24 PM
>
> Richard Perle, a former Reagan administration Pentagon official,
> resigned Thursday as chairman of the Defense Policy Board that is a
> key advisory arm for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.
>
> In a brief written statement, Rumsfeld thanked Perle for his service
> and made no mention of why Perle resigned. He said he had asked Perle
> to remain as a member of the board.
>
> “He has been an excellent chairman and has led the Defense Policy
> Board during an important time in our history,” Rumsfeld said. “I
> should add that I have known Richard Perle for many years and know him
> to be a man of integrity and honor.”
>
> Perle was an assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan
> administration. He took the advisory board chairman’s post early in
> Rumsfeld’s tenure.
>
> Perle became embroiled in a recent controversy stemming from a New
> Yorker magazine article that said he had lunch in January with
> controversial Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi and a Saudi
> industrialist.
>
> The industrialist, Harb Saleh Zuhair, was interested in investing in a
> venture capital firm, Trireme Partners, of which Perle is a managing
> partner. Nothing ever came of the lunch in Marseilles; no investment
> was made. But the New Yorker story, written by Seymour M. Hersh,
> suggested that Perle, a longtime critic of the Saudi regime, was
> inappropriately mixing business and politics.
>
> Perle called the report preposterous and “monstrous.”
>
> Perle, 61, was so strongly opposed to nuclear arms control agreements
> with the former Soviet Union during his days in the Reagan
> administration that he became known as “the Prince of Darkness.”
>
> © 2003 The Associated Press