RICHARD PERLE CAUGHT RUNNING A $100-MILLION SHEIK-DOWN
by Rosalinda - Thursday March 13, 2003 at 08:43 PM

Richard Perle, one of the most outspoken war party figures in and 
around the Bush Administration, has been caught in a $100-million 
attempted blackmail ``sheik-down'' of the Saudis, which could land 
him in jail.  

As reported in the current (March 17, 2003) issue of The New Yorker, 
in an expose by Seymour Hersh, Perle met, in Marseille, France, on Jan. 
3, 2003, with former Iran-Contra figure Adnan Khashoggi and a second 
Iraqi-Saudi businessman, and, according to Saudi Ambassador Prince 
Bandar, offered to call off of his and his fellow neo-con's Saudi-bashing 
operations, in return for a $100-million payoff ``investment'' in one 
of his companies, Trireme Partners L.P.  

Of course, it was Perle who brought the stark-raving loon, Laurent 
Murawiec, before the Defense Policy Board, on July 10, 2002, to call 
for the U.S. military occupation of the Saudi oil fields; and it was 
Perle, again, who later got Murawiec his current job at the Washington 
office of the Hudson Institute--working under Meyrav Wurmser.  

The expose so unnerved the power-mad Perle, that he went berserk, 
calling Hersh a terrorist, during a Sunday CNN interview with Wolf 
Blitzer.  

Two weeks earlier, Perle had been similarly unnerved when Meet the 
Press host Tim Russert confronted him on his authorship of ``A Clean 
Break,'' the warplan that he, Doug Feith, David Wurmser, Meyrav 
Wurmser and others had written for Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, 
calling for the invasion of the Palestinian Authority territory and 
the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein.  

The recent spate of public exposes of the ``Clean Break,'' and this 
latest expose of Perle's $100-million extortion scheme, are near to 
drawing blood.  

In yet another serious blow to the neo-con war party gang, the 
Frankfurter Algemeine Zeitung (FAZ) published a major expose on 
Tuesday, March 11, of the Wolfowitz cabal inside the Bush 
Administration, directly nailing them as members of the philosophical 
kindergarten of Leo Strauss and Allan Bloom. The FAZ piece was a 
promo for a 90-minute television documentary on the same topic, which 
aired on Tuesday night on the German TV station, Arte. This is the 
second time in less than a week that the Leo Strauss role has been 
played up in the German media. Last week, it was the Suddeutsche 
Zeitung that lambasted the neo-cons and named Strauss as the 
godfather of the war party.   

By raising the role of Leo Strauss as the fascist existentialist guru 
of the current breed of war party killers -- some factions in Germany have 
clearly signalled that they are out to draw blood, and stop this damned 
war. These exposes will strengthen the position of Chancellor 
Schroeder, and the overall Franco-German resistance to the war, which, 
must also develop into a key element in the renewed Eurasian 
Landbridge push. In Germany, it is far more well-known than in the 
United States, that Leo Strauss was the associate and admirer of the 
official Nazi philosopher, Martin Heidegger, and the Nazi jurist Karl 
Schmitt. It was Schmitt who personally arranged for Strauss to leave 
Germany in 1934 on a Rockefeller Foundation grant--to go to England 
and France to study the original writings of Thomas Hobbes. From 
there, Strauss went to the New School, and then on to the University 
of Chicago, where he trained several generations of Neitzschean fascists, 
many of whom are now among the leading neo-cons. Paul Wolfowitz, for 
example, was the protege of the leading Straussian, Allan Bloom. When 
President George H.W. Bush rejected Wolfowitz and Cheney's demand, 
in 1991, to allow the U.S. forces to go on to Baghdad, Wolfowitz called 
Bloom to vent his anger at a President who just was not Neitzschean 
enough for his taste.  

William Kristol, the son of Strauss cohort Irving Kristol, who was also 
singled out in the FAZ story, was trained at Harvard under another of 
Strauss' leading proteges; and Robert Kagan, the Brussels-based war 
party propagandist, who recently wrote, nonsensically, that the conflict 
between the U.S. and Europe is a battle between Hobbes and Kant, is a 
second-generation Straussian, whose father wrote a four volume 
commentary on Thucydides' {The Peloponnesian War}, which was a 
typical Straussian falsification of history (Strauss himself argued 
that Socrates and Plato were, indeed, the fascist totalitarians, 
described in the writings of I.F. Stone; but, while Stone attacked 
them, Strauss embraced the fascist smear of the great republican 
philosophers, as both true and commendable).  

Two other events highlight the past days' intensification of the battle:  

On Monday, March 10, both the London Times and BusinessWeek Online drew 
attention to a speech, given by former President George H.W. Bush, at 
Tufts University on Feb. 26, in which he urged his son not to go to war 
in anger, and warned against actions that might irreparably damage America's 
relations with longstanding allies abroad.  

Second, we have reports from leading Democratic Party figures, that 
in a recent speech, Mega Group house pet Joe Lieberman has declared 
that:  

1. Any Democrat seeking public office in 2004 must NOT discuss the economy.
The only issue to campaign on is the U.S. strategic interests, and the need 
for preventive war;

and 2. To win election in 2004, and for the Democratic Party to be
``relevant,'' it is vital to wipe out all remnants of Franklin Roosevelt 
and the FDR tradition.

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                             -==-

Source: South Africa Independent Media Centre 
http://southafrica.indymedia.org/news/2003/03/3329.php

Cheers, Steve..

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