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High Price For Bad Advice
Thu Jan 15 21:44:15 2004
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High Price For Bad Advice
http://www.tompaine.com/feature2.cfm/ID/9753

William D. Hartung is the author of How Much Are You Making on the War, Daddy?—A Quick and Dirty Guide to War Profiteering in the Bush Administration. (Nation Books/Avalon Group, 2004). This commentary is adapted from chapter 5 of the book, "The Defense Policy Board: Richard Perle and His Merry Band of Profiteers."

As he roams the airwaves plugging his new book, giving aggressive prescriptions for American policy at every stop, we would all be well advised to take a closer look at Richard Perle's recent counsel. If you want bad advice at a high price, Perle is your man.

Perle's last big moment in the spotlight was in the spring of 2003, when he stepped down as chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board (DPB) amidst charges that he had abused his position as a top adviser to Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld for personal gain. Perle's self-imposed "punishment" came in the wake of not one, not two, but three questionable business deals.

The first deal, exposed by veteran investigative reporter Seymour Hersh in the May 17, 2003 issue of the New Yorker, involved a luncheon in the south of France, brokered by infamous arms dealer and Iran/Contra middleman Adnan Khashoggi. Perle, under the guise of listening to a "peace plan" for Iraq, tried to persuade Saudi industrialist Harb Saleh al-Zuhair to raise $100 million to invest in Trireme, a security-oriented investment firm that Perle had started after he was appointed chairman of the DPB. Other deals that Perle solicited while chairing the policy board included a consulting arrangement in which he sought $750,000 in exchange for helping the telecommunications firm Global Crossing get Pentagon approval to sell one of its units to a Chinese-owned company; and an arrangement in which he was helping the Loral Corporation get reinstated in the satellite export business in the wake of making illegal technology transfers to Beijing.

Perle's role in the Global Crossing deal was particularly rich. After denying that he had used his role at the Defense Policy Board to secure the consulting deal, a memo surfaced, signed by Perle, stating the following: "As the chairman of the Defense Policy Board, I have a unique perspective on and intimate knowledge of the C.F.I.U.S. process and security issues that will be raised by the C.F.I.U.S. review that will not be available to other C.F.I.U.S. professionals." The organization referenced is the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, the body that had to rule on whether Global Crossing could sell a part of its company to a Chinese-owned firm.

Perle literally never seems to stop promoting himself for a fee. Boeing decided to invest $20 million in Trireme, and lo and behold, Perle later became a public advocate of a controversial deal that called for the Air Force to lease 100 Boeing 747s for use as aerial refueling tankers at a cost to taxpayers of more than $20 billion. Richard Perle endorsed the Boeing tanker deal on the pages of The Wall Street Journal—but only after Boeing invested in his company.

You may not be surprised to learn that Richard Perle thinks that there is nothing wrong with any of this. In an op-ed that he wrote for The Wall Street Journal at the time that he stepped down as chairman of the Defense Policy Board, he suggested that "the people best able to help" the government in an advisory capacity "are professionally involved with the businesses for which the official is responsible: . . . energy executives advising the Department of Energy, or defense executives advising the Department of Defense." He then suggests that as long as said executives follow appropriate rules of disclosure, and don't rule on policies directly affecting their own companies, they should be free to give their "best candid advice" to the government.

There are several problems here. First, it is not clear that Perle has ever made full disclosure of his ever-widening web of business entanglements. And second, his "candid advice" to Donald Rumsfeld has been uniformly bad. It was he and his colleague Kenneth Adelman who suggested that the invasion and occupation of Iraq would be a "cakewalk." It was he and his neocon cohorts who claimed that Saddam Hussein was sitting astride a vast arsenal of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. It was he and his colleague R. James Woolsey who asserted an operational link between Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda that did not and does not exist. It was he and his pals at the American Enterprise Institute who suggested that their hand-picked choice to lead Iraq, exiled leader Ahmed Chalabi, would be welcomed with open arms by ordinary Iraqis. None of these things proved true.

In fact, it's hard to think of any major claim about Iraq that Richard Perle got right. So why is he still on the Defense Policy Board? Given a record of financial impropriety, which surely violates the spirit if not the letter of our conflict-of-interest laws, and a record of uniformly bad advice that has put our military personnel at risk, what possible reason could Donald Rumsfeld have for keeping Richard Perle as an adviser? Isn't Rumsfeld's bad judgment on Perle just the latest indicator of how ethically challenged and politically tone-deaf his leadership of the Pentagon has become?
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Committee on Foreign Investments in the United States (CFIUS). US DEPARTMENT
OF TREASURY. ... L. 102-484, 106 Stat. 2315, 2463. CFIUS. Executive Order. ...
http://www.ustreas.gov/offices/international-affairs/exon-florio/

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