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MILAN, Sept 8 (AFP) - Mohammed Atta consulted Saddam Hussein prior to leading the suicide attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, according to Richard Perle, an advisor to the US defense secretary. "Mohammed Atta met Saddam Hussein in Baghdad prior to September 11. We have proof of that, and we are sure he wasn't just there for a holiday," Perle told Italy's business daily "Il Sole 24 Ore". "The meeting is one of the motives for an American attack on Iraq," added Perle, who is chairman of the Defense Policy Board and consultant to US Defense...

Instead of pressuring reluctant Republican senators for rapid ratification of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty with Russia, the Obama administration should just drop it, says Richard Perle, a key architect of President Ronald Reagan’s strategy to end the Cold War. “It’s a seriously flawed treaty,” Perle, now a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, says during an exclusive interview with Newsmax.TV. “It’s certainly not the kind of treaty Ronald Reagan fought for and accomplished.” The pact is very weak on verification, he says. “For example, our right to inspections is limited to sites the Russians declare . . ....

Push to blame the Iraq war on "Jewish influence" sounds a familiar theme http://www.jewishworldreview.com | A few months ago, a great deal of tut-tutting and dignified outrage emanated from much of the civilized world over the broadcast of a series on Egyptian television which sought to dramatize the "truth" of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. But, as the debate over President Bush's rightful determination to pursue war against the Iraqi regime of Saddam Hussein heats up, it looks like the dimwitted propagandists who write scripts for Egyptian potboilers have been sharing sources with prominent Washington pundits, leftist anti-war...

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...