[Alberta's Child]

Retired Rear Admiral Jeremiah Denton, whose seven years as a POW in Vietnam are chronicled in his famous autobiography, When Hell was in Session, despised Perle as far back as the mid-1980s, when Denton was a U.S. Senator from Alabama and Perle was being investigated for leaking classified information to an employee of the Israeli embassy in Washington. I'll take Jeremy Denton over Richard Perle any day of the week.

There was nothing wrong with Conyers' demand for an investigation of Perle. Even before he did this, a number of us right here on FreeRepublic wondered why the hell Perle was allowed within a mile of the U.S. Defense Department in the first place. His presence on the Defense Policy Board was very suspicious to me, particularly because the DPB didn't even exist until early 2001. In light of: A) Perle's track record in the Reagan administration, and B) the revelations of his lobbying career on behalf of a front company for the Red Chinese Army, I speculated that the Defense Policy Board was created specifically for one or both of the following reasons:

1. So people like Perle could serve in an advisory role at the Pentagon without obtaining the required security clearances, or

2. So people like Perle could serve in an advisory role at the Pentagon without giving up their lucrative lobbying careers -- even on behalf of Communist China.

At least I've been consistent about this kind of sh!t. I seem to remember a lot of justifiable outrage among conservatives when the players were Bernard Schwartz and Loral instead of Richard Perle and Global Crossing.

[FreeReign]

Retired Rear Admiral Jeremiah Denton, whose seven years as a POW in Vietnam are chronicled in his famous autobiography, When Hell was in Session, despised Perle...

I wasn't defending Perle and his lobbying controversies. I was criticizing your seeming effort to discredit this administration's foreign policy in the WOT and how it pertains to Iraq, based on the lobbying controversies of Perle.

Alberta's Child:I think this author has it all wrong. The so-called "neo-conservative" element of the Republican Party lost every shred of credibility over three defining events in the last 18 months: 1. Richard Perle's resignation as head of the Defense Policy Board...

The irony is, that the honorable Jeremiah Denton is a strong believer in the Bush foreign policy and the WOT and how it pertains to Iraq.

As I said, things really aren't that simple.