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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...

In the morning of March 11, 2004, Susan Lindauer woke to find five F.B.I. agents at her front door. After reading her her rights, the agents took Lindauer from her home in Takoma Park, Md., to the F.B.I. field office in Baltimore, where she was charged with having acted as an unregistered agent of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi government and otherwise having elevated the interests of a foreign country above her allegiance to the United States. ''The only visible sign of stress is that I'm chain-smoking,'' she said when I met with her recently. Forty-one and free on bail, she wore...

Former Chicago Sun-Times publisher David Radler, a lawyer for the newspaper's parent company and a media holding company that was controlled until recently by Conrad Black were indicted on federal fraud charges Thursday for allegedly diverting $32 million through a series of bogus deals. The indictment alleged the three diverted the money through a series of secret deals by disguising it as noncompete fees connected to the sale of newspaper publishing groups. Radler, Mark S. Kipnis, the former top in-house lawyer for Chicago-based Hollinger International, and Toronto-based Ravelston Corp., a private company owned until this spring by Black, were accused...

The 200-mile "Iran Freedom Walk," organized by the Iran Freedom Foundation, concludes today with a rally at noon in Lafayette Park across the street from the White House. The keynote speaker is Richard Perle, former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense and a key architect of President Bush's Middle East policy. Also featured is former Ambassador Mike Palmer; Joe Grieboski, founder and president of the Institute on Religion and Public Policy; and "Atomic Iran" author Jerome Corsi, who is leading the walk. The final three-mile stage of the journey, launched in Philadelphia two weeks ago, begins at 10 a.m. in front...

Rep. Walter B. Jones Jr.--a conservative Republican from North Carolina--voted to authorize the use of force in Iraq. So it jarred all the more yesterday when Jones turned his fury on Richard N. Perle, the Pentagon adviser who provided the Bush administration with brainpower for the Iraq war. Jones, who said he has signed more than 900 condolence letters to kin of fallen soldiers, pronounced himself "incensed" with Perle. "It is just amazing to me how we as a Congress were told we had to remove this man..... but the reason we were given was not accurate," Jones told Perle...

Ankara The government is close to making its decision on a Washington proposal to use the southern air base of Incirlik as a cargo hub for U.S. forces operating in the region, said a deputy from the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP). A decision on the issue will be made very soon. I cannot tell you when exactly since I am not in the government but it will be very soon, Murat Mercan, AKP's deputy chairman told a meeting in Washington, called, "Can the U.S.-Turkish Relationship be Repaired" Other attendees of the event, hosted by the American Enterprise Institute,...

Cold warrior Richard Perle - dubbed the "Prince of Darkness" during the Reagan years - is feeling heat from the SEC. Hollinger International director and former Pentagon bigwig Richard Perle might face civil charges for his involvement in the alleged looting of the company by ousted newspaper baron Conrad Black. The SEC has warned Perle — that it is considering filing suit against him........... Perle confirmed he had received a so-called Wells notice — a formal warning that SEC staffers are prepared to bring charges............. If the SEC decides to take action, regulators could seek an order barring Perle...

Richard Perle, a prominent neo-conservative policy intellectual, headed the Pentagon's Defense Policy Board until March 2003 and was an assistant secretary of defense during the Reagan administration. He spoke with Global Viewpoint editor Nathan Gardels in Washington on Tuesday. Question: Jean Daniel, co-founder of the magazine Le Nouvel Observateur and a pillar of the French left, has said "the election in Iraq changes everything" and now it is time to make sure democracy works there. The impression left by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's recent visit to Europe in advance of President Bush's tour is that the split over the...

That's all for now. This should be fun consider it's being held in Wackoland, Oregon.

It just started on C-Span 1

PORTLAND, Ore. (AP)-Howard Dean, the newly minted leader of the Democratic Party, and former Pentagon advisor Richard Perle made clear their opposing views on the war in Iraq during a debate marred by a protester who tossed a shoe at Perle.Perle had just started his comments Thursday when a protester threw a shoe at him before being dragged away, screaming, "Liar! Liar!"

PORTLAND, Ore. Feb 16, 2005 — Howard Dean, the new chairman of the Democratic National Committee, requested a media blackout of a debate with top Pentagon adviser Richard Perle, then quickly changed his mind Wednesday after news agencies complained. "DNC Chair Howard Dean has declared a news blackout of his appearance and requested the media not quote, record, and/or paraphrase his remarks," event coordinator Gabrielle Williams wrote in an e-mail sent to news agencies Wednesday morning. "We apologize for the late notice, but we were just informed of this request." Less than two hours later, Williams called to say: "We...

In a massive roundup by Iranian security officials, as many as 50 Iranian CIA operatives were exposed and killed, leaving the U.S without any intelligence sources in that critical Middle Eastern nation. The shocking story surfaced on Feb. 2, when former Pentagon adviser Richard N. Perle told the House Intelligence Committee about what he called the "terrible setback that we suffered in Iran a few years ago when, in a display of unbelievable, careless management, we put pressure on agents operating in Iran to report with greater frequency and didn't provide improved communications." He called it an example of the...

WASHINGTON — Dozens of CIA informants inside Iran were executed or imprisoned in the late 1980s or early 1990s after their secret communications with the agency were uncovered by the government, according to former CIA officials who discussed the episode after aspects of it were disclosed during a recent congressional hearing. As many as 50 Iranian citizens on the CIA's payroll were "rolled up" in the failed operation, according to the former officials, who described the events as a major setback in spying on a regime that remains one of the most difficult targets for U.S. intelligence. The disclosures underscore...

Since midsummer, the Senate Intelligence Committee has been attempting to solve the biggest mystery of the Iraq war: the disparity between the Bush Administration’s prewar assessment of Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction and what has actually been discovered. The committee is concentrating on the last ten years’ worth of reports by the C.I.A. Preliminary findings, one intelligence official told me, are disquieting. “The intelligence community made all kinds of errors and handled things sloppily,” he said. The problems range from a lack of quality control to different agencies’ reporting contradictory assessments at the same time. One finding, the official went...

Bobby Muller on their also, says we lost this war and so did Joe Wilson!

US troops in Iraq have captured two former Iraqi army generals in the town of Falluja, US officials have said. Military sources said the pair are believed to have financed and organised anti-coalition fighters in the area, west of Baghdad. The Pentagon, meanwhile, has announced plans to send thousands of additional troops to Iraq early next year. But, defence officials said the number of US troops currently serving in Iraq could be reduced by next May. Falluja raided Military officials said the generals were captured by paratroopers of the 82nd Airborne Division in an early morning raid in Falluja, about...

Unedited transcript prepared from a tape recording 10:15 a.m. Registration 10:30 Panelists: Five Saddam-era Torture Victims Commentator: Richard Perle, AEI Moderator: Michael Ledeen, AEI 12:30 p.m. Adjournment Proceedings: MR. PERLE: Good morning. I'm Richard Perle, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. We are here this morning to learn more than most people know about things that went on during Saddam Hussein's regime. I haven't seen the video that we're now going to see, but I'm told that it is very difficult to watch. Difficult as it is, I expect that it will be easier for Michael, and me and...

In a hot, crowded room in a turn-of-the-century house overlooking Reykjavik harbour, the President of the United States listened intently to his advisers. A few hours earlier, after a day and a half of intense negotiation, Mikhail Gorbachev had agreed to accept American proposals to slash nuclear arsenals - but only if Ronald Reagan would confine his Strategic Defence Initiative (SDI) to the laboratory, effectively killing any chance it could be built. The question was whether to accept Gorbachev's offer and abandon SDI, or reject it and return home without an agreement, leaving the US free to continue work on...