Perle Jam

This hasn't been a good two weeks for Richard Perle.

Perle, the man most often credited with (blamed for?) the Bush Administration's current quagmire in Iraq, resigned today from his unpaid post as chairman of the Defense Policy Institute, a powerful Pentagon advisory group.

The resignation came in the wake of a New Yorker article 2 weeks ago by Seymour Hersh in which Hersh raised serious conflict of interest questions. In summary, Perle is the managing partner of Trireme Partners L.P, a venture firm that invests in companies dealing with homeland security-related technology and services. To put it more bluntly than the New Yorker article, more terrorism means more resources going into homeland security which means more money in Perle's pocket.

Interestingly, Perle, who once told the National Review that "the Saudis are a major source of the problem we face with terrorism," is exposed in the article as trying to squeeze $100 million for his homeland security business from a bunch of Saudi businessmen in a meeting at Marseilles in early January set up by Adnan Khashoggi (arms dealer of Iran/Contra fame). The Saudi ambassador in Washington, Prince Bandar Bin Sultan, is unusually bold in his characterization of the meetings: "there were elements of the appearance of blackmail—‘If we get in business, he’ll back off on Saudi Arabia’"

By it turns out that Perle is an equal opportunity blackmailer. Although he had been an ardent critic of China, he was retained by Global Crossing, a defunct telecom company whose global network is used by the US government, to help them gain approval from the Defense Department for their sale to a Hong Kong businessman. Perle's modest consulting fee was $725,000, with the promise of an additional $600,000 if the company had gained the approval for the deal.

And when the New York Times reported this week that Congressman Richard Conyers, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee had asked for a Pentagon investigation of potential conflict of interest (as a "special government employee", Perle falls under the Federal Code of Conduct rules), it seems that Perle finally became too big a liability for his friend Donald Rumsfeld.