Re: American journalists as terrorists?

[David Farber <farber () tmail com>]

-----Original Message-----
From: K. N. Cukier <kn () cukier com>
To: dave () farber net
Subject: Re: American journalists as terrorists?
Date: Wed, 12 Mar 2003 17:46:45 -0500


Dave,

Sy spoke today at Harvard's Shorenstein Center for Press and Politics 
(where he won the Goldsmith Career Award for investigative reporting), 
and addressed Perle's comments. His retort: "Forty years ago I would 
have been called a Communist and 70 years ago I would have been called a 
Jew...."

Yours,

KNC

Kenneth Neil Cukier
Research Fellow
John F. Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
Tel: +1 617 723 7734
Work: kenneth_cukier () harvard edu
Personal: kn () cukier com


------ Forwarded Message
From: Tim Finin <finin () cs umbc edu>
Organization: UMBC http://umbc.edu/
Date: Tue, 11 Mar 2003 13:42:16 -0500
To: dave () farber net
Subject: American journalists as terrorists?

There is an interesting article in the New Yorker on apparent conflict
of interests involving Richard Perle, who said of the author Seymour
Hersh on CNN, "Look, Sy Hersh is the closest thing American journalism
has to a terrorist, frankly."  Details below, including a Salon 
article
with a partial CNN transcript and the offending New Yorker article.

--

The latest Perle jam
http://www.salon.com/opinion/conason/2003/03/10/hersh/

In the higher circles of the Bush Administration, investigative
journalism is now regarded as a form of terrorism. At least that
seemed to be the definition used by foreign policy adviser Richard
Perle during an appearance yesterday on CNN, when he described New
Yorker writer Seymour Hersh as a "terrorist."
...


LUNCH WITH THE CHAIRMAN
Why was Richard Perle meeting with Adnan Khashoggi?
Seymour M. Hersh, The New Yorker

Issue of 2003-03-17, Posted 2003-03-10
http://www.newyorker.com/fact/content/?030317fa_fact

At the peak of his deal-making activities, in the nineteen-seventies,
the Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi brokered billions of
dollars in arms and aircraft sales for the Saudi royal family, earning
hundreds of millions in commissions and fees. Though never convicted
of wrongdoing, he was repeatedly involved in disputes with federal
prosecutors and with the Securities and Exchange Commission, and in
recent years he has been in litigation in Thailand and Los Angeles,
among other places, concerning allegations of stock manipulation and
fraud. During the Reagan Administration, Khashoggi was one of the
middlemen between Oliver North, in the White House, and the mullahs in
Iran in what became known as the Iran-Contra scandal. Khashoggi
subsequently claimed that he lost ten million dollars that he had put
up to obtain embargoed weapons for Iran which were to be bartered
(with Presidential approval) for American hostages. The scandals of
those times seemed to feed off each other: a congressional
investigation revealed that Khashoggi had borrowed much of the money
for the weapons from the Bank of Credit and Commerce International
(B.C.C.I.), whose collapse, in 1991, defrauded thousands of depositors
and led to years of inquiry and litigation.

Khashoggi is still brokering. In January of this year, he arranged a
private lunch, in France, to bring together Harb Saleh al-Zuhair, a
Saudi industrialist whose family fortune includes extensive holdings
in construction, electronics, and engineering companies throughout the
Middle East, and Richard N. Perle, the chairman of the Defense Policy
Board, who is one of the most outspoken and influential American
advocates of war with Iraq.

The Defense Policy Board is a Defense Department advisory group
composed primarily of highly respected former government officials,
retired military officers, and academics. Its members, who serve
without pay, include former national-security advisers, Secretaries of
Defense, and heads of the C.I.A. The board meets several times a year
at the Pentagon to review and assess the country's strategic defense
policies.

Perle is also a managing partner in a venture-capital company called
Trireme Partners L.P., which was registered in November, 2001, in
Delaware. Trireme's main business, according to a two-page letter that
one of its representatives sent to Khashoggi last November, is to
invest in companies dealing in technology, goods, and services that
are of value to homeland security and defense. The letter argued that
the fear of terrorism would increase the demand for such products in
Europe and in countries like Saudi Arabia and Singapore.

The letter mentioned the firm's government connections prominently:
"Three of Trireme's Management Group members currently advise the
U.S. Secretary of Defense by serving on the U.S. Defense Policy Board,
and one of Trireme's principals, Richard Perle, is chairman of that
Board." The two other policy-board members associated with Trireme are
Henry Kissinger, the former Secretary of State (who is, in fact, only
a member of Trireme's advisory group and is not involved in its
management), and Gerald Hillman, an investor and a close business
associate of Perle's who handles matters in Trireme's New York
office. The letter said that forty-five million dollars had already
been raised, including twenty million dollars from Boeing; the
purpose, clearly, was to attract more investors, such as Khashoggi and
Zuhair.  ...


------ End of Forwarded Message
-- Dave

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