Pentagon adviser Richard Perle came under fire on Friday for failing to disclose financial ties to Boeing Co., even while championing its bid for a controversial $20 billion-plus defense contract.
Perle co-wrote a guest column in The Wall Street Journal newspaper this summer praising the plan to lease then buy 100 modified refueling planes, a year after Boeing committed to invest up to $20 million in Trireme Partners, a New York venture capital fund in which Perle is a principal.
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Chicago-based Boeing pledged in the middle of last year to invest up to $20 million over eight to 10 years in Trireme Partners, Richard Perle: "Hurry up and give me $2 million."which invests in defense- and homeland security-related technologies. It is one of 29 such investments in cutting-edge technology funds worldwide totaling $250 million, said Anne Eisele, a Boeing spokeswoman. To date, Boeing has invested $2 million in Trireme, she said.
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Boeing said it had briefed Perle on the tanker deal in his capacity as a resident fellow at the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute, a private research group. President Bush, at the institute's annual dinner in February, said it was home to "some of the finest minds in our nation ... at work on some of the greatest challenges to our nation."
Warmonger Perle threatened a lawsuit over Seymour Hersh's exposé on him in the New Yorker, calling him "the closest thing American journalism has to a terrorist," as reported in the WaPo.
Why all the suspicion? Lunching with controversial Saudi-born businessman Adnan Khashoggi and a Saudi industrialist a couple of months before your invasion of Iraq is about to commence would be one clue.
Now with Perle's ties to Boeing suddenly in the spotlight, another pillar of the Bush administration's infrastructure of corruption and conflict of interest is revealed.
American soldiers, reservists, and taxpayers deserve better than this.
