Richard Perle double-crossed friends in favor of global crossing

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 15, 2003

Even Jesus, who urged us to forgive our enemies, didn't make a point of requiring the harder task of forgiving our friends. Conservatives are asking how Richard Perle could have more grossly betrayed his friends George W. Bush and Donald Rumsfeld than by selling his influence or expertise in a matter involving U.S. national security?

* According to the New York Times, Perle was to be paid $725,000 by Global Crossing, including $600,000 if the government approved the sale of a joint venture to Hutchison Whampoa, the international giant based in China that has been linked in testimony to Beijing intelligence. The Pentagon and FBI were balking because this would put Global Crossing's fiber-optics network--used by the U.S. government--under Chinese authority. Perle has resigned as chairman of the Defense Policy Board but remains a member. Dis-gustin'!

* Immunity for crooks? Federal judge Gerald Lynch just ruled that Global Crossing investors who were wiped out when the looted company collapsed last year could not include Bill Clinton among plaintiffs in a shareholder-fraud lawsuit because he had presidential immunity when he allegedly ignored a stock scam and "corruption of Pentagon officials" in return for a $1 million "gift" from Global Crossing Chairman Gary Winnick to Clinton's presidential library.

* Keep an eye on Turkey. MI6 has reported to London that the top military brass in Ankara have been actively considering a coup to prevent further deterioration of the special relationship between Turkey and the United States and the United Kingdom.

* Back when Arab slave traders were grabbing blacks to sell into servitude in the New World, they also were selling Bantu peoples from Malawi, Mozambique and Tanzania into slavery in Somalia. In 1999, some big brain in the Clinton administration agreed to accept 12,000 (that's twelve thousand) of these Muslims as immigrants to the U.S.A. Not only are they a potential terrorist threat, but they are so backward that few ever have seen a kitchen sink or flushed a toilet. They now are in a camp in rural Kenya, being trained to live in U.S. cities to include Boston and San Diego.

* Despite French efforts to sabotage U.S. forces preparing for war with Iraq, the French company Sodexho enjoyed an $881 million contract to manage the food service at all 55 U.S. Marines mess halls in the continental United States.

* A recent favorite on the Internet: You know the world is going crazy when ... the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy and Germany doesn't want to go to war.

* A Hollywood insider says she is waiting for those who voted child rapist Roman Polanski last year's best film director to discover the artistic genius of Hitler's watercolors.

* Wow, Bob Dole is knocking them dead on 60 Minutes! Apparently producer Don Hewett is going for a younger look.

* Call it March Madness if you will, but despite some of the most exciting games in years, the war has been outdrawing NCAA basketball, with cable news up 638 percent by the Sunday after it started.

* Ah, there he is again broadcasting from Baghdad--68-year-old Peter Arnett, the leftwing correspondent who got fired from CNN for his 1998 antimilitary screed falsely claiming the United States used nerve gas in Vietnam in 1970. CNN retracted and apologized for that one, but now he's with MSNBC.

* Leave it to the French, who just have announced colors for four stages of terrorist alerts, making two of them red and scarlet. Hmm. Well, at least they had sufficient self-knowledge to start with yellow.

* Even the Germans are starting to get it. They just arrested a terrorist suspect in whose apartment police found a flight simulator and a computer program called, "Flying Low Over Germany."

* Insiders who have noted that former Clinton national-security adviser Tony Lake now is bleating warnings about the power of Iraqi nationalism are chuckling that it's too bad he never discovered the power of American nationalism.

* The 3rd U.S. Infantry Division is known as the Rock of the Marne, a name it acquired during World War I when, under horrendous attack by the Germans, it held its ground while the French ran.

* American troops who captured the huge Tallel air base south of Baghdad quickly put up a sign renaming it the "George Bush International Airport."

* So how is campaign reform working out for the liberal Democrats who championed it? Since January the Democratic House, Senate and national-campaign committees together have raised less than $10 million, while their Republican counterparts have taken in nearly $39 million.

* And, finally, the insider will miss retired liberal Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) and conservative activist Joseph Coors, both personal friends of long standing. Somehow the mental picture returns of Joe laughing `til his sides ached when Pat was U.S. ambassador to India and word came that the assuredly heterosexual Irishman had won the Pansy Award, a horticultural prize in a competition among embassy gardeners in New Delhi.