RICHARD PERLE CAUGHT RUNNING A $100-MILLION `SHEIK-DOWN'

Richard Perle, one of the most outspoken war party figures in and around the Bush Administration, has been caught in a $100-million attempted blackmail ``sheik-down'' of the Saudis, which could land him in jail. As reported in the current issue of The New Yorker, in an expose by Seymour Hersh, Perle met, in Marseille, France, on Jan. 3, 2003, with former Iran-Contra figure Adnan Khashoggi and a second Iraqi-Saudi businessman, and, according to Saudi Ambassador Prince Bandar, offered to call off of his and his fellow neo-con's Saudi-bashing operations, in return for a $100-million payoff ``investment'' in one of his companies, Trireme Partners L.P. Of course, it was Perle who brought the stark-raving loon, Laurent Murawiec, before the Defense Policy Board, on July 10, 2002, to call for the U.S. military occupation of the Saudi oil fields; and it was Perle, again, who later got Murawiec his current job at the Washington office of the Hudson Institute--working under Meyrav Wurmser.

The expose so unnerved the power-mad Perle, that he went berserk, calling Hersh a terrorist, during a Sunday CNN interview with Wolf Blitzer. Two weeks earlier, Perle had been similarly unnerved when Meet the Press host Tim Russert confronted him on his authorship of ``A Clean Break,'' the warplan that he, Doug Feith, David Wurmser, Meyrav Wurmser and others had written for Benjamin Netanyahu in 1996, calling for the invasion of the Palestinian Authority territory and the military overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

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