Richard Perle
Richard Perle
Richard Norman Perleis an American political advisor, consultant, and lobbyist who began his career in government as a senior staff member to Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson on the Senate Armed Services Committee in the 1970s. Later he was heavily involved with the Reagan administration and served as an assistant Secretary of Defense and also worked on the Defense Policy Board Advisory Committee from 1987 to 2004. He was Chairman of the Board in 2001 under the Bush Administration but eventually...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPublic Servant
Date of Birth16 September 1941
CountryUnited States of America
But even a nation of laws must understand the limits of legalism. Between 1861 and 1865, the government of the United States took tens of thousands of American citizens prisoner and detained them for years without letting any one of them see a lawyer.
Non-citizen terrorist suspects are not members of the American national community, and they have no proper claim on the rights Americans accord one another.
The lax multiculturalism that urges Americans to accept the unacceptable from their fellow citizens is one of this nation's greatest vulnerabilities in the war on terror.
I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing.
Look, he's trying to change an institution that is very set in its ways and that's not easy. You've got some disgruntled former officers. It's no big deal.
We can train Iraqi soldiers to combat insurgencies while respecting human rights, as we have trained armies in the Philippines and Latin America.
France has aligned itself with Saddam -- there's no other way to look at this.
What's the big fuss about preemption? You'd shoot first if someone was planning to shoot you right?
The situation in Bosnia is such that a safe withdrawal of American forces can be made effective. The scale of the problem is now such that it is entirely manageable by the Europeans.
President Chirac has said Saddam Hussein was his friend -- a friend, one of the most brutal dictators in this world?
a formal warning that the agency's enforcement staff has determined that evidence of wrongdoing is sufficient to bring a civil lawsuit.
After 9/11, there was an awakening. The administration has to believe that it's possible to wait too long to deal with a problem, the contours of which could have been seen easily before. Is it safe to do that again?
The problem is the message, ... The message is confused and inconsistent. It posits a problem, but does not provide a convincing solution. Only if the problem and the solution are in balance can they hope to convince a skeptical public.
Nor should we exclude the possibility that Islamic terrorism may begin to make common cause with Western political extremists of the far Left and far Right.