Representing the Right

Today we're going to talk some inside baseball. Not to worry, this column is not about America's "national pastime"; "inside baseball" is just an expression. This column actually is about the work of Eleana Benador. She is one of those influential public relations folks who work behind the scenes, managing and massaging the media.

Eleana Benador runs a high-powered media relations and international Speakers bureau called Benador Associates. With offices in New York City, Paris, London, Madrid, and Geneva, she is a woman on a mission. The last time, and I must confess the first time, I heard about her activities was when Brian Whittaker, writing for Britain's The Guardian ("US think tanks give lessons in foreign policy"), described Benador's work promoting a gaggle of spokespeople that support Israel's objectives in the Middle East.

Whitaker's article painstakingly described the coterie of Middle East "experts" -- nurtured by several right-wing, and mostly Washington, DC-based think tanks -- who have come to dominate the public discourse over Middle East policy. (For more, see "Richard Perle's posse".)

This domination has been aided and abetted by the work of Ms. Benador.

An expert booking agent, Ms. Benador succeeds with remarkable ease in getting her clients maximum exposure on cable's talking-head television programs, and in placing their op-ed pieces in a number of the nation's major newspapers.

Ms. Benador represents a constellation of right-wing politicos and conservative think tankers including: Alexander M. Haig, Jr., -- former Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan who currently runs Worldwide Associates, Inc., a company that assists "corporations around the world in providing strategic advice on global political, economic, commercial and security matters"; James Woolsey -- former Director of the Central Intelligence Agency for two years under Bill Clinton and one of the earliest of drum beaters for taking out Saddam Hussein; Richard Perle -- the neoconservative icon who is one of the chief architects of Bush's Middle East policy; Charles Krauthammer -- a regular columnist with the Washington Post who is a "hawk's hawk"; Michael Ledeen -- currently occupying the Freedom Chair at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C.; Frank Gaffney -- founder and president of the Washington, DC-based Center for Security Policy and columnist with the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Washington Times; and Arnaud de Borchgrave -- Senior Adviser and Director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former editor-in-chief of the Washington Times.

Dr. Khidir Hamza

One of Benador's bright new stars is Dr. Khidhir Hamza, the dissident Iraqi nuclear scientist who recently charged that Iraq could have a nuclear bomb within months. According to an article in Britain's The Times (September 16), Dr. Hamza, who was science adviser to the Atomic Energy Establishment and later helped to start and direct Iraq's nuclear bomb program before his 1994 defection, claimed "that Saddam [Hussein] could be in a position to make three nuclear weapons within the next few months, if he has not already done so."

The Times: "Dr. Hamza gave warning that UN inspectors would be useless because even if they were given 'unfettered access' they would find it far more difficult than before to detect the nuclear assembly line. 'The beauty of the present system is that the units are each very small and in the four years since the inspectors left they will have been concealed underground or in basements or buildings that outwardly seem normal,' Dr. Hamza said."

Dr. Hamza testified before Senator Joe Biden's Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearings on Iraq in Washington last August, "but it was only after the recent International Institute for Strategic Studies report on the threat from Saddam," reports The Times, "that he became aware of the West's imperfect understanding of the urgency of the situation."