Eleana Benador
Eleana Benador is a Peruvian-born linguist who acts as a "sort of theatrical agent for experts on the Middle East and terrorism, organizing their TV appearances and speaking engagements." Her clients have included Richard N. Perle, Michael Rubin, David Wurmser, and Laurie Mylroie (author of Saddam Hussein's Unfinished War Against America) and Judith Miller (Saddam Hussein and the Crisis in the Gulf, co-authored with Mylroie), a New York Times journalist.
It is alleged that, of the twenty-eight clients in Benador's "books," at least nine are connected with the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Washington Institute, and the Middle East Forum.
Above paragraphs based on article from The Guardian[1]
"Now Benador's clients are working just as hard to get the U.S. to invade Iran. One of her clients is Amir Taheri, who is a "commentator for CNN." (CNN does not publish a list of commentators, which is extremely suspicious. What are they hiding?) Taheri became infamous this week for writing a bogus story claiming Iran just passed a law requiring Jews to wear yellow stripes." [2]
Biographical Information from Benador Associates web site[3]:
- Eleana Benador, founder and CEO of Benador Associates, Inc., welcomes you to the website of the company she created in 2001, based in New York City.
- Eleana Benador, who is Swiss-American, was born in Lima, Peru. After living most of her life in Europe, Paris, Vienna and Geneva, she moved to the United States. A linguist by nature, Ms Benador studied interpreting and translating at the Sorbonne and the Universite Catholique de Lille. She also studied psychology at the Universidad Nacional Mayor de San Marcos in Lima, Peru, as well as political science in Vienna, Austria, and in Geneva, Switzerland. She is fluent in French, English, German and Spanish, understands and speaks Portuguese, Italian and Dutch, and reads Hebrew and some Russian.
- Ms Benador has also participated in various capacities in some international organizations. She has also worked as an advisor to the Minister of Industry and Tourism of Peru, as an editor of the Peruvian Times, a consultant to Swiss-German Television, and as an advisor to a former mayor of Geneva and to a former Peruvian ambassador to Austria. She provided for a former Peruvian President the first translation into Spanish of a book by former President of France, M. Valery Giscard d'Estaing, "La democratie Francaise." More recently, she has been a consultant to Professor Bezalel Narkiss, and associate director and director in New York City of a Philadelphia think tank.
- Eleana Benador, the Peruvian-born publicist for Perle, Woolsey, Michael Ledeen, Frank Gaffney, and a dozen other prominent neo-conservatives whose hawkish opinions proved very hard to avoid for anyone who watched news talk shows or read the op-ed pages of major newspapers over the past 20 months.
- Also found among her client list are other major war-boosters, including former New York Times executive editor and now New York Daily News columnist, A.M. Rosenthal; Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer; the Council on Foreign Relations's resident imperialist, Max Boot; and Victor Davis Hanson, a blood-and-guts classicist and one of Vice President Dick Cheney's favourite dinner guests.
- Aside from her success in getting her clients distributed all over the television dial at critical moments in the march to war, what is particularly remarkable about Benador is the speed with which she has built what is obviously a thriving business, based on 17 to 18-hour work days, the personal attention she gives to both her clients and her media contacts, and her conviction that what her clients say is true and right.
- In general, I do agree with their views, Benador told IPS during an interview this week in the plush lobby of what is Washington's only grand hotel in the European style, the Willard. So when I represent them, I can really convince another person.
- New York-based Benador Associates is less than two years old, but has a star-studded client roster of 38 people, most of them Middle East specialists.
- Benador estimates that she arranges for her clients each week between 15 and 30 interviews on U.S. and foreign television. In the same period, she places an average of about five op-eds by them in the most influential newspapers, such as the Times, the Post, the Wall Street Journal and the Los Angeles Times. And none of that includes what she considers her main responsibility -- to get her clients influential and, if possible, lucrative speaking engagements.
quoted from Source: Jim Lobe, IPS
