Benador Associates

About

Benador Associates is a public relations firm that was founded by Eleana Benador, the former director of Daniel Pipe's Middle East Forum, a hard-line think thank whose members have urged for wider U.S. intervention in the Middle East. Benador's list of experts reads like a who's who of heavy hitters in the neoconservative advocacy world. Clients include Frank Gaffney, Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen, and James Woolsey.

Wrties journalist Jim Lobe of Benador's work: "When historians look back on the United States war in Iraq, they will almost certainly be struck by how a small group of mainly neo-conservative analysts and activists outside the administration were able to shape the US media debate in ways that made the drive to war so much easier than it might have been. . . . But historians would be negligent if they ignored the day-to-day work of one person who, as much as anyone outside the administration, made their media ubiquity possible. Meet 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." (2)

Also on Benador's client list is Khidhir Hamza, an Iraqi nuclear scientist who fled to the United States in the early 1990s, where he wrote a book claiming that Saddam Hussein had a nuclear bomb. When pressed on the issue, he denied saying that Iraq had a bomb, despite the fact that he says exactly that in his book's opening pages. (3) Says Benador of Hamza (and Iraqi National Congress figure Kanan Makiya), "[They are] really my most powerful voices right now." (2)

Right Web connections

• Eleana Benador, founder/CEO
• Max Boot, speaker
• Hillel Fradkin, speaker
• Frank Gaffney Jr., speaker
• Charles Krauthammer, speaker
• Michael A. Ledeen, speaker
• Richard Perle, speaker
• Richard Pipes, speaker
• Ruth Wedgwood, speaker
• James Woolsey, speaker
• Meyrav Wurmser, speaker

(1) Benador Associates
http://www.benadorassociates.com/

(2) Jim Lobe, "The Andean Condor among the Hawks," Asia Times, August 15, 2003
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/EH15Aa01.html

(3) Catherine Auer, "A View from Inside," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March-April 2001
http://www.thebulletin.org/issues/2001/ma01/ma01reviews.html