Right Web

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Founded around the time of the 9/11 terrorist attacks by Eleana Benador, Benador Associates is a speakers bureau-cum-public relations firm whose core clientele consisted of neoconservatives and other proponents of an aggressive "war on terror." Among the firm's more well known speakers have been Frank Gaffney of the Center for Security Policy, former Defense Policy Board chairman Richard Perle, Michael Ledeen and Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute, and former CIA director James Woolsey.

Benador (who sometimes spells her first name "Eliana"), announced in 2007 that Benador Associates would be scaled back in "winter 2007" so that she could focus her efforts on a new endeavor, Benador Public Relations. Benador Associates " will become an independent intellectual platform that will continue posting writings by American and Western thinkers as well as thinkers and writers from other parts of the world, such as the Middle East, Asia, Southeast Asia, etc., while at the same time it will continue to facilitate the access to experts associated in one way or another with Benador Associates" (PR Newswire, November 19, 2007).

In a 2006 expose about Benador, a Swiss-American originally from Peru who had served as director of Daniel Pipes' Middle East Forum, the New York-based magazine Bidoun reported: "Founded, with what Mrs. Benador calls 'serendipity,' on September 10, 2001, Benador Associates has ridden the rising demand for such strident voices. If you read something that advocates regime change in the New York Post, or if you see a 'political adviser' on Fox News suggesting that Israel hasn't gone far enough in its attacks on Hizbullah, there's a good possibility that the appearance has been engineered by Mrs. Benador. She arranges speaking events for her clients, places articles in newspapers for them, and helps them address problems with their public image. Which is good for them, as Mrs. Benador's fifty-plus clients are hardly a lovable bunch. Benador Associates' first member was the late A.M. Rosenthal, an executive editor at the New York Times, and a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, who, in the wake of the attacks on September 11, called for the bombing of the capital cities of Afghanistan, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Syria, and Sudan."

Other commentators have remarked on Eleana Benador's important role in promoting neoconservatives. Wrote Jim Lobe of the Inter Press Service (Asia Times, August 15, 2003): "When historians look back on the United States war in Iraq, they will almost certainly be struck by how a small group of mainly neoconservative analysts and activists outside the administration were able to shape the U.S. 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 neoconservatives 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."

Indeed, in a 2007 press release Benador characterized herself and her firm thusly: "Ms. Benador has been the mastermind behind Benador Associates, which became the centerpiece of the neoconservative movement in the United States and the West in the aftermath of the attacks of September 11" (see "Announcing the Creation ...," Benador Public Relations).

Benador Associates' expert speakers have included Max Boot, Rachel Ehrenfeld, Hillel Fradkin, Charles Krauthammer, Richard Pipes, Dennis Prager, Paul Vallely, and Meyrav Wurmser. One controversial Benador client was 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 (see Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March/April 2001). Said Benador of Hamza and Iraqi National Congress figure Kanan Makiya in 2003: "[They are] really my most powerful voices right now" (Asia Times, August 15, 2003).

Explaining Benador's decision to found a new, supposedly non-political firm, a press release said that "Ms. Benador announced that in view of the uncertain political situation in America, she is to devote her undivided attention to her new public relations outfit" (see "Announcing the Creation ...," Benador Public Relations). The new Benador Public Relations, "whose areas of expertise—with absolute exclusion of politics—will include: international finance, with investment banking and infrastructure projects as the main chapters in that field; international real estate; science and culture," features photos of Benador with Gaffney and Perle.