| Author | Message | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Feb 11, 2005 7:12 am Post subject: Elliott Abrams: the Neocon's Neocon |
| Elliott Abrams: the Neocon's Neocon
… Minutes before his State of the Union Address, in which he repeated the promise to answer the call of freedom worldwide, the White House announced that Elliott Abrams would direct the new global democracy campaign as well as overseeing Middle East policy from his perch in the National Security Council.
Elliott Abrams embodies neoconservatism. Perhaps more than any other neoconservative, Abrams has integrated the various influences that have shaped today's neoconservative agenda. A creature of the neoconservative incubator, Abrams is a political intellectual and operative who has advanced the neoconservative agenda with chutzpah and considerable success. …
… Abrams remained an integral part of the tight-knit neoconservative foreign policy community in Washington that revolved around the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Abrams was also a charter member of the Project for the New American Century …
… Elliott Abrams, who has established a close working relationship with Condoleezza Rice, will become the leading administration architect of Middle East policy during the second Bush administration. … the new administration will continue to be guided by neocon notions about the centrality of Israel, the U.S. mission to restructure the Arab world …
http://www.counterpunch.org/barry02092005.html
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Wake up and smell the fascism.
http://www.oldamericancentury.org/14pts.htm
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U.S. Trade Deficit Hits All-Time High In 2004
….For the full year of 2004, the annual trade gap widened more than 24% to a record $617.7 billion, as annual imports hit a record $1.76 trillion, surpassing exports at a record $1.15 trillion. …
http://www.forbes.com/markets/2005/02/10/cx_ab_0210video1.html
Last edited by Alpha on Wed Feb 16, 2005 1:20 pm; edited 1 time in total | |  | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Feb 11, 2005 7:23 am Post subject: Re: Elliott Abrams: the Neocon's Neocon |
| | Alpha wrote: | Elliott Abrams: the Neocon's Neocon
… Minutes before his State of the Union Address, in which he repeated the promise to answer the call of freedom worldwide, the White House announced that Elliott Abrams would direct the new global democracy campaign as well as overseeing Middle East policy from his perch in the National Security Council.
Elliott Abrams embodies neoconservatism. Perhaps more than any other neoconservative, Abrams has integrated the various influences that have shaped today's neoconservative agenda. A creature of the neoconservative incubator, Abrams is a political intellectual and operative who has advanced the neoconservative agenda with chutzpah and considerable success. …
… Abrams remained an integral part of the tight-knit neoconservative foreign policy community in Washington that revolved around the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Abrams was also a charter member of the Project for the New American Century …
… Elliott Abrams, who has established a close working relationship with Condoleezza Rice, will become the leading administration architect of Middle East policy during the second Bush administration. … the new administration will continue to be guided by neocon notions about the centrality of Israel, the U.S. mission to restructure the Arab world …
http://www.counterpunch.org/barry02092005.html
*********************************************************
Wake up and smell the fascism.
http://www.oldamericancentury.org/14pts.htm
*********************************************************
U.S. Trade Deficit Hits All-Time High In 2004
….For the full year of 2004, the annual trade gap widened more than 24% to a record $617.7 billion, as annual imports hit a record $1.76 trillion, surpassing exports at a record $1.15 trillion. …
http://www.forbes.com/markets/2005/02/10/cx_ab_0210video1.html |
The Ambassador of Lies
Elliott Abrams: the Neocon's Neocon
By TOM BARRY
President Bush's Inaugural Address was the sound of the second shoe dropping. Three years ago the president shocked the world with the announcement of the U.S. government's new doctrine of preventive war and global military engagement. Last month he proclaimed that U.S. power and influence had a soft side. Along with use of our military might, the U.S. government was committing the American people to an international campaign to promote freedom and democracy.
Minutes before his State of the Union Address, in which he repeated the promise to answer the call of freedom worldwide, the White House announced that Elliott Abrams would direct the new global democracy campaign as well as overseeing Middle East policy from his perch in the National Security Council.
Elliott Abrams embodies neoconservatism. Perhaps more than any other neoconservative, Abrams has integrated the various influences that have shaped today's neoconservative agenda. A creature of the neoconservative incubator, Abrams is a political intellectual and operative who has advanced the neoconservative agenda with chutzpah and considerable success.
As a government official, Abrams organized front groups to provide private and clandestine official support for the Nicaraguan Contras; served as the president of an ethics institute despite his own record of lying to Congress and managing illegal operations; rose to high positions in the National Security Council to oversee U.S. foreign policy in regions where he had no professional experience, only ideological positions; proved himself as a political intellectual in books and essays that explore the interface between orthodox Judaism, American culture, and political philosophy; and demonstrated his considerable talents in public diplomacy as a political art in the use of misinformation and propaganda to ensure public and policy support for foreign relations agendas that would otherwise be soundly rejected.
Abrams has moved back and forth between government and the right's web of think tanks and policy institutes, holding positions as a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), advisory council member of the American Jewish Committee, and charter member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Abrams has maintained close ties with the Social Democrats/USA, the network of right-wing social democrats and former Trotskyites who became the most vocal of the self-described "democratic globalists" within the neocon camp in the 1990s.
His family ties have helped propel Abrams into the center of neoconservatism's inner circles over the past few decades. In 1980 he joined one of the two reigning families of neoconservatism through his marriage to Rachel Decter, one of Midge Decter's two daughters from her first marriage. As a member of the Podhoretz-Decter clan, Abrams became a frequent contributor to Commentary and Norman Podhoretz's choice to direct the magazine's symposiums on foreign policy. As one of the leading neocons in the Reagan administration, Abrams also served as a liaison between government and the right wing's network, as exemplified by his appearances at the forums organized by Midge Decter's Committee for the Free World in the 1980s.
Emblematic of Abrams' visceral right-wing politics was his statement following the murder of John Lennon in December 1980. Setting the tone for the cultural and political backlash that would soon dominate U.S. politics, Abrams complained publicly about all the media attention given the famous singer: "I'm sorry, but John Lennon was not that important a figure in our times...Why is his death getting more attention than Elvis Presley's? Because Lennon is perceived as a left-wing figure politically, anti-establishment, a man of social conscience with concern for the poor. And, therefore, he is being made into a great figure. Too much has been made of his life. It does not deserve a full day's television and radio coverage. I'm sick of it."
Abrams as Anti-Communist Gladiator
As an aide to Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson in the 1970s, Abrams began his political career mixing the soft and hard sides of the neoconservative agenda¬as both a proponent of Jackson's strategically driven human rights policies and as an advocate of his proposals to boost the military-industrial complex. Through Jackson, Abrams became involved in a group of Cold Warriors called the Coalition for a Democratic Majority, which was associated with the Democratic Party and led by the neoconservatives.
Among former members of Jackson's staff to find positions in the Reagan administration's foreign policy team were such neoconservative operatives as Paul Wolfowitz, Richard Perle, Frank Gaffney, Charles Horner, and Ben Wattenberg. Other Jackson Democrats who secured appointments in the Reagan administration included Jeane Kirkpatrick, as UN ambassador, and neoconservatives on her staff, such as Joshua Muravchik, Steven Munson (like Abrams a Podhoretz-Decter son-in-law), Carl Gershman, and Kenneth Adelman.
Abrams joined the neocon exodus from the Democratic Party in the late 1970s led by members of the Committee on the Present Danger and the Coalition for a Democratic Majority. His first position in the Reagan administration was director of the State Department's Office for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. But he was appointed only after Reagan's first choice came under fire in the Senate.
During the Reagan years, the neocon human rights program was a velvet glove tailored for the iron fist side of foreign and military policy. During the Reagan administration, Abrams was at once a human rights advocate, a manager of clandestine operations, and a bagman for the Nicaraguan contras¬calling himself "a gladiator" in the cause of freedom.
Crimes and Misdemeanors
Although he entered the Reagan administration scandal-free, he left as a convicted criminal. Abrams, who entered the administration as its human rights chief and in 1985 became assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, was indicted by the Iran-Contra special prosecutor for intentionally deceiving Congress about the administration's role in supporting the Contras, including his own central role in the Iran-Contra arms deal.
The U.S.-backed and organized Contras were spearheading a counterrevolution against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Congress had prohibited U.S. government military support for the Contras because of their pattern of human rights abuses. Abrams pleaded guilty to two lesser offenses (including withholding information from Congress) to avoid a trial and a possible jail term.
Abrams and five other Iran-Contra figures were pardoned by President George H.W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992, shortly before the senior Bush left office. By pardoning Abrams, John Poindexter, and other former Reagan officials, Bush was in effect protecting himself. At that time media and congressional investigations of Iran-Contra scandal were threatening to expose the role of Bush himself, who was Reagan's vice president during the executive branch's program of illegal support to the Nicaraguan Contras.
During the Reagan administration, Abrams was the government's nexus between the militarists in the National Security Council and the public-diplomacy operatives in the State Department, White House, and National Endowment for Democracy (NED). Abrams worked closely with Otto Reich, who directed the White House's Office of Public Diplomacy, which was in charge of disseminating "white propaganda" to the U.S. public, media, and policymakers to build support for the Reagan administration's interventionist policies in Latin America and elsewhere.
Abrams in the 1990s
After Reagan left office in 1989, Abrams, like a number of other prominent neoconservatives, was not invited to serve in the Bush Sr. administration. Instead, he worked for a number of think tanks and in 1996 became president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. With EPPC as his new base, Abrams wrote widely on foreign policy issues, especially on Middle East policy, and on cultural issues, including about the threats posed by U.S. secular society to Jewish identity.
Created in 1976, EPPC was the first neocon institute to break ground in the frontal attack on the secular humanists. For nearly three decades, EPPC has functioned as the cutting edge of the neoconservative-driven culture war against progressive theology and secularism, and the associated effort to ensure right-wing control of the Republican Party. It explicitly sought to unify the Christian right with the neoconservative religious right, which was mostly made up of agnostics back then. A central part of its political project was to "clarify and reinforce the bond between the Judeo-Christian moral tradition and the public debate over domestic and foreign policy." Directed by Elliott Abrams from 1996-2001, EPPC counts among its board members well connected figures in the neocon matrix including Jeane Kirkpatrick, Richard Neuhaus, and Mary Ann Glendon.
Abrams remained an integral part of the tight-knit neoconservative foreign policy community in Washington that revolved around the American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Abrams was also a charter member of the Project for the New American Century, which issued its statement of principles about the need for a "neo-Reaganite" foreign policy in 1997.
Elliott Abrams, when serving as EPPC president, said that human rights should be a "policy tool" of the U.S. government. Working closely with Newt Gingrich and the Republican Congress, EPPC together with the Christian Coalition and Family Research Council lobbied for the creation of a new permanent commission that focused on religious persecution. The main countries of concern listed in the congressional deliberations were China, Sudan, North Korea, Cuba, Laos, Saudi Arabia, and Indonesia, as well as general condemnation of Muslim nations. Abrams became a founding member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom and served as its chairman until mid-2001, when he joined the Bush administration.
Regarding Abrams's biased stance on Middle East affairs, Dr. Laila al-Marayati, a former member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, wrote: "From the vantage point of the [U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom], as an American and as a Muslim, I had the unfortunate opportunity of witnessing¬clearly and unequivocally¬the deep bias that Abrams brings to his new position. ...As chairman of the commission at the time, Abrams led the delegation to Egypt and Saudi Arabia, but did not go to Jerusalem with three of us as he was of the opinion that there are no problems with religious freedom in Israel that would warrant the attention of the commission. ...Bypassing Israel was not the only way Abrams undermined the Commission's visit to the Middle East. ...Abrams managed to snub the leading Islamic cleric in Egypt... which nearly created a diplomatic nightmare that was only narrowly averted by the intervention of the U.S. ambassador."
The New Freedom Fighter
Since Bush's reelection in early November, Abrams has become one of the administration's most high-profile officials. He has acted as Bush's envoy to Europe and Israel as part of the administration's new attention to the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Abrams participated in an hour-plus meeting in the Oval Office with the president and Natan Sharansky, Israel's minister for Jerusalem and diaspora affairs. Sharansky, the author of The Case for Freedom, subsequently met with Rice. Both Bush and Rice have repeatedly referred to Sharansky's book in their pronouncements about the U.S. government's new commitment to ending tyranny and spreading democracy, frequently using the same phrasing as Abransky.
Also in November, Abrams arranged conference calls with the leaders of the major national Jewish American organizations in advance of formal meetings with Rice. Last week, Abrams traveled to Israel and met with Ariel Sharon's top adviser Dov Weisglass to smooth the way for Secretary of State's visit with Prime Minister Sharon.
After the scandals involving neoconservatives in the late 1980s and the end of the cold war, many foreign policy observers wrote off the neoconservatives as a spent force. The same dismissal of the enduring influence of the neoconservative camp became widespread among pundits and analysts when the Iraq invasion proved a quagmire rather than a liberation "cakewalk."
It's likely that Elliott Abrams, who has established a close working relationship with Condoleezza Rice, will become the leading administration architect of Middle East policy during the second Bush administration. Like the Middle East policy of the first administration, the regional initiatives of the new administration will continue to be guided by neocon notions about the centrality of Israel, the U.S. mission to restructure the Arab world, and the use of public diplomacy gloss of spreading freedom and democracy to advance U.S. national security strategy.
Tom Barry is policy director of the International Relations Center, online at www.irc-online.org He is the author of books on U.S. economic aid including The Soft War: Uses and Abuses of U.S. Economic Aid in Central America (Grove Press). | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Feb 12, 2005 3:35 pm Post subject: Liberals and Neocons: Together Again |
| The neoconservative Project for the New American Century (PNAC) has signaled its intention to continue shaping the government's national security strategy with a new public letter stating that the "U.S. military is too small for the responsibilities we are asking it to assume." Rather than reining in the imperial scope of U.S. national security strategy as set forth by the first Bush administration, PNAC and the letter's signatories call for increasing the size of America's global fighting machine.
The Jan. 28 PNAC letter advocates that House and Senate leaders take the necessary steps "to increase substantially the size of the active duty Army and Marine Corps."
Joining the neocons in the letter to congressional leaders were a group of prominent liberals – giving some credence to PNAC's claim that the "call to act" to increase the total number of U.S. ground forces counts on bipartisan support.
After an initial spate of public pronouncements after 9/11 and during the onset of the Iraq occupation, the Project for the New American Century is again positioning itself as the policy institute that will set the second Bush administration's security agenda. Although PNAC's 1997 statement of principles included only prominent right-wing figures – many of whom later joined the first-term Bush administration – the neocon policy institute has repeatedly reached out to liberals to give its public letters to the Congress and the president the gloss of bipartisanship.
Its new call for congressional leaders to increase overall U.S. troop levels includes endorsement of key liberal analysts. Among the signatories are the leading foreign policy analysts at the Brookings Institution and the Progressive Policy Institute, which are closely associated with the Democratic Party. The endorsees of the letter are largely neoconservatives who are principals in such neocon-led institutes as PNAC, American Enterprise Institute (AEI), Foundation for the Defense of Democracies, and the Center for Security Policy. However, this call for a larger expeditionary force was also signed by prominent liberal hawks, including Michael O'Hanlon, Ivo Daalder, James Steinberg, and Will Marshall – all of whom have signed previous PNAC letters and policy statements.
Support for a "Generational Commitment" in Middle East
PNAC's "Letter to Congress on Increasing U.S. Ground Forces" endorses Secretary of State Rice's assessment that U.S. military engagement in the Middle East is a "generational commitment." To meet that commitment, the PNAC signatories call on Congress to fulfill its constitutional obligation to raise and support military forces – which they say means increasing the number of ground forces by at least 25,000 troops annually over the next several years.
PNAC, which has repeatedly called for increases in the military budget and for military-backed "regime change" around the world, is concerned that the "United States military is too small for the responsibilities we are asking it to assume." The neoconservative policy institute, which produced the blueprint for the national security strategy of the first Bush administration, echoes the recent assertion by the chief of the Army Reserve that the "overuse" of U.S. ground forces in Iraq and Afghanistan could be result in a "broken force."
Given that the military's reenlistment rates are declining and recruitment goals are not being met, PNAC's call for Congress to increase troop levels implies either reintroducing the draft or dramatically increasing the pay for volunteer enlistees. The latter option would in effect create a global mercenary force deployed to meet the new responsibilities of preventive war, regime change, and political restructuring of the Middle East.
Liberal Hawks Fly with the Neocons
The recent PNAC letter to Congress was not the first time that PNAC or its associated front groups, such as the Coalition for the Liberation of Iraq, have included hawkish Democrats.
Two PNAC letters in March 2003 played to those Democrats who believed that the invasion was justified at least as much by humanitarian concerns as it was by the purported presence of weapons of mass destruction. PNAC and the neocon camp had managed to translate their military agenda of preemptive and preventive strikes into national security policy. With the invasion underway, they sought to preempt those hardliners and military officials who opted for a quick exit strategy in Iraq. In their March 19 letter, PNAC stated that Washington should plan to stay in Iraq for the long haul: "Everyone – those who have joined the coalition, those who have stood aside, those who opposed military action, and, most of all, the Iraqi people and their neighbors – must understand that we are committed to the rebuilding of Iraq and will provide the necessary resources and will remain for as long as it takes."
Along with such neocon stalwarts as Robert Kagan, Bruce Jackson, Joshua Muravchik, James Woolsey, and Eliot Cohen, a half-dozen Democrats were among the 23 individuals who signed PNAC's first letter on postwar Iraq. Among the Democrats were Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution and a member of Clinton's National Security Council staff; Martin Indyk, Clinton's ambassador to Israel; Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute and Democratic Leadership Council; Dennis Ross, Clinton's top adviser on the Israel-Palestinian negotiations; and James Steinberg, Clinton's deputy national security adviser and head of foreign policy studies at Brookings. A second post-Iraq war letter by PNAC on March 28 called for broader international support for reconstruction, including the involvement of NATO, and brought together the same Democrats with the prominent addition of another Brookings' foreign policy scholar, Michael O'Hanlon.
In late 2002 PNAC's Bruce Jackson formed the Committee for the Liberation of Iraq that brought together such Democrats as Senator Joseph Lieberman; former Senator Robert Kerrey, the president of the New School University who now serves on the 9/11 Commission; PPI's Will Marshall; and former U.S. Representative Steve Solarz. The neocons also reached out to Democrats through a sign-on letter to the president organized by the Social Democrats/USA, a neocon institute that has played a critical role in shaping the National Endowment for Democracy in the early 1980s and in mobilizing labor support for an interventionist foreign policy.
The liberal hawks not only joined with the neocons to support the war and the postwar restructuring but have published their own statements in favor of what is now widely regarded as a morally bankrupt policy agenda. Perhaps the clearest articulation of the liberal hawk position on foreign and military policy is found in an October 2003 report by the Progressive Policy Institute, which is a think tank closely associated with the Democratic Leadership Council. The report, entitled Progressive Internationalism: A Democratic National Security Strategy, endorsed the invasion of Iraq, "because the previous policy of containment was failing," and Saddam Hussein's government was "undermining both collective security and international law."
PPI President Will Marshall said that the progressive internationalism strategy draws "a sharp distinction between this mainstream Democratic strategy for national security and the far left's vision of America's role in the world. In this document we take issue with those who begrudge the kind of defense spending that we think is necessary to meet our needs, both at home and abroad; with folks who seem to reflexively oppose the use of force; and who seem incapable of taking America's side in international disputes." Among the other liberal hawks who contributed to the Progressive Internationalism report were Bob Kerrey; Larry Diamond of the Hoover Institution and the National Endowment for Democracy; and Michael McFaul of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
The repeated willingness of influential liberal leaders and foreign policy analysts, such as Marshall, O'Hanlon, and Daalder, to join forces with the neoconservative camp has bolstered PNAC's claim that its foreign policy agenda is neither militarist nor imperialist but one that is based on a deep respect for human rights, democracy, and universal moral values. Other liberal hawks signing the recent PNAC letter include New Republic editor Peter Beinart; Steven Nider, director of security studies at the Progressive Policy Institute; James Steinberg, director of Brooking's foreign policy studies program and former director of the State Department's Policy Planning office during the Clinton administration; Craig Kennedy, president of the German Marshall Fund and former program officer at the Joyce Foundation; and Michelle Flournoy, a self-described "pro-defense Democrat" who is a member of the Aspen Strategy Group and served in the Clinton administration in the DOD's strategy secretariat. Having Yale historian Paul Kennedy, the author of The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, sign the new letter was a major coup for PNAC.
Not surprising is the list of neocons signing PNAC's new letter. In addition to PNAC's founders William Kristol and Robert Kagan, other PNAC principals included as signatories were its deputy director Daniel McKivergan, executive director Gary Schmitt, military strategist Thomas Donnelly, Middle East associate Reuel Marc Gerecht; and board members Bruce Jackson and Randy Scheunemann. Signatories from the closely associated American Enterprise Institute include Daniel Blumenthal, Joshua Muravchik, Danielle Pletka, and Elliot Cohen. Other neocon luminaries among the 34 signatories include pundit Max Boot; Clifford May, executive director of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies; and Frank Gaffney, founder of the Center for Security Policy.
One striking difference marking the new PNAC letter was its inclusion of several high-ranking retired military officers, including Gen. Barry McCaffrey, former SouthCom commander and Drug Czar, and Lt. Gen. Buster Glosson, who directed air strategy during the Gulf War.
Mugging and Hugging
Irving Kristol, known as the "godfather of neoconservatism," famously defined neoconservatives as "liberals who have been mugged by reality." That political mugging occurred in the late 1960s and early 1970s with the rise of the counterculture, the antiwar movement, and progressive New Politics of the Democratic Party.
Former Trotskyite militants and Cold War liberals like Kristol, Norman Podhoretz, and Midge Decter switched their loyalties to the Republican Party. The "reality" that mugged the neocons was the progressive turn in the Democratic Party led by such figures as Jesse Jackson, Bella Abzug, George McGovern, and Jimmy Carter. In contrast, the neoconservatives found the militant anticommunism and social conservatism of the Ronald Reagan faction in the Republican Party invigorating. In the neocon lexicon, liberalism became synonymous with secularism, women's liberation, anti-Americanism, and appeasement.
Over the past quarter century, the neocons have sought, with increasing success, to rid the Republican Party of its isolationists, its anti-imperialists, and its realists. The younger neocons, such as William Kristol (son of Irving) and Elliott Abrams (son-in-law of Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter), have promoted a new right-wing internationalism that holds that America should be both a global cop and a global missionary for freedom.
Traditional conservatives and Republican Party realists say that the neocons' foreign policy agenda is, respectively, neo-imperialist and unrealistic about the capacity of U.S. military power to remake the world. Apart from their militarist friends in the Pentagon and defense industries, the neocons are finding that their closest ideological allies are the internationalists in the liberal camp. Having recuperated from their mugging, the neocons are now reaching out to liberals who share their idealism about America's global mission. To the delight of the neocons at PNAC and AEI, an influential group of liberal hawks share their vision of a U.S. grand strategy that will create a world order based on U.S. military supremacy and America's presumed moral superiority.
http://www.antiwar.com/orig/barry.php?articleid=4799
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The Expulsion of the Palestinians, 1947-1948 - http://www.robincmiller.com/pales2.htm
News - http://www.astandforjustice.org | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Sat Feb 12, 2005 9:59 pm Post subject: Democracy According to Elliott Abrams |
| Forwarded:
War is Peace; Slavery is Freedom
Democracy According to Elliott Abrams
By LARRY BIRNS
02/11/05 "ICH" - - Why has an admitted perjurer, a facilitator of death squads and an arms broker to Islamic terrorists just been appointed to be deputy national security adviser to President Bush?
It's tough to think of anything more "un-American" and less reflective of traditional family values than lying to Congress about illegal U.S. arm sales to a CIA-created band of murderous rightwing terrorists known as the Contras, and sticking up for death squads. Also, can one defend selling arms to Islamic terrorists by claiming that waging the Cold War sometimes required subscribing to the thesis that the end justifies the means? Given that Elliott Abrams managed to commit all the derelictions cited above, one might think that there was sufficient reason to prevent his name from being associated with the word "democracy." However, it appears that the Bush administration, as was the case of its appointing a known human rights violator like U.S. Ambassador to Iraq John Negroponte (when he was the ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s), rewards those who offer the White House their blood-soaked resumes.
On February 2, the White House announced that Abrams was being appointed to the number two position on the National Security Council, where he "will be responsible for pushing Bush's strategy for advancing democracy." In terms of the outrageous, one could compare this to appointing Pinochet or Kissinger to head the inquiry into Chile's human rights record during the general's dictatorial rule, or Saddam's conversion to the Quaker faith.
A brief review of his more notorious exploits will show that no one in the president's neocon inventory would be a less appropriate candidate than Abrams to be the overseer of global democratization and to make certain that "freedom's on the march." Needless to say, he was once again given a job at his present agency, the National Security Council, which would thus not require the all-but impossible achievement of being confirmed by the Senate, a body that is well aware of his blighted record.
In 1991, Abrams plead guilty to two misdemeanor counts for perjury after providing false information to Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal. Concerning death squads, he remains unrepentant regarding the role he played in the 1980s for facilitating lethal militant aid to these U.S.- sanctioned murderers of civilians. They operated throughout Central America and were responsible for the thousands of atrocities committed by the aforementioned Nicaraguan Contras and by the Salvadoran military. As for assisting Islamic terrorists, Abrams was directly involved, along with Colonel Oliver North, in the sale of arms to Iranian terrorists in exchange for the release of hostages being held by Tehran.
Given that Bush knew about Mr. Abrams' sordid personal history, including that it was his own father who pardoned Abrams for his crimes, does the President really believe that selling arms to terrorists in "axis of evil" countries and promoting democracy abroad is not somewhat of a contradiction?
Larry Birns is director of the Council on Hemispheric Affairs.
_________________
"We must use terror, assassination, intimidation, land confiscation, and the cutting of all social services to rid the Galilee of its Arab population." David Ben-Gurion, May 1948.
ISRAELI'S MUST ASSIMILATE FOR WORLD PEACE! | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Wed Feb 16, 2005 7:06 am Post subject: More on Zionist Neocon Elliott Abrams |
| More on Zionist Neocon Elliott Abrams
Forwarded:
Originally Posted by XXXXXX
Here's another one of their buddies who's taking over for Douglas Feith:
Elliot Abrams
SILVER CITY, New Mexico, Feb 14 (IPS) - Elliott Abrams, a figure from the Ronald Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal who describes himself as a ”neo-conservative and neo-Reaganite”, is moving to centre-stage in U.S. foreign policy as head of President George W.. Bush's Global Democracy Strategy..
Excellent post. It gives a real bird's eye view of what is going on. What is shocking (or I guess not so shocking) is how little air time exposure of this neat little cabal gets. The conflicts of interest that Douglas Feith had working as the Undersecretary for Defense Policy and the shadow government he helped create, The Office for Special Plans, was really appalling. His law firm Feith Zell is allied with Israel based Zell Goldberg, which owns interest in Franz International Group. Franz International holds reconstruction contracts in Iraq. So, the Office for Special plans cooks up the policy to push an invasion in Iraq and Feith profits from contracts on the backs of our bloody sons and daughters..literally. I don't remember the source of this but if you are interested it is in a previous post of mine. You can search jonseven and Douglas Feith.
http://www.libertyforum.org/showfla...b=&o=&part=&vc=
That's where I picked it up...
Here's a place to get tons more info on Abrams...
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/cgi-binn/htsearch | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Thu Feb 17, 2005 12:53 am Post subject: Oh No!, Elliot Abrams is back, Tom Barry |
| Oh No!, Elliot Abrams is back, Tom Barry
Fallen Hawk Soars Again
by Tom Barry
February 16, 2004
by Tom Barry
Elliott Abrams, a figure from the Ronald Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal who describes himself as a "neoconservative and neo-Reaganite," is moving to center stage in U.S. foreign policy as head of President George W. Bush's Global Democracy Strategy.
In his new position, Abrams will oversee the administration's promotion of democracy and human rights while continuing to provide oversight to the National Security Council's directorate of Near East and North African affairs – including involvement in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
Although not known as a regional specialist, Abrams has frequently voiced his strong support for Israel's Likud party positions on the Oslo peace process and "land for peace" negotiations.
After the launch of the al-Aqsa Intifada in late September 2000, Abrams lambasted mainstream Jewish groups for their continued support of peace talks between the Palestinian Authority and for their call to Israel to halt its attacks.
During the first George H.W. Bush administration, the White House kept Abrams out of the public limelight. When he was appointed to the National Security Council (NSC), first as chief human rights officer and then as the NSC's senior director of Near East and North Africa Affairs, the White House told the media that Abrams was unavailable for interviews.
There is less reticence this time around. Even before just-departed Secretary of State Colin Powell started clearing his desk in Foggy Bottom, Abrams was hitting the road last November in Europe to promote the Sharon-Bush plan to resolve what he calls the "Israel-Arab" conflict.
Also in November, Abrams participated in an hour-plus meeting in the Oval Office with the president and Natan Sharansky, Israel's minister for Jerusalem and diaspora affairs.
Sharansky's book, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, has found favor with both Bush and new Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, who have repeatedly referred it in their pronouncements about the U.S. government's new commitment to ending tyranny and spreading democracy.
The Israeli minister's connection to Abrams and other neoconservatives dates back to the mid-1970s when Sharansky worked closely with Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, a Washington State Democrat and the Senate's most vocal supporter of Israel and Soviet Jewry.
Abrams has long rejected the peace process in the Middle East as a policy of appeasement. His Likudnik positions on Israeli-Palestinian tensions and Middle East restructuring are well established in his writings in the neocon magazine Commentary and his books.
Abrams authored the chapter on the Middle East in the 2000 blueprint for U.S. foreign policy by the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Edited by PNAC founders William Kristol and Robert Kagan, Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy is a chapter-by-chapter playbook on how to deal with America's current and future adversaries.
In his chapter on the Middle East, Abrams laid out the "peace through strength" credo that has become the operating principle of the Bush administration. "Our military strength and willingness to use it will remain a key factor in our ability to promote peace," wrote Abrams.
"Strengthening Israel, our major ally in the region, should be the central core of U.S. Middle East policy, and we should not permit the establishment of a Palestinian state that does not explicitly uphold U.S. policy in the region," Abrams asserted.
Following the February 2001 election of the Likud party's Ariel Sharon as Israel's new prime minister, Abrams wrote that Sharon embodied a new approach "of firmness and resistance to violence or the threat of violence." He likened the return of Sharon to head the Israel government as similar to the return of Winston Churchill to government when Great Britain's survival was threatened.
Abrams has moved back and forth between government and the right's web of think tanks and policy institutes, holding positions as a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), advisory council member of the American Jewish Committee, and charter member of PNAC.
He has also maintained close ties with the Social Democrats/USA, the network of right-wing social democrats and former Trotskyites who became the most vocal of the self-described "democratic globalists" within the neocon camp in the 1990s.
By the end of the 1970s, he abandoned the Democrats and in 1981 became the director of State Department's Office of Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs.
During the Reagan years, the executive branch's human rights program was a velvet glove tailored for the iron fist side of foreign and military policy. In his position as human rights director and later as chief of Latin America policy, Abrams was at once a human rights advocate, a manager of clandestine operations, and a bagman for the Nicaraguan contras – calling himself "a gladiator" in the cause of freedom.
Although he entered the Reagan administration scandal-free, he left as a convicted criminal. Abrams, who in 1985 became the administration's assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, was indicted by the Iran-Contra special prosecutor for intentionally deceiving Congress about the administration's role in supporting the Contras, including his own central role in the Iran-Contra arms deal.
Abrams pleaded guilty to two lesser offenses (including withholding information from Congress) to avoid a trial and a possible jail term. He and five other Iran-Contra figures were pardoned by President George H.W. Bush on Christmas Eve 1992, shortly before the senior Bush left office.
Central to Abrams' neoconservative philosophy – and his perspective on the objectives of U.S. foreign policy – are his own religious and Zionist convictions.
In his private writing and nongovernmental policy advocacy work, Abrams has described radical separatist and segregationist leanings. He believes, for example, that Jews shouldn't date or attend school with non-Jews.
"Outside the land of Israel," says Abrams, "there can be no doubt that Jews, faithful to the covenant between God and Abraham, are to stand apart from the nation in which they live. It is the very nature of being Jewish to be apart – except in Israel – from the rest of the population."
Judaism, according to Abrams, demands "apartness" – not in the sense of confining oneself to a physical ghetto, but in that all necessary measures should be taken to prevent "prolonged and intimate exposure to non-Jewish culture."
Abrams takes care to note that his positions imply no "disloyalty" to the United States, but at the same time he insists that Jews must be loyal to Israel because they "are in a permanent covenant with God and with the land of Israel and its people. Their commitment will not weaken if the Israeli government pursues unpopular policies."
Abrams describes himself as a "somewhat observant Conservative Jew" in his controversial book, Faith and Fear: How Jews Can Survive in Christian America.
Unlike Condoleezza Rice, Abrams is not commonly regarded as being a Bush or Republican Party loyalist. Rather, over the past three decades he has established his credentials as an influential right-wing ideologue – one who has effectively put his own ideas about religion, human rights, democracy, and U.S. power to work both as a leading figure the world of neoconservative policy institutes and as a skilled foreign policy operative.
Abrams is equally comfortable in using military intervention, human rights advocacy, democratization programs, and backdoor illegal channels as instruments to advance a neoconservative foreign policy agenda.
Tom Barry is policy director of the Interhemispheric Resource Center (IRC).
http://www.lewrockwell.com/orig4/barry-tom7.html | | | | Alpha | | Posted: Fri Feb 18, 2005 8:13 am Post subject: Coming Soon to the United States? Plan Condor, the Sequel |
| Just saw the following at http://www.whatreallyhappened.com
Coming Soon to the United States? Plan Condor, the Sequel
It may seem strange now that Elliot Abrams and John Negroponte would have facilitated Argentinian fascists (who refined their torment of Jewish victims back in Buenos Aires by torturing them beneath portraits of Adolf Hitler). But Abrams and Negroponte did just that. Argentinian officers trained members of the Honduran army in techniques of mass repression while John Negroponte was ambassador in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa from 1981 to 1985. There he worked closely with Honduran armed forces chief Gustavo Alvarez Martinez to impose a "national security" state on the Argentine model – that is, a police state based on extra-judicial murder. As US ambassador in Honduras, John Negroponte displayed cynical contempt for US Congress and legitimacy, shamelessly violating the 1983 Boland Amendment restricting aid to the Contra. On Negroponte's recommendation, the Reagan government gave Alvarez Martinez the Legion of Merit in 1983 for "encouraging democracy." Alvarez Martinez was reponsible for disappearing over 140 trades unionists, students and other leaders of the Honduran popular movement between 1981 and 1984. In 1989, in a test case, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights convicted Honduras of forcibly disappearing four people between 1981 and 1983. During that period, under Negroponte's proconsulship, Argentinian and Israeli terrorists helped the Honduran military refine their techniques of repression.
Posted Feb 17, 2005 04:18 PM PST
Category: ISRAEL
http://www.doublestandards.org/solo5.html
Coming Soon to the United States? Plan Condor, the Sequel
by Toni Solo
28 September 2003
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When Shimon Peres celebrated his 80th birthday on September 22nd, there at the top of the guest list, ahead of Bill Clinton, Mikhail Gorbachev, South Africa's F.W. De Klerk, and Australia's Bob Hawke was Carlos Bulgheroni. Bulgheroni is head of the Argentinian energy company Bridas. [1] If terrorism cropped up in their conversation, Bulgheroni and Peres had plenty to reminisce about. Israel and Argentina served as US proxies training terrorists in Central America through the 1970s and 1980s.
Argentinian death squad trainers based in Guatemala were reported to have masqueraded as Bridas employees. During that time Peres served as Israel's Defence Minister, Prime Minister, deputy Prime Minister and Foreign Minister – well aware of Israeli military commitments in the Americas. Reviewing the background to US sponsored Argentinian and Israeli terrorism reveals how the fictional "war on terror" is just another pretext for the pillage of Latin America by the US government and its favoured multinational corporations.
Argentina – 30,000 reasons to cry
Three years after destroying democracy by instigating the military coup against Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973, Henry Kissinger was in Santiago for a meeting of the Organization of American States. There he met the Argentinian military junta's foreign minister. According to Robert Hill, then U.S. Ambassador in Argentina, "Kissinger asked how long it would take ... to clean up the (terrorist) problem....Kissinger gave the Argentines the green light ... The Secretary wanted Argentina to finish its terrorist plan before year end." [2] Hill should know. It was he who served as intermediary between organizers of the Guatemalan death squads and leading figures in the Argentinian government. [3]
Between 1976 and 1983, under the military dictatorship, the Argentinian armed forces killed over 30,000 civilian members of the country's political opposition. Around 500 babies of women who gave birth in detention were distributed among their parents' murderers. In over 300 camps and detention centres, victims were tortured to death and then dumped in mass graves or flown out to be dropped into the Atlantic from military transport planes. Their property and goods were divided up among their torturers and murderers – over US$70m worth.
Plan Condor – some history
US determination to destroy opposition to its domination in Latin America stemmed from its defeat in Vietnam. The 1972 team in Paris helping Kissinger negotiate with the Vietnamese included current US ambassador to the UN, John Negroponte, and Vernon Walters, later a key adviser to Ronald Reagan, then Army Attache at the U.S. Embassy in Paris. In those days George Bush Sr. was ambassador to the UN.
By 1975 Bush Sr. was head of the CIA and working together with Kissinger and Vernon Walters to develop Plan Condor – a coordinated operation against opposition movements throughout Latin America. [4] Plan Condor involved using illegal covert means such as the assassination team coordinated between the Chilean DIN security service and Miami Cuban terrorists like Orlando Bosch, Guillermo Novo and Luis Posada Carriles. [5] It also meant supporting brutal government policies of mass repression in countries throughout South America. Plan Condor was an ambitious and successful attempt to coordinate that repression.
Plan Condor moves to the Isthmus
By 1980, the priorities for President Reagan's Latin American team were to defeat the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, stop the revolutionary movements in Guatemala and El Salvador and to wipe out the popular movment in Honduras. By the end of 1981 many now familiar people were in place. Elliot Abrams (now Senior Director for Near East and North African Affairs on the National Security Council) was Assistant Secretary of State for, incredibly, human rights and humanitarian affairs. John Negroponte was ambassador to Honduras and John Maisto ambassador to Nicaragua. John Poindexter, Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, Otto Reich, Roger Noriega, all worked on Latin America under Reagan. All were brought back into the White House by George W. Bush after the Republican packed Supreme Court effectively validated the Florida voting fraud in the 2000 US presidential elections.[6]
Early in 1980, Argentinian army and naval officers arrived in Guatemala to provide counterinsurgency training for the Lucas Garcia regime. Together with advisers from Chile and Israel they assisted the Guatemalan death squads, originally created by the CIA in the 1960s. An estimated 200,000 people were killed by the Guatemalan military during the long popular resistance to that country's US supported dictatorships. In August 1981, the deputy director of the CIA, Vernon Walters, arranged a meeting in Guatemala City with the aim of consolidating an anti-Sandinista terrorist force with training from Argentina. [7]
Between 1981 and 1983, members of Argentina's Battalion 601, the unit responsible for much of the terror in Argentina itself, worked with Israeli trainers out of Guatemala. In El Salvador they helped train murderers like Roberto D'Aubuisson (who organised the killing of Archbishop Oscar Romero). In Honduras they helped organise both the notorious death squad Battalion 3-16 and the mass murderers of the Nicaraguan Contra. From 1983 onwards, the Israelis trained Carlos Castaño and other current leaders of the Colombian AUC paramilitary death squads. [8]
John Negroponte – fascist proconsul
It may seem strange now that Elliot Abrams and John Negroponte would have facilitated Argentinian fascists (who refined their torment of Jewish victims back in Buenos Aires by torturing them beneath portraits of Adolf Hitler). But Abrams and Negroponte did just that. Argentinian officers trained members of the Honduran army in techniques of mass repression while John Negroponte was ambassador in the Honduran capital Tegucigalpa from 1981 to 1985. There he worked closely with Honduran armed forces chief Gustavo Alvarez Martinez to impose a "national security" state on the Argentine model – that is, a police state based on extra-judicial murder.
As US ambassador in Honduras, John Negroponte displayed cynical contempt for US Congress and legitimacy, shamelessly violating the 1983 Boland Amendment restricting aid to the Contra. On Negroponte's recommendation, the Reagan government gave Alvarez Martinez the Legion of Merit in 1983 for "encouraging democracy." Alvarez Martinez was reponsible for disappearing over 140 trades unionists, students and other leaders of the Honduran popular movement between 1981 and 1984. In 1989, in a test case, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights convicted Honduras of forcibly disappearing four people between 1981 and 1983. During that period, under Negroponte's proconsulship, Argentinian and Israeli terrorists helped the Honduran military refine their techniques of repression.
Saudi and drugs paymasters
That training did not come free. Who paid for it? Mostly the US taxpayer via military aid to Argentina and Israel. But when legal funds were hard to come by, illegal sources served, including drugs proceeds and money siphoned through the fraudulent Bank of Commerce and Credit International, courtesy of links between George Bush Sr., the Saudi royal family and the Bin Laden family. [9] BCCI folded afer revelations that it laundered money from the Colombian Medellin drugs cartel, later to figure in the Iran Contra affair.
At this time, both Colombia and Taiwan also gave training. But the principal countries involved were Argentina and Israel. To help things along, Israel set up a plant in Guatemala to manufacture Galil rifles. Under an agreement reached in October 1981, 200 Guatemalan army officers took anti-insurgency courses in Buenos Aires including use of "interrogation techniques". Among their "instructors" was Ricardo Cavallo.
The Cavallo Scandal
On June 11th this year the Mexican authorities confirmed an extradition order against Ricardo Cavallo by the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzon for crimes against humanity during the terror in Argentina. [10] Cavallo is accused of 337 political kidnappings, 227 forced disappearances and the theft of children of political prisoners. Cavallo's story stems from Plan Condor and threads back to the current Bush administration.
Cavallo and his colleagues, Jorge Radice, Jorge Acosta and others were torturers in the Argentine armed forces. They forced their victims to sign authorities permitting them to dispose of their property, bank accounts and belongings. Cavallo also worked closely with the Bolivian army under Luis Garcia Meza in the early 1980s when Bolivia was virtually run by drugs traffickers.
With their illict capital, Cavallo and his friends set up the security and data control businesses Martiel and Talsud in Argentina. They made deals with Seal Lock, an Argentine company representing US based Advantage Security systems. Martiel represented Casa de la Moneda of Brazil, CONSAD of Argentina, Ciccone Calcográfica [11] and the French smart card firm Gemplus. [12] Talsud and Martiel were virtually interchangeable, both worked on the deal to emit the New Zaire currency for CIA favourite President Mobutu in Zaire in 1993.
In 1995, Bridas subsidiary TTI and Seal Lock helped Talsud secure lucrative deals in Argentina's Mendoza province. In 1996, Talsud got the contract to issue driving licenses in Argentina's Rioja province. Among Seal Lock's clients were the Argentine Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Argentine Central Bank, The National Registry of Bolivia, Shell Paraguay and Israel's ZIM maritime line. Cavallo and his brother Oscar also set up a business in El Salvador called Sertracen, closely linked to the Salvadoran military. Sertracen issues driver and gun licenses in El Savador.
In August 1998, Cavallo entered Mexico as a tourist, miraculously managing to process his residency within a month. Within a year his Talsud company was bidding for the Mexican driver licensing authority (RENAVE), together with Gemplus and the Mexican company CIFRA. On September 7th 1999, they won the contract guaranteeing an estimated annual turnover of US$400 million
The Cavallo/RENAVE scandal broke in Mexico earlier this year amid mounting evidence of irregularities. Commerce Vice-Minister Raul Tercero, who authorised the RENAVE deal, was found in a wood near Mexico City with his throat cut. He left behind several letters defending himself against accusations of corruption.
Cavallo's business associates have an unfortunate tendency to die violently. In October 1998, during a bribery scandal involving IBM, Marcel Cattaneo, brother of the owner of Cavallo client CONSAD was found hanging from a lamp post. That apparent suicide followed similar suspicious deaths. In June 1998 a friend of President Carlos Menem, leading businessman Alfredo Yabran, associated with De La Rue subsidiary Ciccone Calcografica, was found dead. In August of the same year Jorge Estrada, Cavallo's former chief at the ESMA torture centre and a shareholder in Martiel was found dead, another apparent suicide.
Plan Condor veteran in Mexico
Like Cavallo, someone else arrived in Mexico in 1998, but not as a tourist, US ambassador Jeffrey Davidow. [13] Davidow was a political adviser at the US embassy in Chile from 1971 to 1974. In Santiago, he was an embassy insider when the CIA and the DIN Chilean security agency were organising the assassination gang that later murdered leading Chilean opposition figures, Carlos Prats in Buenos Aires and Orlando Letelier in Washington. In Mexico Davidow continued honing the skills he learned in Chile, covering up human rights abuses in Chiapas and cultivating dubious relationships with drug dealing businessmen – all to be expected of a Plan Condor veteran.
The Cavallo scandal sharpened concern in Mexico and the rest of Latin America relating to reports that US data mining company Choicepoint has been purchasing confidential information from companies like Talsud and Martiel on whole populations of Central and South American countries. People fear violations of the legitimate privacy of Latin American people travelling to or living in the United States. Choicepoint is the company whose DBT subsidiary spoiled the electoral roll in Florida enabling George Bush to win that 2000 presidential election. [14]
Data abuse – the Choicepoint link
It is hard to get precise details on who is selling Choicepoint this confidential information. [15] But some idea of the use to be made of all that data can be inferred from the role envisaged by John Poindexter for his Total Information Awareness program (TIA) in the developing John Ashcroft police state. While Poindexter, convicted of lying to Congress during the Iran Contra hearings, may be off the public scene after the DARPA "terrorism futures" fiasco, TIA soldiers on under different guises, like the MATRIX program in various US states, notably Florida.
Richard Armitage, one of the Iran-Contra plotters, was a board member of Database Technologies (DBT)/ChoicePoint Inc before taking office under George Bush Jr. Now he is Colin Powell's deputy Secretary of State. Choicepoint is a partner of data mining company SAIC whose web site proclaims it has "developed a strategic alliance with ChoicePoint Incorporated to provide our clients with quick and effortless information retrieval from public records data. ChoicePoint Incorporated maintains thousands of gigabytes of public records data." [16] SAIC's clients include The U.S. Army National Guard and Reserve, United States Marine Corps and BP Amoco. Before becoming Defence Secretary, Donald Rumsfeld was on BP Amoco's advisory board.
BP-Amoco? Sounds like Bridas-Pan American Energy....
Back at the conversation between Shimon Peres and Carlos Bulgheroni, their terrorist reminiscences over, maybe the conversation turned to oil and gas. Funny how times change and erstwhile friends fall out.
In the early 1990s Bridas obtained oil exploration concessions in Turkmenistan. By 1997 they were negotiating with the Taliban regime in Afghanistan to build a pipeline there. Bridas found itself in competition vying for Taliban favor with Unocal, a US oil company heavily criticised for its operation in army controlled Myanmar (Burma).
Richard Armitage [17] worked for Unocal along with another Iran-Contra figure, Robert Oakley. The Taliban favoured a deal with Bridas. Bridas and Unocal ended up fighting it out in the US courts. Bridas lost. At the same time, through 1997 and 1998, US policy on Afghanistan turned sour. [18] Between November 2000 and August 2001, Argentina had its financial guts ripped out by US banks and the international finance markets. [19] In October 2001 the US invaded Afghanistan.
This is a fine illustration of the Bush Doctrine: no country will be permitted to pose a threat to the perceived interests of the United States, not even a friendly former terrorist client state like Argentina. Bridas could see how things were going and went with the flow. In 1997 it teamed up with BP-Amoco. Reborn as Panamerican Energy, Bridas is working with BP-Amoco to exploit gas and oil reserves throughout Latin America, but mainly in Argentina and, controversially, Bolivia. BP-Amoco gets the benefit of Bridas assets in Central Asia.
Plan Condor – alive and well
The progression from Chile, Argentina and Uruguay through Central America to present day Venezuela and Colombia is clear. The same actors appear time after time. Elliot Abrams, John Negroponte, Colin Powell, Richard Armitage, John Maisto Roger Noriega and Otto Reich all move between comfortable jobs in US government and the corporate plutocracy that dictates US government policy.
Every one of them participated one way or another in the Iran Contra conspiracy to mislead Congress. Abrams was indicted and found guilty by the Congressional investigating commission but pardoned by George Bush Sr. Richard Armitage escaped prosecution because the investigating commission lacked resources. They were exhausted nailing former Defence Secretary Caspar Weinberger, also pardoned by Bush Sr. Now Powell, Armitage, Maisto, Noriega and Reich are plotting the overthrow of democratically elected Hugo Chavez in Venezuela and attempting to deepen US military engagement in Colombia. In Guatemala, an old associate, mass murderer Rios Montt is threatening violent overthrow of the country's hard-won democratic governance.
None of this has anything to do with any "war on communism" or "war on drugs" or "war on terror". The United States and the European Union are in Latin America for the same reasons as the Spanish, Portuguese, British, French and Dutch colonialists before them – natural resources and cheap labour, compounded these days by neo-colonial extraction of forcibly contrived "debt". The methods are privatisation, dismantling of domestic agricultural economies, and open markets imposed by the IMF and World Bank through local clients to favour multinational corporations like BP-Amoco, Monsanto, Cargill and other all too familiar names.
For people in the United States the lessons of Latin America should be very clear. French philosopher Simone Weil once wrote that people in Europe were shocked by the Nazis because the Nazis applied to Europe the methods European powers practiced in their colonies. Now it's the turn of the United States. The banal, evil individuals currently running the White House are steadily putting into practice at home what they have done for three decades while facilitating terror in Latin America.
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NOTES
1. Bridas is an energy production and exploration company. It operates in Latin America and Central Asia. It has a joint exploration & production venture with BP Amoco called Pan American Energy. The company owns 40% of Pan American Energy (60% owned by BP Amoco). Pan American Energy LLC is a company registered in Delaware, USA. (From BP-Amoco and related web sites.)
2. For Hill quote see : www.icai-online.org/72616,46136.html among many others
3. "Guatemala: Laboratorio estadounidense del terror", February 2002.
Gustavo Meoño Brenner, Nuevo Diario, Guatemala. This article cites:
Ariel C. Armony "La Argentina, los Estados Unidos y la Cruzada Anti-Comunista en América Central, 1977-1984" Editorial Universidad Nacional de Quilmes, 1999.
Stella Calloni "Operación Cóndor, pacto criminal" Ediciones La Jornada, Ciudad de México, 2001.
"Las intimidades del proyecto político de los militares en Guatemala". Jennifer Schirmer, Facultad Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales, Guatemala, 1999.
4. The same team helped set up in 1975 the Committee on the Present Danger, in which Paul Wolfowitz was a leading figure.
5. Hernando Calvo Ospina, "Pinochet, la CIA y los terroristas cubanos", 23 de agosto del 2003, www.rebelion.org.
6. Colin Powell is Secretary of State. Richard Armitage is Deputy Secrteary of State. John Maisto is US representative to the Organization of American States. Roger Noriega is Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. Otto Reich is US Special Envoy for Western Hemisphere Initiatives.
7. Testimony of Edgar Chamorro, former Contra organizer to the International Court of Justice in the Hague, September 5th 1985.
8. Jeremy Bigwood, Narco News, "Israel y los paramilitares colombianos" from www.rebelion.org August 15th 2003
9. The Reagan administration also used BCCI to channel funds to the Afghan mujaheddin in the days when Bin Laden was a US hero. Two former CIA directors, Richard Helms and William Casey were involved in BCCI before it folded following revelations that it laundered money for the Medellin drugs cartel. William Casey died before the Iran Contra hearings took place. Among various sources:
"US arms group heads for Lisbon" The News, Portugal's English language Weekly, 4 April 2003. www.globalresearch.ca
"À qui profite le crime? Les liens financiers occultes des Bush et des Ben Laden" Réseau Voltaire 11 septembre 2001
10. Sources for information on Cavallo:
Article by Olga Viglieca, Hector Pavon and Guido Braslavsky. Clarín-Zona. Argentina September 10th 2000
"Renave: los porqué de un fracaso" Jorge Fernández Menéndez. Semanario Milenio. Mexico, September 14th 2000
"El largo brazo de la mafia argentina", José Steinsleger La Jornada. Mexico September 24th 2000
"Se expanden las empresas del ex marino Ricardo Cavallo licencia." Mario Fiore. Los Andes. Mendoza. Argentina August 17th 2001.
"Tiene Cavallo Información Estrategica" Jorge Carrasco A. La Reforma. Date unclear.
11. A subsidiary of De la Rue producing passports for the Mexican government. De La Rue now own the US Sequoia computerised voting systems company, part owned by Carlyle group partner, US investment firm Madison Dearborn who took over Jefferson Smurfit's share of Sequoia
12. Fort Worth based Texas Pacific Group recently made a huge private equity investment between $300 and $500 million into Gemplus to expand Gemplus presence in the international wireless communications, e-commerce and Internet security markets.
13. "Borderline behavior", Al Giordano. The Boston Phoenix. December 16-23, 1999
14. Greg Palast, November 2nd 2002,"The re-election of Jim Crow: How Jeb Bush's team is trying to steal Florida again" and his book "The Best Democracy Money Can Buy"
15. "Imperio de control", Dieter Drüssel. www.rebelion.org, September 1st 2003. Drussel mentions Costa Rican owned Silnica in Nicaragua. In El Salvador and Guatemala public concern has centred on Sertracen and InforNet.
16. SAIC web site
17. Iran-Contra Special Counsel's report, "Independent Counsel declined to prosecute Armitage because the OIC's limited resources were focused on the case against Weinberger and because the evidence against Armitage, while substantial, did not reach the threshold of proof beyond a reasonable doubt."
18. Various web sites
"Afghanistan, Turkmenistan Oil and Gas, and the Projected Pipeline",
ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~pdscott/q7.html
Timeline, www.worldpress.org/specials/pp/pipeline_timeline.htm
www.thedubyareport.com/oilwar.html
"Enron played key role in events presaging war", Martin Yant. Columbus Free Press. April 10, 2002
19. "Argentina Didn't Fall on Its Own – Wall Street Pushed Debt Till the Last", Paul Blustein. The Washington Post. August 3rd 2003
(Toni Solo is an activist based in Central America. Contact tonisolo52@yahoo.com.) | | | | | ©2002-2009 WarWithoutEnd.co.uk |
