[News] Elliot Abrams - defender of death squads to direct 'democracy' crusade

Mon Feb 14 11:42:19 EST 2005

ELLIOT ABRAMS: DEFENDER OF DEATH SQUADS TO DIRECT U.S. 'DEMOCRACY' CRUSADE
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News & Analysis: North America
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/abra-f10.shtml
By Bill Van Auken

On February 2, the same day he delivered his State of the Union speech
vowing to "stand with the allies of freedom" in "ending tyranny in our
world," George W. Bush named Elliot Abrams as his deputy national security
advisor. Nothing could more clearly expose the real aims of the US
president's worldwide crusade for "democracy" than this appointment.

Perhaps more than any other political figure, Abrams personifies the
criminal, deceitful and thuggish character of the current US
administration. He has been tapped to serve as Bush's principal advisor on
democracy and human rights.

A senior State Department official during the Reagan administration, Abrams
was infamous for his lying on behalf of US-backed military dictatorships
and his zealotry in attacking any regime that failed to submit to
Washington dictates, as well as in defaming any individual who dared
question the administration's policies.

In 1991, he pleaded guilty to two counts of lying to Congress under oath in
relation to the secret and illegal operation mounted by the Reagan
administration to fund the CIA-organized contra mercenaries' war on
Nicaragua. Abrams entered the plea agreement in order to avoid a felony
prosecution and potential jail time. Within little more than a year, Bush
senior pardoned him together with others convicted in relation to the
Iran-Contra conspiracy.

After he spent a decade as a fixture within right-wing Republican think
tanks, the Bush administration called Abrams back into government, placing
him on the National Security Council. In June 2002, he was given the NSC
portfolio for the "Near East and North Africa," including the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

That choice was also a revealing one, as Abrams is an avowed right-wing
Zionist and supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the Likud
bloc. Before his appointment, he had insisted that the US reject the
"land-for-peace" formula that was the basis for previous
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. In a document drafted for the Project on
the New American Century, he declared that Washington "should not permit
the establishment of a Palestinian state that did not explicitly uphold US
policy in the region." He was also a key proponent of currying support
among the Christian fundamentalists for Israel.

Naming Abrams as the key advisor on the Middle East was widely seen as a
signal of unconditional US support for Israel's military repression of the
Palestinians and seizure of land in the occupied territories.

Abrams is a self-declared neo-conservative, part of a coterie of
anticommunist and pro-Zionist Democrats--among them, current Deputy Defense
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Pentagon advisor Richard Perle--who came into
politics as aides to US Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson in the 1970s, and
then followed their right-wing political trajectory into the Republican
Party under Reagan in the 1980s.

Reagan named Abrams as director of the State Department's Office for Human
Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. He was the Republican president's second
choice, after the nomination of Ernest Lefever, a hard-line cold warrior,
was rejected in the Senate. Lefever had voiced open contempt for the idea
that Washington should consider human rights abuses in its relations with
anticommunist regimes and expressed sympathy in particular for the Chilean
military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Abrams was a protégé of Lefever, who was the founder of the Ethics and
Public Policy Center, a right-wing think tank devoted to portraying US
multinationals as ethical institutions. After his conviction for lying to
Congress, Abrams became president of the center.

As the State Department official in charge of human rights, and later as
assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, Abrams's main
activity centered on the US organization of a counterrevolutionary army to
carry out terrorist attacks against Nicaragua and the support of right-wing
dictatorships in neighboring El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras.

He specialized in grossly exaggerating human rights abuses in
Nicaragua--most particularly in a trumped-up campaign to portray the
Sandinista government as a persecutor of the Miskito Indians--in order to
justify support for the contra army, which killed some 10,000 Nicaraguans.

Meanwhile, Abrams contemptuously dismissed substantiated reports of massive
atrocities by the US-backed dictatorships.

This was the case with the massacre of nearly 1,000 unarmed Salvadoran
civilians by the US-trained Atlacatl Battalion in December 1981. When
Raymond Bonner of the New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto of the
Washington Post published accounts of the mass killings, Abrams dismissed
them as "nothing but communist propaganda."

A day after the newspaper reports appeared, the State Department filed a
report officially certifying that the Salvadoran regime was making "a
concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized
human rights" and working "to bring an end to the indiscriminate torture
and murder of Salvadoran citizens." Congress required the document as a
condition for approving additional aid. Reagan later vetoed legislation
extending the certification requirement.

The United Nations-sponsored Truth Commission published a documented
account of the massacre in 1992, complete with the identities of over 500
of the victims and the results of forensic examinations of their remains.
Many others were never identified. The summary of the report stated:

"On 10 December 1981, in the village of El Mozote in the Department of
Morazan, units of the Atlacatl Battalion detained, without resistance, all
the men, women and children who were in the place. The following day, 11
December, after spending the night locked in their homes, they were
deliberately and systematically executed in groups. First, the men were
tortured and executed, then the women were executed and, lastly, the
children, in the place where they had been locked up...."

It has since emerged that the US State Department was fully informed about
this slaughter at the time that Abrams was claiming it never happened and
slandering journalists as communist "dupes."

Similarly, Abrams had heatedly denied that Salvadoran rightist and death
squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson was involved in the assassination of
Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who had called for an end to the
repression in El Salvador. He denounced human rights critics who accused
the administration of a cover-up. "Anybody who thinks you're going to find
a cable that says that Roberto D'Aubuisson murdered the archbishop is a
fool," he said. At the time, the State Department was in possession of two
such cables from its embassy in San Salvador detailing the death squad
leader's role in organizing the killing.

Similarly, Abrams brushed off reports of massacres in Guatemala that the
Catholic Church there described as "genocidal." In one particularly
grotesque incident, he dismissed the 1985 abduction, torture and murder of
Guatemalan human rights activist Maria Rosario Godoy, who was killed
together with her 21-year-old brother and her 2-year-old son. Their
mutilated bodies were found in a ravine. It was evident that the young
mother had been brutally raped and the child's fingernails had been ripped
off. Abrams insisted that there was no reason to disbelieve the Guatemalan
regime's official story that the three died in an auto accident.

Abrams made no effort to conceal his contempt for the ineffectual efforts
of the US Congress to impose some restraint on the dirty wars Washington
was waging in Central America. He described US legislators as "pious
clowns" and "abysmally stupid."

While he knew nothing of Latin America and did not even speak Spanish, he
reveled in the covert operations surrounding the illegal war in Nicaragua.
He played a direct and central role in creating a covert network for
funding the CIA-organized contras after Congress had passed the so-called
Boland amendment barring US military support for the mercenaries.

Working with Lt. Col. Oliver North, who was then a member of the National
Security Council, he personally participated in obtaining illegal sources
of funding, including making a flight to London and using the alias of "Mr.
Kenilworth" to obtain $10 million from the Sultan of Brunei.

All the while, Abrams was testifying before Congress that the Reagan
administration had no connection whatsoever to the supposedly private
efforts to support the contras. He specifically claimed he had no knowledge
that North had directed illegal arms sales to Iran and diverted the
proceeds to the Nicaraguan contras.

The Bush administration brushed off questions concerning Abrams's guilty
pleas on the lying to Congress charges, claiming that they had been "dealt
with."

After joining the National Security Council, Abrams was implicated in the
abortive coup attempt against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in April
2002. It was widely reported that he and Otto Reich, another veteran of the
illegal contra operation appointed by Bush to the State Department, had met
with the coup plotters and held detailed discussions on their prospects for
success.

He was likewise tied to the Valerie Plame affair. A covert CIA agent, Plame
was exposed to the press in an act of retaliation for the debunking of the
administration's claims on Iraq's nonexistent nuclear weapons program by
her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson. Abrams has been named as a
prime suspect in providing the illegal leak.

This individual is the standard-bearer of Washington's worldwide crusade
for "democracy." His appointment only underscores that the Bush
administration's vacuous rhetoric about "freedom" and "liberty" are merely
window dressing for a global campaign of military aggression in pursuit of
US imperialism's strategic aims

Illegal wars, right-wing coups, death-squad terror and torture are the
means associated with Abrams's previous "democratic" crusade--combined with
riding roughshod over democratic processes at home. These methods are now
being revived on an even more horrific scale.

*****

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