[News] Presidents Keep Hiring Elliott Abrams Because the US Empire Is Just That Evil

[Anti-Imperialist News]

orinocotribune.com
<https://orinocotribune.com/presidents-keep-hiring-elliott-abrams-because-the-us-empire-is-just-that-evil/>
Presidents Keep Hiring Elliott Abrams Because the US Empire Is Just That
Evil
------------------------------

[image: Elliott Abrams. Photo: caitlinjohnstone.com/file photo.]

Elliott Abrams. Photo: caitlinjohnstone.com/file photo.

By Caitlin Johnstone – Jul 4, 2023

CNN reports
<https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/03/politics/elliott-abrams-public-diplomacy-nomination/index.html>
that
President Biden has nominated criminal neocon Elliott Abrams for a position
on the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, which according
to
<https://www.state.gov/about-us-u-s-advisory-commission-on-public-diplomacy/>
the
US State Department is responsible for “appraising activities intended to
understand, inform, and influence foreign publics” and pays “acute
attention” to the US government’s official foreign propaganda arm, the US
Agency for Global Media
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Agency_for_Global_Media>.

Usually when you hear someone called a “neocon” it’s not a strictly
accurate description from a technical point of view and is frequently used
to just mean “warmonger”, but Abrams is actually a proper PNAC
neoconservative ideologue
<https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/elliott-abrams/> with deep ties to
the old-school neocons of the 1970s, and has helped promote violent US
imperialism in Latin America and the Middle East for decades.

In addition to serving as the Trump administration’s special representative
for both Iran and Venezuela (two of the nations where Trump’s foreign
policy was at its
<https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/trump-has-murdered-over-40-000-venezuelans-with-sanctions-6eb3e7f0eb7f>
 most
<https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/starvation-sanctions-are-worse-than-overt-warfare-b52604b53290>
 murderous
<https://consortiumnews.com/2020/01/09/full-scale-war-avoided-trump-goes-right-back-to-warmongering/>),
Abrams is probably best known for confessing to his role in the criminal
coverup of Iran-Contra during the Reagan administration. CNN — notoriously
reluctant to criticize both US foreign policy and Democratic presidential
administrations — was surprisingly critical on this point in its report on
Biden’s nomination of Abrams to the position.

In an article titled “Biden nominates controversial former Trump-appointee
to Public Diplomacy Commission
<https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/03/politics/elliott-abrams-public-diplomacy-nomination/index.html>,”
CNN’s Jack Forrest writes the following:

Elliott Abrams, who has served in three Republican administrations, most
recently acted as the Trump administration’s special envoy to Iran and
Venezuela where he was tasked at the time with directing the campaign to
replace Venezuela’s President Nicolas Maduro.

The Republican insider’s long history in foreign policy is marked by a 1991
guilty plea for withholding information about the Iran-Contra affair that
earned him two misdemeanor counts
<https://fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/chap_25.htm>, two years probation and
100 hours of community service — though his crimes were later pardoned by
President George H.W. Bush.

The secret Iran-Contra operation, which took place during Abrams’ time as
an assistant secretary of state in the Reagan administration, involved the
funding of anti-communist rebels in Nicaragua using the proceeds from
weapon sales to Iran despite a congressional ban on such funding.

Again in his role under former President Ronald Reagan, Abrams was also
blasted by a Human Rights Watch report
<https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/pdfs/e/elsalvdr/elsalv923.pdf> for his
attempts in a February 1982 Senate testimony to downplay reports of the
massacre of 1,000 people by US-trained-and-equipped military units in the
Salvadoran town of El Mozote in December 1981 — the largest mass killing
<https://cja.org/downloads/Terry%20Karl.pdf> in recent Latin American
history. He insisted the numbers of reported victims were “implausible” and
“lavished praise” on the military battalion behind the mass killings —
stances he doubled down on when they were put on display during a 2019
House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing
<https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/13/politics/abrams-omar-venezuela-hearing/index.html>
by
Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, who used his history in Latin
American to call into question his credibility.

When you’re so gross that even CNN is disgusted by you, you’re a special
kind of gross.

As Forrest noted, this would be the fourth presidential administration that
Abrams has been a part of, despite being a confessed crook and despite
pushing for bloodshed at every opportunity in some of the US empire’s most
notorious criminal actions. Abrams is such a cold-hearted killer that he openly
admitted
<https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/25/world/push-the-russians-intellectuals-say.html>
during
a 1985 conference that the purpose of aiding the Contras in Nicaragua was
“to permit people who are fighting on our side to use more violence,” and
has promoted US military violence
<https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/elliott-abrams/> against Iraq,
Syria and Iran with remarkable forcefulness throughout his career. The fact
that someone so tyrannical, so corrupt and so unscrupulous keeps getting
appointed to positions involved with US foreign policy tells you everything
you need to know about the nature of US foreign policy.

It’s actually a damning indictment of our entire civilization that swamp
monsters like Elliott Abrams remain esteemed members of society instead of
reviled outcasts who can’t safely show their faces in public. They should
be driven from every town they try to enter and unable to secure even
entry-level jobs working for minimum wage, but instead they’re employed as
high-profile pundits, think tankers and political officials providing
expertise on some of the most consequential matters in the world.

To paraphrase a quote often attributed to Jiddu Krishnamurti, it is no
measure of health to be well-rewarded in a profoundly sick society. Because
our society is so profoundly sick, one of the fastest ways to fortune and
esteem is to be as gross as Elliott Abrams. That’s how messed up you have
to be inside to rise to prominence within the US power structure: willing
to say and do whatever needs to be said and done in order to secure the
continued dominance of a global empire that is sustained by human blood.

(caitlinjohnstone.com
<https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/07/04/presidents-keep-hiring-elliott-abrams-because-the-us-empire-is-just-that-evil/>
)

Caitlin Johnstone

Rogue journalist. Bogan socialist. Anarcho-psychonaut. Guerrilla poet.
Utopia prepper.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://freedomarchives.org/pipermail/news_freedomarchives.org/attachments/20230708/f8db8ff7/attachment.htm>