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ELLIOT ABRAMS: DEFENDER OF DEATH SQUADS TO DIRECT U.S. 'DEMOCRACY'
CRUSADE<br>
____________________________________________________________________<br><br>
News & Analysis: North America<br>
<a href="http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/abra-f10.shtml" eudora="autourl">http://www.wsws.org/articles/2005/feb2005/abra-f10.shtml<br>
</a>By Bill Van Auken<br><br>
On February 2, the same day he delivered his State of the Union
speech<br>
vowing to "stand with the allies of freedom" in "ending
tyranny in our<br>
world," George W. Bush named Elliot Abrams as his deputy national
security<br>
advisor. Nothing could more clearly expose the real aims of the US<br>
president's worldwide crusade for "democracy" than this
appointment.<br><br>
Perhaps more than any other political figure, Abrams personifies
the<br>
criminal, deceitful and thuggish character of the current US<br>
administration. He has been tapped to serve as Bush's principal advisor
on<br>
democracy and human rights.<br><br>
A senior State Department official during the Reagan administration,
Abrams<br>
was infamous for his lying on behalf of US-backed military
dictatorships<br>
and his zealotry in attacking any regime that failed to submit to<br>
Washington dictates, as well as in defaming any individual who
dared<br>
question the administration's policies.<br><br>
In 1991, he pleaded guilty to two counts of lying to Congress under oath
in<br>
relation to the secret and illegal operation mounted by the Reagan<br>
administration to fund the CIA-organized contra mercenaries' war on<br>
Nicaragua. Abrams entered the plea agreement in order to avoid a
felony<br>
prosecution and potential jail time. Within little more than a year,
Bush<br>
senior pardoned him together with others convicted in relation to
the<br>
Iran-Contra conspiracy.<br><br>
After he spent a decade as a fixture within right-wing Republican
think<br>
tanks, the Bush administration called Abrams back into government,
placing<br>
him on the National Security Council. In June 2002, he was given the
NSC<br>
portfolio for the "Near East and North Africa," including
the<br>
Israeli-Palestinian conflict.<br><br>
That choice was also a revealing one, as Abrams is an avowed
right-wing<br>
Zionist and supporter of Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon and the
Likud<br>
bloc. Before his appointment, he had insisted that the US reject
the<br>
"land-for-peace" formula that was the basis for previous<br>
Israeli-Palestinian negotiations. In a document drafted for the Project
on<br>
the New American Century, he declared that Washington "should not
permit<br>
the establishment of a Palestinian state that did not explicitly uphold
US<br>
policy in the region." He was also a key proponent of currying
support<br>
among the Christian fundamentalists for Israel.<br><br>
Naming Abrams as the key advisor on the Middle East was widely seen as
a<br>
signal of unconditional US support for Israel's military repression of
the<br>
Palestinians and seizure of land in the occupied territories.<br><br>
Abrams is a self-declared neo-conservative, part of a coterie of<br>
anticommunist and pro-Zionist Democrats--among them, current Deputy
Defense<br>
Secretary Paul Wolfowitz and Pentagon advisor Richard Perle--who came
into<br>
politics as aides to US Senator Henry "Scoop" Jackson in the
1970s, and<br>
then followed their right-wing political trajectory into the
Republican<br>
Party under Reagan in the 1980s.<br><br>
Reagan named Abrams as director of the State Department's Office for
Human<br>
Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. He was the Republican president's
second<br>
choice, after the nomination of Ernest Lefever, a hard-line cold
warrior,<br>
was rejected in the Senate. Lefever had voiced open contempt for the
idea<br>
that Washington should consider human rights abuses in its relations
with<br>
anticommunist regimes and expressed sympathy in particular for the
Chilean<br>
military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.<br><br>
Abrams was a protégé of Lefever, who was the founder of the Ethics
and<br>
Public Policy Center, a right-wing think tank devoted to portraying
US<br>
multinationals as ethical institutions. After his conviction for lying
to<br>
Congress, Abrams became president of the center.<br><br>
As the State Department official in charge of human rights, and later
as<br>
assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, Abrams's
main<br>
activity centered on the US organization of a counterrevolutionary army
to<br>
carry out terrorist attacks against Nicaragua and the support of
right-wing<br>
dictatorships in neighboring El Salvador, Guatemala and
Honduras.<br><br>
He specialized in grossly exaggerating human rights abuses in<br>
Nicaragua--most particularly in a trumped-up campaign to portray
the<br>
Sandinista government as a persecutor of the Miskito Indians--in order
to<br>
justify support for the contra army, which killed some 10,000
Nicaraguans.<br><br>
Meanwhile, Abrams contemptuously dismissed substantiated reports of
massive<br>
atrocities by the US-backed dictatorships.<br><br>
This was the case with the massacre of nearly 1,000 unarmed
Salvadoran<br>
civilians by the US-trained Atlacatl Battalion in December 1981.
When<br>
Raymond Bonner of the New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto of
the<br>
Washington Post published accounts of the mass killings, Abrams
dismissed<br>
them as "nothing but communist propaganda."<br><br>
A day after the newspaper reports appeared, the State Department filed
a<br>
report officially certifying that the Salvadoran regime was making
"a<br>
concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally
recognized<br>
human rights" and working "to bring an end to the
indiscriminate torture<br>
and murder of Salvadoran citizens." Congress required the document
as a<br>
condition for approving additional aid. Reagan later vetoed
legislation<br>
extending the certification requirement.<br><br>
The United Nations-sponsored Truth Commission published a
documented<br>
account of the massacre in 1992, complete with the identities of over
500<br>
of the victims and the results of forensic examinations of their
remains.<br>
Many others were never identified. The summary of the report
stated:<br><br>
"On 10 December 1981, in the village of El Mozote in the Department
of<br>
Morazan, units of the Atlacatl Battalion detained, without resistance,
all<br>
the men, women and children who were in the place. The following day,
11<br>
December, after spending the night locked in their homes, they were<br>
deliberately and systematically executed in groups. First, the men
were<br>
tortured and executed, then the women were executed and, lastly,
the<br>
children, in the place where they had been locked up...."<br><br>
It has since emerged that the US State Department was fully informed
about<br>
this slaughter at the time that Abrams was claiming it never happened
and<br>
slandering journalists as communist "dupes."<br><br>
Similarly, Abrams had heatedly denied that Salvadoran rightist and
death<br>
squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson was involved in the assassination
of<br>
Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero, who had called for an end to the<br>
repression in El Salvador. He denounced human rights critics who
accused<br>
the administration of a cover-up. "Anybody who thinks you're going
to find<br>
a cable that says that Roberto D'Aubuisson murdered the archbishop is
a<br>
fool," he said. At the time, the State Department was in possession
of two<br>
such cables from its embassy in San Salvador detailing the death
squad<br>
leader's role in organizing the killing.<br><br>
Similarly, Abrams brushed off reports of massacres in Guatemala that
the<br>
Catholic Church there described as "genocidal." In one
particularly<br>
grotesque incident, he dismissed the 1985 abduction, torture and murder
of<br>
Guatemalan human rights activist Maria Rosario Godoy, who was
killed<br>
together with her 21-year-old brother and her 2-year-old son. Their<br>
mutilated bodies were found in a ravine. It was evident that the
young<br>
mother had been brutally raped and the child's fingernails had been
ripped<br>
off. Abrams insisted that there was no reason to disbelieve the
Guatemalan<br>
regime's official story that the three died in an auto
accident.<br><br>
Abrams made no effort to conceal his contempt for the ineffectual
efforts<br>
of the US Congress to impose some restraint on the dirty wars
Washington<br>
was waging in Central America. He described US legislators as
"pious<br>
clowns" and "abysmally stupid."<br><br>
While he knew nothing of Latin America and did not even speak Spanish,
he<br>
reveled in the covert operations surrounding the illegal war in
Nicaragua.<br>
He played a direct and central role in creating a covert network
for<br>
funding the CIA-organized contras after Congress had passed the
so-called<br>
Boland amendment barring US military support for the
mercenaries.<br><br>
Working with Lt. Col. Oliver North, who was then a member of the
National<br>
Security Council, he personally participated in obtaining illegal
sources<br>
of funding, including making a flight to London and using the alias of
"Mr.<br>
Kenilworth" to obtain $10 million from the Sultan of
Brunei.<br><br>
All the while, Abrams was testifying before Congress that the
Reagan<br>
administration had no connection whatsoever to the supposedly
private<br>
efforts to support the contras. He specifically claimed he had no
knowledge<br>
that North had directed illegal arms sales to Iran and diverted the<br>
proceeds to the Nicaraguan contras.<br><br>
The Bush administration brushed off questions concerning Abrams's
guilty<br>
pleas on the lying to Congress charges, claiming that they had been
"dealt<br>
with."<br><br>
After joining the National Security Council, Abrams was implicated in
the<br>
abortive coup attempt against Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez in
April<br>
2002. It was widely reported that he and Otto Reich, another veteran of
the<br>
illegal contra operation appointed by Bush to the State Department, had
met<br>
with the coup plotters and held detailed discussions on their prospects
for<br>
success.<br><br>
He was likewise tied to the Valerie Plame affair. A covert CIA agent,
Plame<br>
was exposed to the press in an act of retaliation for the debunking of
the<br>
administration's claims on Iraq's nonexistent nuclear weapons program
by<br>
her husband, former diplomat Joseph Wilson. Abrams has been named as
a<br>
prime suspect in providing the illegal leak.<br><br>
This individual is the standard-bearer of Washington's worldwide
crusade<br>
for "democracy." His appointment only underscores that the
Bush<br>
administration's vacuous rhetoric about "freedom" and
"liberty" are merely<br>
window dressing for a global campaign of military aggression in pursuit
of<br>
US imperialism's strategic aims<br><br>
Illegal wars, right-wing coups, death-squad terror and torture are
the<br>
means associated with Abrams's previous "democratic"
crusade--combined with<br>
riding roughshod over democratic processes at home. These methods are
now<br>
being revived on an even more horrific scale.<br><br>
Copyright 1998-2005 World Socialist Web Site. All rights
reserved.<br><br>
*****<br>
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