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<h1 class="gmail-reader-title">Presidents Keep Hiring Elliott Abrams Because the US Empire Is Just That Evil</h1></div>
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<p><img src="https://i0.wp.com/orinocotribune.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/medium-1.jpg?fit=1080%2C565&ssl=1" alt="Elliott Abrams. Photo: caitlinjohnstone.com/file photo." class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="392" height="205"> </p>
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Elliott Abrams. Photo: <a href="http://caitlinjohnstone.com/file">caitlinjohnstone.com/file</a> photo. </p>
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<p>By Caitlin Johnstone – Jul 4, 2023</p>
<p id="gmail-3f81">CNN <a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/03/politics/elliott-abrams-public-diplomacy-nomination/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener ugc nofollow">reports</a> that
President Biden has nominated criminal neocon Elliott Abrams for a
position on the United States Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy,
which <a href="https://www.state.gov/about-us-u-s-advisory-commission-on-public-diplomacy/" target="_blank" rel="noopener ugc nofollow">according to</a> 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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._Agency_for_Global_Media" target="_blank" rel="noopener ugc nofollow">US Agency for Global Media</a>.</p>
<p id="gmail-9f50">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 href="https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/elliott-abrams/" target="_blank" rel="noopener ugc nofollow">a proper PNAC neoconservative ideologue</a> 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.</p>
<p id="gmail-8d5a">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 <a href="https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/trump-has-murdered-over-40-000-venezuelans-with-sanctions-6eb3e7f0eb7f" rel="noopener">was at its</a> <a href="https://caityjohnstone.medium.com/starvation-sanctions-are-worse-than-overt-warfare-b52604b53290" rel="noopener">most</a> <a href="https://consortiumnews.com/2020/01/09/full-scale-war-avoided-trump-goes-right-back-to-warmongering/" target="_blank" rel="noopener ugc nofollow">murderous</a>),
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.</p>
<p id="gmail-7930">In an article titled “<a href="https://edition.cnn.com/2023/07/03/politics/elliott-abrams-public-diplomacy-nomination/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener ugc nofollow">Biden nominates controversial former Trump-appointee to Public Diplomacy Commission</a>,” CNN’s Jack Forrest writes the following:</p>
<p id="gmail-f3bc">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.</p>
<p id="gmail-8951">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 <a href="https://fas.org/irp/offdocs/walsh/chap_25.htm" target="_blank" rel="noopener ugc nofollow">two misdemeanor counts</a>, two years probation and 100 hours of community service — though his crimes were later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush.</p>
<p id="gmail-52b4">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.</p>
<p id="gmail-996a">Again in his role under former President Ronald Reagan, Abrams was also blasted by <a href="https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/pdfs/e/elsalvdr/elsalv923.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener ugc nofollow">a Human Rights Watch report</a> 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 — <a href="https://cja.org/downloads/Terry%20Karl.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener ugc nofollow">the largest mass killing</a> 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 <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2019/02/13/politics/abrams-omar-venezuela-hearing/index.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener ugc nofollow">2019 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing</a> by Rep. Ilhan Omar, a Minnesota Democrat, who used his history in Latin American to call into question his credibility.</p>
<p id="e227">When you’re so gross that even CNN is disgusted by you, you’re a special kind of gross.</p>
<p><span></span></p><div><p><img alt="" src="https://i.ytimg.com/vi/InGCmxCjaWE/hqdefault.jpg" class="gmail-moz-reader-block-img" style="margin-right: 0px;" width="392" height="294"></p></div><p></p>
<p>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 <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1985/11/25/world/push-the-russians-intellectuals-say.html" target="_blank" rel="noopener ugc nofollow">openly admitted</a> 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 <a href="https://militarist-monitor.org/profile/elliott-abrams/" target="_blank" rel="noopener ugc nofollow">promoted US military violence</a> 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.</p>
<p id="gmail-2714">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.</p>
<p id="gmail-49d9">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.</p>
<p>(<a href="https://caitlinjohnstone.com/2023/07/04/presidents-keep-hiring-elliott-abrams-because-the-us-empire-is-just-that-evil/" target="_blank" rel="noopener">caitlinjohnstone.com</a>)</p>
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<span>
Caitlin Johnstone </span>
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<p>Rogue journalist. Bogan socialist. Anarcho-psychonaut. Guerrilla poet. Utopia prepper.</p>
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