| Topic: |
Science > Abortion |
| User: |
"james g. keegan jr." |
| Date: |
02 Jun 2006 03:05:36 PM |
| Object: |
The Swift Boating of America |
The Swift Boating of America
By Greg Grandin
TomDispatch.com
Thursday 01 June 2006
An illegal war, torture rooms, warrantless wiretapping,
manipulated intelligence, secret prisons, disinformation planted in
the press, graft, and billions of reconstruction dollars gone
missing: just when it seemed that the Bush administration had reached
its corruption quota comes a new scandal. This one is a bribery case
involving defense contractors, Republican congressmen, prostitutes,
secret Hawaiian getaways, Scottish castles, and - wait for it - the
Watergate Hotel. At its center is the just ex-Executive Director of
the CIA, Kyle "Dusty" Foggo, whose sole qualification for being
appointed to that post by just ex-Director Porter Goss seems to have
been his ability, while head of the Agency's Frankfurt post, to hand
out bottled-water contracts to friends and show junketing politicians
a good time.
Don't fret though if you are having trouble separating this
particular crime from other Republican offenses. There's a good
reason - they're all one scandal, part of the same wave of
militarism, fraud, and ideology that has swamped American politics of
late. While this wave of scandal seems now to be heading for tsunami
proportions, its first swells date back decades. Just take a look at
Dusty's rèsumè.
After his zealotry got him booted from Sears' security and the
San Diego police department, Foggo drew on his collegiate Young
Republican connections to land a job in the early 1980s with the CIA.
His first mission was in Honduras, then the staging ground for Ronald
Reagan's secret paramilitary war against Nicaragua's leftist
Sandinista government. In addition to his official duties, Foggo
helped his old college buddy Brent Wilkes - the defense contractor
now implicated in the ongoing bribery case involving former
Republican Congressman Randy "Duke" Cunningham - bring conservative
cadres down to Central America. There, he introduced them to
anti-Sandinista rebels, better known as Contras. It seems that, even
then, a lot more than anti-Communist solidarity was on the agenda.
Three of Wilkes' former friends now claim that these trips included
partying with prostitutes.
A New Right Mecca
Dusty, of course, is not the only veteran of Reagan's Central
American policy who has resurfaced to help fight George W. Bush's
"Global War on Terror." The list includes John Negroponte, Elliot
Abrams, Otto Reich, John Poindexter, John Bolton, Oliver North,
Robert Kagan, and Michael Ledeen. They can also be found in the
highest levels of the White House: ***** Cheney cut his political
teeth in Congress in the 1980s plumping for Reagan's Nicaragua
policy, thundering that any attempt to prohibit Contra aid was a
legislative "abuse of power." And on the frontlines, James Steele,
who led the Special Forces mission in El Salvador and worked with
North to run weapons and supplies to the Contras, was sent to Iraq to
help train a ruthless counterinsurgency force made up of ex-Baathist
thugs. (Steele is batting two for two: As in El Salvador, such
training has produced not security but widespread death-squad
atrocities.)
Just as progressives from the United States traveled to Nicaragua
in the 1980s to support the Sandinistas, militants of the ascendant
Reagan Revolution flocked to Honduras as well as El Salvador and
Guatemala, where staunchly anti-Communist regimes were waging
ruthless counterinsurgencies that resulted in the murder of over
260,000 people. Dig a bit into the past of any of the thousands of
religious or secular movement conservatives who came up in those
years and odds are, as with Dusty, you'll find they played some role
in Central America.
Central America became a New Right mecca because it was the one
place where conservatives could match words to deeds. Reagan swept
into office promising to restore America's pride and purpose in the
post-Vietnam world. But the complexities of the Cold War often forced
a more equivocating diplomacy on him than he had promised his
followers. There was unexpected conciliation (he befriended Soviet
leader Mikhail Gorbachev) and deep humiliation (the withdrawal of
American troops from Lebanon after a devastating car bombing). By
midpoint in his second term, the Right had had enough of what they
considered Reagan's timidity, condemning their President as an
appeaser and a "useful idiot" for his evident willingness to
negotiate nuclear-arms reductions with Moscow.
But on Central America, of little geopolitical importance in
itself, there would be no conciliation or humiliation. Based on
policies designed and executed by the hardest of hardliners in his
administration, Reagan's unwavering patronage of death-squad states
in El Salvador, Guatemala, and Honduras, and his backing of
anti-Communist "freedom fighters" in Nicaragua gathered the disparate
passions of the conservative movement - of all those obscure Dusty
Foggos - into a single mission. It also turned Central America into a
sinkhole of fanaticism and murder.
Enter Ollie North
Many of those who traveled down to Central America were Young
Turk Republicans who would preside over the right-wing radicalization
and corruption of the House of Representatives under Reagan in the
1980s and during the Gingrich insurgency of the 1990s. San Diego
Representative Bill Lowery, for example, first elected to the House
in 1980 at the tender age of thirty-three, traveled in the Foggo and
Wilkes Honduran road show, part of a Republican task force organized
to help sell Reagan's Contra war against the Sandinistas to a
skeptical Congress and public. After leaving office, Lowery, who has
floated around the edges of every Republican scandal from the Savings
and Loan collapse of the 1980s to the recent Jack Abramoff lobbying
case, and is now reportedly under investigation by the Justice
Department, went on to become a top lobbyist, skilled in the art of
"earmarking."
The corruption represented by Foggo, Wilkes, and Duke Cunningham
is an integral part of what President Dwight Eisenhower termed the
"military-industrial complex." And it goes hand-in-hand with
war-making. If we didn't have an enemy to fight, how could we justify
spending all that money on defense, not to mention on the hookers and
poker that went with the lobbying parties?
But in the wake of Vietnam, just as Foggo's generation of
conservatives was beginning to taste power, the Democratic Congress,
along with the State Department and even much of the Pentagon, was
not in a fighting mood. Congress had enacted a slew of laws, set up
oversight committees, and designed prohibitions to limit the White
House's ability to wage war and execute covert actions. Congress now
claimed the power to regulate presidential decisions related to
military aid, arms sales, and the sending of troops abroad; it also
demanded that the CIA inform up to eight committees of its
activities. Banned were peacetime assassinations of foreign leaders,
as were covert operations against American citizens at home. Worse
yet, the USSR, the "evil empire," was proving to be an uncooperative
opponent - or rather, it was being too cooperative, willing to
negotiate on a range of security issues. In order to implement a
policy of "rollback," as the neocons and militarists wanted to do,
one needed an enemy to rollback.
Enter Colonel Ollie North, then an aide to the National Security
Council - and the rest of the Iran-Contra gang. It was twenty years
ago this November that a story broke in the press revealing a secret
sale, brokered by North, of thousands of high-tech missiles to
Ayatollah Khomeini's Iran at a greatly inflated price, with the
profits laundered through a rogue's gallery of unsavory middlemen -
Iranian expatriates, Israeli-arms dealers, right-wing mercenaries,
anti-Communist client states like Saudi Arabia, Moonies, and drug
runners - to bypass a congressional prohibition on military aid to
the Contras.
No One Left Behind
What became known as "Iran-Contra," however, was much more than
an illegal arms deal. It was the New Right's first concerted campaign
to restore to the executive branch the power to wage unaccountable
war, to override congressional scrutiny, and go on the ideological
and military offensive in a place where, unlike in Vietnam, there was
no major power to get in the way.
Democratic and public opposition to the Contras, which was
strong, proved to be a blessing in disguise for the conservative
movement. It forced the White House to rely on its social base to
execute its "off-the-books" Nicaraguan war, thus thickening the
connections between diverse New Right groups. It created a dense
network of intellectuals, action groups, and social movements,
uniting mainstream conservatives with militants from the
carnivalesque Right. Urbane sophisticates like Ambassador to the UN
Jeanne Kirkpatrick and businessmen like Rite-Aid heir Lewis Lehrman
(today a member of the infamous neocon Project for the New American
Century) made common cause with Soldier of Fortune wet-op lunatics,
Sunbelt evangelical capitalists like Pat Robertson, and end-timers
like Tim LaHaye (who, long before he hit the best-seller lists with
his Left Behind series, was hawking Reagan's Central American crusade
to the evangelical rank-and-file).
In Washington, the first generation of neoconservatives, in
alliance with politicized Vietnam vets like North who took
second-tier positions in the Reagan administration, created an
inter-agency war party that allowed them to move forward with support
for the Contras despite congressional opposition. The shadowy
infrastructure of Iran-Contra, designed to override more cautious
area experts in the State Department and the CIA, who opposed Contra
funding, foreshadowed Douglas Feith's scheming Office of Special
Plans, which cooked the intelligence and helped manipulate the media
to make the case for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. In fact, a key Feith
advisor, neocon intellectual Michael Ledeen, who in the 1980s worked
the Israeli angle of the Iran-Contra affair, has recently helped to
rehabilitate his old buddy and fellow Iran-Contra luminary, the
habitual liar Manucher Ghorbanifar, as a credible proponent of
"regime change" in Iran. (There are even reports that the Pentagon,
with ***** Cheney's backing, has just put Ghorbanifar on the U.S.
payroll.)
It was over Central America that New Right ideologues first began
to junk multilateralism. When the International Court of Justice
ordered that the United States pay Nicaragua billions of dollars in
reparations for mining the country's principle port and for
conducting an illegal war of aggression, Washington balked and
withdrew from the Court's jurisdiction. It was a "watershed moment,"
according to legal scholar Eric Posner, in the U.S. relationship with
the international community, one that Bush's Ambassador to the UN
John Bolton has cited as evidence for why the U.S. should not support
the new International Criminal Court.
In the field, Reagan's Central American wars provided a way to
reactivate CIA and Pentagon counterinsurgency operatives, desk-bound
since the U.S. was kicked out of Southeast Asia, coordinating their
work with private mercenaries, conservative (often evangelical)
financiers, and a rising Christian fundamentalist movement.
So even as the military high command was taking steps to prevent
another Vietnam from happening by attempting to limit the use of
American troops to clearly defined objectives with clearly defined
exit strategies, civilian ideologues and militarists in Central
America were pushing in the opposite direction. In El Salvador, they
were funding the largest nation-building counterinsurgency since
Vietnam; while in Nicaragua - where they were hailing rapists,
torturers, and murderers as "the moral equivalents of our founding
fathers" - they were advancing a vision of military power used not
for specific ends but to launch what they today call a "democratic
global revolution."
Watch Out, John Murtha
As does today's "War on Terror," Iran-Contra had a domestic
front, which helped to normalize the kind of media manipulation,
political harassment, and domestic surveillance that has since become
commonplace in Bush's America.
Staffed with psych warfare operatives from the CIA and the Army's
Fourth Psychological Operations Group, the Office of Public
Diplomacy, set up in 1983 and headed by Otto Reich, carried out a
massive campaign of media deception. Working with polls conducted by
Madison-Avenue PR firms, the office provided emotive talking points
to government officials, pundits, and scholars, linking the
Sandinistas to any number of world evils: terrorism, Soviet nuclear
submarines, religious and ethnic persecution, Cuba's Castro, East
Germans, Bulgarians, PLO leader Arafat, Libyan dictator Qadhafi,
Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini, even Germany's Baader-Meinhof Gang -
claims as false as, yet no less effective than, those now famous
sixteen words in Bush's State of the Union Address of 2003 that
pinned the yellowcake tail on the Iraqi donkey.
It was through Reich's Office of Public Diplomacy that the White
House mobilized grassroots conservative organizations not just to
supply anti-Communist rebels with arms, bibles, medicine, and food,
but to go after congressional and media critics. Here began the
"swift boating" of American politics - distinct from 1950s
McCarthyism in that it was actually orchestrated and funded by the
executive branch.
For instance, New Right militants, advised by PR experts under
government contract, focused much of their work on unseating the
congressional anti-militarists elected in the wake of the Vietnam
disaster, particularly those who opposed Reagan's Central American
policy. If you "cross" Reagan, said a Republican aide, "they're going
to carve you up publicly." That's what happened to Maryland
Democratic Congressman Michael Barnes during a failed Senatorial bid.
He fell victim to a smear campaign organized by International
Business Communication, a Republican PR firm that worked closely with
Public Diplomacy and the independent Anti-Terrorism American
Committee. "Destroy Barnes," said the notes of one of the Committee's
operatives. Watch out, John Murtha.
It was also in defense of Reagan's Central American policies that
the various branches of the country's intelligence agencies joined
forces to intimidate domestic dissenters, anticipating many of the
practices - FBI and CIA file-sharing, for instance - that would be
institutionalized by the Patriot Act and the creation of the Office
of the Director of National Intelligence (filled by John Negroponte,
who presided over the Contra war as ambassador to Honduras, where he
reportedly covered-up death-squad murders). And the logic that today
justifies Gitmo contains more than a whiff of Oliver North's plan to
suspend the Constitution and place domestic opponents of the Contra
War in concentration camps.
The Swamp of Militarism and Corruption
Like the Watergate scandal, Iran-Contra started out as a small,
back-page newspaper story only to explode into a major constitutional
crisis. Yet unlike Watergate, which yielded a broad consensus
regarding the dangers of unchecked executive power, Iran-Contra
produced no closure. The Tower Commission, appointed by Reagan,
focused on procedural issues related to presidential control over the
NSA; Congress's investigation turned out to be a mess; and the
Special Prosecutor's inquiry dragged on for years, stonewalled by the
Department of Justice, with none other than John Bolton taking the
lead in playing defense.
One reason neither the public, nor the press, nor the political
system ever successfully came to terms with Iran-Contra was the
tendency of reporters and government investigators to get lost in a
thicket of conspiracy, to waste their energy tracing the tangle of
branches that they always hoped would provide a clear map of the
crime. Aspects of Iran-Contra were certainly criminal - illegal arms
sales to an enemy nation to fund an illegal war; the use of drug
traffickers to run supplies to the Contras; money laundering; the
deployment of CIA operatives to influence domestic opinion.
Yet, in a sense, the investigators were all barking up the wrong
tree. It wasn't a conspiracy at all, but part of a larger storm of
ideological passion, entwining economic interests and political
ambition, that delivered the American system to the New Right.
Iran-Contra - and Reagan's Central American policy more broadly -
broke down the tottering levees of a foreign policy already
discredited from failure in Vietnam, creating the swamp in which
militarism and corruption thrive. Until it is recognized as such, it
will continue to suck us down, even as odd pieces of flotsam like
Foggo, Wilkes, and Cunningham continue to rise to the surface.
http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/060206O.shtml
.
|
|
| User: "Attila2" |
|
| Title: Re: The Swift Boating of America |
02 Jun 2006 04:36:49 PM |
|
|
On Fri, 02 Jun 2006 16:05:36 -0400, "james g. keegan jr."
<jgkeegan@gmail.com> in alt.abortion with message-id
<jgkeegan-77BA65.16053602062006@individual.net> wrote:
More propagandizing spam from one of the usual sources.
.
|
|
|
| User: "james g. keegan jr." |
|
| Title: Re: The Swift Boating of America |
02 Jun 2006 05:02:40 PM |
|
|
In article <vqb182tm931jmhqtav5amqvhh0nuqa8oin@4ax.com>,
Attila2 <prochoice@here.now> wrote:
On Fri, 02 Jun 2006 16:05:36 -0400, "james g. keegan jr."
<jgkeegan@gmail.com> in alt.abortion with message-id
<jgkeegan-77BA65.16053602062006@individual.net> wrote:
More propagandizing spam from one of the usual sources.
you continue to demonstrate your ignorance of usenet newsgroups,
scumball, and your disrespect for readers' ability to decide for
themselves what is and is not appropriate.
do you feel like a hypocrite criticizing others for doing what you
do? even osprey has legitimately commented on your hypocrisy.
your hypocrisy aside, what you might want to do to make yourself feel
like an even bigger ***** is take a random sample of posts you've
whined about and then search google for the number of posts with this
topic, demonstrating that readers know what is of interest to them
far better than you do.
.
|
|
|
|
|
|
Related Articles |
|
|
