enders, tom dos

=<div><a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/world/elliott-abrams-mozote/">https://www.thenation.com/article/world/elliott-abrams-mozote/</a></div><div>
</div><div>finally cops
<div>=<div><a href="https://theintercept.com/2020/01/28/el-mozote-massacre-reagan-war-on-press/">https://theintercept.com/2020/01/28/el-mozote-massacre-reagan-war-on-press/</a></div><div>
</div><div>1/20 john s</div><div>
</div><div><div data-reactid="217" style="box-sizing: border-box;">A RETIRED AIR FORCE general in El Salvador <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/reuters/2020/01/25/world/24reuters-elsalvador-massacre.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">admitted</a> in court last Friday that the country’s armed forces carried out the infamous El Mozote massacre in December 1981. This acknowledgement marks the first time the Salvadoran military has taken responsibility for the atrocity.Over a period of days, the Atlacatl Battalion, a Salvadoran army unit created and trained by the U.S., slaughtered <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/08/world/americas/oas-to-reopen-inquiry-into-massacre-in-el-salvador-in-1981.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">more than 800</a> civilian men, women, and children in several villages in the mountains near El Salvador’s border with Honduras. The Reagan administration immediately acted to protect its Salvadoran allies, engaging in a far-reaching coverup.There was wholesale torture and rape, and many victims were burned alive. The <a href="http://www.markdanner.com/articles/127" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">level of cruelty</a> is most comparable currently to the actions of the Islamic State. One survivor remembered hearing an officer threaten to murder a soldier who wasn’t willing to kill kids.Today, Americans may see El Mozote as an obscure tale from the misty past. But this is not the case. In fact, this week’s final, complete confirmation of the events 38 years ago holds critical lessons about the Trumpist war on the media now.Raymond Bonner, who broke the El Mozote story for the New York Times, says that assaults on journalism by the government have “gone to an extreme [under President Trump], but it’s certainly not new. … What happened to me is an example of attacks on reporting.”The key things to understand about this war is, first, that it didn’t start with Trump, but rather with Richard Nixon almost five decades ago. Second, the right-wing fury at journalism has never been about the press’s many faults; instead, conservatives are most enraged when reporters do their job well. Third, officials who lie successfully are not punished, but are instead rewarded by the GOP apparatus for a job well done.the Reagan administration entered office in January 1981 filled with fervor about rolling back communism in Central America. The Cuban revolution in 1959 had been bad enough. But then the Sandinistas had overthrown Nicaragua’s dictatorship in 1979, and left-wing guerrillas in Guatemala and El Salvador threatened to do the same to their autocrats.</div><div data-reactid="228" style="box-sizing: border-box;">In retrospect, it’s clear that these were “<a href="https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/walter-lafeber-3/inevitable-revolutions-the-united-states-in-cen/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">Inevitable Revolutions</a>,” the title of one history of the period. Tiny, cruel white oligarchies had ruled over Indigenous peasants across the region for hundreds of years, and sooner or later, the dam was going to break. But to the Reaganites, this was all the work of the international communist conspiracy, headquartered in Moscow, and had to be crushed by any means necessary.There was a roadblock to Reagan’s plans, however: Congress was queasy about the U.S. alliance with the Salvadoran government and had required the president to certify by January 29, 1982 that El Salvador was “making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights.” If it did not, all U.S. aid would be cut off. It was therefore unwelcome at the White House when word began circulating that something extremely bad had happened in the Salvadoran mountains. That New Year’s Eve, the head of the Salvadoran’s junta was forced to declare that rumors of a massacre were just “a guerrilla trick.”Then came — from the perspective of the Reagan administration — catastrophe. On January 27, both the <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/1982/01/27/world/massacre-of-hundreds-reported-in-salvador-village.html" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">New York Times</a> and the Washington Post published accurate, front-page stories about what had happened.Thomas Enders, a career diplomat who at the time was assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, later said that “El Mozote, if true, might have destroyed the entire effort” in El Salvador. What to do?The answer had been articulated by Richard Nixon years earlier. As was borne out by Nixon’s direct experience during Watergate, few things are more dangerous to conservative priorities than good journalism. Therefore, as a top Nixon aide <a href="https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/forresearchers/find/histories/haldeman-1988-04-12.pdf" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">later recalled</a>, Nixon believed that it was necessary to “fight the press through … the nutcutters as [the president] called them, forcing our own news. Make a brutal, vicious attack on the opposition.”The Reaganites shared this perspective. News outlets were “the opposition” that had to be brutally, viciously attacked, and individual journalists were fair game as a way to discredit their employers. Bonner was therefore caught in the White House crosshairs.The pushback began with congressional testimony by Enders. “There is no evidence to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians,” he told a House subcommittee.What about the number of victims? Bonner’s article had mentioned a list of 733 compiled by villagers, as well as a tally of 926 from a human rights organization.Elliott Abrams, who’d just taken office as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, informed the Senate that “the numbers, first of all, were not credible. … Our information was that there were only 300 people in the canton.” This was clear, conscious deceit on the part of Abrams. Both the Times and Post articles had mentioned that the massacre had taken place in several locations.Then came the assault from the administration’s outside allies. On February 10, the Wall Street Journal ran a <a href="https://www.newspapers.com/image/65962448" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">lengthy editorial</a> headlined “The Media’s War.” Americans were “badly confused” about the situation in El Salvador thanks to the U.S. press. El Mozote was not a massacre, the Journal wrote, but a “massacre.” On the one hand, the number of dead had obviously been exaggerated and on the other, maybe the killing had been carried out by rebels dressed in government uniforms. Bonner was “credulous,” “a reporter out on a limb,” and, like reporters in Vietnam, a sucker for “communist sources.” One of the editorial’s authors appeared on PBS to proclaim that “obviously Ray Bonner has a political orientation.”Accuracy in Media, the conservative media criticism organization, went further. Bonner, it declared, was waging “a propaganda war favoring the Marxist guerrillas in El Salvador.” Meanwhile, a Times editor later said, the administration was engaging in a “really vicious” whisper campaign about him.</div><div data-reactid="232" style="box-sizing: border-box;">The message was received loud and clear in the executive offices of the Times. While Bonner considers Punch Sulzberger, then the publisher of the Times, to have been “a great, great man,” he also recalls that he “supposedly said to [Times editor] Abe Rosenthal, ‘Who the hell is this guy down there that’s causing us all the trouble?’”In August 1982, Rosenthal pulled Bonner out of Central America and back to New York for additional “training” in journalism. Bonner believes that Rosenthal made this decision not simply due to his El Mozote coverage, but because Rosenthal was a committed anti-communist who felt that Bonner was generally too sympathetic to the Salvadoran guerrillas and Nicaragua’s Sandinista government.Within the Times newsroom, says Bonner, “It was certainly perceived as if I were being punished. I had a reporter who told me, ‘I’m not going to let this happen to me.’ … There is no question that this had a chilling effect on the reporting out of Central America.”This coincided with a period of Grand Guignol violence by the Salvadoran government and its allied death squads that’s truly <a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=BU9tAwAAQBAJ&lpg=PA426&dq=%22as%20if%20each%20body%20was%20stroking%20its%20own%20head.%22%20-chomsky&pg=PA426#v=onepage&q=%22tonita%20is%20a%20peasant%22&f=false" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">beyond human comprehension</a>. About 75,000 Salvadorans were killed during this time, the per capita equivalent of about 5 million Americans today. According to a later U.N. investigation, the government was responsible for 85 percent of the murders, all committed with U.S. arms and training.For Bonner’s part, he quit the Times three years later in 1984. “When I told Abe I was leaving there were no tears shed,” he remembers. He eventually returned to work for the paper after Rosenthal’s retirement. Now 77, he <a href="https://www.bookoccino.com.au/about-us/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">owns a bookstore</a> in Australia.Meanwhile, the key personnel who squelched the story went on to greater and greater heights. Enders retired from government service and enjoyed a lucrative career on Wall Street. Abrams was later a member of George W. Bush’s National Security Council. Today, he is the special representative for Venezuela for the Trump administration.Given how well pressure on the media worked with El Mozote, it’s no wonder that the U.S. right has used the same strategy over and over since. With the rise of conservative talk radio, and then Fox News, it’s become ever easier for politicians to simply ignore any inconvenient aspects of reality. Trump privately explained to journalist Leslie Stahl <a href="https://theintercept.com/2018/05/22/lesley-stahl-donald-trump-said-he-attacks-the-media-so-when-you-write-negative-stories-about-me-no-one-will-believe-you/" style="box-sizing: border-box; outline: none; text-decoration-line: none;">in 2016</a> that he strategically attacks journalism “to discredit you all and demean you all so when you write negative stories about me no one will believe you.”Thus, while Bonner lived through a lot in 1981, he believes that “today it has gotten much worse.” Today, he says, “public officials simply lie with impunity,” and there doesn’t seem to be much anyone can do about it
.</div></div><div>=</div><div>='Something Horrible’ in El SalvadorJoan Didion JULY 14, 1994 ISSUE The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold Warby Mark DannerVintage, 304 pp., $12.00 (paper)In December of 1981 in El Salvador, twenty-one months after the murder of Archbishop Oscar Arnulfo Romero in San Salvador and twelve months after the murder of the four American Maryknoll women outside San Salvador and eleven months after the murder of the head of the Salvadoran land-reform agency and two of his American aides at the Sheraton Hotel in San Salvador, which is to say at a time when the government of the United States had already demonstrated the ability to tolerate grave insults to its Central American policy, certain events occurred in certain remote villages north of the Torola river in Morazán province. In what has since become the most familiar of those villages, El Mozote, the events in question began late on a Thursday afternoon, December 10, a time when the village was crowded with refugees from areas believed less safe, and were concluded at dawn on Saturday.Later that day, in Los Toriles, two kilometers to the southeast, similar events occurred, as similar events had already occurred or would within a few hours occur in Arambala and La Joya and Jocote Amarillo and Cerro Pando and Joateca and La Ranchería. These events were later and variously described to Mark Danner by the two American embassy officials assigned to investigate them, Todd Greentree and Major John McKay, as “something bad,” “something horrible,” a case in which “there had probably been a massacre, that they had lined people up and shot them,” a case in which “abuses against the civilian population probably took place”; a case that presented as its most urgent imperative the need to craft a report that would “have credibility among people who were far away and whose priorities were—you know, we’re talking about people like Tom Enders—whose priorities were definitely not necessarily about getting at exactly what happened.”On December 10, 1992, eleven years to the day after the commencement of what has become known as the Mozote massacre (the largest number of those killed on that long December weekend were killed during the thirty-six hours spent by members of the Salvadoran army’s Atlacatl Battalion in El Mozote), four American forensic experts submitted to the United Nations Truth Commission the results of their analysis of skeletal remains and artifacts recovered by a team of Argentinian forensic anthropologists originally assembled to reconstruct evidence of their own country’s dirty war. Working exclusively with material exhumed from what had been the sacristy of the Mozote church, the Americans were able to identify the bones of 143 human beings, 136 of whom were children and adolescents. Of the remaining seven adults, six were women, one in the third trimester of pregnancy. The average age of the children was six.The report prepared for the United Nations noted that there may have been a greater number of deaths in the sacristy, which was one of several sites mentioned by survivors as places where bodies would be found, since “many young infants may have been entirely cremated” (much of the village had been burned before the Atlacatl left El Mozote) and “other children may not have been counted because of extensive fragmentation of body parts.” Of the ten officers who, according to the report prepared for the United Nations, commanded the units participating in the Morazán operation, three are now dead, and four are still serving in the Salvadoran army. None has been officially charged on any count related to the massacre.A year before, Tutela Legal, the human rights office of the Archbishopric of San Salvador, had compiled what may be the final and most comprehensive list of all those known or believed to have died in El Mozote and the surrounding villages. The Tutela Legal list numbered 767 men, women, and children, the youngest the two-day-old grandson of a day laborer named Miguel Márquez (the grandfather was also killed, as were his son, his daughter-in-law, two of his daughters, and seven of his other grandchildren), the oldest a man named Leoncio Díaz, who was said to be 105 years old and to have had a 100-year-old companion named Leoncia Márquez, who was also killed. Of the 767 victims cited on the Tutela Legal list, 358 were infants and children under the age of thirteen.This of course is not a new story, and the fact that it is not a new story is in many ways the point of Mark Danner’s dispassionate, meticulously documented, and for these reasons conclusive book, The Massacre at El Mozote. The essential facts of the Mozote massacre were published on January 27, 1982, on the front pages of both The New York Times and The Washington Post, accompanied by photographs taken by Susan Meiselas, who had walked into Morazán from Honduras with Raymond Bonner of the Times. Bonner reported seeing the charred skulls and bones of what appeared to him to be several dozen men, women, and children. Allowing that it was “not possible for an observer who was not present at the time of the massacre to determine independently how many people died or who killed them,” he reported that the surviving relatives and friends of the victims believed the dead to number 733 and the killing to have been done “by uniformed soldiers” during an Atlacatl sweep of the region.Alma Guillermoprieto, who was then a stringer for The Washington Post and who entered Mozote a few days after Bonner and Meiselas had left, also reported seeing bodies and body parts and quoted the same survivors, as well as the Salvadoran ambassador to Washington, Ernesto Rivas Gallont, who dismissed the reports from Morazán as the “type of story that leads us to believe there is a plan,” the plan being either to derail the Salvadoran election scheduled for March 1982 or “to take credit away from the certification President Reagan must make to Congress.” This “certification,” during 1982 and 1983 a semiannual requirement for continued aid to El Salvador, involved asserting that its government was “making a concerted and significant effort to comply with internationally recognized human rights” and was “achieving substantial control over all elements of its own armed forces, so as to bring to an end the indiscriminate torture and murder of Salvadoran citizens by these forces.”The Reagan administration made its certification to these points on January 28, 1982, the day after Bonner’s and Alma Guillermoprieto’s extensive reports from Morazán appeared in the Times and the Post. Mark Danner’s true subject in The Massacre at El Mozote, then, is not the massacre itself but the way in which the story of the massacre, which was carried out by troops trained by the US Special Forces and equipped with US manufactured M-16s and with ammunition manufactured for the US government at Lake City, Missouri, came to be known and discounted in the United States, the way in which the story of El Mozote “was exposed to the light and then allowed to fall back into the dark.”Reports that something bad had happened in Morazán began to circulate almost immediately. The Reverend William L. Wipfler at the New York office of the National Council of Churches first heard the story from a contact at Socorro Jurídico, which was then the legal aid office of the Archbishopric of San Salvador. Wipfler left a message for Raymond Bonner at the Mexico City bureau of the Times, and also sent a cable, dated December 15, 1981, asking Ambassador Deane Hinton in San Salvador for “confirmation or otherwise” of “reliable reports received here [indicating] that between December 10 and 13 a government joint military and security forces operation took place in Morazán Department which resulted in over 900 civilian deaths.”Hinton did not reply until January 8, by which time the guerrillas’ Radio Venceremos was back in operation (to at least temporarily knock out the Venceremos transmitter had been one goal, perhaps the single successfully realized goal, of the Atlacatl’s Morazán operation) and broadcasting a detailed account of the massacre from a survivor named Rufina Amaya. Rufina Amaya had witnessed the killing of her husband and four of her children, ages nine, five, three, and eight months, but in the confusion and terror of the event had been inadvertently overlooked as the soldiers corralled groups of struggling and screaming women, many of them torn from their infants and children, to be killed and then burned.“I do not know what your sources are but the only sources that I have seen alleging something like this are clandestine Radio Venceremos reports,” Hinton’s January 8 cable to the National Council of Churches read in part. “Frankly, I do not consider Radio Venceremos to be a reliable source.” Since Radio Venceremos did not restore its ability to broadcast until well after the National Council of Churches query was sent, that Hinton would devote an extraordinary ten of this cable’s twelve paragraphs to illustrations of Radio Venceremos unreliability seems in retrospect to suggest a certain crisis of confidence, if not a panic, at the embassy.In fact, definitely before January 8 and probably closer to mid-December, Todd Greentree, then a junior reporting officer at the embassy in San Salvador and now the desk officer for Nicaragua at the State Department, had relayed to Hinton not only a report from his own sources on the left about a massacre in Morazán but also an offer from the FMLN to guide Greentree there. “I knew the guerrillas would never have masqueraded something like this, would never have fabricated it, if they were offering safe-conduct,” Greentree told Danner. “I was convinced that something had gone on, and that it was bad. I mean, it was pretty clear, if they were going to do this, that something must have happened.”Hinton’s decision was that Greentree could not go in under guerrilla protection. “I should emphasize that I never got the feeling that they just wanted this to go away,” Greentree told Danner about the meeting in which this decision was taken. “But there were political and military restraints that we were operating under.” What discussion there may have been of an independent investigation (at least ten of the fifty-five American military advisers Congress then allowed in El Salvador were assigned to the Atlacatl) is unknown, although Danner was told by one of the advisers assigned to the Atlacatl that someone from the embassy Milgroup (Military Advisory Group) had called the Atlacatl base at La Libertad a few days after the massacre “and talked to the Special Forces people and told them they wanted Monterrosa [Lt. Col. Domingo Monterrosa Barrios, the Atlacatl commander] to come in—they wanted to talk to him about something that had happened during the operation.”Monterrosa had declined to come in, a suggestive illustration of the level of control the United States then had over the military forces it was funding. Whether or not the embassy decision to refuse the FMLN offer to guide Greentree to the site of the massacre was discussed with Washington also remains shrouded in the subjunctive. “However much we might have wanted more information, no one in State was going to make that call,” Danner was told by Peter Romero, at the time of Mozote an El Salvador specialist at the State Department.Most of the interested players, then, knew about Morazán, in outline if not in detail, well before January 6, when Bonner and Susan Meiselas, followed a few days later by Alma Guillermoprieto, first walked into El Mozote. Not until January 30, however, three days after the story had appeared on the front pages of the Times and the Post, did the embassy dispatch Todd Greentree and Major John McKay, who was then in the defense attaché’s office at the embassy and is now a colonel attached to NATO in Brussels, to Morazán. Greentree and McKay did not exactly get to El Mozote, although they did fly over it. Greentree’s impression from the air was that “El Mozote had been pretty much destroyed.”Once on the ground in Morazán, Greentree and McKay, accompanied by a squad of the Atlacatl, interviewed those residents of the northern villages who had reached the refugee camp outside San Francisco Gotera.Although the Americans later recalled being able to “observe and feel this tremendous fear,” they did not elicit eyewitness accounts of a massacre, nor had they expected to. “You had a bunch of very intimidated, scared people, and now the Army presence further intimidated them,” McKay told Danner. “I mean, the Atlacatl had supposedly done something horrible, and now these gringos show up under this pretense of investigating it, but in the presence of these soldiers. It was probably the worst thing you could do. I mean, you didn’t have to be a rocket scientist to know what the Army people were there for.” Greentree and McKay then set out for El Mozote, and got to within an hour’s walk of what had been the village before the Atlacatl soldiers accompanying them refused to go further. “In the end, we went up there and we didn’t want to find that anything horrible had happened,” McKay told Danner. “And the fact that we didn’t get to the site turned out to be very detrimental to our reporting—the Salvadorans, you know, were never very good about cleaning up their shell casings.”That evening, back at the embassy in San Salvador, Greentree wrote a report, the overriding aim of which appears to have been “credibility,” summarizing his and McKay’s findings. Here is the point at which El Mozote entered the thin air of policy. “The end of Bob White’s tour, and the transition period before Hinton arrived [Robert White had preceded Hinton as ambassador], and the first six months of Hinton’s tour—those were the absolute worst days, really out of control,” Greentree told Danner by way of explaining why the conviction that what was known or suspected in country would not be “credible” in Washington had by then increased exponentially. “And the fact that Bob White and everybody in the Embassy had been so thoroughly traumatized by the murders of the nuns, and theAFL-CIO guys [the two Americans who were killed with the head of the Salvadoran land-reform agency at the Sheraton in San Salvador], and just the general sort of out-of-control way the military was—it meant that everything we reported could be taken as suspect.”The following day, after review and revisions, Greentree’s report went to the State Department over Hinton’s name. This was the cable containing the careful and soon to be repeated assertions that it was “not possible to prove or disprove excesses of violence against the civilian population of El Mozote by government troops” and that “no evidence could be found to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians in the operation zone, nor that the number of civilians killed even remotely approached number being cited in other reports circulating internationally.” The Greentree cable also contained, deep in its text, a curious warning from one of the interviewees, the mayor of Jocoaitique, who according to the cable “intimated that he knew of violent fighting in El Mozote” but was “unwilling to discuss deportment of government troops” and who then made a comment so coded that it could stand as a veiled but exact expression of the embassy position on what did or did not take place in Morazán. What the cable quoted the mayor of Jocoaitique as having said to Todd Greentree and Major McKay was this: “This is something one should talk about in another time, in another country.”That part of the embassy cable did not make it into the statement made two days later to the House Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs by Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Thomas O. Enders. (Nor would it appear in the sanitized version of the cable released under the Freedom of Information Act to Raymond Bonner in 1983.)1 The Enders statement is arresting not only for what it says and does not say but for its tone, which suggests an extreme version of a kind of exaggerated hauteur commonly translated as entitlement in the northeastern United States. “Many of you have read,” he said, addressing what he called “special pleading” in the matter of death and disappearance statistics, “about something called the Legal Aid Office of the Archbishopric—Socorro Judico [sic] is its Spanish name; it is often cited in the international media. It strangely lists no victims of guerrilla and terrorist violence. Apparently they do not commit violence.”This was a level of seigneurial dismissal often emulated but never quite mastered by Jeane Kirkpatrick and Elliott Abrams and other regular defenders of administration policy in Central America. “There is another organization, the Central American University, that collects statistics too,” Enders continued, referring to UCA, the Jesuit José Simeón Cañas University of Central America. “Its bias may be apparent from the fact that it does include a category of persons killed by what I believe Congressman Bonker referred to as paramilitary organizations. And they are called in Spanish ajusticiados, referring to persons that have received justice at the hands of their executioners.” Only then did Enders turn his attention to what he described as “allegations” of massacres, including Mozote. “We sent two embassy officers down to investigate the reports,” Enders said, inadvertently illuminating the particular distance between Washington and Morazán, which in local usage is said to be not “down” but “up” from San Salvador. Enders continued:It is clear from the report they gave that there has been a confrontation between the guerrillas occupying Mozote and attacking Government forces last December. There is no evidence to confirm that Government forces systematically massacred civilians in the operations zone, or that the number of civilians remotely approached the 733 or 926 victims cited in the press. I note they asked people how many people there were in that canton and were told probably not more than 300 in December, and there are many survivors including refugees now.Enders said this on February 2. On February 1, however, Deane Hinton, in response to what he apparently construed as careless use of his reply to the National Council of Churches, had sent a corrective cable to the State Department. This cable read in part:I would be grateful if department would use extreme care in describing my views on alleged massacre. Case in point is description in para 3 of REFTEL referring to my letter…as “denying the incident.” My letter did not “deny” incident: it reported that at that time I had no confirmation and argued from available evidence from Radio Venceremos and from lack of other reports that I had no reason to believe Venceremos reports. I still don’t believe Venceremos version but additional evidence strongly suggests that something happened that should not have happened and that it is quite possible Salvadoran military did commit excesses. Allegations that it was unit from Atlacatl battalion in El Mozote remain to be confirmed or discredited.Several days later, Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs Elliott Abrams echoed Enders in his statement to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. The El Mozote case was, Abrams said, “a very interesting one in a sense.” (“Interesting” was at the time a word much in use, as were “strange” and “unusual.” Enders for example had noted that Socorro Jurídico “strangely lists no victims of guerrilla and terrorist violence.” I recall watching Jeane Kirkpatrick during this period whip an audience to a frenzy with little silken whips of innuendo as she described how “interested,” even “bemused,” she was by the “unusual standards,” the “extraordinarily, even uniquely demanding standards” imposed by the certification requirement.) The reason El Mozote was “interesting” to Abrams was this:…because we found, for example, that the numbers, first of all, were not credible, because as Secretary Enders notes, our information was that there were only three hundred people in the canton.Abrams went on to wonder why a massacre that had occurred in mid-December, if indeed a massacre had occurred at all, had not been “publicized” until late January.Ten years later, in an interview, Abrams was asking the same question, to the same innuendo: “If it had really been a massacre and not a firefight, why didn’t we hear right off from the FMLN? I mean, we didn’t start hearing about it until a month later.” Abrams, in other words, was still trying to negotiate what became with the exhumation of the sacristy unnegotiable, still trying to return discussion to the familiar question of whether or not a massacre had actually occurred. Enders, when he talked to Danner, had transcended this now inoperative line of attack, ascending effortlessly to the big-picture argument against the existence of a massacre: “Coming on top of everything else, El Mozote, if true, might have destroyed the entire effort. Who knows? I certainly thought that when I first heard about it.” In other words it had been necessary to deny the massacre because had there been a massacre the “effort” would have become, again in Enders’s word, “unfundable.”The effort did not become unfundable. The effort instead became the most expensive attempt to support a foreign government threatened by an insurgency since Vietnam.2 Progressively cruder interpretations of what had been the surgically precise statements made by the embassy came to dominate, during the spring and summer of 1982, discussion of this country’s role in Central America. By February 10 of that spring The Wall Street Journal was noting editorially that “extremists” in El Salvador had “learned long ago the trick of dressing in military uniforms to confuse their victims.” (This appears to have been the source for Ronald Reagan’s later assertion that “communist operatives” were dressing in “freedom fighter uniforms” to discredit the Nicaraguan contras.) Shrill excoriations of Raymond Bonner, who necessarily had to be cast as having what George Melloan of The Wall Street Journal called “a political orientation,” became commonplace.Bonner was a graduate of Stanford Law School, had been a prosecutor in the San Francisco district attorney’s office, and had served as a Marine officer in Vietnam. The Marine major who went up to Morazán with Todd Greentree, John McKay, had been with Bonner in Vietnam, where McKay lost an eye. “We could not have said, ‘My God, there’s been a massacre,”’ McKay told Danner about the cable the embassy sent to Washington as a report of his and Greentree’s trip to Morazán. “But, truth be known, the ambiguity of the cable that went out—in my own conscience I began to question it. And then when I saw the New York Times piece, and the picture, that really got me thinking. Bonner and I had gone to Quantico together, went to Vietnam together.” In the late summer of 1980, at a time when Bonner had spent time in Bolivia and Guatemala but made only a few short visits to El Salvador, he was asked his opinion of US policy in El Salvador. “Ask me about Bolivia, or Guatemala, or any country, I’ll probably have an opinion,” Bonner recalled having said. “But El Salvador, boy, I just don’t know. I guess we’re doing the right thing.”3Bonner, then, might have seemed an unlikely target for the campaign then being mounted against him in Washington and New York. For those waging this campaign (notably The Wall Street Journal), however, the question of “political orientation” was answered once and for all in August 1982, when the Times abruptly withdrew Bonner from Central America. According to A.M. Rosenthal, then the executive editor of the Times, Bonner was withdrawn because he “didn’t know the techniques of weaving a story together…. I brought him back because it seemed terribly unfair to leave him there without training.” Actually Bonner had spent a good part of 1981 on the Metro desk at the Times, but Rosenthal suggested that those who believed Bonner to have been withdrawn for reasons other than “training” did so because they resented him, Rosenthal. “I was an agent of change in the Times,” he said, “and a lot of people didn’t like my politics.”In many ways this tends to beg the point, burying the issue as it does in the self-referential. Whatever reason or reasons Rosenthal may have had for withdrawing Bonner, it was the sheer fact of that withdrawal, the fact of that apparent failure to back up a reporter who had put the paper on the line with a story denied by the government, that spoke so eloquently to those who wanted to discredit the reporting on El Mozote. That the Times withdrew Bonner was seen, immediately and by wider numbers of people than were actually knowledgeable about El Salvador or administration policy, as “proof” that he had been wrong about El Mozote: as recently as a few years ago it was possible to hear it casually said about Bonner that the Times “had to pull him out,” that he had “bought into a massacre.”“For more than a year now we’ve been following the campaign that we victimized former New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner,” The Wall Street Journal noted editorially in 1993. “The excavation of children’s bones in Mozote is supposed to vindicate Mr. Bonner and discredit what we said…we did not fire Mr. Bonner in the first place. The New York Times did. Or, more precisely, after then-Managing Editor A.M. Rosenthal undertook his own reporting visit to Salvador, it pulled Mr. Bonner off the beat and back to New York, where he left the paper.” In defense of its own reasonableness, the Journal noted that in its original 1982 attack on Bonner it had “offered not one word of criticism of Alma Guillermoprieto of the Washington Post.”[different article explains why?]Danner includes, among the documents reproduced at the end of The Massacre at El Mozote, the full text of both Bonner’s and Alma Guillermoprieto’s stories. There is no substantive difference between the two in either the reporting or the qualifying of the story, but there were certain marginal distinctions on which critics of Bonner could seize. Guillermoprieto referred to herself as “this correspondent” and said that she had been taken into Morazán by “the Farabundo Marti Liberation Front”; Bonner referred to himself as “a visitor who traveled through the area with those who are fighting against the junta that now rules El Salvador,” i.e., the Farabundo Martí Liberation Front.Guillermoprieto began: “Several hundred civilians, including women and children, were taken from their homes in and around this village and killed by Salvadoran Army troops during a December offensive against leftist guerrillas, according to three survivors who say they witnessed the alleged massacres.” She then proceeded to describe the bodies she herself had seen. Bonner began: “From interviews with people who live in this small mountain village and surrounding hamlets, it is clear that a massacre of major proportions occurred here last month.” He then proceeded to describe the bodies he himself had seen. Bonner’s statement is the less varnished of the two, but to call it different is to resort to a point of journalistic convention so narrowly defined as to be merely legalistic.There seemed at the time at least two clear reasons that Bonner, not Guillermoprieto, became the target of choice. One reason was that Bonner, unlike Guillermoprieto, continued to report on a daily basis from El Salvador and so, all through the spring and into the summer of 1982, remained a stubborn mote in Deane Hinton’s ability to project the situation as the State Department wanted it projected. “I’m just afraid he’s going to get himself killed,” I recall an embassy official saying about Bonner during a lunch with Hinton in June of 1982; the tone here was the macho swagger never entirely absent from American embassies on hardship status. “That would be a tragedy.” The other clear reason was that Benjamin C. Bradlee and The Washington Post backed up their reporter; A.M. Rosenthal and The New York Times did not.The Mozote massacre occurred only six years after most of us watched the helicopters lift off the roof of the Saigon embassy and get pushed off the flight decks of the US fleet into the South China Sea. There are now more than twice as many years between us and Mozote than there were between Mozote and those helicopters. This is not an insignificant time line, and suggests, in retrospect, a third reason that Raymond Bonner’s report from Morazán elicited an acrimony that Alma Guillermoprieto’s did not. Bonner was an American. Alma Guillermoprieto was born in and was then living in Mexico, a fact that was in some way understood to render her ineligible for casting as a member of what was sometimes called “the adversary culture,” the culture that was construed as hostile to the interests of American business and the American government, the culture that was even then drawing parallels between El Salvador and Vietnam.Certain parallels were inescapable, since El Salvador was seen, by both the American military and the American policy community, as an opportunity to “apply the lesson” of Vietnam. The counterinsurgency doctrine that rationalized such operations as the 1981 sweep of Morazán was intended as a “revision” of the failed counterinsurgency effort in Vietnam (the revision for El Salvador placed a central emphasis on correcting “root causes,” or winning popular support by “democratizing” Salvadoran society), yet it had come to sound dispiritingly the same. The word “pacification” was in use, as was the phrase “third force,” usually in reference to José NapoleónDuarte.“The only territory you want to hold is the six inches between the ears of the campesino,” Colonel John C. Waghelstein, who became commander of the Milgroup not long after Mozote, said when he spoke at the American Enterprise Institute in 1985 on “LIC [Low-Intensity Conflict] in the Post Vietnam Period.”4 As late as 1986, in The Wall Street Journal, an American military adviser was quoted describing a community event sponsored by a Salvadoran army unit as “winning hearts and minds.” The event involved clowns, mariachis, and speeches from army officers calling on peasants to reject the guerrillas. “This is low-intensity-conflict doctrine in action,” the adviser said.5Again as in Vietnam, the doctrine was met with resistance on the part of those charged with carrying it out. “Attempts to address root causes during [this] period enjoyed less success than did efforts to stabilize the military situation,” four American military officers observed in their 1988 American Military Policy in Small Wars: The Case of El Salvador, the so-called “colonels’ report” prepared for the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis.American officers recognized… [that] the government had to transform itself into an institution perceived as effective, impartial, and committed to bringing about genuine reform. Meaningful implementation of this concept has eluded the Salvadorans and their American advisers.In a 1991 Rand Institute report prepared for the Department of Defense,6 Benjamin C. Schwarz noted that “the greed and apparent tactical incompetence of Salvadoran officers has so exhausted American experts posted to El Salvador that all the individuals interviewed for this report who have served there in the past two years believe that the Salvadoran military does not wish to win the war because in so doing it would lose the American aid that has enriched it for the past decade.”In San Salvador as in Saigon, this had long been accepted as one of many taxing givens that made the posting so difficult to share with those who were planning the effort in Washington. Deane Hinton, who would not talk to Danner, emerges in The Massacre at El Mozote as the ultimate example of the career foreign service officer trying to execute an extremely doubtful policy in an even more doubtful situation. (In his role as the good soldier of American foreign policy, Deane Hinton left El Salvador in 1983 for Pakistan, a more remote but equally doubtful situation, and then returned to Central America to mop up the debris left by the contra and then the Panama efforts. Alma Guillermoprieto, whose work since El Mozote has been especially acute on the immediacy with which Washington dreams become Central and South American responsibilities, notes in her essential The Heart That Bleeds that, as late as 1992 in Hinton’s Panama embassy, the preferred way to refer to the 1989 invasion was as “la liberación.”7 )“This is a suicide mission,” an unidentified embassy official in San Salvador said when Warren Hoge of The New York Times asked, not long after Mozote, if assignment to El Salvador could advance a foreign service career. “Someone’s got to be nuts to be here. How many people do you think profited from having worked in Vietnam?”8 What made the San Salvador embassy a suicide mission was, of course, the certain knowledge that the facts of the situation would be less than welcome at the other end of the cable traffic. “There was no secret about who was doing the killing,” Danner was told by Howard Lane, the public affairs officer at the embassy at the time of El Mozote. “I mean, you formed that view within forty-eight hours after arriving in the country, and there was no secret at all about it—except, maybe, in the White House.”What Danner details in The Massacre at El Mozote is the process by which actual eyewitness accounts (Bonner, Guillermoprieto) and photographs (Meiselas) came to be discounted by large numbers of Americans for no other reason than that the government, presenting no conflicting evidence, referred to the accounts (the photographs seemed rather eerily not to exist in anyone’s argument) as describing an event that was intrinsically unconfirmable, rendering the accounts by definition untrue. “Accurate information,” Enders said as he began his February 2, 1982, statement on Capitol Hill. “I think we have all found out that is very hard to establish.” He continued, first questioning the possibility of ever determining who, if indeed there had been “deaths,” had been responsible for them, then raising the ultimate question, the coup de grâce question, the one that had to do with the true interests of those who reported such deaths:The responsibility for the overwhelming number of deaths is never legally determined nor usually accounted for by clear or coherent evidence. Seventy percent of the political murders known to our embassy were committed by unknown assailants. And there is much special pleading going on also in this.What is especially striking about Enders, as he presents himself in The Massacre at El Mozote, is his apparent inability to recognize any contradiction between what he said in 1982 to the House Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs and what he said a decade later to Danner. Danner at one point asked Enders about a rumor, believed by a number of prominent Salvadorans, that two American advisers had observed the Mozote operation from a base camp below the Torola river. This was the answer Enders gave: “Certainly, one of the issues I remember raising between us and the Embassy was: Were there any American advisers on this sortie? The Embassy made a great effort to talk to advisers who were with the Atlacatl to try to find out the truth.” Any admission of knowledge, Enders conceded, “would have ruined those guys’ careers—they would have been cashiered. So no one’s going to volunteer, ‘Hey, I was up there.”’ The effect of such a disclosure on administration efforts to continue funding the war, Enders said, “would have been devastating. American advisers with a unit that committed an atrocity? Devastating. Can you imagine anything more corrosive of the entire military effort?”Enders had recognized at the time, then, the existence of a “sortie,” even the possibility of an “atrocity” (the atrocity if not the sortie was in the subjunctive), and had raised the question of whether there had been “American advisers” present. Yet what Enders had said in 1982 was this: “…frankly, we do not have people who go out with the units as advisers, you know. These are military trainers. They stay behind.” The idea that there was a difference between “advisers” and “trainers,” another of the many legalistic distinctions at that time employed to rhetorical advantage, seems not to have been consistently held even by Enders.Danner describes what happened to the story of El Mozote during the days and months after its initial disclosure as “a parable of the cold war.” It was that, and as such a parable Mozote is irresistibly legible, but it was also something else. “There have also been many fewer allegations of massacres during this reporting period than last,” Thomas Enders was able to say in July 1982, when the question of certification once again came before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs. “This may be in part,” he said, still the loyalist but still careful, fewer allegations of massacres, may be, in part, “because many earlier reports proved to be fabricated or exaggerated.”9At the same hearing, Nestor Sanchez, then deputy assistant secretary of defense for Inter-American affairs, was able to single out “the first quick-reaction battalion trained by US instructors in El Salvador” not only for “its tactical capability in fighting the guerrillas” but also for “its humane treatment of the people.”10 That was the Atlacatl. Just six years after Vietnam and in the face of what was beginning to seem a markedly similar American engagement, Mozote, by which we have come to mean not exactly the massacre itself but this systematic obfuscation and prevarication that followed the disclosure of the massacre, was the first evidence that we had emerged a people again so yearning to accept the government version as to buy into a revision of history in which those Americans who differed, those Americans who for reasons of their “political orientation” would “fabricate” reports of a massacre carried out by a unit noted for its “humane treatment of the people,” were once again our true, and only truly sinister, enemy.</div><div>
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<div>Cambodia's other madmenHOWEVER MONSTROUS POL POT'S ACTIONS, HE IS NOT THE ONLY ONE TO HAVE TURNED THE COUNTRY INTO A LIVING HELL.https://web.archive.org/web/20010210021906/http://www.salon.com/news/1998/04/24news.htmlBY JUDITH COBURN AND JOSHUA PHILLIPSJust as it seemed Pol Pot's old international allies were conspiring to snatch him and put him on trial, the ailing mass murderer turns up dead in his jungle redoubt."Natural causes," claim his former comrades in the Khmer Rouge, burning his remains on a pyre before an autopsy could be performed. They say their former leader had been under house arrest for ordering the assassination of his own defense minister and 12 members of his family, including his grandchildren.But nothing will ever seem "natural" about the terror Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge rained on Cambodia. And while the near 20-year search for the elusive Saloth Sar ("Pol Pot" was his nom de guerre) could make for a great Hollywood journalist-in-action movie, it presents a false, celebrity-style view of history. The millions of Cambodians who died beginning in 1970 -- and continue to die today -- did not perish simply because a single madman seized power in their country.If Pol Pot had been tried in an international war crime tribunal, as the United States wanted, would he have stood alone in the dock? His most recent captors, the high-level leaders who held out with him in the jungle after the overthrow of the Khmer Rouge, men like Ieng Sary, Khieu Sampan and the guerrilla commander Ta Mok -- known to Cambodians as "the butcher" -- certainly should have been co-defendants.And what about the high-level officials of the Hun Sen government? Most of them were powerful Khmer Rouge leaders themselves until they mutinied against Pol Pot's purges in 1976-78. Yet they helped carry out the brutal march back in history that emptied Cambodia's towns, wrecked its agricultural economy and medical system and turned the country into a mass labor camp so that hundreds of thousands died from malnutrition, disease and overwork.Thousands more were killed in a labor-intensive bloodletting by Khmer Rouge cadres wielding clubs -- bullets were scarce. Should those cadres, many of them in their teens at the time, be tried?What about King Norodom Sihanouk, who threw his royal lot in with the Khmer Rouge after he was overthrown in 1970 by Gen. Lon Nol.What about those who created the political vacuum that permitted a group of marginal jungle fighters to seize power? The Vietnamese communist leaders who undermined Sihanouk by using Cambodia as a staging area for their war to unify Vietnam? The Americans who encouraged Sihanouk's overthrow and drove Cambodian peasants into the arms of the Khmer Rouge by one of the most intense bombing campaigns ever recorded -- and then invaded the country in 1970? Should Richard Nixon's ghost, Nobel Prize-winner Henry Kissinger and the late U.S. diplomat Thomas Enders, who chose targets for the bombing, join the ghost of Pol Pot before a war crimes tribunal?And what of those who sustained the Khmer Rouge after the Vietnamese invasion in 1978 -- the Thais who gave them sanctuary, the Chinese who armed them, the U.S. officials who encouraged the Thais and Chinese and the U.N. members who voted to keep the Khmer Rouge as Cambodia's representatives in the United Nations?Pol Pot may be dead, but his legacy lives on. Former Khmer Rouge comrades led by Hun Sen still rule Cambodia with an iron fist, routinely killing political opponents, newspaper reporters and labor activists. Hundreds of candidates were killed in the U.N.-supervised 1993 elections while observers and journalists -- desperate to herald the arrival of democracy -- looked the other way.Four years later, the jerry-built coalition government was vanquished in a coup. Opposition parties and a budding labor movement are being repressed. This July's elections promise to be violent.A "great madman" theory of Cambodia's history can hardly do justice to what has happened to these people and their country. "Killing Fields" are not built in a day. Neither is democracy. Both take many, many hands. 
SALON | APRIL 24, 1998Judith Coburn covered the war in Cambodia from 1970 to 1973 and has reported from there regularly since then. Joshua Phillips, a freelance journalist, reported for the Pnomh Penh Post in 1997.</div><div></div><div>hmmn:</div><div><a href="http://www.whale.to/b/pol_pot.html">http://www.whale.to/b/pol_pot.html</a></div><div>See: <a href="http://www.whale.to/b/bombing_ger.html">Allied bombing civilians</a> <a href="http://www.whale.to/b/argentina_h.html">Argentina's 'dirty war'</a>   <a href="http://www.whale.to/b/palestinian_genocide.html">Palestinian</a>  <a href="http://www.whale.to/b/indonesian_genocide.html">Indonesian</a>   <a href="http://www.whale.to/b/communism.html">Communism</a>  <a href="http://www.whale.to/b/reptilian_hosting.html">Reptilian hosting</a><a title="Pol Pot Revisited" rel="bookmark" href="http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/?p=56571">Pol Pot Revisited</a><a href="http://www.whale.to/c/french_revolution1.html">[2011 Sept] French Revolution's Hidden Depopulation Agenda by Andrew Smith</a>  "Pol Pot's regime is surprisingly similar to the French Revolution, 200 years before. Both revolutions began in the French capitol of Paris. Both revolutions conducted deadly purges, resulting in the death of many. Also, when they took over, both Pol Pot and the French declared, 'This is the year zero.' They both made their own 10 day calendar and rejected the thought of any God. Both revolutions were curtailed within a decade." And both were financed by the Illuminati Bankers.<a href="http://www.whale.to/b/khmer_rouge_jailer.html">[2009 April] Khmer Rouge jailer says U.S. contributed to Pol Pot rise</a><a href="http://www.whale.to/b/collins1.html">[2007] The Cambodian Memory Hole by Paul David Collins</a><a href="http://www.whale.to/b/henry_kiss.html">[2001] Henry Kissinger and Gerald Ford Lied to the American Public about East Timor</a><a href="http://www.whale.to/b/pol_pot1.html">[1998] The Friends of Pol Pot by John Pilger</a><a href="http://www.whale.to/b/herman1.html">[1998] Pol Pot's Death In The Propaganda System by Edward S. Herman</a><a href="http://www.whale.to/b/pilger15.html">[1997] The Long Secret Alliance: Uncle Sam and Pol Pot by John Pilger</a><a href="http://www.whale.to/b/pol_pot_and_kissinger.html">[1997] Pol Pot And Kissinger. On war criminality and impunity by Edward S. Herman</a><a href="http://www.whale.to/b/roberts.html">[1997] US intervention in Cambodia from bombs to ballots by David Roberts</a><a href="http://www.whale.to/b/colhoun.html">[1990] On the Side of Pol Pot: U.S. Supports Khmer Rouge by Jack Colhoun</a><a href="http://www.whale.to/b/cambodia1.html">[1983] Cambodia: The Secret Bombing by Seymour M. Hersh</a>Books
<a href="http://www.whale.to/b/blum_b.html">[2003] Killing Hope. U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II by William Blum</a>Quotes
According to Webster Tarpley and Anton Chaitkin, the Pol Pot Regime was "a demonstration model of the <a href="http://www.whale.to/b/nssm200_h.html">NSSM 200 </a>policy". The Khmer Rouge could not have made the gains it did in Cambodia without the aid of Kissinger and Nixon. It was the Nixon Administration's bombing of Cambodia that aided the Khmer Rouge in their takeover of Cambodia. Tarpley and Chaitkin elaborate: 
"The most important single ingredient in the rise of the Khmer Rouge was provided by Kissinger and Nixon, through their systematic campaign of terror-bombing against Cambodian territory during 1973. This was called Arclight, and began shortly after the January 1973 Paris Accords on Vietnam. With the pretext of halting a Khmer Rouge attack on Phnom Penh, U.S. forces carried out 79,959 officially confirmed sorties with B-52 and F-111 bombers against targets inside Cambodia, dropping 539,129 tons of explosives. Many of these bombs fell upon the most densely populated sections of Cambodia, including the countryside around Phnom Penh. The number of deaths caused by this genocidal campaign has been estimated at between 30,000 and 500,000. Accounts of the devastating impact of this mass terror-bombing leave no doubt that it shattered most of what remained of Cambodian society and provided ideal preconditions for the further expansion of the Khmer Rouge insurgency, in much the same way that the catastrophe of World War I weakened European society so as to open the door for the mass irrationalist movements of fascism and Bolshevism." 
The ruin visited upon Cambodia by the Nixon Administration paved the way for Pol Pot and his murderous insurgents. The Khmer Rouge forced the Cambodian people out of the cities and into brutal agrarian slave labor. The end result was the death of some two million Cambodians. <a href="http://www.whale.to/b/collins1.html">[2007] The Cambodian Memory Hole by Paul David Collins</a><a href="http://www.whale.to/b/colhoun.html">[1990] On the Side of Pol Pot: U.S. Supports Khmer Rouge by Jack Colhoun</a> For the last eleven years the United States government, in a covert operation born of cynicism and hypocrisy, has collaborated with the genocidal Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. More specifically, Washington has covertly aided and abetted the Pol Potists' guerrilla war to overthrow the Vietnamese backed government of Prime Minister Hun Sen, which replaced the Khmer Rouge regime.The "secret bombing" of Cambodia by the Nixon-Kissinger gang may have killed as many Cambodians as were executed by the Khmer Rouge and surely contributed to the ferocity of Khmer Rouge behavior toward the urban elite and citizenry whose leaders had allied themselves with the foreign terrorists.  ....Over a fourteen-month period, ending in April 1970, Nixon and Kissinger authorized a total of 3,630 flights over Cambodia; by the Pentagon's count, the planes dropped 110,000 tons of bombs. <a href="http://www.whale.to/b/pol_pot_and_kissinger.html">[1997] Pol Pot And Kissinger. On war criminality and impunity by Edward S. Herman</a>Henry Kissinger's role in the Cambodian genocide, Chile, and East Timor, makes him a first class war criminal, arguably at least in the class of Hitler's Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop, hanged in 1946. But Kissinger has the impunity flowing naturally to the leaders and agents of the victorious and dominant power. He gets a Nobel Peace prize, is an honored member of national commissions, and is a favored media guru and guest at public gatherings. <a href="http://www.whale.to/b/pol_pot_and_kissinger.html">[1997] Pol Pot And Kissinger. On war criminality and impunity by Edward S. Herman</a>The United States gave direct as well as indirect aid to Pol Pot-in one estimate, $85 million in direct support-and it "pressured UN agencies to supply the Khmer Rouge," which "rapidly improved" the health and capability of Pol Pot's forces after 1979 (Ben Kiernan, "Cambodia's Missed Chance," Indochina Newsletter, Nov.-Dec. 1991). U.S. ally China was a very large arms supplier to Pol Pot, with no penalty from the U.S. and in fact U.S. connivance-Carter's National Security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski stated that in 1979 "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot...Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him but China could."  <a href="http://www.whale.to/b/pol_pot_and_kissinger.html">[1997] Pol Pot And Kissinger. On war criminality and impunity by Edward S. Herman</a>before Pol Pot came to power in 1975, the United States had devastated Cambodia for the first half of what a Finnish government's study referred to as a "decade" of genocide (not just the four years of Pol Pot's rule, 1975-78). The "secret bombing" of Cambodia by the Nixon-Kissinger gang may have killed as many Cambodians as were executed by the Khmer Rouge and surely contributed to the ferocity of Khmer Rouge behavior toward the urban elite and citizenry whose leaders had allied themselves with the foreign terrorists. <a href="http://www.whale.to/b/pol_pot_and_kissinger.html">[1997] Pol Pot And Kissinger. On war criminality and impunity by Edward S. Herman</a>......"U.S. B-52s pounded Cambodia for 160 consecutive days [in 1973], dropping more than 240,000 short tons of bombs on rice fields, water buffalo, villages (particularly along the Mekong River) and on such troop positions as the guerrillas might maintain," a tonnage that "represents 50 percent more than the conventional explosives dropped on Japan during World War II". This "constant indiscriminate bombing" was of course carried out against a peasant society with no air force or ground defenses. The Finnish government study estimates that 600,000 people died in this first phase, with 2 million refugees produced. Michael Vickerey estimated 500,000 killed in phase one. <a href="http://www.whale.to/b/pol_pot_and_kissinger.html">[1997] Pol Pot And Kissinger. On war criminality and impunity by Edward S. Herman</a>Scholars uniformly pointed to the important contribution the first phase made to Khmer Rouge behavior in phase two: by destroying the fabric of society and providing the victors "with the psychological ingredients of a violent, vengeful, and unrelenting social revolution" (David Chandler). But for the mainstream media, phase one did not exist; Cambodian history began with Khmer Rouge genocide starting in April 1975.  <a href="http://www.whale.to/b/pol_pot_and_kissinger.html">[1997] Pol Pot And Kissinger. On war criminality and impunity by Edward S. Herman</a>To bring about depopulation of large cities according to the trial run carried out by the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. It is interesting to note that Pol Pot's genocidal plans were drawn up in the US by one of the Club of Rome's research foundations, and overseen by Thomas Enders, a high-ranking State Department official. It is also interesting that the committee is currently seeking to reinstate the Pol Pot butchers in Cambodia. <a href="http://www.whale.to/b/coleman1.html">Targets of the Illuminati and the Committe of 300 By Dr. John Coleman.</a>What is remarkable about the U.S. coverage of his death is the omission of U.S. complicity in his rise to power, a complicity that sustained him for almost two decades. For the truth is that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge would be historical nonentities-and a great many people would be alive today- had Washington not helped bring them to power and the governments of the United States, Britain, China and Thailand not supported them, armed them, sustained them and restored them.
......Between 1969 and 1973, U.S. bombers killed perhaps three-quarters of a million Cambodian peasants in an attempt to destroy North Vietnamese supply bases, many of which did not exist. During one six-month period in 1973, B-52s dropped more bombs on Cambodians, living mostly in straw huts, than were dropped on Japan during all of World War II, the equivalent of five Hiroshimas. <a href="http://www.whale.to/b/pol_pot1.html">The Friends of Pol Pot by John Pilger</a></div><div></div><div>The Friends of Pol Potby <a href="http://www.whale.to/b/pilger_h.html">John Pilger</a>The Nation magazine, May 11, 1998It is my duty," wrote the correspondent for The Times of London at the liberation of the Nazi death camp at Belsen, "to describe something beyond the imagination of mankind." That was how I felt in the summer of 1979 when I arrived in Cambodia. In the silent humidity, houses, office blocks, hotels and schools stood empty, as if vacated that day. In the ruined National Bank, blown up by the retreating Khmer Rouge, a pair of spectacles rested on a ledger. When the afternoon monsoon broke, the streets nearby ran with money as thousands of brand-new bank notes washed away in the gutter. Children, orphans, collected and dried them for fuel; I can still hear the crackle as the money burned.As if in a mirage, a pyramid of cars rose on a football field. It included an ambulance, a fire engine, police cars, refrigerators, washing machines, TV sets, telephones and typewriters. It was as if these had been swept there by a gigantic broom on April 17, 1975-Year Zero in Pol Pot's calendar. From that date, anybody who had owned them, anybody who had lived in a city or town, or anybody who knew or worked with foreigners was in mortal danger. More than a million and a half would die-although recent discoveries of mass graves by a Yale University team suggest that this figure may be a gross underestimate. During the three years and eight months they held power, Pol Pot and his medievalists may have put to death a third of the nation.It is all too easy and too dangerous to remember Pol Pot as a unique monster. What is remarkable about the U.S. coverage of his death is the omission of U.S. complicity in his rise to power, a complicity that sustained him for almost two decades. For the truth is that Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge would be historical nonentities-and a great many people would be alive today- had Washington not helped bring them to power and the governments of the United States, Britain, China and Thailand not supported them, armed them, sustained them and restored them. In other words, the iconic images of the piles of skulls ought to include those who, often at great remove in distance and culture, were Pol Pot's accessories and Faustian partners for the purposes of their own imperial imperatives.To hear Henry Kissinger deny recently that the United States and especially the Nixon Administration bore any responsibility for Cambodia's horror was to hear truth denigrated and our intelligence insulted. For Cambodia's nightmare did not begin with Year Zero but on the eve of the U.S. land invasion of neutral Cambodia in 1970. The invasion provided a small group of extreme ethnic nationalists with Maoist pretensions, the Khmer Rouge, with a catalyst for a revolution that had no popular base among the Cambodian people. Between 1969 and 1973, U.S. bombers killed perhaps three-quarters of a million Cambodian peasants in an attempt to destroy North Vietnamese supply bases, many of which did not exist. During one six-month period in 1973, B-52s dropped more bombs on Cambodians, living mostly in straw huts, than were dropped on Japan during all of World War II, the equivalent of five Hiroshimas. Evidence from U.S. official documents, declassified in 1987, leaves no doubt that this U.S. terror was critical in Pol Pot's drive for power. "They are using [the bombing] as the main theme of the propaganda," reported the C.I.A. Director of Operations on May 2, 1973. "This approach has resulted in the successful recruitment of a number of young men [and] the propaganda has been most effective among refugees subjected to B-52 strikes."What Kissinger and Nixon began, Pol Pot completed. Had the United States and China allowed it, Cambodia's suffering could have stopped when the Vietnamese finally responded to years of Khmer Rouge attacks across their border and liberated the country in January 1979. But almost immediately the United States began secretly backing Pol Pot in exile. Direct contact was made between the Reagan White House and the Khmer Rouge when Dr. Ray Cline, a former deputy director of the C.I.A., made a clandestine visit to Pol Pot's operational base inside Cambodia in November 1980. Cline was then a foreign policy adviser to President-elect Reagan. Within a year some fifty C.I.A. and other intelligence agents were running Washington's secret war against Cambodia from the U.S. Embassy in Bangkok and along the Thai-Cambodian border. The aim was to appease China, the great Soviet foe and Pol Pot's most enduring backer, and to rehabilitate and use the Khmer Rouge to bring pressure on the source of recent U. S. humiliation in the region: the Vietnamese. Cambodia was now America's "last battle of the Vietnam War," as one U.S. official put it, "so that we can achieve a better result."Two U.S. relief aid workers, Linda Mason and Roger Brown, later wrote, "The U.S. government insisted that the Khmer Rouge be fed.. .the U.S. preferred that the Khmer Rouge operation benefit from the credibility of an internationally known relief operation." In 1980, under U.S. pressure, the World Food Program handed over food worth $12 million to pass on to the Khmer Rouge. In that year, I traveled on a U.N. convoy of forty trucks into Cambodia from Thailand and filmed a U.N. official handing the supplies over to a Khmer Rouge general, Nam Phan, known to Western aid officials as The Butcher. There is little doubt that without this support and the flow of arms from China through Thailand the Khmer Rouge would have withered on the vine. If the U.S. bombing was the first phase of Cambodia's holocaust and Pol Pot's Year Zero the second, the third phase was the use of the United Nations by Washington, its allies and China as the instrument of Cambodia's, and Vietnam's, punishment. With Vietnamese troops preventing the return of the Khmer Rouge and a Hanoi-installed regime in Phnom Penh, a U.N. embargo barred Cambodia from all international agreements on trade and communications, even from the World Health Organization. The U.N. withheld development aid from only one Third World country: Cambodia, which lay unreconstituted from the years of bombing and neglect. For the United States the blockade was total. Not even Cuba and the Soviet Union were treated this way.If on his deathbed Pol Pot had felt moved to offer thanks to his Western collaborators, he surely would have made special mention of an unworkable U.N. "peace plan" imposed by the West and China in 1992. At the insistence of Washington and Beijing, the Khmer Rouge was included in the U.N. operation as a legitimate "warring faction"; the rationale was that they were far too powerful to be left out. Since then, the argument has been turned upside down. Thanks to the "triumph" of the U.N. in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge has "virtually disappeared." In 1993 the U.N.'s military maps showed that in half of Cambodia Pol Pot had a military advantage he did not have before the U.N. arrived. "You must understand," the U.N. spokesman in Phnom Penh, Eric Falt, told me in 1992, "the peace process was aimed at allowing the Khmer Rouge to gain respectability."I watched Khmer Rouge officials welcomed back to Phnom Penh by U.N. officials who went to astonishing lengths not to offend them. Khieu Samphan, Pol Pot's henchman who once said that the only mistake the Khmer Rouge had made was not killing enough people, took the salute of U.S. and other U.N. troops as a guest of honor on United Nations Day in Phnom Penh.The West, with the U.N. as its vehicle, brought to Cambodia elections, the "free market," AIDS and massive corruption, all of it reminiscent of the surreal and violent days in the early seventies when the B-52s were bombing the countryside and the Khmer Rouge was infiltrating the cities and towns. The fact that this process of infiltration is under way again was one of the reasons Cambodia's "second prime minister," Hun Sen, last year attacked the forces and supporters of the "first prime minister," Prince Ranariddh, who in exile had been the leader of the Khmer Rouge-dominated coalition.Are the Khmer Rouge now finished? I doubt it. The more pertinent question is: Will those foreign governments that backed Pol Pot while wringing their hands now help rebuild the country they helped devastate? Henry Kissinger appeared to answer this when he said, "Why should we flagellate ourselves for what the Cambodians did to each other?" John Pilger has twice won Britain's highest award for journalism. His documentary films have won awards in the United States and Britain.</div><div></div><div>Pol Pot And Kissinger. On war criminality and impunityby <a href="http://www.whale.to/b/herman_h.html">Edward S. Herman</a>1997 <a href="https://www.zcommunications.orgs/">Z Magazine</a>The hunt is on once again for war criminals, with ongoing trials of accused Serbs in The Hague, NATO raids seizing and killing other accused Serbs, and much discussion and enthusiasm in the media for bringing Pol Pot to trial, which the editors of the New York Times assure us would be "an extraordinary triumph for law and civilization" (June 24).The Politics of War Criminality
There are, however, large numbers of mass murderers floating around the world. How are the choices made on who will be pursued and who will be granted impunity? The answer can be found by following the lines of dominant interest and power and watching how the mainstream politicians, media, and intellectuals reflect these demands. Media attention and indignation "follows the flag," and the flag follows the money (i.e., the demands of the corporate community), with some eccentricity based on domestic political calculations. This sometimes yields droll twists and turns, as in the case of Saddam Hussein, consistently supported through the 1980s in his war with Iran and chemical warfare attacks on Iraqi Kurds, until his invasion of Kuwait in 1990, transformed him overnight into "another Hitler." Similarly, Pol Pot, "worse than Hitler" until his ouster by Vietnam in 1979, then quietly supported for over a decade by the United States and its western allies (along with China) as an aid in "bleeding Vietnam," but now no longer serviceable to western policy and once again a suitable target for a war crimes trial.Another way of looking at our targeting of war criminals is by analogy to domestic policy choices on budget cuts and incarceration, where the pattern is to attack the relatively weak and ignore and protect those with political and economic muscle. Pol Pot is now isolated and politically expendable, so an obvious choice for villainization. By contrast, Indonesian leader Suharto, the butcher of perhaps a million people (mainly landless peasants) in 1965-66, and the invader, occupier, and mass murderer of East Timor from 1975 to today, is courted and protected by the Great Powers, and was referred to by an official of the Clinton administration in 1996 as "our kind of guy." Pinochet, the torturer and killer of many thousands, is treated kindly in the United States as the Godfather of the wonderful new neoliberal Chile. President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger, who gave the go ahead to Suharto's invasion of East Timor and subsequent massive war crimes there, and the same Kissinger, who helped President Nixon engineer and then protect the Pinochet coup and regime of torture and murder and directed the first phase of the holocaust in Cambodia (1969-75), remain honored citizens. The media have never suggested that these men should be brought to trial in the interest of justice, law, and "civilization."U.S./Western Embrace of Pol Pot
The Times editorial of June 24 recognizes a small problem in pursuing Pol Pot, arising from the fact that after he was forced out of Cambodia by Vietnam, "From 1979 to 1991, Washington indirectly backed the Khmer Rouge, then a component of the guerrilla coalition fighting the Vietnamese installed Government [in Phnom Penh]." This does seem awkward: the United States and its allies giving economic, military, and political support to Pol Pot, and voting for over a decade to have his government retain Cambodia's UN seat, but now urging his trial for war crimes. The Times misstates and understates the case: the United States gave direct as well as indirect aid to Pol Pot-in one estimate, $85 million in direct support-and it "pressured UN agencies to supply the Khmer Rouge," which "rapidly improved" the health and capability of Pol Pot's forces after 1979 (Ben Kiernan, "Cambodia's Missed Chance," Indochina Newsletter, Nov.-Dec. 1991). U.S. ally China was a very large arms supplier to Pol Pot, with no penalty from the U.S. and in fact U.S. connivance-Carter's National Security adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski stated that in 1979 "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot...Pol Pot was an abomination. We could never support him but China could."In 1988-89 Vietnam withdrew its army from Cambodia, hoping that this would produce a normalization of relationships. Thailand and other nations in the region were interested in a settlement, but none took place for several more years "because of Chinese and U.S. rejection of any...move to exclude the Khmer Rouge. The great powers...continued to offer the Khmer Rouge a veto," which the Khmer Rouge used, with Chinese aid, "to paralyze the peace process and...advance their war aims." The Bush administration threatened to punish Thailand for "its defection from the aggressive U.S.-Chinese position," and George Shultz and then James Baker fought strenuously to sabotage any concessions to Vietnam, the most important of which was exclusion of Pol Pot from political negotiations and a place in any interim government of Cambodia. The persistent work of the Reagan-Bush team on behalf of Pol Pot has been very much downplayed, if not entirely suppressed, in the mainstream media.The Times has a solution to the awkwardness of the post-1978 Western support of Pol Pot: "All Security Council members...might spare themselves embarrassment by restricting the scope of prosecution to those crimes committed inside Cambodia during the four horrific years of Khmer Rouge rule." We must give the Times credit for semi-honesty in admitting that this is to avoid embarrassing the Great Powers. It is interesting, though, that the Times finds no real problem in the "dirty hands," and hypocrisy, so apparent in the lengthy support of war criminals, and that it offers no reflections on how "law and civilization" are served if the criminals were protected and supported for more than a decade by the forces of law and order.Two Phases of Cambodian "Genocide"
The Times, along with everybody else in the mainstream media, also fails to mention that before Pol Pot came to power in 1975, the United States had devastated Cambodia for the first half of what a Finnish government's study referred to as a "decade" of genocide (not just the four years of Pol Pot's rule, 1975-78). The "secret bombing" of Cambodia by the Nixon-Kissinger gang may have killed as many Cambodians as were executed by the Khmer Rouge and surely contributed to the ferocity of Khmer Rouge behavior toward the urban elite and citizenry whose leaders had allied themselves with the foreign terrorists.The U.S.-imposed holocaust was a "sideshow" to the Vietnam War, the United States bombing Cambodia heavily by 1969, helping organize the overthrow of Sihanouk in 1970, and in collaboration with its puppet Saigon government making period incursions into Cambodia in the 1960s and later. "U.S. B-52s pounded Cambodia for 160 consecutive days [in 1973], dropping more than 240,000 short tons of bombs on rice fields, water buffalo, villages (particularly along the Mekong River) and on such troop positions as the guerrillas might maintain," a tonnage that "represents 50 percent more than the conventional explosives dropped on Japan during World War II". This "constant indiscriminate bombing" was of course carried out against a peasant society with no air force or ground defenses. The Finnish government study estimates that 600,000 people died in this first phase, with 2 million refugees produced. Michael Vickerey estimated 500,000 killed in phase one.At the end of the first half of the decade of genocide, with the Khmer Rouge victorious and occupying Phnom Penh in April 1975, Cambodia was a shattered, embittered society, on the verge of mass starvation with crops unsowed and vast numbers of refugees in and around Phnom Penh suddenly cut off from the U.S. aid that had kept them alive. High U.S. officials were estimating a million deaths from starvation before the Khmer Rouge takeover. The Khmer Rouge forced a mass exodus from Phnom Penh, whose population they were in no position to feed, an action interpreted in the West as simply a completely unjustified exercise in vengeance.There is no question but that the Khmer Rouge were brutal and killed large numbers. Michael Vickerey estimated 150-300,000 executed and an excess of deaths in the four years of Pol Pot rule of 750,000. David Chandler estimates up to 100,000 executions (Newsweek, June 30, 1997). The Finnish study estimated the total deaths in the Pol Pot years at a million, encompassing both executions and deaths from disease, starvation and overwork. Other serious studies of Cambodia yield comparable numbers.Genocide in the Propaganda System
Throughout the "decade of genocide" the media's performance fitted perfectly the propaganda model Noam Chomsky and I advanced in Manufacturing Consent (Pantheon, 1988). As the first phase was U.S.-sponsored, the Cambodian victims were "unworthy," and the hundreds of thousands killed and several million refugees were almost entirely ignored-the existence of "killing fields" was only discovered in phase two. Of 45 columns by Sydney Schanberg, who reported for the New York Times from Phnom Penh at the peak of the 1973 bombing, only three granted first phase refugee victims a few phrases to describe what was happening, and in not a single article did he interview at length one of their vast numbers in the nearby refugee camps.Scholars uniformly pointed to the important contribution the first phase made to Khmer Rouge behavior in phase two: by destroying the fabric of society and providing the victors "with the psychological ingredients of a violent, vengeful, and unrelenting social revolution" (David Chandler). But for the mainstream media, phase one did not exist; Cambodian history began with Khmer Rouge genocide starting in April 1975. Now we had "worthy" victims in a "gentle land" undergoing terror based on Parisian intellectual/maoist theory, and reporters rushed to interview refugees in Thailand. Jean Lacouture, in a well-publicized book review in the New York Review of Books, claimed that the book, Cambodia: Year Zero, cited Pol Pot officials "boasting" that they had "eliminated" two million people. This claim was withdrawn by Lacouture after it was shown to be a fabrication (one of a number he advanced), but the two million figure remained authoritative, and it and other forgeries and fabrications have proved impossible to dislodge.These convenient views prevail today: there is no phase one, although it is sometimes admitted in passing that the United States dropped some bombs on Cambodia before 1975 and aligned itself with the "resistance" (including Pol Pot) after 1978. All deaths in phase two are attributed to Pol Pot and his fanatical beliefs, so that it is reasonable to identify him as the unique villain deserving a war crimes trial. It can be suggested in the Canadian media that maybe Nixon and Kissinger are war criminals also (Thomas Walkum, "Let's try Kissinger along with Pol Pot," Toronto Star, June 30, 1997), but not in the mainstream U.S. press. Even a scholar like Ben Kiernan, who wrote eloquently about the U.S. support of Pol Pot in the Reagan-Bush years, now places an op ed column in the New York Times (June 20, 1997) denouncing Pol Pot and calling for his trial, without even mentioning phase one or suggesting any compromising of the case by the aggressive post-1978 U.S. and Western support of the war criminal. Kiernan had been subjected to a furious red-baiting campaign by the right-wing fanatic Stephen Morris and Wall Street Journal editors, and in an excellent illustration of the working of "flak" is now busily proving his anti-Pol Pot credentials.Anthony Lewis: Lying With Impunity
Another feature of the U.S. propaganda system is that contesting propaganda campaigns is not permissible, and results in a blackout and/or gross misrepresentation and vilification. As soon as Chomsky and I criticized media coverage of Cambodia, in 1977, we, and especially Chomsky, were accused of being apologists for Pol Pot. William Shawcross eventually (and ludicrously) blamed Chomsky for having paralyzed Western policy responses to genocide by his (and my) single review article in the Nation.Those who attack alleged "defenders of Pol Pot" can lie with impunity. On June 23, Anthony Lewis jumped into the fray, boldly denouncing Pol Pot and urging his prosecution for war crimes. Lewis did mention the "bombing inflicted on the peasant society by President Nixon and Henry Kissinger," but only as an introduction to the fact that Pol Pot outdid our leaders. No suggestion of any causal relation between the bombing (etc.) and the "one million Cambodians [who] lost their lives" in phase two. Lewis also does not discuss whether, even if Pol Pot was worse, the toll under Nixon and Kissinger wasn't high enough to be worthy of a war crimes trial.Lewis then goes on: "A few Western intellectuals, notably Prof. Noam Chomsky, refused to believe what was going on in Cambodia. At first, at least, they put the reports of killing down to a conspiratorial effort by American politicians and press to destroy the Cambodian revolution." This is a multiple lie: First, we did not disbelieve the reports in general and were very clear that "gruesome" atrocities were being carried out. We did contest some blatant lies, like those of Lacouture, and media gullibility, which in this case, where points were being scored against an enemy. reached remarkable levels. Second, we never believed or said that there was any conspiracy going on, and regularly cited State Department experts as sources of plausible information. Third, we weren't defending the "Cambodian revolution," and never believed that the propaganda campaign was designed to destroy it; in fact, we stressed that its spokespersons didn't do, or even propose doing, anything to help Cambodians. We saw the propaganda campaign as aimed at Americans, to help reconstruct an imperial ideology that had been badly damaged by the Vietnam War.Lewis goes on to speak of "explaining away reports of rights violations as a Western way of interfering in other countries," ignoring the fact that a vast stream of human rights reports on El Salvador, Guatemala, Turkey, Colombia, Peru, etc., have involved human rights violators funded and protected by the United States. In our writings on Cambodia, Chomsky and I often point out that the Indonesian invasion and genocidal actions in East Timor began in the same year that Pol Pot took power in Cambodia; and we stressed that in the case of East Timor, in contrast to Cambodia, the United States as the primary weapons supplier and with extensive economic relationships to Indonesia could have effectively protected human rights. But that genocide was carried out by an ally, was approved by U.S. officials, and silence prevailed in the U.S. media. The sanctimonious Anthony Lewis does not address this anomaly.Lewis can lie and mouth his clichés about the need to bring his country's preferred war criminals to trial without fear of reply because his newspaper gives him impunity from criticism. A letter from Chomsky answering Lewis's lies, and several other letters doing the same, were refused publication in the New York Times.The Collapsing Left
The left is so weak in the United States that establishment propaganda themes and untruths often become part of the left's own intellectual apparatus. One critic of Manufacturing Consent, noting that even the antiwar leaders didn't refer to U.S. policy in Vietnam as "aggression" or an "invasion," asked why we should expect more from the mainstream media? It didn't occur to him that if the establishment view is so powerful as to define the discourse boundaries even for dissidents, that this shows an overwhelmingly potent propaganda system.With the U.S. left today, the conventional wisdom on Cambodia, as on many other issues, frequently predominates. In an article in In These Times for July 29, Adam Fifield finds only Pol Pot guilty of genocide, plays down the U.S. role, and gives the conventional lie about Chomsky, who allegedly "disparaged the [news] accounts as fabrications aimed at demonizing Pol Pot's noble revolution." As in the case of Anthony Lewis it is unlikely that the author ever bothered to look at any of Chomsky's writings on Cambodia. The mainstream lie about Chomsky is reported without question in this left journal, just as in the New York Times, although in this case there is a right of reply.A July 1997 piece on Cambodia by Philip S. Robertson Jr., in the Foreign Policy in Focus series issued by the supposedly left Institute for Policy Studies and Interhemispheric Resource Center, literally starts Cambodian history in 1975, gives a death toll of the Khmer Rouge period as 1.5-2 million, without mentioning any earlier events that might have contributed to the toll, expresses regret at the "impunity" of Cambodian civil servants, but nobody else, and urges that the United States "must continue the vital work of bringing Pol Pot and the remaining KR leaders to trial for genocide..."With a left like this who needs a right?Power as Justice
In one famous formulation, "the bigger the crime the smaller the penalty" (Friedrich Schiller). This is not unreasonable for single countries, but in international affairs we need a refinement: the bigger the crime the smaller the penalty only if you are the dominant power, servant of that power, or military victor. Though Germany was powerful, some Nazi leaders were executed for war crimes after the German defeat; Pol Pot may be tried because he is weak, a loser, and no longer useful to the Great Powers as he was from 1979 to the mid 1990s.On the other hand, Suharto services U.S., Japanese, and other global interests, is protected by the hegemonic power, and is therefore a "moderate" rather than war criminal for Western elites and mainstream media. Henry Kissinger's role in the Cambodian genocide, Chile, and East Timor, makes him a first class war criminal, arguably at least in the class of Hitler's Foreign Minister Joachim Von Ribbentrop, hanged in 1946. But Kissinger has the impunity flowing naturally to the leaders and agents of the victorious and dominant power. He gets a Nobel Peace prize, is an honored member of national commissions, and is a favored media guru and guest at public gatherings. Edward S. Herman is Professor Emeritus at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania</div><div></div><div>hmmn</div><div>http://www.whale.to/b/pilger15.html</div><div>
</div><div>The Long Secret Alliance: Uncle Sam and Pol Potby <a href="http://www.whale.to/b/pilger_h.html">John Pilger</a>Covert Action Quarterly Fall 1997The US not only helped create conditions that brought Cambodia's Khmer Rouge to power in 1975, but actively supported the genocidal force, politically and financially. By January 1980, the US was secretly funding Pol Pots exiled forces on the Thai border. The extent of this support-$85 million from 1980 to 1986-was revealed six years later in correspondence between congressional lawyer Jonathan Winer, then counsel to Sen. John Kerry (D-MA) of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and the Vietnam Veterans of America Foundation. Winer said the information had come from the Congressional Research Service (CRS). When copies of his letter were circulated, the Reagan administration was furious. Then, without adequately explaining why, Winer repudiated the statistics, while not disputing that they had come from the CRS. In a second letter to Noam Chomsky, however, Winer repeated the original charge, which, he confirmed to me, was "absolutely correct.''Washington also backed the Khmer Rouge through the United Nations, which provided Pol Pot's vehicle of return. Although the Khmer Rouge government ceased to exist in January 1979, when the Vietnamese army drove it out, its representatives continued to occupy Cambodia's UN seat. Their right to do so was defended and promoted by Washington as an extension of the Cold War, as a mechanism for US revenge on Vietnam, and as part of its new alliance with China (Pol Pot's principal underwriter and Vietnam's ancient foe). In 1981, President Carter's national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, said, "I encouraged the Chinese to support Pol Pot." The US, he added, "winked publicly" as China sent arms to the Khmer Rouge through Thailand.As a cover for its secret war against Cambodia, Washington set up the Kampuchean Emergency Group (KEG) in the US embassy in Bangkok and on the Thai-Cambodian border. KEG's job was to "monitor" the distribution of Western humanitarian supplies sent to the refugee camps in Thai land and to ensure that Khmer Rouge bases were fed. Working through "Task Force 80" of the Thai Army, which had liaison officers with the Khmer Rouge, the Americans ensured a constant flow of UN supplies. Two US relief aid workers, Linda Mason and Roger Brown, later wrote, "The US Government insisted that the Khmer Rouge be fed ... the US preferred that the Khmer Rouge operation benefit from the credibility of an internationally known relief operation."In 1980, under US pressure, the World Food Program handed over food worth $12 million to the Thai army to pass on to the Khmer Rouge. According to former Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke "20,000 to 40 000 Pol Pot guerrillas benefited." This aid helped restore the Khmer Rouge to a fighting force, based in Thailand, from which it de stabilized Cambodia for more than a decade.Although ostensibly a State Department operation, KEG's principals were intelligence officers with long experience in Indochina. In the early 1980s it was run by Michael Eiland, whose career underscored the continuity of American intervention in Indochina. In 1969-70, he was operations officer of a clandestine Special Forces group code-named "Daniel Boone," which was responsible for the reconnaissance of the US bombing of Cambodia. By 1980, Col. Eiland was running KEG out of the US embassy in Bangkok, where it was de scribed as a "humanitarian" organization. Responsible for interpreting satellite surveillance photos of Cambodia, Eiland became a valued source for some of Bangkok's resident Western press corps, who referred to him in their reports as a "Western analyst." Eiland's "humanitarian" duties led to his appointment as Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) chief in charge of the South east Asia Region, one of the most important positions in US espionage.In November 1980, the just elected Reagan administration and the Khmer Rouge made direct contact when Dr. Ray Cline, a former deputy director of the CIA, secretly visited a Khmer Rouge operational headquarters inside Cambodia. Cline was then a foreign policy adviser on President-elect Reagan's transitional team. Within a year, according to Washington sources, 50 CIA agents were running Washington's Cambodia operation from Thailand. The dividing line between the international relief operation and the US war became more and more confused. For example, a Defense Intelligence Agency colonel was appointed "security liaison officer" between the United Nations Border Relief Operation (UNBRO) and the Displaced Persons Protection Unit (DPPU). In Washington, sources revealed him as a link between the US government and the Khmer Rouge.The UN as a BaseBy 1981, a number of governments, including US allies, became decidedly uneasy about the charade of continued UN recognition of Pol Pot as legitimate head of the country This discomfort was dramatically demonstrated when a colleague of mine, Nicholas Claxton, entered a bar at the UN in New York with Thaoun Prasith, Pol Pot's representative. "Within minutes," said Claxton, "the bar had emptied." Clearly, something had to be done. In 1982, the US and China, supported by Singapore, invented the Coalition of the Democratic Government of Kampuchea, which was, as Ben Kiernan pointed out, neither a coalition, nor democratic, nor a government, nor in Kampuchea. Rather, it was what the CIA calls "a master illusion." Cambodia's former ruler, Prince Norodom Sihanouk, was appointed its head; otherwise little changed. The Khmer Rouge dominated the two "non-communist" members, the Sihanoukists and the Khmer People's National Liberation Front (KPNLF). From his office at the UN, Pol Pot's ambassador, the urbane Thaoun Prasith, continued to speak for Cambodia. A close associate of Pol Pot, he had in 1975 called on Khmer expatriates to return home, whereupon many of them "disappeared."The United Nations was now the instrument of Cambodia's punishment. In all its history, the world body has withheld development aid from only one Third World country: Cambodia. Not only did the UN-at US and Chinese insistence-deny the government in Phnom Penh a seat, but the major international financial institutions barred Cambodia from all international agreements on trade and communications. Even the World Health Organization refused to aid the country. At home, the US denied religious groups export licenses for books and toys for orphans. A law dating from the First World War, the Trading with the Enemy Act, was applied to Cambodia and, of course, Vietnam. Not even Cuba and the Soviet Union faced such a complete ban with no humanitarian or cultural exceptions.By 1987, KEG had been reincarnated as the Kampuchea Working Group, run by the same Col. Eiland of the Defense Intelligence Agency The Working Group's brief was to provide battle plans, war materiel, and satellite intelligence to the so-called "non-communist" members of the "resistance forces." The non-communist fig leaf allowed Congress, spurred on by an anti-Vietnamese zealot, then - Rep. Stephen Solarz (D-NY), to approve both "overt" and "covert" aid estimated at $24 million to the "resistance " Until 1990, Congress accepted Solarz' specious argument that US aid did not end up with or even help Pol Pot and that the mass murderers US-supplied allies "are not even in close proximity with them [the Khmer Rouge] "Military LinksWhile Washington paid the bills and the Thai army provided logistics support, Singapore, as middleman, was the main conduit for Western arms. Former Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew was a major backer of the US and Chinese position that the Khmer Rouge be part of a settlement in Cambodia. "It is journalists," he said, "who have made them into demons."Weapons from West Germany, the US, and Sweden were passed on directly by Singapore or made under license by Chartered Industries, which is owned by the Singapore government. These same weapons were captured from the Khmer Rouge. The Singapore connection allowed the Bush administration to continue its secret aid to the "resistance," even though this assistance broke a law passed by Congress in 1989 banning even indirect "lethal aid" to Pol Pot. In August 1990, a former member of the US Special Forces disclosed that he had been ordered to destroy records that showed US munitions in Thailand going to the Khmer Rouge. The records, he said, implicated the National Security Council, the president's foreign policy advisory body.In 1982, when the US, Chinese, and ASEAN governments contrived the "coalition" that enabled Pol Pot to retain Cambodia's UN seat, the US set about training and equipping the "non-communist" factions in the "resistance" army These followers of Prince Sihanouk and his former minister, Son Sann, leader of the KPNLF, were mostly irregulars and bandits. This resistance was nothing with out Pol Pot's 25,000 well-trained, armed and motivated guerrillas, whose leadership was acknowledged by Prince Sihanouk's military commander, his son, Norodom Ranariddh. "The Khmer Rouge'' he said, are the "major attacking forces" whose victories were "celebrated as our own."'The guerrillas' tactic like that of the Contras in Nicaragua, was to terrorize the countryside by setting up ambushes and seeding minefields. In this way, the government in Phnom Penh would be destabilized and the Vietnamese trapped in an untenable war: its own "Vietnam." For the Americans in Bangkok and Washington, the fate of Cambodia was tied to a war they had technically lost seven years earlier. "Bleeding the Vietnamese white on the battlefields of Cambodia" was an expression popular with the US policy-making establishment. Destroying the crippled Vietnamese economy and, if necessary overturning the government in Hanoi, was the ultimate goal. Out of that ruin, American power would again assert itself in Indochina.The British-who have had special military forces in Southeast Asia since World War II, also played a key role in supporting Pol Pot's armed force. After the "Irangate" arms-for-hostages scandal broke in Washington in 1986, the Cambodian training became an exclusively British operation. "If Congress had found out that Americans were mixed up in clandestine training in Indochina, let alone with Pol Pot," a Ministry of Defense source told Simon O'Dwyer-Russell of the London Sunday Telegraph, "the balloon would have gone right up. It was one of those classic Thatcher-Reagan arrangements. It was put to her that the SAS should take over the Cambodia show, and she agreed."Pol Pot's Washington ImpunityShortly after the start of the Gulf War in January 1991, President Bush described Saddam Hussein as "Adolf Hitler revisited.'' Bush's call for "another Nuremberg" to try Saddam under the Genocide Convention was echoed in Congress and across the Atlantic in London.It was an ironic distraction. Since the original Fuhrer expired in his bunker, the US has maintained a network of dictators with Hitlerian tendencies-from Suharto in Indonesia to Mobutu in Zaire and a variety of Latin American mobsters, many of them graduates of the US Army School of the Americas. But only one has been identified by the world community as a genuine "Adolf Hitler revisited," whose crimes are documented in a 1979 report of the UN Human Rights Commission as "the worst to have occurred anywhere in the world since Nazism.'' He is, of course, Pol Pot, who must surely wonder at his good fortune. Not only was he cosseted, his troops fed, supplied, and trained, his envoys afforded all diplomatic privileges, but-unlike Saddam Hussein-he was assured by his patrons that he would never be brought to justice for his crimes.These assurances were given publicly in 1991 when the UN Human Rights Subcommission dropped from its agenda a draft resolution on Cambodia that referred to "the atrocities reaching the level of genocide committed in particular during the period of Khmer Rouge rule." No more, the UN body decided, should member governments seek to "detect, arrest, extradite or bring to trial those who have been responsible for crimes against humanity in Cambodia." No more are governments called upon to "prevent the return to government positions of those who were responsible for genocidal actions during the period 1975 to 1978."Such guarantees of impunity for the genocidists were also part of the UN "peace plan" drafted by the permanent members of the Security Council: that is, by the United States. To avoid offending Pol Pot's principal backers, the Chinese, the plan dropped all mention of "genocide," replacing it with the euphemism: "policies and practices of the recent past.'' On this, Henry Kissinger, who played a leading pan in the mass bombing of Cambodia in the early 1970s, was an important influence.Western propaganda prior to the UN "peace process" in Cambodia concentrated on the strength of the Khmer Rouge, so as to justify their inclusion. UN officials and American and Australian diplomats talked about 35-40,000 Khmer Rouge. "You will understand," they would say, "we can't leave a force as powerful as that outside the tent." As soon as the Khmer Rouge had been welcomed back to Phnom Penh and, in effect, given a quarter to a third of the countryside, they refused to take part in the elections. The tune then changed. They were now "finished," chorused Western diplomats. They were "weakened beyond hope."In the meantime, the Khmer Rouge was establishing itself as the richest terrorist group in history by selling off tracts of Cambodia's forests, as well as its precious stones, to the Thai, whose government was a signatory to the "peace accords." No one stopped them. They established four large new bases inside Thailand, complete with a field hospital. Thai soldiers guarded the road that led to them. The "they are finished" line remains in vogue to this day Undoubtedly, they have been numerically diminished by defections and attrition, but their number was always a false measure of their true strength. It seems the State Department believes they are far from finished.On July 10 this year, the spokesperson Nicholas Burns let slip that Khmer Rouge strength ran into "thousands. "The real threat from the Khmer Rouge comes from their enduring skill at deception and infiltration. Before they seized power in 1975, they had honeycombed Phnom Penh. This process is almost certainly under way again. As one resident of Phnom Penh said recently, "They're everywhere." The "trial" of Pol Pot this year was a wonderful piece of Khmer Rouge theater cum-media-event, but was otherwise worthless as an indication of the organizations strength and immediate aims. The truth is that no one on the outside can really say what these are, and that alone is a measure of the organization's strength and resilience. The Cambodian leader Hun Sen, for one, clearly retains a respect for the veracity and menace of their ambitions.The media relish Pol Pot as a unique monster. That is too easy and too dangerous. It is his Faustian partners in Washington, Beijing, London, Bangkok, Singapore, and elsewhere who deserve proper recognition. The Khmer Rouge have been useful to all their converging aims in the region. Eric Falt, the UN's senior spokesperson in Phnom Penh at the time of that manipulated organization's "triumph" in Cambodia, told me with a fixed smile, "The peace process was aimed at allowing [the Khmer Rouge to gain respectability." Unfortunately, many ordinary Cambodian people share his cynicism. They deserve better.</div><div>-
<div style="font-size: x-large;">Reading numerous references to a You Tube video that I watched regarding US President Jimmy Carter's "Global 2000 Report", I came across information regarding numerous Club of Rome and Committee of 300 depopulation claims including one where the US President Nixon / Henry Kissinger team during Vietnam war played a vital role in the rise to power of Pol Pot.Some further searching uncovered an article by John Pilger. A related article that cited the Pilger article stated that US State Department Thomas Enders was instrumental in various ways of bringing to power the Pol Pot / Khmer Rouge regime. <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.salon.com/news/1998/04/24news.html" style="text-decoration: none; padding-right: 13px; background-image: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent), url(data:image/svg+xml,%3C%3Fxml%20version%3D%221.0%22%20encoding%3D%22UTF-8%22%3F%3E%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20width%3D%2210%22%20height%3D%2210%22%3E%3Cg%20transform%3D%22translate%28-826.429%20-698.791%29%22%3E%3Crect%20width%3D%225.982%22%20height%3D%225.982%22%20x%3D%22826.929%22%20y%3D%22702.309%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%20stroke%3D%22%2306c%22%2F%3E%3Cg%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M831.194%20698.791h5.234v5.391l-1.571%201.545-1.31-1.31-2.725%202.725-2.689-2.689%202.808-2.808-1.311-1.311z%22%20fill%3D%22%2306f%22%2F%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M835.424%20699.795l.022%204.885-1.817-1.817-2.881%202.881-1.228-1.228%202.881-2.881-1.851-1.851z%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E); background-color: initial; background-position: 100% 50%, 100% 50%;">Salon Magazine</a> explicitly says that Thomas Enders selected bombing targets in Cambodia for US air raids. The Pilger article says that nearly all of these targets were innocent populations with only a couple being involved in NVA resupply of Soviet arms.The resulting Pol Pot / Khmer Rouge regime killed anyone they could find who wore glasses, had an education, could read, or who owned or could drive a car / truck. The death toll was from 1.6 to several million of their own countrymen. The mass, unmarked graves were nicknamed "The Killing Fields." Critics of the regime point out that the plot for such mass killings originated in Paris, France, and Washington DC, and had the earmarks of the French Revolution (that originated with the Liberty, Fraternity, etc, of the European Freemasons) where many aristocrats were beheaded by guillotine.Can the current article include this Salon Magazine information? <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Oldspammer" title="User:Oldspammer" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">Oldspammer</a> (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Oldspammer" title="User talk:Oldspammer" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">talk</a>) 09:17, 9 September 2011 (UTC)<dl style="margin-top: 0.2em; margin-bottom: 0.5em; line-height: 22.3999996185303px;"><dd style="margin-left: 1.6em; margin-bottom: 0.1em; margin-right: 0px;">I'm currently coming across this information and I wonder the same. I suspect with accusations as stark as these we would need independent, high-quality <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:RS" title="Wikipedia:RS" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">reliable sources</a> for corroboration. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Meco" title="User:Meco" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">meco</a> (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Meco" title="User talk:Meco" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">talk</a>) 17:52, 16 July 2012 (UTC)</dd></dl><h2 style="font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); line-height: 1.3; background: none rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Massacre at El Mozote[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Thomas_O.Enders&action=edit&section=2" title="Edit section: The Massacre at El Mozote" style="text-decoration: none; background: none;">edit</a>]</h2>The role of Enders in attempting to deny the massacre in El Salvador in December 1981 is described in Mark Danner, The Massacre at El Mozote: A Parable of the Cold War. Source: Joan Didion, 'Something Horrible' in El Salvador, New York Review of Books, July 14, 1994. — Preceding <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Signatures" title="Wikipedia:Signatures" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">unsigned</a> comment added by <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/76.71.66.215" title="Special:Contributions/76.71.66.215" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">76.71.66.215</a> (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:76.71.66.215&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="User talk:76.71.66.215 (page does not exist)" style="text-decoration: none; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">talk</a>) 21:20, 10 March 2015 (UTC)</div><div style="font-size: x-large;">
</div><div style="font-size: x-large;">=</div><div style="font-size: x-large;">wikifluff OMFG see talk above:</div><div style="font-size: x-large;">
</div><div>Thomas Ostrom Enders (1932–1996) was a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States" title="United States" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">United States</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomat" title="Diplomat" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">diplomat</a>.<div class="thumb tright" style="clear: right; float: right; margin: 0.5em 0px 1.3em 1.4em; width: auto; color: rgb(37, 37, 37); line-height: 22.3999996185303px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><div class="thumbinner" style="min-width: 100px; border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding: 3px; text-align: center; overflow: hidden; width: 222px; background-color: rgb(249, 249, 249);"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ThomasOEnders.jpg" class="image" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><img alt="" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/0/04/ThomasOEnders.jpg/220px-ThomasOEnders.jpg" width="220" height="271" class="thumbimage" srcset="//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/ThomasOEnders.jpg 1.5x, //upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/04/ThomasOEnders.jpg 2x" data-file-width="230" data-file-height="283" style="border: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); vertical-align: middle; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /></a><div class="thumbcaption" style="border: none; line-height: 1.4em; padding: 3px; text-align: left;"><div class="magnify" style="float: right; margin-left: 3px; margin-right: 0px;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ThomasOEnders.jpg" class="internal" title="Enlarge" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); display: block; text-indent: 15px; white-space: nowrap; overflow: hidden; width: 15px; height: 11px; -webkit-user-select: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent), url(data:image/svg+xml,%3C%3Fxml%20version%3D%221.0%22%20encoding%3D%22UTF-8%22%20standalone%3D%22no%22%3F%3E%0A%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20viewBox%3D%220%200%2011%2015%22%20width%3D%2215%22%20height%3D%2211%22%3E%0A%20%20%20%20%3Cg%20id%3D%22magnify-clip%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%20stroke%3D%22%23000%22%3E%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%3Cpath%20id%3D%22bigbox%22%20d%3D%22M1.509%201.865h10.99v7.919h-10.99z%22%2F%3E%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%3Cpath%20id%3D%22smallbox%22%20d%3D%22M-1.499%206.868h5.943v4.904h-5.943z%22%2F%3E%0A%20%20%20%20%3C%2Fg%3E%0A%3C%2Fsvg%3E%0A);" /></div><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ThomasOEnders.jpg" class="internal" title="Enlarge" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); display: block; text-indent: 15px; white-space: nowrap; overflow: hidden; width: 15px; height: 11px; -webkit-user-select: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent), url(data:image/svg+xml,%3C%3Fxml%20version%3D%221.0%22%20encoding%3D%22UTF-8%22%20standalone%3D%22no%22%3F%3E%0A%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20viewBox%3D%220%200%2011%2015%22%20width%3D%2215%22%20height%3D%2211%22%3E%0A%20%20%20%20%3Cg%20id%3D%22magnify-clip%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%20stroke%3D%22%23000%22%3E%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%3Cpath%20id%3D%22bigbox%22%20d%3D%22M1.509%201.865h10.99v7.919h-10.99z%22%2F%3E%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%3Cpath%20id%3D%22smallbox%22%20d%3D%22M-1.499%206.868h5.943v4.904h-5.943z%22%2F%3E%0A%20%20%20%20%3C%2Fg%3E%0A%3C%2Fsvg%3E%0A);">Thomas Ostrom Enders</a></div></div></div><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:ThomasOEnders.jpg" class="internal" title="Enlarge" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); display: block; text-indent: 15px; white-space: nowrap; overflow: hidden; width: 15px; height: 11px; -webkit-user-select: none; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent), url(data:image/svg+xml,%3C%3Fxml%20version%3D%221.0%22%20encoding%3D%22UTF-8%22%20standalone%3D%22no%22%3F%3E%0A%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20viewBox%3D%220%200%2011%2015%22%20width%3D%2215%22%20height%3D%2211%22%3E%0A%20%20%20%20%3Cg%20id%3D%22magnify-clip%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%20stroke%3D%22%23000%22%3E%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%3Cpath%20id%3D%22bigbox%22%20d%3D%22M1.509%201.865h10.99v7.919h-10.99z%22%2F%3E%0A%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%20%3Cpath%20id%3D%22smallbox%22%20d%3D%22M-1.499%206.868h5.943v4.904h-5.943z%22%2F%3E%0A%20%20%20%20%3C%2Fg%3E%0A%3C%2Fsvg%3E%0A);">Thomas O. Enders was born on November 28, 1932 in </a><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hartford,Connecticut" title="Hartford, Connecticut" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Hartford, Connecticut</a>. He was educated at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yale_University" title="Yale University" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Yale University</a>, where he was a member of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scroll_and_Key" title="Scroll and Key" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Scroll and Key</a> society, receiving a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bachelor_of_Arts" title="Bachelor of Arts" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">B.A.</a> in 1953; at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Paris" title="University of Paris" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">University of Paris</a>, receiving a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Arts" title="Master of Arts" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">M.A.</a> in 1955; and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_University" title="Harvard University" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Harvard University</a>, receiving a <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master_of_Arts" title="Master of Arts" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">M.A.</a> in 1957.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_note-1" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[1]</a>In 1958, Enders joined the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Service" title="United States Foreign Service" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">United States Foreign Service</a> as an intelligence research specialist. From 1960 to 1963, he was a visa officer and then an economic officer in<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stockholm" title="Stockholm" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Stockholm</a>. From 1963, he was supervisory international economist at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bureau_of_European_Affairs" title="Bureau of European Affairs" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Bureau of European Affairs</a>. In 1966, he was a special assistant in the Office of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Under_Secretary_of_State_for_Political_Affairs" title="Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs</a>. In 1968, he became Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Monetary Affairs.From 1969, he was deputy <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chief_of_mission" title="Chief of mission" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">chief of mission</a> in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Belgrade" title="Belgrade" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Belgrade</a>. From 1971 to 1973, he held the same position in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phnom_Penh" title="Phnom Penh" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Phnom Penh</a>. In 1974, Enders became Assistant Under Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs.In 1976, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_President" title="US President" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">US President</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Ford" title="Gerald Ford" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Gerald Ford</a> nominated Enders as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Ambassador_to_Canada" title="United States Ambassador to Canada" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">United States Ambassador to Canada</a>; Enders held this post from February 17, 1976 to December 14, 1979. From 1979, he was <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Ambassador_to_the_European_Communities" title="United States Ambassador to the European Communities" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">United States Ambassador to the European Communities</a>.President <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronald_Reagan" title="Ronald Reagan" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Ronald Reagan</a> nominated Enders as <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assistant_Secretary_of_State_for_Inter-American_Affairs" title="Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs</a>; Enders held this office from June 23, 1981 to June 27, 1983. The Reagan administration made the decision to reduce the emphasis that the Carter administration had put on human rights issues in dealings with allies and this new policy had been made clear to Ambassador <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jack_R.Binns" title="Jack R. Binns" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Jack R. Binns</a>, a Carter appointee, following his repeated reports of human rights abuses by the Honduran Military.In a June 1981 cable, Binns reported that he was deeply concerned about increasing evidence of officially sponsored or sanctioned assassinations of political or criminal targets and repression.Binns was summoned to Washington by Thomas O. Enders.<blockquote style="overflow: hidden; color: rgb(37, 37, 37); line-height: 22.3999996185303px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">I was told to stop human rights reporting except in back channel. The fear was that if it came into the State Department, it will leak, Binns recalled. They wanted to keep assistance flowing. Increased violations by the Honduran military would prejudice that. <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_note-2" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[2]</a></blockquote>Reagan then named Enders <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Ambassador_to_Spain" title="US Ambassador to Spain" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">US Ambassador to Spain</a>, with Enders presenting his credentials to the Spanish government September 15, 1983 and representing the U.S. in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spain" title="Spain" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Spain</a> until July 6, 1986.Enders retired in 1986. He died in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City" title="New York City" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">New York City</a> on March 17, 1996. He is buried in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waterford,Connecticut" title="Waterford, Connecticut" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Waterford, Connecticut</a>.
<div id="toc" class="toc" style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 7px; display: table; zoom: 1; color: rgb(37, 37, 37); background-color: rgb(249, 249, 249);"><div id="toctitle" style="direction: ltr; text-align: center;"><h2 style="color: black; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border: none; display: inline; line-height: 1.3; background: none;">Contents</h2>  [<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#" id="togglelink" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">hide</a>] </div><ul style="list-style-type: none; margin: 0.3em 0px; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none;"><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-1" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#Background_and_early_life" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">1 Background and early life</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-2" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#Diplomatic_career" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">2 Diplomatic career</a><ul style="list-style-type: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none;"><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-3" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#Assistant_Under_Secretary_of_State_for_Economic_and_Business_Affairs_1973-1976" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">2.1 Assistant Under Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs 1973-1976</a></li><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-4" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#US_Ambassador_to_Canada_1976-1979" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">2.2 US Ambassador to Canada 1976-1979</a></li><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-5" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#Assistant_Secretary_of_State_for_Inter-American_Affairs_1981-1983" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">2.3 Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs 1981-1983</a></li><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-6" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#US_Ambassador_to_Spain_1983-1986" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">2.4 US Ambassador to Spain 1983-1986</a></li></ul></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-7" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#Personal_life" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">3 Personal life</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-8" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#Enders_Endowment" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">4 Enders Endowment</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-9" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#Notes" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">5 Notes</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-10" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#References" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">6 References</a></li></ul></div><h2 style="font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); line-height: 1.3; background: none rgb(255, 255, 255);">Background and early life[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thomas_O.Enders&action=edit&section=1" title="Edit section: Background and early life" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">edit</a>]</h2><table class="metadata plainlinks ambox mbox-small-left ambox-content" role="presentation" style="margin: 4px 1em 4px 0px; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 10px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(170, 170, 170) rgb(170, 170, 170) rgb(170, 170, 170) rgb(242, 133, 0); width: 238px; border-collapse: collapse; line-height: 1.25em; color: rgb(37, 37, 37); background: rgb(251, 251, 251);"><tbody><tr><td class="mbox-image" style="border: none; padding: 2px 0px 2px 0.5em; text-align: center;"><img alt="Wiki letter w.svg" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/6c/Wiki_letter_w.svg/23px-Wiki_letter_w.svg.png" width="23" height="23" srcset="//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/6c/Wiki_letter_w.svg/35px-Wiki_letter_w.svg.png 1.5x, //upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/6c/Wiki_letter_w.svg/46px-Wiki_letter_w.svg.png 2x" data-file-width="44" data-file-height="44" style="border: none; vertical-align: middle;" /></td><td class="mbox-text" style="border: none; padding: 0.25em 0.5em; width: 185.6875px;">This section is empty. You can help by <a class="external text" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thomas_O.Enders&action=edit&section=" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding: 0px !important; background: none !important;">adding to it</a>. (November 2014)</td></tr></tbody></table><h2 style="font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); line-height: 1.3; background: none rgb(255, 255, 255);">Diplomatic career[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thomas_O.Enders&action=edit&section=2" title="Edit section: Diplomatic career" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">edit</a>]</h2><h3 style="margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 1.6; background: none rgb(255, 255, 255);">Assistant Under Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs 1973-1976<span class="mw-editsection" style="-webkit-user-select: none; font-weight: normal; margin-left: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1em; display: inline-block; white-space: nowrap; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;">[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thomas_O.Enders&action=edit&section=3" title="Edit section: Assistant Under Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs 1973-1976" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">edit</a>]</h3><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Kissinger" title="Henry Kissinger" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Henry Kissinger</a> appointed Tom to the role of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Assistant_Secretary_of_State_for_Economic_and_Business_Affairs" title="Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Assistant Secretary of State for Economic and Business Affairs</a> in 1973.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_note-3" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">[3]</a> Tom’s job was to corral the allies into a common approach to the energy crisis and prevent bilateralism from gaining the upper hand. The US spearheaded the International Energy Program (IEP) Agreement,<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_note-4" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">[4]</a> underpinned by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Energy_Agency" title="International Energy Agency" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">International Energy Agency</a>(IEA), which still exists today, as a counterweight to <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPEC" title="OPEC" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">OPEC</a>.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_note-5" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">[5]</a> To make the US credible on the IEA, Congress adopted our first energy legislation in 1975 promoting conservation, renewable and alternative energy resources.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_note-6" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">[6]</a>Canada was a key piece of the energy supply puzzle, lying in between the lower 48 states and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alaska_North_Slope" title="Alaska North Slope" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Alaskan North Slope</a>. The US Government had chosen the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trans-Alaska_Pipeline_System" title="Trans-Alaska Pipeline System" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Trans-Alaskan Pipeline System (TAPS)</a> over the more efficient Trans-Canadian route, to avoid relying on Canada for such a vital resource.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_note-7" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[7]</a> TAPS routed the oil pipeline from <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prudhoe_Bay,Alaska" title="Prudhoe Bay, Alaska" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Prudhoe Bay</a> to the Port of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valdez" title="Valdez" class="mw-disambig" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Valdez</a>, then requiring transport via tanker to west coast ports. The <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haida_people" title="Haida people" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Haida Nation</a>, whose homeland is the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haida_Gwaii" title="Haida Gwaii" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Queen Charlotte Islands</a>, protested that the passage of massively-laden oil tankers would create risks. Keenly conscious of the unique culture of the Haida Nation, Tom managed to impose on the US maritime shipping industry a 100-mile tanker exclusion zone from Cape St John, at least for a period of time.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_note-8" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">[8]</a>Tom was also an enthusiastic supporter of Canada’s development of its own energy resources. Tom felt that it made more sense to exploit the Alberta tar sands, for example, to serve proximate markets in the lower 48 than distant markets in Central and Eastern Canada. This preference for North-South trade where manifestly more efficient became a common theme of his approach on coal and electricity, dovetailing with the economic interests of provincial premiers.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_note-9" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[9]</a><h3 style="margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 1.6; background: none rgb(255, 255, 255);">US Ambassador to Canada 1976-1979<span class="mw-editsection" style="-webkit-user-select: none; font-weight: normal; margin-left: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1em; display: inline-block; white-space: nowrap; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;">[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thomas_O.Enders&action=edit&section=4" title="Edit section: US Ambassador to Canada 1976-1979" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">edit</a>]</h3>Tom Enders, Ambassador to Canada from 1976 to 1979, set the stage for the historic <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUSFTA" title="CUSFTA" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">CUSFTA</a>: he fired up talk of free trade with Canada; he engaged policymakers, business people and Canadians in general in a future-oriented dialogue to define a shared North-American destiny, reversing Prime Minister <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Trudeau" title="Pierre Trudeau" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Pierre Trudeau’s</a> <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_option" title="Third option" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">third option</a> and East-West blueprint for Canada’s economic development.Introducing himself in an interview with Bruce Philips on <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CTV_Television_Network" title="CTV Television Network" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">CTV</a> on 11 April 1976, Tom said: “We think that the Canadian-American relationship is one that has a lot of opportunities as well as clearly some differences that have to be solved. I think that an activist approach to this is the word I would use about the kinds of missions that I’ve been given and the kind of person I expect to be here. This is necessary to ensure that we exploit those opportunities as well as try and resolve those differences so that the differences don’t come to dominate the relationship.”Tom decided on an extensive outreach effort of speeches focussed on his ‘missions’: defence, energy, the environment and trade liberalisation. This was a dramatic change from the historical tradition of US envoys engaging in fatuous talk about best friends, closest neighbours and undefended border”.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_note-10" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[10]</a> He was at times attacked for unwarranted intrusion in Canadian affairs.Intensive socialising was also part of the programme. Tom and Gaetana both spoke perfect French: essential in Canada in 1976 on the eve of the victory of the Parti Quebecois. They travelled the length and breadth of Canada, Tom alone claiming to have travelled 50,000 miles each year.Early on in his posting, Tom addressed in a speech at the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conference_Board_of_Canada" title="Conference Board of Canada" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Conference Board of Canada</a> in November 1976, the “continentalism that haunts every discussion of improving Canadian-US relations”.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_note-11" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[11]</a> This periodic Canadian paranoia of being absorbed by the US de facto, he thought, was a natural consequence of the US being Canada’s top trading partner. He responded by noting that the US had now also recognised Canada as its top trading partner, setting the stage for a partnership of equals. Tom anticipated that mutual dependence would grow under ambitious tariff liberalisation.“Canada-US relations will not work well”, Tom said, “if we feel we are prisoners of that interdependence, not its masters.” He urged a new common practice: that every difficulty and dispute be met with consultation, inquiry, process towards a joint understanding. He urged “expansionary” solutions be found to permit a higher balance of advantage, rather than taking something away from one country for the benefit of the other.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_note-12" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[12]</a>His Excellency, then Under Secretary of External Affairs Allan Gotlieb, subsequently Ambassador to the US in the 1980s, said about Tom: “Over many years, Canada and the US typically emphasized the importance of resolving issues, or trying to, behind closed doors. Tom was, I believe, the first US Ambassador to Canada to speak so often and openly about our differences and the reasons for them. This sometimes gave rise to controversy, but he believed that a key part of his assignment was to contribute to a better public understanding of the relationship and issues between us. This sometimes got him into hot water with the Canadian government and senior officials, but he rightly saw this as a key part of his job. As a part of his practice of public diplomacy, he and Gaetana made the Ambassadorial residence a place of great excitement and for continuing debate and dialogue. The official residence became highly prized as a place to mix and mingle and debate. There was no more exciting place to be in Ottawa and probably Canada.”<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_note-13" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[13]</a>Strengthening management of shared environments, as had been achieved since 1972 by the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Joint_Commission" title="International Joint Commission" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">International Joint Commission for the Great Lakes</a>, was a recurring aspiration for Tom.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_note-14" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[14]</a> At the time, the irritants were the Garrison Diversion project on the US side and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saskatchewan" title="Saskatchewan" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Saskatchewan</a> Government’s plan to build a thermal generating plant on the Poplar River near the border with <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montana" title="Montana" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Montana</a>. In several speeches on environmental frictions, his message was “we must develop better ways of dealing with them to our mutual benefit and not to trade them off.”<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_note-15" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[15]</a>Tom knew a lot about trade with Canada even before he arrived. He was closely involved in the Kennedy Round of trade negotiations in 1966 and 1967 as Special Assistant to Under Secretary for Political Affairs<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Whitman_Rostow" title="Walt Whitman Rostow" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Walt Rostow</a>. Reporting to Secretary of State <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dean_Rusk" title="Dean Rusk" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Dean Rusk</a>, Tom stated a “a very significant – in some ways brilliant - deal with Canada” had been reached “involving substantial cuts on $1.3-$1.4 billion on trade in each side”.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_note-16" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[16]</a> The Kennedy Round was the first of the multilateral trade negotiations to build multilateral tariff cuts on the basis of a series of bilateral tariff deals that were then multilateralised to all <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Agreement_on_Tariffs_and_Trade" title="General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">GATT</a> parties.By 1977, Tom was [quote] “running around talking about <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_trade" title="Free trade" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">free trade</a>” [unquote]<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_note-17" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[17]</a> in Canada. In a key speech to the Conference Board of Canada, Tom said: “You’re going to ask right off what two job-short economies can do for each other in the field of trade without making their problems worse. The answer is, of course, that you can get important net job creation – and a major assist in combatting inflation – by reciprocal reduction of trade barriers…”On October 20, 1977, freer trade with the US became official Canadian policy and the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third_option" title="Third option" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">third option</a> was formally binned. Finance Minister <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Chr%C3%A9tien" title="Jean Chrétien" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Jean Chrétien</a>’s Economic and Fiscal Statement to the House of Commons indicated: “We need lower – not higher – trade barriers here and around the world if we are to build efficient manufacturing industries and increase our productivity.”Both Canada and the US were firmly focussed on concluding the Tokyo Round of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multilateral_trade_negotiations" title="Multilateral trade negotiations" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">multilateral trade negotiations</a> (MTN) held by the GATT. The Tokyo Round was not going well, mainly because <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japan" title="Japan" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Japan</a> and the<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Economic_Community" title="European Economic Community" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">European Economic Community</a> were reluctant to cut tariffs in a period of economic recession. The US instead believed that multilateral trade liberalisation was urgently required to restart economic growth in all its major trading partners in the wake of the energy crisis.On his own bat, Tom publicised a US tariff offer to reduce (but not eliminate) nuisance tariffs on processed raw materials which hindered Canadian exports to the US.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_note-18" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[18]</a> Tom thought an ambitious bilateral tariff cutting agreement with Canada might galvanise Japan and the European Economic Community to do the same. He also saw the multilateral route as being the only one for Canada and the US to advance in their common objective of removing trade barriers to the export of agricultural products, including distortive aid for grain exports to emerging markets.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_note-19" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[19]</a>If the MTN route seemed superior to Tom, he was also keenly aware that a trade agreement might not “yield enough economic benefit to offset its political costs” and a North American energy market, would “arouse American expectations that cannot be met and stir up Canadian fears that are difficult to put to rest”.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_note-20" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[20]</a> (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CUSFTA" title="CUSFTA" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">CUSFTA</a> and <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NAFTA" title="NAFTA" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">NAFTA</a> are not common markets.)<h3 style="margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 1.6; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs 1981-1983<span class="mw-editsection" style="-webkit-user-select: none; font-weight: normal; margin-left: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1em; display: inline-block; white-space: nowrap; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thomas_O.Enders&action=edit&section=5" title="Edit section: Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs 1981-1983" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">edit</a>]</h3><h3 style="margin: 0.3em 0px 0px; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0px; border-bottom-style: none; line-height: 1.6; background: none rgb(255, 255, 255);">US Ambassador to Spain 1983-1986<span class="mw-editsection" style="-webkit-user-select: none; font-weight: normal; margin-left: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1em; display: inline-block; white-space: nowrap; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate;">[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thomas_O.Enders&action=edit&section=6" title="Edit section: US Ambassador to Spain 1983-1986" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">edit</a>]</h3><h2 style="font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); line-height: 1.3; background: none rgb(255, 255, 255);">Personal life[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thomas_O.Enders&action=edit&section=7" title="Edit section: Personal life" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">edit</a>]</h2><table class="metadata plainlinks ambox mbox-small-left ambox-content" role="presentation" style="margin: 4px 1em 4px 0px; border-width: 1px 1px 1px 10px; border-style: solid; border-color: rgb(170, 170, 170) rgb(170, 170, 170) rgb(170, 170, 170) rgb(242, 133, 0); width: 238px; border-collapse: collapse; line-height: 1.25em; color: rgb(37, 37, 37); background: rgb(251, 251, 251);"><tbody><tr><td class="mbox-image" style="border: none; padding: 2px 0px 2px 0.5em; text-align: center;"><img alt="Wiki letter w.svg" src="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/6c/Wiki_letter_w.svg/23px-Wiki_letter_w.svg.png" width="23" height="23" srcset="//upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/6c/Wiki_letter_w.svg/35px-Wiki_letter_w.svg.png 1.5x, //upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/6/6c/Wiki_letter_w.svg/46px-Wiki_letter_w.svg.png 2x" data-file-width="44" data-file-height="44" style="border: none; vertical-align: middle;" /></td><td class="mbox-text" style="border: none; padding: 0.25em 0.5em; width: 185.6875px;">This section is empty. You can help by <a class="external text" href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thomas_O.Enders&action=edit&section=" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding: 0px !important; background: none !important;">adding to it</a>. (November 2014)</td></tr></tbody></table><h2 style="font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); line-height: 1.3; background: none rgb(255, 255, 255);">Enders Endowment[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thomas_O.Enders&action=edit&section=8" title="Edit section: Enders Endowment" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">edit</a>]</h2>The Enders Endowment funds a graduate fellowship program as well as hosts a lecture series annually in Washington, DC for US-Canadian Relations. The Thomas and Gaetana Enders Fellowship has sought, in the past 15 years, to contribute to their legacy. It is a partnership with ACSUS and SAIS to advance academic research and fund travel of graduate students to Canada.<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_note-21" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[21]</a><h2 style="font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); line-height: 1.3; background: none rgb(255, 255, 255);">Notes[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thomas_O.Enders&action=edit&section=9" title="Edit section: Notes" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">edit</a>]</h2><div class="reflist" style="margin-bottom: 0.5em; color: rgb(37, 37, 37); list-style-type: decimal; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><ol class="references" style="margin: 0.3em 0px 0.5em 3.2em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none; list-style-type: inherit;"><li id="cite_note-1" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_ref-1" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.nytimes.com/1996/03/18/us/thomas-enders-diplomat-in-cold-war-is-dead-at-64.html?scp=3&sq=%22scroll+and+key%22&st=nyt" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) 100% 50% no-repeat, url(data:image/svg+xml,%3C%3Fxml%20version%3D%221.0%22%20encoding%3D%22UTF-8%22%3F%3E%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20width%3D%2210%22%20height%3D%2210%22%3E%3Cg%20transform%3D%22translate%28-826.429%20-698.791%29%22%3E%3Crect%20width%3D%225.982%22%20height%3D%225.982%22%20x%3D%22826.929%22%20y%3D%22702.309%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%20stroke%3D%22%2306c%22%2F%3E%3Cg%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M831.194%20698.791h5.234v5.391l-1.571%201.545-1.31-1.31-2.725%202.725-2.689-2.689%202.808-2.808-1.311-1.311z%22%20fill%3D%22%2306f%22%2F%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M835.424%20699.795l.022%204.885-1.817-1.817-2.881%202.881-1.228-1.228%202.881-2.881-1.851-1.851z%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E) 100% 50%;">"Thomas Enders, Diplomat In Cold War, Is Dead at 64 - New York Times"</a>. Nytimes.com. 1996-03-18. Retrieved 2011-02-16.<span title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3AThomas+O.+Enders&rft.btitle=Thomas+Enders%2C+Diplomat+In+Cold+War%2C+Is+Dead+at+64+-+New+York+Times&rft.date=1996-03-18&rft.genre=book&rft_id=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2F1996%2F03%2F18%2Fus%2Fthomas-enders-diplomat-in-cold-war-is-dead-at-64.html%3Fscp%3D3%26sq%3D%2522scroll%2Band%2Bkey%2522%26st%3Dnyt&rft.pub=Nytimes.com&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook" class="Z3988" /></li><li id="cite_note-2" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_ref-2" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bal-negroponte4,0,5021321,full.story" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) 100% 50% no-repeat, url(data:image/svg+xml,%3C%3Fxml%20version%3D%221.0%22%20encoding%3D%22UTF-8%22%3F%3E%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20width%3D%2210%22%20height%3D%2210%22%3E%3Cg%20transform%3D%22translate%28-826.429%20-698.791%29%22%3E%3Crect%20width%3D%225.982%22%20height%3D%225.982%22%20x%3D%22826.929%22%20y%3D%22702.309%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%20stroke%3D%22%2306c%22%2F%3E%3Cg%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M831.194%20698.791h5.234v5.391l-1.571%201.545-1.31-1.31-2.725%202.725-2.689-2.689%202.808-2.808-1.311-1.311z%22%20fill%3D%22%2306f%22%2F%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M835.424%20699.795l.022%204.885-1.817-1.817-2.881%202.881-1.228-1.228%202.881-2.881-1.851-1.851z%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E) 100% 50%;">"Unearthed: Fatal Secrets, A carefully crafted deception"</a>. BaltimoreSun.com. 1995-06-18. Retrieved 2013-01-29.<span title="ctx_ver=Z39.88-2004&rfr_id=info%3Asid%2Fen.wikipedia.org%3AThomas+O.+Enders&rft.btitle=Unearthed%3A+Fatal+Secrets%2C+A+carefully+crafted+deception&rft.date=1995-06-18&rft.genre=book&rft_id=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.baltimoresun.com%2Fnews%2Fmaryland%2Fbal-negroponte4%2C0%2C5021321%2Cfull.story&rft.pub=BaltimoreSun.com&rft_val_fmt=info%3Aofi%2Ffmt%3Akev%3Amtx%3Abook" class="Z3988" /></li><li id="cite_note-3" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_ref-3" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }Dr Kissinger devotes pages 347 and 348 of his three-volume memoirs Years of Upheaval to the role played by Tom Enders in the US response to the energy crisis <a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=B4LRAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT4372&lpg=PT4372&dq=kissinger+memoirs+enders&source=bl&ots=J1fVDzsIw8&sig=SY33BpDI6ImNsA5-HbSqcBQfBvw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=xOM8VN6nHtHY7AbHjYHgBQ&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=kissinger%20memoirs%20enders&f=false" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) 100% 50% no-repeat, url(data:image/svg+xml,%3C%3Fxml%20version%3D%221.0%22%20encoding%3D%22UTF-8%22%3F%3E%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20width%3D%2210%22%20height%3D%2210%22%3E%3Cg%20transform%3D%22translate%28-826.429%20-698.791%29%22%3E%3Crect%20width%3D%225.982%22%20height%3D%225.982%22%20x%3D%22826.929%22%20y%3D%22702.309%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%20stroke%3D%22%2306c%22%2F%3E%3Cg%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M831.194%20698.791h5.234v5.391l-1.571%201.545-1.31-1.31-2.725%202.725-2.689-2.689%202.808-2.808-1.311-1.311z%22%20fill%3D%22%2306f%22%2F%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M835.424%20699.795l.022%204.885-1.817-1.817-2.881%202.881-1.228-1.228%202.881-2.881-1.851-1.851z%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E) 100% 50%;">http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=B4LRAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT4372&lpg=PT4372&dq=kissinger+memoirs+enders&source=bl&ots=J1fVDzsIw8&sig=SY33BpDI6ImNsA5-HbSqcBQfBvw&hl=en&sa=X&ei=xOM8VN6nHtHY7AbHjYHgBQ&ved=0CCEQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=kissinger%20memoirs%20enders&f=false</a></li><li id="cite_note-4" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_ref-4" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }The IEP was in fact modelled on an agreement reached by the US and Canada in 1973 to share third-country supplies in the event of an emergency: Canada undertook to keep supplies going to the Midwest of the US rather than divert supplies to Eastern Canada, which the US in turn undertook to supply, in what must have been the first official recognition of the higher efficiency of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North%E2%80%93South_divide" title="North–South divide" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">North-South</a> trade over <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East%E2%80%93West_dichotomy" title="East–West dichotomy" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">West-East</a>. Foreign Relations of the Unites States, 1969-1976, Volume XXXVI, Document 168, “Memorandum from Robert D. Hormats and Helmut Sonnenfeld of the National Security Council to the President’s Assistant for National Security Affairs (Kissinger)”, March 2, 1973.</li><li id="cite_note-5" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_ref-5" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }Members agreed to reduce their dependence on imported oil through domestic energy policies, and to ‘equal hardship’ in the event of a new embargo, sharing supplies. Foreign Relations of the Unites States, 1969-1976, Volume XXXVII, Energy Crisis, 1974-1980, Document 20, “Editorial note” notes the IEA was established on November 15, 1974 by the OECD Council, and the first meeting of the Governing Board of the IEA took place on November 18–19, 1974.</li><li id="cite_note-6" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_ref-6" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }Energy Policy and Conservation Act of 1975. The Act introduced a ban on exports of US domestic crude oil. Exceptions include Alaskan oil exported to Canada and consumed there.</li><li id="cite_note-7" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_ref-7" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }The alternative trans-Canadian route, although more efficient, “was rejected for environmental reasons, because of the potentially negative impact of such negotiations on U.S.-Canadian relations, and to avoid placing a large portion of the pipeline under the jurisdiction of another country” (Foreign Relations of the Unites States, 1969-1976, Volume XXXVI, Document 121, “Editorial note”). In 1977, Canada was considering making available an overland leg for the Natural Gas Pipeline of Alaska in preference to All-Alaskan (sea) routes.</li><li id="cite_note-8" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_ref-8" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }The Haida Nation remains concerned with the shipment of crude oil in its vicinity. <a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://www.haidanation.ca/Pages/haida_laas/pdfs/newsletters/2012/feb.12.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 18px; background: url(https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/23/Icons-mini-file_acrobat.gif) 100% 50% no-repeat;">http://www.haidanation.ca/Pages/haida_laas/pdfs/newsletters/2012/feb.12.pdf</a><a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://www.mwpr.ca/go9450a/HAIDA_GWAII_SAYS_NO_TO_TANKERS" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) 100% 50% no-repeat, url(data:image/svg+xml,%3C%3Fxml%20version%3D%221.0%22%20encoding%3D%22UTF-8%22%3F%3E%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20width%3D%2210%22%20height%3D%2210%22%3E%3Cg%20transform%3D%22translate%28-826.429%20-698.791%29%22%3E%3Crect%20width%3D%225.982%22%20height%3D%225.982%22%20x%3D%22826.929%22%20y%3D%22702.309%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%20stroke%3D%22%2306c%22%2F%3E%3Cg%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M831.194%20698.791h5.234v5.391l-1.571%201.545-1.31-1.31-2.725%202.725-2.689-2.689%202.808-2.808-1.311-1.311z%22%20fill%3D%22%2306f%22%2F%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M835.424%20699.795l.022%204.885-1.817-1.817-2.881%202.881-1.228-1.228%202.881-2.881-1.851-1.851z%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E) 100% 50%;">http://www.mwpr.ca/go9450a/HAIDA_GWAII_SAYS_NO_TO_TANKERS</a></li><li id="cite_note-9" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_ref-9" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }See also “Canada/US Electricity Exchanges Study”, conversation with Minister Gillespie, 15 November 1976; “Ontario Ministry Presentation to Coal Conference Uses Ambassador Enders’ remarks on US coal sourcing”, 30 September 1976.</li><li id="cite_note-10" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_ref-10" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }The Globe and Mail, Nov 6, 1976.</li><li id="cite_note-11" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_ref-11" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }The idea “that we should make decisions on investments, jobs, resources, water and so forth, as if the border wasn’t there, letting benefits and costs be distributed by private decisions without reference to national interests.” The Globe and Mail, November 10, 1976.</li><li id="cite_note-12" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_ref-12" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }The Globe and Mail, March 25, 1976.</li><li id="cite_note-13" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_ref-13" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }Email exchanges in 2014.</li><li id="cite_note-14" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_ref-14" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }Conference Board of Canada, “US-Canadian Relations, 9 November 1976, where Tom “suggested that it would be a help to handle disputes involving coastal waters, dam regulations and allotments in a way analogous to the International Joint Commission [for the Great Lakes]”.</li><li id="cite_note-15" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_ref-15" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }Speech in Vancouver on 2 September 1976, text of editorial In Vancouver Sun of 4 October 1976 cited in telegram.</li><li id="cite_note-16" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_ref-16" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }Foreign Relations of the Unites States, 1964-1968, Volume VII, International Monetary and Trade Policy, Document 361, “Memorandum from the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs’ Special Assistant (Enders) to Secretary of State Rusk”, May 16, 1967.</li><li id="cite_note-17" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_ref-17" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }Vancouver Sun, December 13, 1977.</li><li id="cite_note-18" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_ref-18" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }Toronto Star, September 23, 1977.</li><li id="cite_note-19" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_ref-19" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }Speech to Canadian Export Association, The Globe and Mail, October 19, 1976.</li><li id="cite_note-20" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_ref-20" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }The Globe and Mail, June 30, 1979.</li><li id="cite_note-21" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_O.Enders#cite_ref-21" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important; -webkit-user-select: none;">Jump up^{</a> }<a rel="nofollow" class="external free" href="http://www.sais-jhu.edu/graduate-studies/admissions-and-aid/tuition-aid/fellowships/apply" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) 100% 50% no-repeat, url(data:image/svg+xml,%3C%3Fxml%20version%3D%221.0%22%20encoding%3D%22UTF-8%22%3F%3E%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20width%3D%2210%22%20height%3D%2210%22%3E%3Cg%20transform%3D%22translate%28-826.429%20-698.791%29%22%3E%3Crect%20width%3D%225.982%22%20height%3D%225.982%22%20x%3D%22826.929%22%20y%3D%22702.309%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%20stroke%3D%22%2306c%22%2F%3E%3Cg%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M831.194%20698.791h5.234v5.391l-1.571%201.545-1.31-1.31-2.725%202.725-2.689-2.689%202.808-2.808-1.311-1.311z%22%20fill%3D%22%2306f%22%2F%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M835.424%20699.795l.022%204.885-1.817-1.817-2.881%202.881-1.228-1.228%202.881-2.881-1.851-1.851z%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E) 100% 50%;">http://www.sais-jhu.edu/graduate-studies/admissions-and-aid/tuition-aid/fellowships/apply</a></li></ol></div><h2 style="font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); line-height: 1.3; background: none rgb(255, 255, 255);">References[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Thomas_O.Enders&action=edit&section=10" title="Edit section: References" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">edit</a>]</h2><ul style="margin: 0.3em 0px 0px 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(data:image/svg+xml,%3C%3Fxml%20version%3D%221.0%22%20encoding%3D%22UTF-8%22%3F%3E%0A%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20version%3D%221.1%22%20width%3D%225%22%20height%3D%2213%22%3E%0A%3Ccircle%20cx%3D%222.5%22%20cy%3D%229.5%22%20r%3D%222.5%22%20fill%3D%22%2300528c%22%2F%3E%0A%3C%2Fsvg%3E%0A); color: rgb(37, 37, 37); line-height: 22.3999996185303px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=43723" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) 100% 50% no-repeat, url(data:image/svg+xml,%3C%3Fxml%20version%3D%221.0%22%20encoding%3D%22UTF-8%22%3F%3E%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20width%3D%2210%22%20height%3D%2210%22%3E%3Cg%20transform%3D%22translate%28-826.429%20-698.791%29%22%3E%3Crect%20width%3D%225.982%22%20height%3D%225.982%22%20x%3D%22826.929%22%20y%3D%22702.309%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%20stroke%3D%22%2306c%22%2F%3E%3Cg%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M831.194%20698.791h5.234v5.391l-1.571%201.545-1.31-1.31-2.725%202.725-2.689-2.689%202.808-2.808-1.311-1.311z%22%20fill%3D%22%2306f%22%2F%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M835.424%20699.795l.022%204.885-1.817-1.817-2.881%202.881-1.228-1.228%202.881-2.881-1.851-1.851z%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E) 100% 50%;">President Reagan's Nomination of Enders as Assistant Secretary</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/speeches/1983/60683b.htm" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; background: linear-gradient(transparent, transparent) 100% 50% no-repeat, url(data:image/svg+xml,%3C%3Fxml%20version%3D%221.0%22%20encoding%3D%22UTF-8%22%3F%3E%3Csvg%20xmlns%3D%22http%3A%2F%2Fwww.w3.org%2F2000%2Fsvg%22%20width%3D%2210%22%20height%3D%2210%22%3E%3Cg%20transform%3D%22translate%28-826.429%20-698.791%29%22%3E%3Crect%20width%3D%225.982%22%20height%3D%225.982%22%20x%3D%22826.929%22%20y%3D%22702.309%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%20stroke%3D%22%2306c%22%2F%3E%3Cg%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M831.194%20698.791h5.234v5.391l-1.571%201.545-1.31-1.31-2.725%202.725-2.689-2.689%202.808-2.808-1.311-1.311z%22%20fill%3D%22%2306f%22%2F%3E%3Cpath%20d%3D%22M835.424%20699.795l.022%204.885-1.817-1.817-2.881%202.881-1.228-1.228%202.881-2.881-1.851-1.851z%22%20fill%3D%22%23fff%22%2F%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fg%3E%3C%2Fsvg%3E) 100% 50%;">President Reagan's Nomination of Enders as Ambassador to Spain</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.nndb.com/people/969/000130579/" style="text-decoration: none; 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</div><div>Greetings, all, and welcome to my userpage! <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Der_Lindberghflug" title="Der Lindberghflug" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">My name is not important</a>; on here I go by Ser Amantio di Nicolao. He's a minor character in <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giacomo_Puccini" title="Giacomo Puccini" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Giacomo Puccini</a>'s <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gianni_Schicchi" title="Gianni Schicchi" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Gianni Schicchi</a>, a notary and lawyer - I chose the name almost exclusively because it's one of my favorite character names in opera. And because I love Schicchi. I'm not a notary, nor am I a lawyer; I'm not Italian, and I'm not a baritone.<div id="toc" class="toc" style="border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 7px; font-size: 13.3000001907349px; display: table; zoom: 1; color: rgb(37, 37, 37); background-color: rgb(249, 249, 249);"><div id="toctitle" style="direction: ltr; text-align: center;"><h2 style="color: black; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border: none; font-size: 13.3000001907349px; display: inline; line-height: 1.3; background: none;">Contents</h2>  [<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ser_Amantio_di_Nicolao#" id="togglelink" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">hide</a>] </div><ul style="list-style-type: none; margin: 0.3em 0px; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none;"><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-1" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ser_Amantio_di_Nicolao#Who_I_am" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">1 Who I am</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-2" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ser_Amantio_di_Nicolao#What_I_do" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">2 What I do</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-3" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ser_Amantio_di_Nicolao#User_space_things" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">3 User space things</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-4" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Ser_Amantio_di_Nicolao#Places_I.27ve_visited" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">4 Places I've visited</a></li></ul></div><h2 style="font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); font-family: 'Linux Libertine', Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 1.3; background: none rgb(255, 255, 255);">Who I am<span class="mw-editsection" style="-webkit-user-select: none; font-size: small; margin-left: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1em; display: inline-block; white-space: nowrap; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate; font-family: sans-serif;">[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Ser_Amantio_di_Nicolao&action=edit&section=1" title="Edit section: Who I am" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">edit</a>]</h2>In real life I am a resident of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Washington,_D.C." title="Washington, D.C." style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Washington, D.C.</a> area - I'm not quite a native, but near enough as to make no difference. I went to high school in Virginia, went to a state school for college, and came back home, as did many of my compatriots, after graduation. For a living, I do things. And stuff. Which is as much as I shall say on the subject.I joined Wikipedia way back in 2006, when it was still a large part of the wilds of the internet. This is actually my second account, my first having become inactive when I lost the password. (I think there may have been one before that, even...regardless, I've been editing since the time when IPs could create articles. I should know; I created a couple of articles before I registered.) I took a hiatus for a while, but once I came back to editing I came back with a vengeance, and haven't let off yet, for good or ill. I have been an administrator since June of 2015...please feel free to have a look at my <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Requests_for_adminship/Ser_Amantio_di_Nicolao" title="Wikipedia:Requests for adminship/Ser Amantio di Nicolao" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">RfA</a>.<h2 style="font-weight: normal; margin: 1em 0px 0.25em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); font-family: 'Linux Libertine', Georgia, Times, serif; line-height: 1.3; background: none rgb(255, 255, 255);">What I do<span class="mw-editsection" style="-webkit-user-select: none; font-size: small; margin-left: 1em; vertical-align: baseline; line-height: 1em; display: inline-block; white-space: nowrap; unicode-bidi: -webkit-isolate; font-family: sans-serif;">[<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:Ser_Amantio_di_Nicolao&action=edit&section=2" title="Edit section: What I do" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">edit</a>]</h2>For many years as an editor I focused on content creation - I wrote a lot of articles in my early days on the site. I still try to do so, from time to time, though it happens far less frequently than I would like these days. I found myself, gradually, moving more and more into the territory of the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiGnome" title="Wikipedia:WikiGnome" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">WikiGnome</a>, as I received access to more and more semi-automated tools to help my editing. To be frank, it was a label which I resisted for some time, but I have gradually come to embrace it. There are many, many gnomic tasks that need doing around Wikipedia, and I figure the more I can do myself, the less I have to leave for other people, which means more editors can devote their energies to other things. I have the aptitude for it, and I have the focus to carry it off.I don't really have a preferred topic to edit; I have taken the motto of <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lord_Peter_Wimsey" title="Lord Peter Wimsey" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">the Wimsey</a> family as my own: "As my whimsey takes me."</div><div>==</div></div></div></div></div>