Abrams, E

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619 eabrms TAG

pension plan poster boy?

 capt 7/16

ethics and policy  inst?!

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thom

an 3 24 no lnx

Bill Barr laid the foundation for today’s MAGA movement

How Bill Barr laid the foundation for today’s MAGA movement

Thom Hartmann

March 11, 2024

With nepo-daughter-in-law Lara Trump taking over the GOP, Donald Trump has essentially declared the “old Republican Party” — the party of Reagan and Bill Barr — dead, arguing that it no longer exists in the form it’s taken since the 1970s.

At a Virginia rally a week ago Saturday, Trump said his neofascist MAGA movement has taken over the Republican Party, that it “represents 96%, and maybe 100%” of Republicans, and that, “We’re getting rid of the Romneys of the world. We want to get Romneys and those out.”

While many in the GOP love the nativist, authoritarian turn the party’s taken, others — like former Attorney General Bill Barr — are mourning the loss of the old guard, calling Trump’s actions “despicable” and “nauseating.”

But what is — or was — the old GOP that Bill Barr so loved?

While not as openly fascist as the MAGA movement, the Republican Party of the past five decades or so was frighteningly corrupt and based, itself, on lies and corruption.

Just this week, The New York Times revealed how Bill Barr apparently inserted himself into a Justice Department criminal investigation of a billion-dollar corporation for allegedly corruptly hiding their income offshore to avoid paying their fair share of taxes.

As the Times notes:

“In the months leading up to the canceled interview in the Netherlands, Caterpillar had enlisted a small group of well-connected lawyers to plead the company’s case. Chief among those was William P. Barr, who had served as attorney general in the George H.W. Bush administration.”

And, the Times reported, one of the lead investigators into Caterpillar’s tax avoidance scheme came right out and complained that because of Barr’s involvement:

“It appears that Caterpillar was given special political treatment that the average U.S. citizen cannot obtain.”

But helping out alleged tax cheats is just the tip of the iceberg of “old GOP” corruption and lies since the days of Nixon and Reagan.

— They lied that if we cut taxes on the morbidly rich, the benefits would “trickle down” to everybody else.

— They lied that if labor unions were destroyed, “job creators” would create “prosperity” and pay workers better.

— They lied that if “originalist” judges were put on the Supreme Court, the rights to vote, abortion, and birth control would be protected.

— They lied that Reagan’s 1983 decision to stop enforcing our anti-trust laws would make business “more efficient” and create opportunities for entrepreneurs and locally-owned businesses.

— They lied that if we forbade the federal government from negotiating drug prices, consumers and taxpayers would save money.

— They lied that if we privatized Medicare, like George W. Bush did in 2003 with his Medicare Advantage scam, the system would save money.

— They lied that racism was “over” in America with the election of Barack Obama, so if the Supreme Court simply let former Confederate states do whatever they wanted, there would be no more suppression and purging of Black voters.

Every one of those lies was intended to increase the wealth and power of the morbidly rich at the expense of average working-class Americans.

But most important, the Bill Barr old-school Republicans lied that they’d protect our democracy and bring honesty and integrity to American politics. Barr’s own history is probably the best example of how dangerous and destructive that lie has been.

The depth and breadth of Barr’s possible crimes against democracy while Attorney General for Trump are just now coming into clearer focus. We shouldn’t be surprised: like Ghostbusters, Bill Barr has been the “Who ya gonna call?” guy for Republican presidents committing treason for over 30 years.

Most people know that when the Mueller investigation was completed — documenting ten prosecutable cases of Donald Trump personally engaging in criminal obstruction of justice and witness tampering to prevent the Mueller Report investigators from getting to the bottom of his 2016 connections to Russia — Barr buried the report for weeks while lying to the American people about its content.

(Merrick Garland, Barr’s heir to the AG job, is still hiding large parts of the report from the American people, another reason President Biden should replace him.)

While shocking, this was not Bill Barr‘s first time playing cover-up for a Republican president who’d committed crimes that could rise to the level of treason against America.

He’s the exemplar of the “old GOP” that helped Nixon cut a deal to prolong the Vietnam War in 1968, worked with Reagan in 1980 to sell weapons to Iran in exchange for holding the hostages to screw Jimmy Carter, and stole the 2000 election from Al Gore in Jeb Bush’s Florida.

Instead of today’s GOP, exemplified by Nazi marches, white trash like Marjorie Taylor Greene, and racist rhetoric against immigrants, Barr’s “old GOP” committed their crimes wearing $2000 tailored suits and manipulating the law to their advantage.

For example, back in 1992, the first time Bill Barr was U.S. Attorney General, iconic New York Times writer William Safire referred to him as “Coverup-General Barr” because of his role in burying evidence of then-President George H.W. Bush’s involvement in Reagan’s scheme to steal the 1980 election through what the media euphemistically called “Iron-Contra.”

On Christmas day of 1992, the New York Times featured a screaming all-caps headline across the top of its front page: Attorney General Bill Barr had covered up evidence of crimes by Reagan and Bush in the Iran-Contra “scandal.” (see the bottom of this article)

Earlier that week of Christmas, 1992, George H.W. Bush was on his way out of office. Bill Clinton had won the White House the month before, and in a few weeks would be sworn in as president.

But Bush Senior’s biggest concern wasn’t that he’d have to leave the White House to retire back to one of his million-dollar mansions in Connecticut, Maine, or Texas: instead, he was worried that he may face time in a federal prison after he left office, a concern nearly identical to what Richard Nixon faced when he decided to resign to avoid prosecution.

Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh was closing in fast on Bush and Reagan, and Bush’s private records, subpoenaed by the independent counsel’s office, were the key to it all.

Walsh had been appointed independent counsel in 1986 to investigate the Iran-Contra activities of the Reagan administration and determine if crimes had been committed.

Was the criminal Iran-Contra conspiracy limited, as Reagan and Bush insisted (and Reagan said on TV), to later years in the Reagan presidency, in response to an obscure hostage-taking in Lebanon?

Or had it started in the 1980 presidential campaign against Jimmy Carter with treasonous collusion with the Iranians, as the then-president of Iran asserted? Who knew what, and when? And what was George H.W. Bush’s role in it all?

In the years since then, the President of Iran in 1980, Abolhassan Bani-Sadr, has gone on the record saying that the Reagan campaign reached out to Iran to hold the hostages in exchange for weapons.

“Ayatollah Khomeini and Ronald Reagan,” President Bani-Sadr told the Christian Science Monitor in 2013, “had organized a clandestine negotiation, later known as the ‘October Surprise,’ which prevented the attempts by myself and then-US President Jimmy Carter to free the hostages before the 1980 US presidential election took place. The fact that they were not released tipped the results of the election in favor of Reagan.”

That wouldn’t have been just an impeachable and imprisionable crime: it was every bit as much treason as when Richard Nixon blew up LBJ’s 1968 peace talks with North and South Vietnam to win that November’s election against Vice President Hubert Humphrey.

Walsh had zeroed in on documents that were in the possession of Reagan’s former defense secretary, Caspar Weinberger, who all the evidence showed was definitely in on the deal, and President Bush’s diary that could corroborate it.

Elliott Abrams had already been convicted of withholding evidence about it from Congress, and he may have even more information, too, if it could be pried out of him before he went to prison. But Abrams was keeping mum, apparently anticipating a pardon.

This was the moment the “old GOP” was at the height of its power and prestige, and Bush and Barr weren’t about to let it be exposed for the criminal enterprise that the “party of Lincoln” had become.

Weinberger, trying to avoid jail himself, was preparing to testify that Bush knew about the deal to hold the hostages and even participated in it, and Walsh had already, based on information he’d obtained from the investigation into Weinberger, demanded that Bush turn over his diary from the campaign. He was also again hot on the trail of Abrams.

So Bush called in his attorney general, Bill Barr — the respectable scion of the “old GOP” — and asked his advice.

At that point Barr, along with Bush, was already up to his eyeballs in cover-ups of other shady behavior by the Reagan administration.

Safire had started referring to Barr as “Coverup-General” in the midst of another scandal — Bush illegally selling weapons of mass destruction to Saddam Hussein — because the Attorney General was already covering up for Bush, Weinberger, and others in the Reagan administration with a scandal the newspapers called “Iraqgate.”

Ironically, that illegal sale of weapons to Saddam Hussein in the late 1980s and early 1990s was cited by George W. Bush, Bush’s son, as part of his justification for illegally invading Iraq in 2003.

On October 19, 1992, Safire wrote in The New York Times of Barr’s unwillingness to appoint an independent counsel to look into Iraqgate:

“Why does the Coverup-General resist independent investigation? Because he knows where it may lead: to Dick Thornburgh, James Baker, Clayton Yeutter, Brent Scowcroft and himself [the people who organized the sale of WMD to Saddam]. He vainly hopes to be able to head it off, or at least be able to use the threat of firing to negotiate a deal.”

Now, just short of two months later, Bush was asking Barr for advice on how to avoid another very serious charge in the Iran-Contra crimes they committed to defeat Jimmy Carter in the 1980 election. How, he wanted to know, could they shut down Walsh’s investigation before Walsh’s lawyers got their hands on Bush’s diary?

In April of 2001, safely distant from the swirl of D.C. politics, the University of Virginia’s Miller Center was compiling oral presidential histories, and interviewed Barr about his time as AG in the Bush White House. They brought up the issue of the Weinberger pardon, which put an end to the Iran-Contra investigation, and Barr’s involvement in it.

Turns out, Barr was right in the middle of it.

“There were some people arguing just for [a pardon for] Weinberger, and I said, ‘No, in for a penny, in for a pound,’” Barr told the interviewer. “I went over and told the President I thought he should not only pardon Caspar Weinberger, but while he was at it, he should pardon about five others.”

Which is exactly what Bush did, on Christmas Eve when most Americans were with family instead of watching the news. The holiday notwithstanding, the result was explosive.

America knew that both Reagan and Bush were up to their necks in the Iran-Contra hostages-for-weapons scandal, and Democrats had been talking about treason, impeachment, or worse.

The independent counsel had already obtained one conviction, three guilty pleas, and two other individuals were lined up for prosecution in the case that lost Jimmy Carter the White House. And Walsh was closing in fast on Bush himself.

The second paragraph of the Times story by David Johnston laid it out:

“Mr. Weinberger was scheduled to stand trial on Jan. 5 on charges that he lied to Congress about his knowledge of the arms sales to Iran and efforts by other countries to help underwrite the Nicaraguan rebels, a case that was expected to focus on Mr. Weinberger’s private notes that contain references to Mr. Bush’s endorsement of the secret shipments to Iran.” (emphasis added)

History shows that when a Republican president is in serious legal trouble, the “old GOP’s” go-to guy was Bill Barr.

For William Safire, Iran-Contra was déjà vu all over again. Four months earlier, referring to Iraqgate (Bush’s criminally selling WMDs to Iraq), Safire opened his article, titled “Justice [Department] Corrupts Justice,” by writing:

“U.S. Attorney General William Barr, in rejecting the House Judiciary Committee’s call for a prosecutor not beholden to the Bush Administration to investigate the crimes of Iraqgate, has taken personal charge of the cover-up.”

Safire accused Barr of not only rigging the cover-up, but of being one of the criminals who could be prosecuted.

“Mr. Barr,” wrote Safire in The New York Times in August of 1992, “...could face prosecution if it turns out that high Bush officials knew about Saddam Hussein’s perversion of our Agriculture export guarantees to finance his war machine.”

He added:

“They [Barr and colleagues] have a keen personal and political interest in seeing to it that the Department of Justice stays in safe, controllable Republican hands.”

Earlier in Bush’s administration, Barr had succeeded in blocking the appointment of an investigator or independent counsel to look into Iraqgate, as Safire repeatedly documented in the Times.

In December, Barr helped Bush block indictments from another independent counsel, Lawrence Walsh, and eliminated any risk that Reagan or George H.W. Bush would be held to account for Iran-Contra.

Walsh, wrote Johnston for the Times on Christmas Eve, “plans to review a campaign diary kept by Mr. Bush.” The diary would be the smoking gun that would nail Bush to the scandal.

“But,” noted the Times, “in a single stroke, Mr. Bush [at Barr’s suggestion] swept away one conviction, three guilty pleas and two pending cases, virtually decapitating what was left of Mr. Walsh’s effort, which began in 1986.”

And Walsh didn’t take it lying down. The Times report noted that:

“Mr. Walsh bitterly condemned the President’s action, charging that ‘the Iran-contra cover-up, which has continued for more than six years, has now been completed.’”

Independent Counsel Walsh added that the diary and notes he wanted to enter into a public trial of Weinberger represented:

“{E]vidence of a conspiracy among the highest ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public.”

The phrase “highest ranking” officials almost certainly included Reagan, Bush, and Barr himself.

Walsh had been fighting to get those documents ever since 1986, when he was appointed and Reagan still had two years left in office. Bush’s and Weinberger’s refusal to turn them over, Johnston noted in the Times, could have, in Walsh’s words:

“[F]orestalled impeachment proceedings against President Reagan” through a pattern of “deception and obstruction.”

Back in the 1990s, Barr successfully covered up the involvement of two Republican presidents — Reagan and Bush — in two separate and impeachable “high crimes,” one of them almost certainly treason committed just to win a presidential election.

And now we learn he apparently went so far as to cover up Trump’s involvement with Putin, leading to multiple opportunities for Trump to extort Ukraine and pass sensitive intelligence along to Russia.

Trump is proudly proclaiming that Barr’s old GOP is dead, replaced by the hateful, nativist MAGA movement. Old-school Republicans are wringing their hands, and some are even leaving the party.

But is the difference really that big?

The corrupt “old GOP” merely laid the foundation for today’s MAGA movement: in many ways Trump was the inevitable next step, after 50-plus years of catering to the morbidly rich while taking a meat-axe to voting rights and the rule of law.

Don’t be fooled: the crocodile tears of those like Bill Barr and the “ex-Republicans” who fill the cable airwaves daily longing for a return of their “Grand Old Party” are every bit the con of Iran-Contra, Bush v Gore, and Citizens United.

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what could possibly go wrong

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/trump-blasted-for-naming-war-criminal-and-iran-contra-convict-elliott-abrams-as-iran-envoy

no lnx

Trump blasted for naming ‘war criminal’ and Iran-Contra convict Elliott Abrams as Iran envoy

[pix: UCTV WHEN?]

Written by Common Dreams August 7, 2020

Following the resignation Thursday of State Department Iran envoy Brian Hook, President Donald Trump named as his replacement current special representative for Venezuela Elliott Abrams, a notorious warmonger and supporter of Latin American death squads who was convicted in 1991 of withholding information from Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal.

“Like most Trump appointees, he is not fit for the position, and will continue to hurt U.S. interests by enacting a failing strategy that will only succeed in spreading chaos and misery.”

—Sina Toossi, National Iranian American Council

Abrams will now serve in both roles simultaneously, alarming anti-war groups who say someone with a record as blood-stained as his “should be barred for life from government positions and recognized as the war criminal that he is.”

“From El Salvador to Guatemala, Nicaragua to Panama, Elliott Abrams’ life’s work has been defined by the worst impulses of U.S. foreign policy: embracing war, ignoring gross human rights abuses, and supporting horrific authoritarian regimes,” said Stephen Miles, executive director of Win Without War.

Abrams’ appointment as special envoy to Iran comes days after he confirmed during a Senate hearing that he is still “working hard” to topple Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro. Sina Toossi, senior research analyst at the National Iranian American Council (NIAC), warned that the Trump administration’s installation of Abrams as the top U.S. diplomat to Iran shows the president and Secretary of State Mike Pompeo are “doubling down” on their push regime change in Iran as well.

“Like most Trump appointees,” said Toossi, “he is not fit for the position, and will continue to hurt U.S. interests by enacting a failing strategy that will only succeed in spreading chaos and misery.”

In a statement late Thursday,anti-war group CodePink provided a snapshot of Abrams’ views and record dating back to his time in the Reagan administration:

In the 1980s, he defended the infamous Guatemalan General Efraín Ríos Montt, whose violent crackdown on the indigenous Ixil Mayan people of Guatemala was so brutal that it was classified as genocide by the United Nations.

He denied that the Salvadoran military was responsible for the devastating El Mozote massacrewhere, in 1981, a U.S.-trained battalion murdered more than 500 civilians, slitting the throats of children along the way. Not only did Abrams deny the massacre and push for continued U.S. support for the notoriously brutal Salvadoran government, but he even claimed in a 1994 interview that “the U.S. administration’s record in El Salvador is one of fabulous achievement.”

He is vehemently anti-Palestinian and shamelessly supports Israel.As George Bush’s aide on the National Security Council, Abrams did everything he could to thwart peace negotiations. He repeatedly undercut any U.S. pressure on Israel to stop the building of settlements and cited the Holocaust as justification for Israel’s killings of Palestinians (Jews are “a people who had learned from history what happens to Jews without security”). In 2015, he applauded then-Speaker John Boehner’s decision to invite Netanyahu to address Congress without the approval of President Obama. He lauds Evangelical descriptions of Israel such as the belief that “Israel is connected to the idea that God favors and protects Americans.”

In 1991, Abrams pled guilty to withholding information from Congress related to his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal, the secret and illegal scam in the 1980s to siphon profits from Iranian weapons sales to support the right-wing Contra rebels trying to overthrow the Sandinista government.

Abrams was a key supporter of the disastrous invasion of Iraq. In 1998, he submitted a letter to President Clinton encouraging him to depose Saddam Hussein. As Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy during George W. Bush’s second term, Abrams was in charge of promoting Bush’s strategy of “advancing democracy abroad.”

Abrams championed the U.S. overthrow of Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, echoing the tactics used by the neocons for intervention in Iraq.

Abrams’ opposition to the Iran Nuclear Deal is epitomized by his attempts to encourage Israel to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites before negotiations became too serious. He expressed concern that Israel’s capacity to impede the deal was “already being narrowed considerably by the diplomatic thaw, because it is one thing to bomb Iran when it appears hopelessly recalcitrant and isolated and quite another to bomb it when much of the world—especially the United States—is optimistic about the prospect of talks.”

In January 2019, Abrams was appointed to be the U.S. Special Representative for Venezuela, and used his position to support an attempted coup, quash diplomatic talks, and increase brutal sanctions, even during the pandemic.

“The dangerous conflict resulting from Trump’s withdrawal from the nuclear agreement will be exacerbated by a man committed to Washington’s failed policies of regime change,” CodePink said. “Elliott Abrams has made a career of lying and committing criminal acts that have led to the death and suffering of innocent people from Guatemala to Iraq. He embraces militarism, covers up for gross human rights abuses, and has a history of supporting authoritarian regimes.”

https://yyy.theguardian.com/world/2002/apr/21/usa.venezuela

no lnx guk

Venezuela coup linked to Bush team

Specialists in the 'dirty wars' of the Eighties encouraged the plotters who tried to topple President Chavez

Observer Worldview

Ed Vulliamy in New York

Sun 21 Apr 2002 09.30 EDT First published on Sun 21 Apr 2002 09.30 EDT

The failed coup in Venezuela was closely tied to senior officials in the US government, The Observer has established. They have long histories in the 'dirty wars' of the 1980s, and links to death squads working in Central America at that time.

Washington's involvement in the turbulent events that briefly removed left-wing leader Hugo Chavez from power last weekend resurrects fears about US ambitions in the hemisphere.

It also also deepens doubts about policy in the region being made by appointees to the Bush administration, all of whom owe their careers to serving in the dirty wars under President Reagan.

One of them, Elliot Abrams, who gave a nod to the attempted Venezuelan coup, has a conviction for misleading Congress over the infamous Iran-Contra affair.

The Bush administration has tried to distance itself from the coup. It immediately endorsed the new government under businessman Pedro Carmona. But the coup was sent dramatically into reverse after 48 hours.

Now officials at the Organisation of American States and other diplomatic sources, talking to The Observer, assert that the US administration was not only aware the coup was about to take place, but had sanctioned it, presuming it to be destined for success.

The visits by Venezuelans plotting a coup, including Carmona himself, began, say sources, 'several months ago', and continued until weeks before the putsch last weekend. The visitors were received at the White House by the man President George Bush tasked to be his key policy-maker for Latin America, Otto Reich.

Reich is a right-wing Cuban-American who, under Reagan, ran the Office for Public Diplomacy. It reported in theory to the State Department, but Reich was shown by congressional investigations to report directly to Reagan's National Security Aide, Colonel Oliver North, in the White House.

North was convicted and shamed for his role in Iran-Contra, whereby arms bought by busting US sanctions on Iran were sold to the Contra guerrillas and death squads, in revolt against the Marxist government in Nicaragua.

Reich also has close ties to Venezuela, having been made ambassador to Caracas in 1986. His appointment was contested both by Democrats in Washington and political leaders in the Latin American country. The objections were overridden as Venezuela sought access to the US oil market.

Reich is said by OAS sources to have had 'a number of meetings with Carmona and other leaders of the coup' over several months. The coup was discussed in some detail, right down to its timing and chances of success, which were deemed to be excellent.

On the day Carmona claimed power, Reich summoned ambassadors from Latin America and the Caribbean to his office. He said the removal of Chavez was not a rupture of democra tic rule, as he had resigned and was 'responsible for his fate'. He said the US would support the Carmona government.

But the crucial figure around the coup was Abrams, who operates in the White House as senior director of the National Security Council for 'democracy, human rights and international operations'. He was a leading theoretician of the school known as 'Hemispherism', which put a priority on combating Marxism in the Americas.

It led to the coup in Chile in 1973, and the sponsorship of regimes and death squads that followed it in Argentina, El Salvador, Honduras, Guatemala and elsewhere. During the Contras' rampage in Nicaragua, he worked directly to North.

Congressional investigations found Abrams had harvested illegal funding for the rebellion. Convicted for withholding information from the inquiry, he was pardoned by George Bush senior.[ cheney blocked invest by congress that shd have put him in jail?!]

A third member of the Latin American triangle in US policy-making is John Negroponte, now ambassador to the United Nations. He was Reagan's ambassador to Honduras from 1981 to 1985 when a US-trained death squad, Battalion 3-16, tortured and murdered scores of activists. A diplomatic source said Negroponte had been 'informed that there might be some movement in Venezuela on Chavez' at the beginning of the year.

More than 100 people died in events before and after the coup. In Caracas on Friday a military judge confined five high-ranking officers to indefinite house arrest pending formal charges of rebellion.

Chavez's chief ideologue - Guillermo Garcia Ponce, director of the Revolutionary Political Command - said dissident generals, local media and anti-Chavez groups in the US had plotted the president's removal.

'The most reactionary sectors in the United States were also implicated in the conspiracy,' he said.

https://www.jacobinmag.com/2019/02/the-tragic-life-of-the-war-criminal-elliott-abrams

no lnx few

Elliott Abrams once said the animating force behind his and Ronald Reagan’s foreign policy was that the world is “an exceedingly dangerous place.” And this is true, largely because men like Elliott Abrams exist in it.

Last month, Abrams was tapped by Trump to serve as his special envoy to Venezuela, to essentially help steer the Trump administration’s slow-burn effort to topple that country’s government — or as Mike Pompeo put it, “restore democracy” in the country.

It should go without saying that the idea the Trump administration is pursuing regime change in Venezuela for the sake of democracy and human rights is as laughable as calling Jamal Khashoggi’s murder a surprise party gone wrong. But in case you need to explain this to politically confused friends and relatives, here are eight good reasons why the appointment of Abrams, in particular, makes a mockery of any such high-minded rhetoric.

1. He was knee-deep in human rights atrocities

Let’s start with the most obvious point, which is that Abrams’ chief claim to fame is his role in Ronald Reagan’s blood-soaked foreign policy in Central America in the 1980s, for which he earned the nickname, “contra commander-in-chief.” The contras were the brutal right-wing paramilitary groups in Nicaragua who terrorized civilians throughout the decade, cutting a swath of torture, rape, and murder aimed at everyone from the elderly to children. Their methods were similar to those of right-wing paramilitaries in the other countries of the region, including El Salvador and Guatemala, all of which were supported by the Reagan administration. If you have the stomach to read about them, there’s no shortage of sources that outline their barbarity.

To Abrams, however, they were “freedom fighters,” their work in El Salvador was a “fabulous achievement,” and he mocked critics of Reagan as people forced to “run the risk” of arguing that such groups were “doing something wrong and ought to stop it.” He himself had no illusions about what it is that the contras were doing. “The purpose of our aid is to permit people who are fighting on our side to use more violence,” he said in 1985.

How involved was Abrams? “Sure, there was excessive micromanagement [of the contras],” he told Policy Review in 1989; “and I was one of the people who engaged in it. But I’m not going to go around trying to assess blame, because the contras were an enormous success.” The contras would have floundered and faded away were it not for the tens of millions of dollars Abrams helped funnel to them, including personally soliciting $10 million from the Sultan of Brunei for their cause (that money never made it because Abrams gave the Sultan the wrong account number).

This “micromanagement” at one point also involved Abrams secretly delivering military equipment to the contras under the guise of humanitarian aid. As commentators have noted, this is particularly relevant now, when the Trump administration attacks Maduro for refusing to let humanitarian aid from the US into Venezuela.

2. He covered up brutal acts of terror

Key to Abrams’ role under Reagan was playing down and denying the copious human rights abuses being committed by the forces and governments he and the administration supported.

As Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar pointed out in her grilling of Abrams earlier this week, part of the Reagan administration’s “fabulous achievement” in El Salvador was the horrificEl Mozote massacre, which took place shortly before Abrams took up his post. In his attempt to convince the Senate to certify that El Salvador’s government was improving its human rights record — a precondition for receiving US aid — Abrams testified that the massacre had been “publicized when the certification comes forward to the committee,” and was “being significantly misused, at the very best, by the guerrillas.” He claimed he had sent military officers to investigate the reports, and that the massacre couldn’t be confirmed.

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Another incident was the 1980 assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero, killed on the orders of Major Roberto D’Aubuisson, one of the administration’s partners in the country. “Anybody who thinks you’re going to find a cable that says that Roberto d’Aubuisson murdered the archbishop is a fool,” said Abrams. In fact, two such cables existed. Abrams would later insist that any criticism of the Reagan administration’s activities in El Salvador were simply “a post-Cold War effort to rewrite history.”

Meanwhile, as Guatemalan dictator Ríos Montt embarked on a campaign of genocide in the country, Abrams said he had “brought considerable progress” on human rights. He defended Reagan’s lifting of a military aid embargo on Montt’s government, claiming the slaughter of civilians was “being reduced step by step” and that it was “progress” that had to be “rewarded and encouraged.”

3. He’s an unrepentant liar

Abrams told Omar that it is “always the position of the United States” to protect human rights, including in Venezuela, and he stressed the US didn’t want to arm anti-Maduro forces. Besides his well-documented record of doing exactly the opposite, Abrams’ words are even less relevant when you consider his history of outright lying.

We’ve already seen how Abrams regularly lied to cover up or play down abuses by the right-wing forces he supported. This practice would ultimately land him in trouble when he misled Congress about the Iran-Contraaffair with statements that ranged from outright lies (“we’re not in the fund-raising business”), to lawyerly parsing of the truth (“I said no foreign government was helping the contras, because we had not yet received a dime from Brunei,” he would write later).

Abrams would forever maintain he did nothing wrong, later writing a sanctimonious book that painted himself as the victim of an unjust, vindictive system that had criminalized “political differences.” “This kind of prosecution is something new in America, and it is wrong,” he wrote, before bleating about the “bloodsuckers” and “filthy bastards” who wanted to do him in.

Abrams rained ire upon Lawrence Walsh, the special prosecutor tasked with investigating the Iran-Contra scandal: “You, Walsh, eighty years old, and nothing else to do but stay in this job till the grim reaper gets you. Is this your idea of America?” Abrams insisted the independent counsel law under which Walsh (along with Watergate prosecutor Archibold Cox) served was unconstitutional, despite the fact that the Supreme Court had upheld it 7-1, with even the conservative chief justice Rehnquist affirming (Scalia dissented). It didn’t matter anyway, because the late George H. W. Bush pardoned him.

Abrams managed the trifecta of showing contempt for the truth, the constitution’s separation of powers, and the concept of checks and balances, all in one fell swoop. There’s no reason to believe any of his assurances now.

4. He hates democracy

Abrams has also shown a lifelong contempt for the very thing he’s now meant to be advancing: democracy.

When the Uruguayan military government imprisoned Wilson Ferreira, the country’s most popular politician and a fierce liberal opponent of its rule, Abrams defended the Reagan administration’s meek response, which the New York Times had called “stunning.” Abrams explained that “the transition [to elected government] itself is more important than the immediate situation of any individual politician.” Abrams had earlier insisted there was no evidence the Uruguyan military was stifling political freedom, even as it closed newspapers, arrested its opposition, and continued to ban political leaders, among other things.

Around this same time, Abrams was one of a number of Reagan officials who supported Oliver North’s call to pardon Honduran general Jose Bueso Rosa, despite his having received a relatively lenient sentence. Rosa had been convicted after being caught in Florida plotting to overthrow the Honduran government.

In 2002, Abrams reportedly “gave a nod” to the military coup that attempted, ultimately unsuccessfully, to remove the democratically elected Hugo Chavez from power. The Observer, which broke the story, called Abrams “the crucial figure around the coup.” Abrams has had his eye on toppling Venezuela’s government for some time.

When Hamas defeated Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, Abrams, then the point man for George W. Bush’s Middle East policy, helped implement a scheme to nullify the results by fomenting a Palestinian civil war which, they hoped, would remove Hamas from power. When the plan backfired, with Hamas emerging victorious and in full control of Gaza, Abrams accused Hamas of staging a “coup.”

5. His only political principle was anticommunism

Abrams’ disregard for democracy is part and parcel of his general philosophy, which views left-wing governments uniformly as threats to be stamped out.

Abrams, who once told a reporter that he’s “been a counterrevolutionary for a long time,” cut his teeth opposing student protesters at Harvard in the 1960s. He believes the idea that human rights extend past the political and into the economic realm to be “nonsense” and “old Soviet bromides.” As such, he viewed defeating the Soviet Union as the greatest US priority, telling one interviewer that “the greatest threat to human rights is the Soviet Union, not Guatemala or the Philippines.”

In 1984, Abrams quite candidly explained to Policy Review that his human rights policy was one of double standards: fierce opposition to communist rights abusers, and coddling of oppressors friendly to the US.

“Liberalization for purposes of letting out steam always involves line drawing,” he said. “How much steam should you let out? At what point do you risk anarchy and destabilizing the regime?” He went on to explain that “the line drawn varies from country to country,” and that “even a highly imperfect regime may well give a much better prospect of democratization than would the Communist regime that might follow.”

In other words, no matter how brutal or outright fascist a government, it was by default preferable to a communist one, a philosophy he applied in obvious ways to his work in the Americas. It was also evident in his treatment of Cuba, whose prisons he denounced in 1984 as “barbaric” and whose leader, Fidel Castro, he labeled “oppressive” and accused of “betrayal.” He attacked human rights groups, politicians, reporters, and church groups who praised Cuba as “apologists” who “will never take off their rose-colored glasses” and had spent “years defending tyrants” and “years obfuscating the truth.”

At literally the same time he was doing this, Abrams publicly defended Turkey, a key regional ally, from criticism of its human rights record. Abrams praised Turkey, which had recently been pilloried in an Amnesty International report for widespread torture of its people, for “extraordinary progress,” charging that “some who criticize Turkey’s human rights situation have no interest in human rights in Turkey or anywhere else,” but “simply use this issue as a weapon with which to attack a vital member of the Western alliance.” He dismissed Amnesty’s claims as “false history,” criticized human rights groups for “an appalling shallowness of analysis” that ignored social, political, and historical context, and charged that the Turkish people “resent the activists’ shrill and uninformed criticisms of their country.”

As Abrams had earlier said, “the line drawn varies from country to country.” If you played nice with the Reagan administration, your human rights record was tempered by nuance and context, and it was getting better anyway. And if you didn’t, you were beyond redemption.

6. He dislikes journalists and accountability

Abrams no doubt sympathized with Turkey’s rulers because he himself had first-hand experience dealing with pesky journalists and human rights groups.

He said critics of Reagan’s support of the contras would have “blood on their hands,” and accused human rights groups of having communist sympathies. He hopped aboard the Reagan administration’s McCarthyite attempt to shame congressional critics into giving him a blank check in Latin America, claiming that there was an “elaborate and skillful” campaign by Nicaragua’s Sandinista government to “manipulate Congress and the press.” When the GAO released a report alleging contra corruption that was inconvenient for the administration’s attempts to secure aid, Abrams dismissed it as a “smear campaign” cooked up by Democrats.

While Abrams didn’t have a police state at his disposal, that didn’t prevent him from lobbing heavy-handed broadsides against reporters he didn’t like. He refused to be questioned by or debate certain journalists he perceived as critical. Most infamously, from 1986 to 1987, Abrams accused left-wing Colombian journalist Patricia Lara of being a “Cuban agent” and “an active liaison” between Colombian terrorist organization M-19 and “the Cuban secret police.” In October 1986, Lara was stopped by New York immigration officials and imprisoned, before being sent back home, without explanation.

Abrams claimed to have “concrete evidence” that Lara was “heavily engaged” with M-19, but when challenged to reveal evidence, claimed it was based on “intelligence information” that he couldn’t reveal. The Colombian Defense Ministry, then battling M-19, categorically denied they had any such information, and assigned her a bodyguard because Abrams’ accusation had put her in danger. The country’s foreign minister said “we don’t know where the US government obtained” such information.

Abrams also granted a “meritorious honor” award on the Office of Public Diplomacy, a government body responsible for waging an illegal domestic propaganda campaign, in which Iran-Contra architect Oliver North was closely involved, that disseminated Abrams’ preferred narrative about the region. Abrams praised it for “setting out the parameters and defining the terms of the public discussion on Central America policy” and countering the “formidable and well established Soviet/Cuban/Nicaraguan propaganda apparatus.”

7. He’s a fan of regime change

Like any neoconservative worth his salt, Abrams has an abiding faith in the US government’s ability to simply remove world leaders it dislikes at will. (He’s also continued the neocon tradition of never personally fighting in any war, avoiding Vietnam thanks to a hurt back that happened to clear up once the war was over.)

When Abrams wanted to remove former ally Manuel Noriega from power in Panama, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff under Reagan wrote, he threatened sanctions, then actually imposed sanctions, then established a Panamanian government-in-exile on a US military base. Abrams finally called outright for the US military to topple Noriega, in an op-ed titled “Noriega Respects Power. Use It,” which is what George H. W. Bush ultimately did. It was a chilling preview of where US policy on Venezuela may now be heading if Maduro stays in power.

Reflecting on the mistakes of Reagan’s Latin American policy in 1989, Abrams’ regret was that it hadn’t been more forceful. “You can make a very good argument that after the successful rescue mission in Grenada the president should simply have said, ‘Look, we have to enforce the Monroe Doctrine, we cannot have a Communist government in Nicaragua,’ and done whatever we needed to do to get rid of it, including a naval blockade or possibly even an invasion,” he said.

In 2007, Abrams blessed Bush’s plan to launch a covert operation to destabilize Iran’s government. Two years later, he mused about what should happen if Iran develops a nuclear weapon. “Responsible leadership cannot allow this to happen,” he said. “Preventing it through military action perhaps is the second worst decision we could make. The only worse one being to say it’s all right now, it’s acceptable, we will not act.” But this wouldn’t involve regime change or the killing of civilians, he stressed; just a strike on nuclear facilities. Iran, Abrams warned, was one to three years away from developing a nuclear weapon.

In 2013, Abrams told a House Armed Services Committee hearing that the US had to get militarily involved in Syria. Why? Because “a display of American lack of will power in Syria will persuade many Iranian officials that while we may say ‘all options are on the table,’ in reality they are not — so Iran can proceed happily and safely toward a nuclear weapon.” Two years later, he said at a Council of Foreign Relations event that Netanyahu had two options: either strike Iran right then, or wait two years and see if an administration willing to take a tougher line, or sanction an Israeli strike, would be elected. Abrams, it seems, got his wish.

8. He’s beloved by the Right

In case anyone still believes the fiction that “anti-Trump” conservatives actually oppose Trump, Abrams is a living reminder that there’s no daylight between Trump and the establishment Right that pretends to dislike him.

Abrams was once an “anti-Trump” Republican who signed a letter opposing his candidacy in 2016. He tutored Paul Ryan in foreign policy when he was Mitt Romney’s 2012 running mate, and served on Marco Rubio’s so-called National Security Advisory Council in 2016. It’s no surprise the Florida senator, long viewed as an establishment-friendly, “sensible” conservative alternative to Trump, is now all but directing Trump’s Latin American policy, sounding virtually indistinguishable from Abrams.

Abrams has now served in every Republican administration since he first entered government bar one. In between, he’s worked at the Heritage Foundation (whose head of Latin American policy just called him “a patriot and dedicated voice for repressed communities”), helped found “anti-Trump” Bill Kristol’s Project for the New American Century, was a fellow for the Council on Foreign Relations, and was a board member of the National Endowment for Democracy, the US government’s arm for foreign political meddling.

Meanwhile, just look at who came to Abrams’ defense after his grilling by Rep. Omar. The National Review — which not long ago put out a much-celebrated “Against Trump” issue whose purpose, according to its editor, was to say, “He’s not one of us. He’s not a conservative, and he’s not what conservatism is” — just published an editorial calling Abrams “one of the wisest, most experienced foreign-policy heads in this country,” and “a steadfast advocate of freedom, democracy, and human rights.”

A former Bush administration official and current Harvard professor defended Abrams as “a devoted public servant who has contributed much of his professional life to our country.” The newly rebranded neocon Max Boot, who very publicly proclaims he’s seen the error of his ways and broken with the ugliness he now sees in the GOP, deemed him “a leading advocate of human rights and democracy.” Unfortunately, it’s not just the Right; the Center for American Progress’ vice president of National Security and International Policy called him “a fierce advocate for human rights and democracy” who simply “made serious professional mistakes.”

That someone like Abrams, who’s now leading Trump’s regime change efforts in Venezuela, is warmly embraced by the coterie of establishment and “never-Trump” conservatives should tell you everything you need to know about these groups.

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omg

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/how-elliott-abrams-found-himself-at-the-center-of-a-dark-reagan-era-conspiracy-to-spring-a-cia-linked-trafficker/

When U.S. policymakers needed to spring a convicted CIA-connected drug trafficker doing hard time in federal prison, who did they call?

Trump’s infamous appointed special envoy to Venezuela, Elliott Abrams, according to a September 1986 National Security Council email, written by NSC staffer Oliver North.

In a U.S. House Committee hearing on Thursday,Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) scorched Abrams for his covering up of the infamous El Mozote massacre and lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra conspiracy in the 1980s.

Her interrogation drew rebuke from Max Boot, the apostate conservative, and a chorus of right-wing media commentators. Boot described Omar’s comments as a “disgraceful ad hominem attack.”

Actually, the impertinent congresswoman from Minneapolis could have gone much further about Abrams’ untrustworthy behavior. One of the most revealing stories comes from an impeccably right-wing source, Oliver North, former Republican senatorial candidate and Fox News talking head.

Bagman

The year was 1986. Abrams served as assistant secretary of state for Latin America under President Reagan. He was a 39-year-old lawyer and foreign policy polemicist who qualified as neoconservative royalty. (His wife was the daughter of Norman Podhoretz, the perfervid editor of Commentary magazine.) Even then his perennial scowl managed to make him look furtive and self-righteous at the same time.

The Iran-Contra conspiracy was in full swing. The conspiracy, permissively labeled “a scandal,” was a Reagan White House plot to subvert the U.S. Congress’ powers of the purse. North was the coordinator of what can fairly be described as an unconstitutional covert operation, while Abrams played the role of bagman.

To bypass the so-called Boland Amendment, Abrams took payments from the Sultan of Brunei, a petroleum potentate from South Asia, and passed them to the leaders of Reagan’s counter-revolutionary army in Nicaragua. When questioned under oath, Abrams lied. He later pleaded guilty to two counts of deceiving Congress.

As part of the conspiracy, Abrams also put in a good word for a convicted drug trafficker, General Jose Bueso Rosa. He was a Honduran general who had helped the U.S. government with “sensitive operations” in Central America. As Murray Waas and I wrote in the Washington Post, North did “a favor for a felon.”

So did Abrams.

‘Sensitive Operations’

As an episode of CIA-sanctioned drug trafficking, the Bueso story was typical. Bueso, it turns out, had helped put together a CIA-trained military intelligence unit known as Battalion 316, which served as death squad for U.S. policymakers. A Honduran government investigation found that Battalion 316 had captured, tortured and executed some 200 suspected leftists.

Bueso had also trafficked multi-kiloton shipments of cocaine. As CIA Inspector General Frederick Hitz documented in Volume 2 of his report on contra drug trafficking, the agency did business with more than 50 suspected drug traffickers in the 1980s.

(Lazy reporters sometimes say that the CIA was cleared of the allegation. They didn’t bother to read the Sections 800-1148 of Hitz’s report, which detailed how the agency took no action against four dozen suspected traffickers who aided Reagan’s—and Abrams’—anticommunist crusade.)

Investigating the story for the Post, I spoke on background with law enforcement officials familiar with Bueso’s case. A wiretap had picked up Bueso repeatedly talking about shipments of “flour” into central Florida, they said. Given Bueso’s connections, no one in the Reagan Justice Department cared to make a big deal of his cocaine shipments, no matter how hefty. They just wanted a conviction that would put him out of business. Bueso got a generous plea bargain. He would only have to serve five years.

Bueso, however, was led to believe his American friends would save him from serving any time all.

In his September 1986 email, later uncovered by Iran-Contra investigators, North worried Bueso might “break his longstanding silence.” He might disclose unpleasant truths about death squads and CIA drug trafficking.

So North “cabal[led] quietly” with Abrams, as well as top Pentagon, CIA and Justice Department officials. A presidential pardon was out of the question, but transfer to a comfortable “Club Fed” facility was arranged.

As time when U.S. prosecutors meted out 10-year sentences to young black men for the possession of a few ounces of cocaine, Abrams was part of a gang that thought a multi-kiloton trafficker should be treated leniently. Such was his advocacy of “human rights.”

Bueso got out of prison early—for “good behavior.” Abrams went on to a long career in U.S. foreign policy. Hundreds of thousands of black men remained in jails for years, if not decades.

Question

Rep. Omar could have asked an even tougher question of Abrams, namely, “Does Trump’s policy toward Latin America today involve protection of drug traffickers as Reagan’s policy did in the 1980s?”

She was certainly justified in questioning his veracity.

“I fail to understand why members of this committee or the American people should find any testimony you give today to be truthful,” she said.

You can watch the Omar-Abrams exchange.

Jefferson Morley is a writing fellow and the editor and chief correspondent of the Deep State, a project of the Independent Media Institute. He has been a reporter and editor in Washington, D.C., since 1980. He spent 15 years as an editor and reporter at the Washington Post. He was a staff writer at Arms Control Today and Washington editor of Salon. He is the editor and co-founder of JFK Facts, a blog about the assassination of JFK. His latest book is The Ghost: The Secret Life of CIA Spymaster, James Jesus Angleton.

This article was produced by the*Deep State*, a project of the Independent Media Institute

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Trump official lashes out as Rep. Omar asks him if he’d back genocide in Venezuela like ‘you did in Guatemala’

Brad Reed / Raw StoryFebruary 13, 2019

Elliott Abrams, who currently serves as the Trump administration’s special envoy to Venezuela, reacted angrily when Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) questioned him about his past support for murderous Latin American…

Trump official lashes out as Rep. Omar asks him if he’d back genocide in Venezuela like ‘you did in Guatemala’

Brad Reed / Raw StoryFebruary 13, 2019

Elliott Abrams, who currently serves as the Trump administration’s special envoy to Venezuela, reacted angrily when Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) questioned him about his past support for murderous Latin American…

https://www.alternet.org/2019/02/trump-official-lashes-out-as-rep-omar-asks-him-if-hed-back-genocide-in-venezuela-like-you-did-in-guatemala/

Elliott Abrams, who currently serves as the Trump administration’s special envoy to Venezuela, reacted angrily when Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) questioned him about his past support for murderous Latin American regimes.

In particular, Omar questioned Abrams about whether he was still proud of dismissing accurate reports about the infamous El Mozote massacre that was carried out by American-trained troops in El Salvador in the 1980s.

“More than 800 civilians, including children as young as two years old, were brutally murdered,” Omar told him. “During that massacre, some of those troops bragged about raping a 12-year-old girl before they killed her. You later said that the U.S. policy in El Salvador was a ‘fabulous achievement.’ Do you still think so?”

A visibly upset Abrams told Omar that it was a “fabulous achievement” that democracy came to El Salvador, but Omar wouldn’t let him dodge the question and he eventually had to admit that he didn’t think a mass killing conducted by American-trained forces was something to be proud of.

Next, she turned to Abrams’ role in whitewashing war crimes that were being carried out under the orders of Guatemalan leader Ríos Montt, who was later convicted of ordering genocide within his own country.

“Would you support an armed faction within Venezuela that engages in war crimes, crimes against humanity or genocide if you believed they were serving US interests as you did in Guatemala, El Salvador and Nicaragua?” Omar asked.

"I’m not going to respond to that question, I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t think this entire line of questioning is meant to be real questions.”

Watch the video below.

https://www.democracynow.org/2019/2/13/venezuela_accuses_us_of_secretly_shipping

North Carolina-based air freight company has halted flights to Venezuela following a report by McClatchy linking it to possible arms smuggling. Last week, Venezuelan authorities claimed they had uncovered 19 assault weapons, 118 ammunition cartridges and 90 military-grade radio antennas on board a U.S.-owned plane that had flown from Miami into Valencia, Venezuela’s third-largest city. The Boeing 767 is owned by a company called 21 Air based in Greensboro, North Carolina. The plane had made nearly 40 round-trip flights between Miami and spots in Venezuela and Colombia since January 11, the day after Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was sworn in to a second term. The flights ended after McClatchy first reported on them. Venezuela accused the U.S. government of sending the arms as part of its attempt to topple the Maduro government. While no definitive links between 21 Air and the U.S. government have been established, McClatchy reports the chairman of 21 Air, Adolfo Moreno, as well as another employee at the company have ties to Gemini Air Cargo, which was involved in the CIA’s rendition program during the administration of George W. Bush. We speak to McClatchy reporter Tim Johnson, who broke the story. Johnson was part of a team that shared a 2017 Pulitzer Prize for its investigation of the Panama Papers.

Transcript

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: We turn now to Venezuela. A North Carolina-based air freight company has halted flights to that country following a report by McClatchy linking it to possible arms smuggling. Last week, Venezuelan authorities claimed they uncovered 19 assault weapons, 118 ammunition cartridges and 90 military-grade radio antennas on board a U.S.-owned plane that had flown from Miami into Valencia, Venezuela’s third-largest city. The Boeing 767 is owned by a company called 21 Air based in Greensboro, North Carolina. The plane had made nearly 40 round-trip flights between Miami and spots in Venezuela and Colombia since January 11th, which is the day after Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro was sworn in to a second term. The flights ended after McClatchy first reported on them. Venezuela accused the U.S. government of sending the arms as part of its attempt to topple the Maduro government. Bolivarian National Guard General Endes Palencia Ortiz said, “This materiel was destined for criminal groups and terrorist actions in the country, financed by the fascist extreme right and the government of the United States.”

AMY GOODMAN: 21 Air has denied knowledge of the arms shipment, saying the flight had been chartered by another company called GPS-Air, which also denied sending arms. While no definitive links between 21 Air and the U.S. government have been established, McClatchy reports the chairman of 21 Air, Adolfo Moreno, as well as another employee at the company have ties to Gemini Air Cargo, which was involved in the CIA’s rendition program during the administration of George W. Bush. In 2006, Amnesty International identified Gemini as a front company that had authorization to land on U.S. military bases worldwide.

The CIA has a long history of running front companies for covert actions. Most famously, the CIA ran a front airline called Air America, which operated from 1950 to 1976. In the ’80s, a CIA front company called Southern Air Transport was used to send arms to the U.S.-backed Contras in Nicaragua.

We’re joined now by Tim Johnson, who has been reporting on the story for McClatchy, joining us from Pennsylvania.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Tim, would you lay out what you found?

TIM JOHNSON: Well, as you mentioned, this air charter company, 21 Air, went repeatedly to places in Venezuela and Colombia starting January 11th. Prior to that, it had largely operated domestically, and suddenly it began to change its patterns. And often there would be even two flights a day between Miami and places in Colombia or Venezuela.

I actually learned about this from somebody who tweeted about it. A gentleman in Canada who follows ship and plane movements noticed this, and we started looking into the history of the chairman of 21 Air and saw that he has a number of businesses. And two of those businesses used an address in northwest Miami that were previously used by a subsidiary of Gemini Air Cargo, which, as you mentioned, was listed in that Amnesty International report as having participated in renditions.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, Tim Johnson, a Boeing 767 is a pretty big plane, and the cache of weapons that the Venezuelan government claims they found, while they’re clearly lethal weapons, is not a huge shipment. I’m wondering: Do you have any way of being able to tell what the manifest of this flight, as well as the other 39 or so flights that this airline engaged in—what they were claiming to hold?

TIM JOHNSON: I actually don’t know. We’ve tried to get that, and we haven’t been able to get the manifests yet. So, you know, what was aboard the other flights going to South America, we don’t know. This is a very puzzling case. If you look on social media and dig into the backgrounds of employees of 21 Air and associated companies, you see that there are many accounts of employees who follow the Venezuelan opposition, and opposition accounts that follow them, as well. So, there’s certainly some sympathy from employees within the company to the opposition to Maduro in Venezuela.

AMY GOODMAN: Talk more about the leadership of the company that you investigated, based in North Carolina. And explain what you mean when you talk about the links to rendition under President George W. Bush.

TIM JOHNSON: Well, Adolfo Moreno is a 75 percent owner of 21 Air, and he’s got many other companies, but he’s been involved out of Miami. I don’t know—while the company is registered in North Carolina, the operations really are out of Miami, as far as I can tell. That’s where many of the flights have been operated. They have a huge operation center at Miami International Airport.

A curious secondary aspect of this story is that the company that consigned the cargo also has tangential links to, you know, this historical—the Iran-Contra affair. The head of GPS Air is a man named José Manuel Calvo, and he, like Moreno, has many companies. And one of those companies, with the partner that he used to create this company, is a company called Heavylift Air. And that company has a subsidiary out of the UAE that is controlled by in Iranian American named Farhad Azima, who also had a role in Iran-Contra. So there’s all these circumstantial things, but there’s really no smoking gun, that I could tell. You know, this may be just circumstantial.

AMY GOODMAN: Are you reporting this new now on Iran-Contra, what you’re saying? And explain, for people who aren’t familiar with the Iran-Contra scandal, this happening under the Reagan-Bush years, the selling of weapons to Iran to take that money to support the Contras in Nicaragua, which violated U.S. law, the Boland Amendment.

TIM JOHNSON: Yes. So, that scandal involved Southern Air Transport, which also was a CIA front company. That really exploded into the news back in 1986 because the Sandinista army shot down a twin-engine plane that was run by Southern Air Transport, that was taking armaments to the Contra rebels fighting in Nicaragua. So, Southern Air Transport was actually heavily involved in all the arms shipments to Iran and from the Middle East to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Well, I want to ask you about Eugene Hasenfus, who you mention in your article. In 1986, he was aboard a U.S. plane that was shot down in Nicaragua while on a secret mission to bring arms to the Nicaraguan Contras. He the only passenger to survive. I want to turn to a documentary made by Wisconsin Public Television called the The Eugene Hasenfus Story from 1991. It featured an excerpt from the station’s initial coverage of what happened to him in 1986.

REPORTER: A Wisconsin man has been the focus of international news this week. Forty-five-year-old Eugene Hasenfus of Marinette was captured in Nicaragua after his cargo plane was shot down. At a press conference Thursday, Hasenfus said his mission was directed by the CIA. But U.S. officials say the flights were privately directed. Mrs. Sally Hasenfus joined her husband in Nicaragua this week. Hasenfus has been jailed and may stand trial.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: The documentary also featured an interview with Eugene Hasenfus’s wife, Sally.

SALLY HASENFUS: The next morning, I tried to call President Reagan. I thought, “Well, it’s the only place I’m going to get answers.” He’s—you know, I should be able to trust him. He’s the president. And I knew he knew. He put me in touch with a man named Elliott Abrams. He said, “I don’t know who you are, and I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I got angry. And before I hung up, he did admit that he knew what I was talking about. And he kept warning me that—you know, “Be careful of the press, and be careful what you say. Be careful what you do.”

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: And interestingly or coincidentally, Elliott Abrams is now the special envoy of the White House to Venezuela. I’m wondering your assessment of this affair back then, the impact it had on what was going on at the time, in terms of the war on the Contras?

TIM JOHNSON: I’m not sure I can really speak to the historical impact. But, of course, it—you know, I think it helped lead to a negotiated settlement, leading to the elections in Nicaragua in 1990, because it was, you know, clearly a major impact on that. But I really couldn’t speak further to that.

AMY GOODMAN: But this whole issue of Eugene Hasenfus, this former marine, a mercenary, shot down over Nicaragua, then held by Nicaragua, eventually released, and his contact with the U.S. government at the time, and now you raising this issue in your current piece around the arms shipment that was found going into Venezuela—not clear exactly if there’s a connection to the U.S. government, but clearly the U.S. government is very overtly supporting the attempted overthrow of Maduro, explicitly, and these flights starting a day after Maduro’s inauguration on January 10th.

TIM JOHNSON: Well, yes, there’s a lot of these coincidental links, and it’s worth paying quite close attention to. Again, I use “coincidental” only because we don’t really know. You know, other people point out to me that there are many people that could have a vested interest in this, whether the arms were really aboard that plane. Or, is it possible that this was something that was ginned up by the Venezuelan government to rally support for Maduro? I don’t know. I just—we haven’t been able to determine for a fact that those weapons were loaded aboard that 767 in Miami, that somehow they passed through the normally rigorous screening by TSA for air cargo. These are things that are just yet to be investigated.

...

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https://freespeech.org/stories/allan-nairn-trumps-venezuela-envoy-elliott-abrams-is-a-war-criminal-who-has-abetted-genocide/

In an ongoing effort to topple Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Vice President Mike Pence met with members of the Venezuelan opposition at the White House Tuesday alongside Trump’s new special envoy to Venezuela, Elliott Abrams. Elliott Abrams is a right-wing hawk who was convicted in 1991 for lying to Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal, but he was later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush. Abrams defended Guatemalan dictator General Efraín Ríos Montt as he oversaw a campaign of mass murder and torture of indigenous people in Guatemala in the 1980s. Ríos Montt was later convicted of genocide.Abrams was also linked to the 2002 coup in Venezuela that attempted to topple Hugo Chávez. DN! looks at Abrams’s track record with prize-winning investigative journalist Allan Nairn, who has closely tracked Abrams for over three decades. Nairn is two-time winner of the George Polk Award and a recipient of the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Award.

vid

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https://theintercept.com/2019/01/30/elliott-abrams-venezuela-coup/

 DECEMBER 11, 1981 in El Salvador, a Salvadoran military unit created and trained by the U.S. Army began slaughtering everyone they could find in a remote village called El Mozote. Before murdering the women and girls, the soldiers raped them repeatedly, including some as young as 10 years old, and joked that their favorites were the 12-year-olds. One witness described a soldier tossing a 3-year-old child into the air and impaling him with his bayonet. The final death toll was over 800 people.

The next day, December 12, was the first day on the job for Elliott Abrams as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs in the Reagan administration. Abrams snapped into action, helping to lead a cover-up of the massacre. News reports of what had happened, Abrams told the Senate, were “not credible,” and the whole thing was being “significantly misused” as propaganda by anti-government guerillas.

This past Friday, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo named Abrams as America’s special envoy for Venezuela. According to Pompeo, Abrams “will have responsibility for all things related to our efforts to restore democracy” in the oil-rich nation.

The choice of Abrams sends a clear message to Venezuela and the world: The Trump administration intends to brutalize Venezuela, while producing a stream of unctuous rhetoric about America’s love for democracy and human rights. Combining these two factors — the brutality and the unctuousness — is Abrams’s core competency.

Abrams previously served in a multitude of positions in the Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush administrations, often with titles declaring their focus on morality. First, he was assistant secretary of state for international organization affairs (in 1981); then the State Department “human rights” position mentioned above (1981-85); assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs (1985-89); senior director for democracy, human rights, and international operations for the National Security Council (2001-05); and finally, Bush’s deputy national security adviser for global democracy strategy (2005-09).

In these positions, Abrams participated in many of the most ghastly acts of U.S. foreign policy from the past 40 years, all the while proclaiming how deeply he cared about the foreigners he and his friends were murdering. Looking back, it’s uncanny to see how Abrams has almost always been there when U.S. actions were at their most sordid.

ABRAMS, A GRADUATE of both Harvard College and Harvard Law School, joined the Reagan administration in 1981, at age 33. He soon received a promotion due to a stroke of luck: Reagan wanted to name Ernest Lefever as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs, but Lefever’s nomination ran aground when two of his own brothers revealed that he believed African-Americans were “inferior, intellectually speaking.” A disappointed Reagan was forced to turn to Abrams as a second choice.

A key Reagan administration concern at the time was Central America — in particular, the four adjoining nations of Guatemala, El Salvador, Honduras, and Nicaragua. All had been dominated by tiny, cruel, white elites since their founding, with a century’s worth of help from U.S. interventions. In each country, the ruling families saw their society’s other inhabitants as human-shaped animals, who could be harnessed or killed as needed.

But shortly before Reagan took office, Anastasio Somoza, the dictator of Nicaragua and a U.S. ally, had been overthrown by a socialist revolution. The Reaganites rationally saw this as a threat to the governments of Nicaragua’s neighbors. Each country had large populations who similarly did not enjoy being worked to death on coffee plantations or watching their children die of easily treated diseases. Some would take up arms, and some would simply try to keep their heads down, but all, from the perspective of the cold warriors in the White House, were likely “communists” taking orders from Moscow. They needed to be taught a lesson.

El Salvador

The extermination of El Mozote was just a drop in the river of what happened in El Salvador during the 1980s. About 75,000 Salvadorans died during what’s called a “civil war,” although almost all the killing was done by the government and its associated death squads.

The numbers alone don’t tell the whole story. El Salvador is a small country, about the size of New Jersey. The equivalent number of deaths in the U.S. would be almost 5 million. Moreover, the Salvadoran regime continually engaged in acts of barbarism so heinous that there is no contemporary equivalent, except perhaps ISIS. In one instance, a Catholic priest reported that a peasant woman briefly left her three small children in the care of her mother and sister. When she returned, she found that all five had been decapitated by the Salvadoran National Guard. Their bodies were sitting around a table, with their hands placed on their heads in front of them, “as though each body was stroking its own head.” The hand of one, a toddler, apparently kept slipping off her small head, so it had been nailed onto it. At the center of the table was a large bowl full of blood.

Criticism of U.S. policy at the time was not confined to the left. During this period, Charles Maechling Jr., who had led State Department planning for counterinsurgencies during the 1960s, wrote in the Los Angeles Times that the U.S. was supporting “Mafia-like oligarchies” in El Salvador and elsewhere and was directly complicit in “the methods of Heinrich Himmler’s extermination squads.”

Abrams was one of the architects of the Reagan administration’s policy of full-throated support for the Salvadoran government. He had no qualms about any of it and no mercy for anyone who escaped the Salvadoran abattoir.In 1984, sounding exactly like Trump officials today, he explained that Salvadorans who were in the U.S. illegally should not receive any kind of special status. “Some groups argue that illegal aliens who are sent back to El Salvador meet persecution and often death,” he told the House of Representatives. “Obviously, we do not believe these claims or we would not deport these people.”

Even when out of office, 10 years after the El Mozote massacre, Abrams expressed doubt that anything untoward had occurred there. In 1993, when a United Nations truth commission found that 95 percent of the acts of violence that had taken place in El Salvador since 1980 had been committed by Abrams’s friends in the Salvadoran government, he called what he and his colleagues in the Reagan administration had done a “fabulous achievement.”

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Guatemala

The situation in Guatemala during the 1980s was much the same, as were Abrams’s actions. After the U.S. engineered the overthrow of Guatemala’s democratically elected president in 1954, the country had descended into a nightmare of revolving military dictatorships. Between 1960 and 1996, in another “civil war,” 200,000 Guatemalans were killed — the equivalent of maybe 8 million people in America. A U.N. commission later found that the Guatemalan state was responsible for 93 percent of the human rights violations.

Efraín Ríos Montt, who served as Guatemala’s president in the early 1980s, was found guilty in 2013, by Guatemala’s own justice system, of committing genocide against the country’s indigenous Mayans. During Ríos Montt’s administration, Abrams called for the lifting of an embargo on U.S. arms shipments to Guatemala, claiming that Ríos Montt had “brought considerable progress.” The U.S. had to support the Guatemalan government, Abrams argued, because “if we take the attitude ‘don’t come to us until you’re perfect, we’re going to walk away from this problem until Guatemala has a perfecthuman rights record,’ then we’re going to be leaving in the lurch people there who are trying to make progress.” One example of the people making an honest effort, according to Abrams, was Ríos Montt. Thanks to Ríos Montt, “there has been a tremendous change, especially in the attitude of the government toward the Indian population.” (Ríos Montt’s conviction was later set aside by Guatemala’s highest civilian court, and he died before a new trial could finish.)

Nicaragua

Abrams would become best known for his enthusiastic involvement with the Reagan administration’s push to overthrow Nicaragua’s revolutionary Sandinista government. He advocated for a full invasion of Nicaragua in 1983, immediately after the successful U.S. attack on the teeny island nation of Grenada. When Congress cut off funds to the Contras, an anti-Sandinista guerrilla force created by the U.S., Abrams successfully persuaded the Sultan of Brunei to cough up $10 million for the cause. Unfortunately, Abrams, acting under the code name “Kenilworth,” provided the Sultan with the wrong Swiss bank account number, so the money was wired instead to a random lucky recipient.

Abrams was questioned by Congress about his Contra-related activities and lied voluminously. He later pleaded guilty to two counts of withholding information. One was about the Sultan and his money, and another was about Abrams’s knowledge of a Contra resupply C-123 plane that had been shot down in 1986. In a nice historical rhyme with his new job in the Trump administration, Abrams had previously attempted to obtain two C-123s for the Contras from the military of Venezuela.

Abrams received a sentence of 100 hours of community service and perceived the whole affair as an injustice of cosmic proportions. He soon wrote a book in which he described his inner monologue about his prosecutors, which went: “You miserable, filthy bastards, you bloodsuckers!” He was later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush on the latter’s way out the door after he lost the 1992 election.

Panama

While it’s been forgotten now, before America invaded Panama to oust Manuel Noriega in 1989, he was a close ally of the U.S. — despite the fact the Reagan administration knew he was a large-scale drug trafficker.

In 1985, Hugo Spadafora, a popular figure in Panama and its one-time vice minister for health, believed he had obtained proof of Noriega’s involvement in cocaine smuggling. He was on a bus on his way to Panama City to release it publicly when he was seized by Noriega’s thugs.

According to the book “Overthrow” by former New York Times correspondent Stephen Kinzer, U.S. intelligence picked up Noriega giving his underlings the go-ahead to put Spadafora down like “a rabid dog.” They tortured Spadafora for a long night and then sawed off his head while he was still alive. When Spadafora’s body was found, his stomach was full of blood he’d swallowed.

This was so horrific that it got people’s attention. But Abrams leapt to Noriega’s defense, blocking the U.S. ambassador to Panama from increasing pressure on the Panamanian leader. When Spadafora’s brother persuaded North Carolina’s hyper-conservative GOP Sen. Jesse Helms to hold hearings on Panama, Abrams told Helms that Noriega was “being really helpful to us” and was “really not that big a problem. … The Panamanians have promised they are going to help us with the Contras. If you have the hearings, it’ll alienate them.”

… And That’s Not All

Abrams also engaged in malfeasance for no discernible reason, perhaps just to stay in shape. In 1986 a Colombian journalist named Patricia Lara was invited to the U.S. to attend a dinner honoring writers who’d advanced “inter-American understanding and freedom of information.” When Lara arrived at New York’s Kennedy airport, she was taken into custody, then put on a plane back home. Soon afterward, Abrams went on “60 Minutes” to claim that Lara was a member of the “ruling committees” of M-19, a Colombian guerrilla movement. She also, according to Abrams, was ”an active liaison” between M-19 ”and the Cuban secret police.”

Given the frequent right-wing paramilitary violence against Colombian reporters, this painted a target on Lara’s back. There was no evidence then that Abrams’s assertions were true — Colombia’s own conservative government denied it — and none has appeared since.

Abrams’s never-ending, shameless deceptions wore down American reporters. “They said that black was white,” Joanne Omang at the Washington Post later explained about Abrams and his White House colleague Robert McFarlane. “Although I had used all my professional resources I had misled my readers.” Omang was so exhausted by the experience that she quit her job trying to describe the real world to try to write fiction.

Post-conviction Abrams was seen as damaged goods who couldn’t return to government. This underestimated him. Adm. William J. Crowe Jr., the one-time chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, tangled fiercely with Abrams in 1989 over the proper U.S. policy toward Noriega once it become clear he was more trouble than he was worth. Crowe strongly opposed a bright idea that Abrams had come up with: that the U.S. should establish a government-in-exile on Panamanian soil, which would require thousands of U.S. troops to guard. This was deeply boneheaded, Crowe said, but it didn’t matter. Crowe presciently issued a warning about Abrams: “This snake’s hard to kill.”

Nancy Brinker, Dick Cheney, Elliott Abrams, Condoleezza Rice, and Stephen Hadley in the Oval Office as then-President George W. Bush meets with the leader of the Lebanese Parliament on Oct. 4, 2007.

Photo: Dennis Brack,Pool/Getty Images

To the surprise of Washington’s more naive insiders, Abrams was back in business soon after George W. Bush entered the White House. It might have been difficult to get Senate approval for someone who had deceived Congress, so Bush put him in a slot at the National Security Council — where no legislative branch approval was needed. Just like 20 years before, Abrams was handed a portfolio involving “democracy” and “human rights.”

Venezuela

By the beginning of 2002, Venezuela’s president, Hugo Chavez, had become deeply irritating to the Bush White House, which was filled with veterans of the battles of the 1980s. That April, all of a sudden, out of nowhere, Chavez was pushed out of power in a coup. Whether and how the U.S. was involved is not yet known, and probably won’t be for decades until the relevant documents are declassified. But based on the previous 100 years, it would be surprising indeed if America didn’t play any behind-the-scenes role. For what it’s worth, theLondon Observer reported at the time that “the crucial figure around the coup was Abrams” and he “gave a nod” to the plotters. In any case, Chavez had enough popular support that he was able to regroup and return to office within days.

Iran

Abrams apparently did play a key role in squelching a peace proposal from Iran in 2003, just after the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The plan arrived by fax, and should have gone to Abrams, and then to Condoleezza Rice, at the time Bush’s national security adviser. Instead it somehow never made it to Rice’s desk. When later asked about this, Abrams’s spokesperson replied that he “had no memory of any such fax.” (Abrams, like so many people who thrive at the highest level of politics, has a terrible memory for anything political. In 1984, he told Ted Koppel that he couldn’t recall for sure whether the U.S. had investigated reports of massacres in El Salvador. In 1986, when asked by the Senate Intelligence Committee if he’d discussed fundraising for the contras with anyone on the NSC’s staff, he likewise couldn’t remember.)

Israel and Palestine

Abrams was also at the center of another attempt to thwart the outcome of a democratic election, in 2006. Bush had pushed for legislative elections in the West Bank and Gaza in order to give Fatah, the highly corrupt Palestinian organization headed by Yasser Arafat’s successor, Mahmoud Abbas, some badly needed legitimacy. To everyone’s surprise, Fatah’s rival Hamas won, giving it the right to form a government.

This unpleasant outburst of democracy was not acceptable to the Bush administration, in particular Rice and Abrams. They hatched a plan to form a Fatah militia to take over the Gaza Strip, and crush Hamas in its home territory.As reported by Vanity Fair, this involved a great deal oftorture and executions. But Hamas stole a march on Fatah with their own ultra-violence. David Wurmser, a neoconservative who worked for Dick Cheney at the time, told Vanity Fair, “It looks to me that what happened wasn’t so much a coup by Hamas but an attempted coup by Fatah that was pre-empted before it could happen.” Yet ever since, these events have been turned upside down in the U.S. media, with Hamas being presented as the aggressors.

While the U.S. plan was not a total success, it also was not a total failure from the perspective of America and Israel. The Palestinian civil war split the West Bank and Gaza into two entities, with rival governments in both. For the past 13 years, there’s been little sign of the political unity necessary for Palestinians to get a decent life for themselves.

Abrams then left office with Bush’s exit. But now he’s back for a third rotation through the corridors of power – with the same kinds of schemes he’s executed the first two times.

Looking back at Abrams’s lifetime of lies and savagery, it’s hard to imagine what he could say to justify it. But he does have a defense for everything he’s done — and it’s a good one.

 year was 1995. A young Elliott Abrams taught us how to laugh. Maniacally. When Allan Nairn brought up his involvement in the mass murder and torture of indigenous people in Guatemala.

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In 1995, Abrams appeared on “The Charlie Rose Show” with Allan Nairn, one of the most knowledgable American reporters about U.S. foreign policy. Nairn noted that George H.W. Bush had once discussed putting Saddam Hussein on trial for crimes against humanity. This was a good idea, said Nairn, but “if you’re serious, you have to be even-handed” — which would mean also prosecuting officials like Abrams.

I’m in

Abrams chuckled at the ludicrousness of such a concept. That would require, he said, “putting all the American officials who won the Cold War in the dock.”

Abrams was largely right. The distressing reality is that Abrams is no rogue outlier, but a respected, honored member of the center right of the U.S. foreign policy establishment. His first jobs before joining the Reagan administration were working for two Democratic senators, Henry Jackson and Daniel Moynihan. He was a senior fellow at the centristCouncil on Foreign Relations. He’s been a member of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom,and now is on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy. He’s taught the next generation of foreign policy officials at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. He didn’t somehow fool Reagan and George W. Bush — they wanted exactly what Abrams provided.

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So no matter the gruesome particulars of Abrams’s career, the important thing to remember — as the U.S. eagle tightens its razor-sharp talons around yet another Latin American country — is that Abrams isn’t that exceptional. He’s mostly a cog in a machine. It’s the machine that’s the problem, not its malevolent parts.

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Rios Montt 80 yr sent tossed, retrial 10/16/17 DN

elliot abrams on bookTV

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https://www.thenation.com/article/an-actual-american-war-criminal-may-become-our-second-ranking-diplomat/

... I don’t mean someone that we on the left like to call a “war criminal,” such as Henry Kissinger or Dick Cheney. These people might actually qualify, but the cases are at best arguable, and no one in authority has ever been asked to rule on them. Not so for Trump’s potential pick, the onetime neocon golden boy (and son-in-law to Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter)Elliott Abrams.

The course of Abrams’s failing-upward career reveals the moral rot at the heart of our political establishment.

Like Trump himself, Abrams has behaved so badly in so many different arenas, it actually works in his favor: No one can keep up. The Post piece—which notes that the Trump administration has decided not to appoint a deputy secretary of state for management, giving the sole remaining deputy an enormous amount of influence over both policy and management issues—observes that Abrams was forced to plead guilty to deliberately misleading Congress regarding his nefarious role in the Iran-contra scandal. (He was also disbarred in the District of Columbia.)

However, this is just the tip of a colossal iceberg. As a member of George W. Bush’s National Security Council staff, Abrams encouraged, according to credible reports, a(briefly successful) military coup against the democratically elected government of Venezuela in 2002, poisoning the US relationship with that government once it returned to power. He also worked to subvert the results of the 2006 elections in the Palestinian territories, a move that ended up strengthening the most radical elements of Hamas and undermining—perhaps forever—the possibility of a democratic peace between Israel and the Palestinians.

But these are still relative misdemeanors in the Abrams dossier, paling in comparison with the role he played in the Reagan administration. As assistant secretary of state for human rights, Abrams sought to ensure that General Efraín Ríos Montt, Guatemala’s then-dictator, could carry out “acts of genocide”—those are the legally binding words of Guatemala’s United Nations–backed Commission for Historical Clarification—against the indigenous people in the Ixil region of the department of Quiché, without any pesky interference from human-rights organizations, much less the US government.

As the mass killings were taking place, Abrams fought in Congress for military aid to Ríos Montt’s bloody regime. He credited the murderous dictator with having “brought considerable progress” on human-rights issues. Abrams even went so far as to insist that “the amount of killing of innocent civilians is being reduced step by step” before demanding that Congress provide the regime with advanced arms because its alleged “progress need[ed] to be rewarded and encouraged.”

Promoted to assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, Abrams repeatedly denounced the continued protests by organizations seeking to call attention to the mass murders of both Ríos Montt and the no less bloodthirsty President Vinicio Cerezo Arévalo, who came to power fewer than three years later. In one village during the latter’s reign, “the army herded the entire population into the courthouse, raped the women, beheaded the men, and took the children outside to smash them to death against rocks,” according to Inevitable Revolutions, Walter LaFeber’s classic history of the United States in Central America.

At the time, a leader of the Guatemalan Mutual Support Group (an organization of mothers of the disappeared), her brother, and her 3-year-old son were found dead in their wrecked car. Abrams not only supported the nonsensical official explanation (there was “no evidence indicating other than that the deaths were due to an accident”), he also denounced a spokeswoman for the group who demanded an investigation, insisting that she had “no right to call herself a human rights worker.” When The New York Times published an op-ed challenging the official State Department count of the mass murders under way—by a woman who had witnessed a death-squad-style assassination in broad daylight in Guatemala City without ever seeing it mentioned in the press—Abrams lied outright in a letter to the editor, even citing an imaginary story in a nonexistent newspaper to insist that the man’s murder had, in fact, been reported.

I don’t know about you, but intentionally helping the US government to aid and abet the commission of genocide, while attacking the character and reputation of those trying to expose it, strikes me as securely within the definition of “war criminal.” But since Abrams’s 1991 conviction for his Iran-contra lies (and subsequent pardon by George H.W. Bush), the course of his failing-upward career has repeatedly revealed the moral rot at the heart of our political establishment. George W. Bush and Condoleezza Rice appointed Abrams to top national-security positions. The Council on Foreign Relations offered him a prestigious, high-profile title (senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies) and distanced itself only when he called President Obama’s nominee for defense secretary, former senator Chuck Hagel, an “anti-Semite.” Abrams is a respected regular on the American synagogue circuit and in the Jewish press, and rarely, if ever, does anyone have the bad manners to mention his pro-genocide past.

I’ve been writing about Abrams and his crimes, here and elsewhere, since 1987. I’ve complained privately to the president of the Council on Foreign Relations, to numerous rabbis who book him to speak in their synagogues, and to the editors of Jewish newspapers who publish him. I’ve seen some regret, but never any action.

If Abrams had abetted genocide against Jews instead of Guatemalans, it might not have disqualified him from a top diplomatic position in the Trump administration, but he would at least have been treated as a pariah in the media, the establishment, and, one certainly hopes, the world of professional Jews. These days, however, it’s hard to be certain of anything.

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https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/trumps-neocon-elliott-abrams/515784/

many links

Trump's Neocon?

Elliott Abrams is reportedly under consideration as the nation’s No. 2 diplomat—an appointment that would be somewhat surprising for both Abrams and the president.

Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP

DAVID A. GRAHAM  FEB 6, 2017   POLITICS

Elliott Abrams is reportedly under consideration to be deputy secretary of state—setting up a strange third act for the longtime Republican foreign-policy figure, and a strange No. 2 for the Trump State Department.Politico’s Michael Crowley reports that Abrams is meeting with President Trump on Tuesday, and that Secretary of State Rex Tillerson supports him for the job. Josh Rogin previously reported that Abrams was in the running for the job. Abrams declined to comment for this article.

If selected and confirmed by the Senate, Abrams would occupy a peculiar role: the most prominent neoconservative, and most experienced foreign-policy professional, in an administration that has promised to repudiate nearly everything that neoconservatism stood for, and which has disdained foreign-policy professionals as bumbling fools.

Joining the administration would also require both Abrams and Trump to get over some longstanding differences. Trump is notoriously fond of revenge, and Crowley writes that presidential adviser Steve Bannon is vetting Abrams to see if the White House can get past his past criticisms of the now-president. Abrams advised both the campaigns of both Ted Cruz and Marco Rubio. In March, he told Politico he wasn’t sure whether he could vote for either Trump or Hillary Clinton, and in May he wrote a piece for The Weekly Standard likening the election to 1972’s Democratic nomination of George McGovern: “The party has nominated someone who cannot win and should not be president of the United States. We anticipate a landslide defeat, and then a struggle to take the party back from his team and his supporters and win the following presidential election. Meanwhile, we need to figure out how to conduct ourselves.”

Many neoconservatives opposed Trump: As a candidate, he blasted the Iraq war and lied that he had opposed it from the start; called for pulling back from American involvement overseas; and showed little interest in national defense, though he paid lip service to building up the military. But Abrams is not just any neoconservative. He’s a member of one of the movement’s first families. His late wife, Rachel Decter, was the daughter and stepdaughter, respectively, of the neoconservative progenitors Midge Decter and Norman Podhoretz. While Norman eventually backed Trump, reluctantly, his son (and Abrams’s brother-in-law) John Podhoretz has remained a vocal Trump critic.

Taking a job as the No. 2 diplomat for a president whom he wouldn’t support as the GOP nominee would be a remarkable third act for Abrams’s career. His first big job came in the Reagan administration, where he was assistant secretary of state, including terms overseeing humanitarian affairs and the inter-American policy. That brought him into the Iran-Contra affair, in which the federal government secretly sold weapons to Iran—in violation of an arms embargo—and then funneled the proceeds to fund the Contras, the right-wing militias opposing Nicaragua’s left-wing Sandinista government, also contrary to federal law. The independent counsel investigating the scheme considered charging Abrams with several felonies, but Abrams agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor cases of withholding evidence. He was later pardoned by President George H.W. Bush in the last days of his administration.

When Bush’s son became president eight years later, he appointed Abrams deputy assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser, supervising U.S. policy in the Middle East. Abrams was a supporter of the Iraq war and took a lead on Israeli-Palestinian issues. He’s now a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and writes for a variety of outlets, including items posted on The Atlantic.

It’s a sign of how much Trump has shifted the center of the foreign-policy discourse that one of Abrams’s signal virtues for the job appears to be that he might be widely acceptable to a range of constituencies. That’s remarkable, given his Iran-Contra record and his time in the Bush administration, the Middle East record of which is, to understate things, contested—not least by Trump.

But bringing Abrams on would help reassure the more hawkish and neoconservative wing of the Republican Party, which has slumped uneasily toward Trump since his election but hasn’t fully embraced him. And it might win over liberals, too, who see in Abrams someone they don’t agree with, but an adult with experience in foreign policy—a commodity that is conspicuously absent in the Trump administration. Tillerson, for example, spent his entire career until this month at ExxonMobil. The suggestion that Tillerson is pushing Abrams is intriguing, given Abrams’s past criticism of Trump and reports of tension between Tillerson and the White House over Trump’s immigration executive order.

Matt Waxman, a former Bush administration State Department official who worked with Abrams and is now a professor at Columbia Law School, signed a letter from GOP national-security experts assailing Trump during the campaign. In an email, he wrote that Abrams could be a strong asset to the administration.

“Secretary Tillerson needs a strong #2 who knows the State Department and the interagency process, as well as the Washington and global diplomacy arenas,” Waxman said. “Elliott is masterful at working the levers in all of them.”

Abrams does have some areas of agreement with Trump. He seems to align with the president, at least in broad strokes, in his approach to Israel; Abrams wrote in support of David Friedman, Trump’s pick for ambassador to Israel. He also has pointed to the persecution of Christians around the world, and has written that Western nations should grant refugee status to endangered Christian communities—a position that’s in line with Trump’s own views on the matter. In other areas, they differ. Abrams wrote—too optimistically, in retrospect—in 2011 that Syrian President Bashar al-Assad’s “vicious regime” was likely to fall, while Trump has shown little interest in Assad’s departure, leaning toward the Russian approach of keeping the Syrian president in power nearly six years after the civil war erupted. Abrams has also been critical of Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who early on appears to be Trump’s closest friend in the Arab world.

Of course, not everyone would be on board with an Abrams pick. Eric Alterman rips Abrams in The Nation, indicting Abrams not only for Iran-Contra but his role in a grab-bag of other Latin American adventures, as well as his work in the Middle East under Bush. In the right-of-center, intervention-skeptical The National Interest, Daniel DePetris zeroes in on some of the same issues, writing, “Is the neoconservative, unilateral interventionism that Abrams has advocated for throughout his career—and that led directly to the second Iraq War—the kind of foreign-policy doctrine that President Trump wants in his State Department?”

The reported former leading candidate for the deputy secretary’s job was also a neoconservative—John Bolton, who served as ambassador to the UN under George W. Bush. But Bolton has always been something of a man apart, a figure too wild-eyed and warlike even by the hawkish standards of the neoconservative movement. According to some theories, it was Bolton’s trademark mustache that torpedoed his chances at the secretary of state’s job, but he also hit a roadblock in the person of Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky, who made clear that neither Bolton nor Rudy Giuliani would earn his confirmation vote because of their advocacy for the Iraq War. Abrams has criticized Paul in the past, and the senator wrote on Rare that “Abrams would be a terrible appointment for countless reasons.”

As always, it’s impossible to tell whether Trump might move forward on Abrams. He has been known to change his mind mercurially, and the matter of the old slights may still create a barrier. If those can be patched over, however, the men could strike an unexpected deal that would give Trump some credibility with neocons by bringing one of their to the administration, and give Abrams a chance to steer the untutored Trump team toward his own views.

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also gaffney

omg

http://www.alternet.org/grayzone-project/here-are-five-ted-cruzs-most-fanatical-foreign-policy-advisors

omfg:

The Man Who Broke the Middle East

By Elliott Abrams

June 22, 2014

:{http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-man-who-broke-the-middle-east-108140

Read more: http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2014/06/the-man-who-broke-the-middle-east

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http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/

no bib here

Abrams, a well-known neoconservative ideologue, is a senior fellow for Middle East studies at the Council on Foreign Relations. A key adviser on Mideast policy at the National Security Council (NSC) during the George W. Bush presidency, Abrams was a leading proponent of pursuing an aggressive “war on terror” after the 9/11 attacks.

Abrams was also a key figure in the Ronald Reagan administration before being convicted (and later pardoned) of charges related to the Iran-Contra scandal. He is the son-in-law of former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz and writer Midge Decter, the trailblazing couple who helped shape neoconservatism in the 1970s.[[1]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn1) His spouse, Rachel Abrams, who passed away in 2013, was an activist based at the Emergency Committee for Israel.

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Abrams has used his perch at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), including his CFR blog “Pressure Points,” to comment on high-profile U.S. foreign policy issues and discuss political problems in the Middle East, often with a view to encouraging U.S. intervention, promoting a right-wing Israel-centric agenda, and launching rhetorical broadsides against regimes he does not favor.[[2]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn2)

Observers havefrequently accusedAbrams of maintaining stark double standards that undermine his arguments. A case in point was his response to the dispute between Iran and Saudi Arabia that erupted in early 2016 after the Saudi regime executed the high profile Shiite cleric and political dissident Sheik Nimr Baqr al-Nimr. When a group of protestors attacked the Saudi embassy in Tehran, Abrams used the occasion to denounce Iran as well as the historic nuclear deal that was finalized in 2015 between Tehran and several world powers. He wrote that the incident was “another piece of evidence that Iran refuses to live by the rules of civilized diplomatic practice, and that its behavior has gotten worse not better since the signing of the nuclear deal.”[[3]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn3) One observer remarked on how “the sacking of Riyadh’s embassy in Tehran, rather than Nimr’s execution, was of great concern for Abrams.”[[4]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn4)

Despite his track record of errors and misjudgments, Abrams continually benefits from various forms of public rehabilitation, in part because some of his views are less hardline than those of other neoconservatives. This has led some observers, like Josh Marshall of the liberal-minded Talking Points Memo blog, to describe him as a “respectable neoconservative,” a phrase that others might consider  to be a contradiction in terms, especially when applied to Abrams.

In early 2016, Abrams’ tendency to benefit from comparison to other foreign policy hardliners was on clear display after he was includedon the list of advisers to Sen. Ted Cruz‘s presidential campaign. Also on the list was the notorious Islamophobe Frank Gaffney, director of the Center for Security Policy. Observers quickly pointed to potential tension on the team between Abrams’ call for dialogue with moderate Muslims and Gaffney’s full-throttled anti-Islam rhetoric. Abrams exploited the comparison, telling Bloomberg that Cruz did not support extreme views on Muslims, like Donald Trump‘s call to bar Muslims from entering the country. As other writers pointed out, however, Cruz in fact has a track record of bigoted policy views, including his call “for an explicit religious test to determine which refugees fleeing conflicts abroad can come to the United States, urging the exclusion of all Syrian Muslims.”

On Iran

Iran has long been a focus of Abram’s advocacy. A vocal opponent of the negotiations that led to the 2015 nuclear deal, he accused the Obama administration of being naïve in its efforts at rapprochement with Tehran, even after moderate President Hassan Rouhani was elected in 2013. “We are fooling ourselves if we see in [President Hassan] Rouhani a reformer who wishes to change the Iranian system, move toward democracy, and abandon the nuclear weapons program. That ‘Rouhani narrative’ was carefully constructed to ensnare Western diplomats, officials, and journalists. We have no excuse if we fall for it,” Abrams wrote in his CFR blog in October 2013.[[5]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn5)

Regarding negotiations over Iran’s nuclear program, Abrams wrote in mid-2014 that “the road to peace does not lie through weak agreements with brutal dictatorships” and that “any agreement that strengthens the Iranian regime–that enhances its reputation, that gives it greater leverage in the Middle East, or that strengthens its strangle-hold on the Iranian people–serves neither the cause of freedom nor that of peace.”[[6]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn6)

Remarked one commentator: “If the negotiations fail, the chances of military action increase exponentially. The consequences promise to be disastrous, both to the people of Iran and to the global economy. More death and misery. But, for Mr. Abrams, all that suffering can be winked at.”[[7]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn7)

After a comprehensive nuclear agreement was reached between Iran and the P5+1 world powers in July 2015, Abrams accused President Obama of “throwing in the towel” and said that the administration had “acted as Iran’s lawyer.” In a National Review article, he wrote: “Iran has won a great victory: A weak country has outmaneuvered and outnegotiated the United States and the EU. … The rise of Iran means great danger ahead.”[[8]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn8)

Vox’s Matthew Yglesias wrote in response: “What John Kerry and his team think is that if they had held out even more than they did, the international coalition to maintain the sanctions would have unraveled as foreign leaders concluded that the US, rather than Iran, was being unreasonable. This is the key point on which the whole thing turns, and yet Abrams has literally nothing to say about it—he has no argument.”[[9]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn9)

In August 2015, Abrams penned a controversial piece for the Weekly Standardthat accused President Obama of resorting to anti-Semitism in his criticisms of the deal’s opponents. Pointing to Obama’s spirited defense of the Iran deal during an August 2015 speech at American University, Abrams wrote that “The president … must know that he is here feeding a deep line of anti-Semitism that accuses American Jews of getting America into wars. His American University speech was an eloquent denunciation of those who disagree with him as warmongers with dual loyalty, who will be ‘demanding’ war with Iran. This speech divides Americans not according to principled opinions, nor even by party, but mostly by religion.”[[10]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn10)

He added: “The basic idea is simple: to oppose the president’s Iran deal means you want war with Iran, you’re an Israeli agent, you are in the pay of Jewish donors, and you are abandoning the best interests of the United States.”[[11]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn11)

Jonathan Chait of New York Magazine rebuked Abrams and others who leveled similar charges against Obama: “[W]here is the evidence that Obama himself has engaged in this kind of rhetoric? His critics rely heavily on the power of translation. The various J’accuse! columns are filled with inflammatory terms—’disloyal,’ ‘Jewish lobby’—that the authors use to describe Obama, but that Obama did not actually use. The headline for Abrams’s column in The Weekly Standard—“Obama and the ‘Amen Corner’”—features a phrase uttered not by Obama but by Pat Buchanan more than two decades ago. In the absence of direct evidence, or even indirect evidence, the critics instead read deeply into straightforward claims Obama has made.”[[12]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn12)

Abrams has also expressed support for statements by 2016 GOP presidential candidates Jeb Bush and Scott Walker declaring they would rescind the Iran deal and revert to a confrontational approach with Iran. “The new president will want to think about possible Iranian responses and how to blunt them as well. And Bush is right in saying that we need a comprehensive Iran strategy—something the Obama administration has lacked. Reversing the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), as the Iran deal is formally known, is only part of that, and blunting Iran’s terror and aggression in the region are critical,” Abrams wrote in a July 2015 piece for Newsweek.[[13]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn13)

Abrams has on numerous occasions sought to lay the groundwork for direct U.S. confrontation with Iran. In August 2012, for instance, he argued in theWeekly Standard blog that Congress should vote on a joint resolution to give the president the authority to go to war with Iran.[[14]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn14) In a January 2011 post on his CFR blog, Abrams highlighted apparent setbacks in Iran’s nuclear program to urge the United States to aggressively pursue regime-change strategies in that country, including strengthening sanctions. He wrote: “The new Republican leaders of the House Armed Services, Foreign Affairs, and Intelligence Committees—respectively Buck McKeon, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and Mike Rogers—ought to make this their first order of business. They should be asking right now what more the United States and our allies can be doing to stop the Iranian nuclear weapons program, make our sanctions more effective, and support democratic dissidents in Iran.”[[15]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn15)

OnSyria

Abrams has also been a fervent supporter of launching strikes on Syria. In the wake of the takeover of swathes of territory in Iraq and Syria by the so-called Islamic State group (IS or ISIS), Abrams called for a “wider use of power in Syria than solely attacking ISIS.” Air strikes, he wrote in September 2014, should be “broad enough to greatly restrict Assad’s ability to use air power as an instrument of terror.”[[16]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn16)

Abrams has further implied that American ground forces should be deployed in Syria and Iraq, writing: “If not American [ground forces] then those of some capable force, will also be needed. Combat forces may not be needed, but advisers certainly will be and in the thousands. It is not at all clear that any other forces–Jordanian, Emirati, or Saudi–can actually perform this function that Americans perform so well.”[[17]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn17)

In June 2015, Abrams argued in a piece for the National Journal that the “United States needs to recommit itself to the downfall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria.” He further posited: “ISIS in Iraq cannot be defeated so long as it has Syria as a sanctuary. This means more support for rebels in Syria than we are now giving; the current train-and-equip program is too small and weak to have much impact. It means grounding Assad’s air force. It means safe havens in Syria, formed with the cooperation of Turkey, Jordan, and other allies—who, with other Sunni nations, are willing to do more if they are led by the United States.”[[18]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn18)

Abrams has sought to tie U.S. intervention in Syria and Iraq to the Iranian nuclear issue, saying that a “display of American power and leadership in Iraq and Syria” should “remind Iran that in the end it is a third world nation of 75 million confronting a superpower.”[[19]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn19)

On Egypt

With respect to Egypt, Abrams broke with many of his neoconservative allies—and seemingly steered away from his thinking during the Reagan administration, when he vouched for the human rights records of right-wing regimes receiving U.S. military assistance in Latin America—when he argued in August 2013 that the U.S. should halt its assistance to Egypt’s military following its overthrow of elected Muslim Brotherhood president Mohamed Morsi and its subsequent violent crackdown on his supporters. “Like most Americans, I would like to see the Muslim Brotherhood out of power forever, but killing demonstrators sympathetic to ousted President Mohammed Morsi is not going to bring long-term stability to Egypt or defeat the Brotherhood,” Abrams wrote. “Cutting off aid is the only serious way to tell the Egyptian military that its current conduct is beyond the pale.”[[20]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn20)

On Obama Policy in the Middle East

In a June 2014 article for Politico titled, “The Man Who Broke the Middle East,” Abrams sought to portray President Obama as responsible for much of the instability in the region. Abrams wrote: “The Middle East that Obama inherited in 2009 was largely at peace, for the surge in Iraq had beaten down the al Qaeda-linked groups. U.S. relations with traditional allies in the Gulf, Jordan, Israel and Egypt were very good. Iran was contained, its Revolutionary Guard forces at home. Today, terrorism has metastasized in Syria and Iraq, Jordan is at risk, the humanitarian toll is staggering, terrorist groups are growing fast and relations with U.S. allies are strained.”[[21]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn21)

In response, a commentator for the New Republic opined: “Abrams’s piece is a rant about President Barack Obama. If it appears odd that someone would claim that Obama, who came to office in 2009, “broke” the world’s most infamously broken region, well, it is. The article is almost criminally confusing and ill-argued, which means that it must count, for Abrams, as recidivism.”[[22]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn22)

In a February 2015 piece for the neoconservative Mosaic,Abrams derided President Obama as a radical bent on overhauling American foreign policy: “Given all we know, I would argue that Obama’s mission is to guide America not only out of Bushland (as [Hudson Institute fellow Michael] Doran puts it) but out of Rooseveltland, Kennedyland, and Clintonland—and indeed to reverse most of the foreign-policy legacy of his own party. … The ideas espoused by Obama ‘incubated’ decades ago, and were most likely adopted back at Columbia University or in the Chicago kitchen of his friends of Weathermen fame, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn.”[[23]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn23)

In early 2013, Abrams was a leading neoconservative critic of President Obama’s nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel to serve as defense secretary during Obama’s second term. Instead of focusing on policy disagreements, however, Abrams publicly and repeatedly accused Hagel of holding anti-Semitic views, writing in the Weekly Standard that “Hagel seems to have a thing about ‘the Jews.’”[[24]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn24) He repeated the charge in an NPR interview, leading the network’s ombudsman to admit that he was “troubled” that Abrams was “allowed to use NPR to make an inflammatory allegation for which he offered precious little proof.”[[25]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn25)

Abrams’ accusations became the subject of fervent criticism, leading CFR president Richard Haas to distance his organization from Abrams’ insinuations, calling them “over the line.”[[26]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn26)

“As Ali Gharib of the Daily Beast and others have documented, these charges are baseless,” wrote Foreign Policy’s Steven Walt. “Not only have prominent Israelis leapt to Hagel’s defense against these smears, but so have important American Jewish leaders and some of Hagel’s longtime Jewish friends from Nebraska. Abrams knows all this, of course, but that has not led him to retract his earlier calumnies against a distinguished public servant and decorated soldier.” Calling the anti-Semitism charge “an odious tactic that runs contrary to how one should behave in a great democracy like the United States,” Walt called on Haas to “make a stand for reasoned, rational discourse” and demand that Abrams publicly apologize to Hagel.[[27]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn27)

Abrams, however, stuck by his accusations, claiming that Hagel believes “lobbying by American Jews to be illegitimate and offensive.”[[28]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn28)

Abrams also wielded the anti-Semitism charge against President Obama when the president criticized those opposing the Iran nuclear deal saying that their views could lead to more war in the Middle East. Abrams misleadingly wrote that Obama “must know that he is here feeding a deep line of anti-Semitism that accuses American Jews of getting America into wars. His American University speech was an eloquent denunciation of those who disagree with him as warmongers with dual loyalty, who will be ‘demanding’ war with Iran. This speech divides Americans not according to principled opinions, nor even by party, but mostly by religion.”[[29]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn29)

On Cuba

Abrams vociferously opposed the Obama administration’s December 2014 decision to normalize U.S.-Cuba relations, proclaiming at the time: “The American collapse with respect to Cuba will have repercussions in the Middle East and elsewhere—in Asia, for the nations facing a rising China, and in Europe, for those near Putin’s newly aggressive Russia.  What are American guarantees and promises worth if a fifty-year-old policy followed by Democrats like Johnson, Carter, and Clinton can be discarded overnight?”[[30]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn30)

One commentator said in response to Abrams’ remarks: “To call this mindless would be generous. This takes a typical hawkish loathing of diplomatic engagement and mixes it together with absurd beliefs about ‘credibility’ to create a completely irrational reaction. Restoring diplomatic relations with Cuba isn’t going to have negative ‘repercussions’ around the world … If there are any repercussions from this decision, they are all likely to benefit America. Latin American governments will have less of a reason to fault U.S. policy towards Cuba.”[[31]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn31)

As Campaign Adviser

Abrams has served as an adviser to numerous political campaigns. In 2012, he was the foreign policy adviser to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) during the Mitt Romney presidential campaign. During the campaign, Abrams drew attention when he pushed Congress to vote to authorize the president to go to war with Iran.[[32]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn32) Commenting on Abram’s proposal, ThinkProgressopined: “The fact that an adviser who played a key role in molding Ryan’s foreign policy views is defending dangerous brinksmanship raises serious questions about whether the Romney-Ryan policy might tilt hawkish once in office. Indeed, one commonality amongst the advising corps is a worrying willingness to casually advocate the use of American military force.”[[33]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn33)

More recently, Abrams has advised 2016 Republican presidential candidateMarco Rubio, who is also strongly opposed to U.S. détente with Cuba. Rubio has close ties with numerous prominent neoconservatives and has echoed typical neoconservative notions about foreign policy. “The whole question of the expansion of freedom of democracy is of greater interest to him as a foreign policy theme than it is for many other people,” Abrams has said about Rubio.[[34]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn34)

In March 2015, Mondoweiss reported that Abrams—along with other hardline “pro-Israel” figures like Sheldon Adelson and Bill Kristol—was a funder of Sen. Tom Cotton’s (R-AR) ultimately successful 2014 Senate campaign.[[35]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn35)

Commenting on Abrams’ resilient prominence in the U.S. foreign policy establishment despite a host of scandals—from Iran-contra to Iraq to the Hagel fight—Salon’s Jordan Michael Smith wrote that “Abrams’ bizarre reincarnation as a pseudo-statesman shows that even committing crimes counts as insufficient to merit excommunication from government service.” Smith quoted a former Joint Chiefs chairman who said of Abrams, “This snake’s hard to kill.”[[36]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn36)

The NSC Neocon

Abrams was widely regarded as a key champion within the George W. Bush administration of the neoconservative line on foreign affairs, shunning negotiations in favor of confrontational U.S. policies and promoting views in line with those of hardliners in Israel, who have rejected land-for-peace proposals like those negotiated as part of the Oslo peace talks, which Abrams opposed.[[37]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn37)

Abrams served as a point person for policies related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and pushed a hardline stance on Iran, Syria, and Iraq. Abrams also appeared to use his perch in the NSC to fight efforts by some administration officials and members of Congress to promote diplomatic approaches to crises. The Inter Press Service reported in early April 2007: “Just as [Abrams] worked with Reagan hardliners to undermine the Arias Plan [for Central America] 20 years ago, so he appears to be doing what he can to undermine recent efforts by Saudi King Abdullah to initiate an Arab-Israeli peace process and, for that matter, by Republican realists, and even Secretary of StateCondoleezza Rice, to push it forward.”[[38]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn38)

After Bush took office in 2001, Abrams was appointed to serve as the NSC’s chief human rights officer and later as senior director of Near East and North African Affairs. In January 2005, after Bush’s second inauguration, the White House announced that Abrams would serve as Bush’s deputy assistant and as the deputy national security adviser for global democracy strategy under national security advisor Stephen Hadley, who had been Condoleezza Rice’s deputy at the NSC.

Abrams often appeared alongside Hadley during trips to the Middle East and elsewhere. During a May 2008 trip to Jerusalem aboard Air Force One, Hadley and Abrams discussed the Bush administration’s involvement in Israeli-Palestinian negotiations during Bush’s tenure as president. Hadley said: “What [Bush] did was really launch—what the parties did was launch a three-pronged effort. One was the formal negotiation of the contours of the Palestinian state—borders, refugees, security, Jerusalem. Second was to accelerate the building of the institutions of a Palestinian state so the Palestinians would be able to govern democratically the state that they would get as a result of the negotiations. And finally, at the same time, he negotiated a third element, which was the broader outreach to the Arab world, to get the Arabs involved in this process—so as I say, Israeli-Palestinian reconciliation to be in the context of a broader Arab-Israeli reconciliation.”[[39]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn39)

Hadley then turned to Abrams, asking, “Elliott, do you want to add anything to that?” Abrams shifted the discussion to groups opposed to Israel, saying, “I would add one thing, which is that as we move forward there are those who would like to slow us down and stop us. It’s interesting, as I was listening to you recite the progress of the last seven years, one other thing that’s happened in these years is a very significant increase in the amount of assistance that Iran is giving to Hamas. Seven years ago there really wasn’t much at all. Now there is a lot. So you see the enemies of a peaceful settlement stepping up their activities in an effort to stop us.”[[40]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn40)

Abrams participated in a November 2004 meeting in the Oval Office between Bush and Natan Sharansky, a hardline Likud Party figure. The meeting was arranged by the president after he read galleys of Sharansky’s book, The Case for Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny & Terror, which reportedly helped inspire Bush’s democracy agenda.[[41]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn41)

Sharansky’s connection to the neoconservatives dates to the mid-1970s, when he worked closely with Sen. Henry “Scoop” Jackson (D-WA), who employed Abrams, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and other nascent neoconservatives. After Jackson’s failure to win the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination, Abrams joined the staff of Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) and later became his chief of staff. Abrams later switched to the Republican Party and went to work for the Reagan administration.

In 2006, Abrams played a role in shaping the U.S. response to the summer war between Israel and Hezbollah. The New York Times noted that Secretary of State Rice was accompanied on her mediating trips in the Middle East “by two men with very different outlooks on the conflict”—namely, Abrams and the State Department’s C. David Welch. According to the Times, “Abrams, a neoconservative with strong ties to Vice President [Dick] Cheney, has pushed the administration to throw its support behind Israel. During Ms. Rice’s travels, he kept in direct contact with Mr. Cheney’s office.”[[42]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn42)

According to an unnamed U.S. government consultant “with close ties to Israel” interviewed by Seymour Hersh, Israel had put together bombing plans long before Hezbollah kidnapped two Israeli soldiers, which set off the conflict. As they developed their plans, according to the consultant, Israeli officials went to Washington “to get a green light for the bombing operation and to find out how much the United States would bear…. Israel began with Cheney. It wanted to be sure that it had his support and the support of his office and the Middle East desk of the National Security Council.”[[43]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn43)

Although an NSC spokesman who talked with Hersh denied that Abrams had any role in supporting Israel’s plan, a second unnamed U.S. official, a former intelligence officer, claimed, “We told Israel, ‘Look, if you guys have to go, we’re behind you all the way. But we think it should be sooner rather than later—the longer you wait, the less time we have to evaluate and plan for Iran before Bush gets out of office.'”[[44]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn44)

While many of Bush’s neoconservative supporters were generally pleased with the administration’s strong backing of Israel, some criticized the State Department and Rice for softening many of Bush’s policies. Abrams reportedly worked to intervene on Rice’s behalf. A 2006 New York Timesarticle reported that State Department officials said Abrams served “as a buffer for Ms. Rice with some neoconservatives who are critical of her policies. ‘The genius of Elliott Abrams is that he’s Elliott Abrams,’ one senior administration official said. ‘How can he be accused of not sufficiently supporting Israel?’”[[45]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn45)

When she still served as Bush’s national security advisor, Rice apparently relied on Abrams for his unambiguous views. A friend of Rice told the New Yorker that she saw Abrams “not just as a good manager but a good strategist. As an NSC administrator, you want someone who can think several moves ahead, who has a peripheral vision and an instinct to get where you want to go—someone who can really play the high-stakes game.”[[46]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn46)

Richard John Neuhaus, a longtime Abrams acquaintance and fellow neoconservative, told the New Yorker: “What runs through Elliott’s thinking is a deep, almost quasi-religious devotion to democracy. He thinks real democratic change can happen in the Middle East. It’s breathtaking, in a way.”[[47]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn47)

History and Trajectory

Throughout his career, Abrams has moved back and forth between government and a web of right-wing think tanks and policy institutes, holding positions as a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, president of theEthics and Public Policy Center (EPPC), advisory council member of the American Jewish Committee, and charter member of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC).

Abrams’s family ties have also placed him at the center of neoconservatism. His 1980 marriage to Rachel Decter brought him into the Podhoretz clan, a key family associated with neoconservatism.[[48]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn48) Abrams became a frequent contributor to the American Jewish Committee’s Commentarymagazine when it was edited by his father-in-law Norman Podhoretz. While in the Reagan administration, Abrams also frequently made appearances at the forums organized by mother-in-law Decter’s Committee for the Free World in the 1980s, a rightist foreign policy pressure group that was co-led by Donald Rumsfeld.

As an aide to Senator Jackson in the 1970s, Abrams began his political career mixing the soft and hard sides of the neoconservative agenda as both a proponent of Jackson’s strategically driven human rights policies and as an advocate of his proposals to boost the military-industrial complex. Through Jackson, Abrams became involved with a group of Cold Warriors called theCoalition for a Democratic Majority, which was led by Democratic Party-affiliated neoconservatives like Penn Kemble.

Former members of Jackson’s staff who later received posts in the Reagan administration foreign policy team included such neoconservative operatives as Feith, Perle, Frank Gaffney, Charles Horner, and Ben Wattenberg. Another up-and-coming neoconservative who was close to Jackson and later joined the Reagan administration was Paul Wolfowitz, who together with his mentor, Albert Wohlstetter, advised the senator on arms issues. Other Jackson Democrats who secured appointments in the Reagan administration included Jeane Kirkpatrick, as UN ambassador, and neoconservatives on her staff, such as Joshua Muravchik, Steven Munson,Carl Gershman, and Kenneth Adelman.

Abrams is best known for his role in theIran-Contra scandal. He was indicted by a special prosecutor for intentionally deceiving Congress about the Reagan administration’s role in supporting the Contras—including his own central role in the Iran-Contra arms deal. In this deal, national security staff led by Oliver North brokered the sale of weapons from Israel to Iran in exchange for Iran helping broker the release of six Americans held hostage by Hezbollah. Some of the money made from the sale was channeled to the U.S.-backed and -organized Contras, who were spearheading a counterrevolution against the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. Congress had prohibited U.S. government assistance to the Contras because of their pattern of human rights abuses. At the time of his involvement, Abrams was the assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs, working under George Shultz. Abrams pleaded guilty to two lesser offenses (including withholding information from Congress) to avoid a trial and a possible jail term. Throughout the proceedings, Abrams denied knowledge of the NSC and CIA programs to support the Contras. He blamed Congress for the deaths of two U.S. military members shot down by the Sandinistas in an illegal, clandestine arms supply operation over Nicaragua. He described the legal proceedings against him as “Kafkaesque” and called his prosecutors “filthy bastards” and “vipers.”[[49]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn49)

Abrams and five other Iran-Contra figures were pardoned on Christmas Eve 1992 by President George H.W. Bush, shortly before he left office.[[50]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn50)

In his book Reagan, Bush, and Right-Wing Politics, Philip Burch underscores Abrams’ unapologetic attitude regarding the excesses of the war in Nicaragua: “A few years after he stepped down as assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs, Abrams, once the State Department’s top human rights official, wrote an article on El Salvador in the National Review titled ‘An American Victory’; at the end of this piece he proudly proclaimed that ‘El Salvador’s decade of guerilla war cost thousands of Salvadoran lives, and those of eight Americans. The violence is ending now in part because of the collapse of Communism throughout the world, but more because Communist efforts to take power by force were resisted and defeated. In this small corner of the Cold War, American policy was right, and it was successful.’ Perhaps Mr. Abrams should read Mark Danner’s The Massacre at El Mozote (which contains an appendix giving name, age, and gender for almost every one of the 784 people killed in this grizzly episode),” which was perpetrated by the Salvadoran Army’s Atacatl Battalion, a U.S.-trained counterinsurgency force.[[51]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn51)

Abrams, like a number of other prominent neoconservatives, was not invited to serve in the George H.W. Bush administration. In 1992 he helped form the Committee for U.S. Interests in the Middle East, which was regarded by many as an advocacy campaign to ensure that U.S. policy was aligned with the Likud Party in Israel.[[52]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn52)Other members included Perle, Feith, Gaffney, andJohn Lehman. The committee spoke out against what it perceived as a dangerous distancing between the George H.W. Bush administration and Israel in the administration’s pressure for Israel to pull out of some occupied territories and halt its campaign to expand settlements in those zones.[[53]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn53)

In 1996 Abrams became president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center. At EPPC, he wrote widely on foreign policy issues, especially Mideast policy, and on cultural issues, including what he saw as the threats posed by U.S. secular society to Jewish identity. Directed by Abrams from 1996 to 2001, EPPC has counted among its board members well-connected figures in the neocon matrix including Neuhaus, Bill Kristol, and Mary Ann Glendon. (For more on EPPC, see Right Web Profile: Ethics and Public Policy Center.)

Publications

In his writings,Abrams has consistently voiced strong support for Likud positions on the Israeli-Palestinian peace process and against “land for peace” negotiations. After the launch of the Al Aqsa Intifada in late September 2000, Abrams lambasted mainstream Jewish groups for their continued support for peace talks between the Palestinian Authority and for their call to Israel to halt its attacks.[[54]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn54)

Abrams has also established strong Likudnik positions in articles forCommentary and in various books. Abrams authored the chapter on the Middle East in the 2000 blueprint for U.S. foreign policy by the Project for the New American Century. Edited by PNAC founders Bill Kristol and Robert Kagan, Present Dangers: Crisis and Opportunity in American Foreign and Defense Policy is a playbook on how to deal with U.S. adversaries. In his chapter, Abrams laid out the “peace through strength” credo that became the operating principle of the George W. Bush administration. “Our military strength and willingness to use it will remain a key factor in our ability to promote peace,” wrote Abrams. “Strengthening Israel, our major ally in the region, should be the central core of U.S. Middle East policy, and we should not permit the establishment of a Palestinian state that does not explicitly uphold U.S. policy in the region.” Presaging the Mideast policy of the Bush administration, Abrams wrote: U.S. interests “do not lie in strengthening Palestinians at the expense of Israelis, abandoning our overall policy of supporting the expansion of democracy and human rights, or subordinating all other political and security goals to the ‘success’ of the Arab-Israel ‘peace process’.” Like other right-wing Zionists, Abrams refers to the conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis not for what it is—a conflict over occupied Palestinian land—but rather as an “Arab-Israel” conflict, implying that U.S. support of Israel necessitates a foreign policy that confronts all the Arab countries.[[55]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn55)

In his book Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America, Abrams takes care to insist that his positions imply no “disloyalty” to the United States, but at the same times insists that Jews must be loyal to Israel because they “are in a permanent covenant with God and with the land of Israel and its people. Their commitment will not weaken if the Israeli government pursues unpopular policies.”[[56]](http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/abrams_elliott/#_ftn56)

Abrams’ other books include The Influence of Faith (2001), Security and Sacrifice (1995),Undue Process(1993). He has also contributed articles toCommentary, Weekly Standard, National Interest, Public Interest, and National Review.In 1998 he and Donald Kagan edited the EPPC volume Honor Among Nations: Intangible Interests and Foreign Policy.

==

DN

...

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, this was only—this was only politically possible because of the uprising. The uprising, where hundreds of thousands of people came into the streets, brought down General Pérez Molina, and it created a climate where the prosecutors dared to try to go forward with these charges.

These officers arrested the other day include a former army chief of staff, a group of intelligence chiefs, a former member of the Ríos Montt junta, a former minister of the interior. These are people at the heart of the power structure in Guatemala.They’re the partners of the oligarchy. They were the partners of the U.S. military. If you go back and read the cables that have so far been declassified from within the Defense Intelligence Agency and other U.S. agencies, you see them praising these officers, the very ones who were—have now been arrested for these atrocities. And these men arrested are also—also form part of the core of the group that’s the government of—the incoming government, Jimmy Morales, just elected. His right-hand man was Ovalle Maldonado, who is one of those charged with crimes at the Cobán base, which I was just describing, where they—the pits are just stacked with skeletons. So, this has big implications.

And it could have even bigger implications for the U.S. I spoke to, during the years when this was happening, three of the four CIA station chiefs who served there. I named their names in an article which appeared in The Nation in 1995. The prosecutors can go look at that article, see who they are. The U.S. personnel who were there, and who are still alive, can be subpoenaed. The U.S. should be subpoenaed to release all NSA, State Department and Pentagon documents regarding payments they made to these officers, training and advice they gave to them. The Guatemalan authorities, in theory, would have the right to extradite surviving U.S. officials.

AMY GOODMAN: Allan Nairn, I wanted to go back to 1995—we’re talking what? Twenty years ago—when you were interviewed by Charlie Rose about the piece inThe Nation called "C.I.A. Death Squad," in which you described how Americans were directly involved in the killings by the Guatemalan army. You were being interviewed alongsideElliott Abrams, who challenged what you were saying. Abrams had served as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs under President Reagan from ’81 to 1985. It starts with you, Allan.

ALLAN NAIRN: We’re talking about more than 100,000 murders, an entire army, many of its top officers employees of the U.S. government. We’re talking about crimes, and we’re also talking about criminals, not just people like the Guatemalan colonels, but also the U.S. agents who have been working with them and the higher-level U.S. officials. I mean, I think you have to be—you have to apply uniform standards. President Bush once talked about putting Saddam Hussein on trial for crimes against humanity, Nuremberg-style tribunal. I think that’s a good idea. But if you’re serious, you have to be even-handed. If we look at a case like this, I think we have to talk—start talking about putting Guatemalan and U.S. officials on trial. I think someone like Mr. Abrams would be a fit—a subject for such a Nuremberg-style inquiry. But I agree with Mr. Abrams that Democrats would have to be in the dock with him.

AMY GOODMAN: So, there, as Allan is speaking, Elliott Abrams, the assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs under President Reagan, is simply throwing his head back and laughing. Allan, your thoughts today?

ALLAN NAIRN: Well, Abrams was perhaps the key figure in U.S. Central American policy during the time of the slaughter. He later became a top adviser to the Bush Jr. White House dealing with the Middle East, where the U.S. has mounted similar operations in support of killer forces. For example, in Iraq, in the capacity as a privatecontractor, the U.S. brought over one of the U.S. military men, Colonel Steele, who had worked alongside the Salvadoran death squads. And in Iraq, he helped to set up the Shiite militia operations that went out and targeted Sunnis in Iraq.This was under the time of General Petraeus, when Petraeus was also carving up Baghdad with walls on a sectarian basis. They called it the "Salvador Option." This is a policy that’s been applied uniformly around the world.But since the U.S. is not yet as civilized as Guatemala, people like Abrams have not been put in the dock. But the Elliott Abrams equivalent—equivalents in Guatemala are this morning being brought before a judge in Guatemala as prisoners, and they’re going to face their fate.

hmmn sparticus?

Iran-Contra and Arms-for-Hostages Scandals

Felix Rodriguez

Project: Iran-Contra and Arms-for-Hostages Scandals

Open-Content project managed by mtuck

1982: CIA, NSC Official Becomes Bush’s Foreign Policy Adviser

Vice President George H. W. Bush asks CIA agent and National Security Council official Donald Gregg to serve as his national security and foreign policy adviser. Gregg agrees, and retires from the CIA. Gregg will work closely with Bush and former CIA agent Felix Rodriguez to help put together a covert operation to supply the Nicaraguan Contras with arms, cash, and supplies. [SPARTACUS SCHOOLNET, 12/28/2007]

Entity Tags: National Security Council, Central Intelligence Agency, Contras, George Herbert Walker Bush, Felix Rodriguez, Donald Gregg

Category Tags: Aid for Nicaraguan Contras, Violation of US Law, George H. W. Bush, Felix Rodriguez, Donald Gregg

March 17, 1983: Bush’s Foreign Policy Adviser, Ex-CIA Agent Create Plan to Supply Nicaraguan Contras

Vice President George Bush hosts a secret meeting with his foreign policy adviser, Donald Gregg (see 1982), and former CIA agent Felix Rodriguez. The meeting is the first impetus of the National Security Council (NSC)‘s initiative to secretly, and illegally, fund the Nicaraguan Contras in an attempt to overthrow that country’s socialist government. Rodriguez agrees to run a central supply depot at Ilopango Air Base in El Salvador. In a memo to NSC chief Robert McFarlane, Gregg will note that the plan is rooted in the experience of running “anti-Vietcong operations in Vietnam from 1970-1972.” Gregg will also note that “Felix Rodriguez, who wrote the attached plan, both worked for me in Vietnam and carried out the actual operations outlined above.” [SPARTACUS SCHOOLNET, 12/28/2007] Rodriguez and Gregg, along with others such as Watergate burglar Frank Sturgis (see April-June 1972), were part of the CIA’s “Operation 40,” an assassination squad that operated in Cuba and the Caribbean during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Rodriguez tried at least once, in 1961, to assassinate Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. In 1967, Rodriguez interrogated and executed South American revolutionary Che Guevara. He was part of the infamous and shadowy Operation Phoenix during the Vietnam War. [SPARTACUS SCHOOLNET, 1/17/2008]

Entity Tags: Felix Rodriguez, Donald Gregg, Contras, Robert C. McFarlane, Fidel Castro, Frank Sturgis, George Herbert Walker Bush, Ché Guevara, ’Operation 40’,National Security Council, ’Operation Phoenix’

Category Tags: Aid for Nicaraguan Contras, Violation of US Law, Robert McFarlane,Felix Rodriguez, Donald Gregg

December 21, 1984: Bush’s Foreign Policy Adviser Introduces North to Contra Liaison

Donald Gregg, Vice President Bush’s national security and foreign policy adviser and one of the architects of the secret plan to fund the Nicaraguan Contras (see March 17, 1983), introduces his partner Felix Rodriguez to Lieutenant Colonel Oliver North of the National Security Council (NSC). North will head the NSC’s Contra resupply and funding operations. [SPARTACUS SCHOOLNET, 12/28/2007]

Entity Tags: Oliver North, Contras, Donald Gregg, National Security Council, George Herbert Walker Bush, Felix Rodriguez

Category Tags: Aid for Nicaraguan Contras, Violation of US Law, George H. W. Bush,Oliver North, Felix Rodriguez, Donald Gregg

Febuary 15, 1985: D. G. ‘Chip’ Tatum Makes Contact with Felix Rodriguez, Briefed on Pegasus Missions

During a flight to La Cieba, Honduras, CIA operative D.G. “Chip” Tatum is instructed to make contact with Major Felix Rodriguez, assigned by Oliver Northas Tatum’s local handler. Upon arrival in La Cieba, Tatum meets Rodriguez, who then takes the crew to a CIA safe house for the night. Following dinner, Tatum and Rodriguez plan their four-month support calender. Tatum is scheduled to leave Honduras in June 1985. Tatum is instructed that in addition to flying normal MEDEVAC missions, his duties will include a covert group of missions, the control word for these missions being Pegasus, and with Pegasus missions to take priority over normal medical evacuations. Rodriguez also instructs Tatum as to his chain of command. Missions could be ordered by any of the following: 

 Oliver North (assistant national security advisor to the White House); 

 Amiram Nir (former Israeli intelligence officer (Mossad) and advisor to Vice President Bush); 

 Felix Rodriguez (CIA). [TATUM, 1996]

Entity Tags: Oliver North, Amiram Nir, Felix Rodriguez

Category Tags: Felix Rodriguez

Summer 1985: Costa Rica Allows Contra Airstrip

Lewis Tambs becomes the US Ambassador to Costa Rica. Tambs is under orders to open what is called a “southern front” for the Nicaraguan Contras; a small force of Contras is striking into southern Nicaragua from northern Costa Rica, and the Costa Rican government wants them out of their territory. Tambs believes that the orders for the “southern front” come from National Security Council (NSC) officer Oliver North, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, and their Restricted Interagency Group (RIG—see Late 1985 and After). Tambs, with the assistance of North’s liaison in Central America, Felix Rodriguez (seeMid-September 1985), secures permission from the Costa Rican government to build an airstrip for use by the Contras in northern Costa Rica, as long as it is not close enough to the border to allow the Contras to use it as a staging area for ground raids. One of Abrams’s first questions to North after being tasked to “monitor” the NSC officer (see September 4, 1985) is why the Costa Ricans are allowing the airstrip. The airstrip will be built at Santa Elena, Costa Rica, by the Udall Corporation, one of the private firms controlled by North’s partner, retired General Richard Secord (see November 19, 1985 and February 2, 1987), and will be called “Point West.” Abrams will later testify, falsely, that no US officials were involved in securing permission to build the airstrip. Notes taken by the US Ambassador to El Salvador, Edwin Corr, about discussions concerning the airstrip, will prove that Abrams lies under oath about the airstrip. [FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS: CHAPTER 25: UNITED STATES V. ELLIOTT ABRAMS: NOVEMBER 1986, 8/4/1993]

Entity Tags: Felix Rodriguez, Contras, Edwin Corr, Elliott Abrams, Richard Secord,Lewis Tambs, Udall Corporation, Restricted Interagency Group, Oliver North

Timeline Tags: US International Relations

Category Tags: Aid for Nicaraguan Contras, Geopolitics and Diplomacy, Violation of US Law, Elliott Abrams, Felix Rodriguez, Richard Secord

Mid-September 1985: North Persuades Former CIA Agent to Assist in Funneling Illegal Funds, Arms to Contras

The National Security Council’s Oliver North persuades former CIA officer Felix Rodriguez to help him divert funds and weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras(seeDecember 6, 1985 and April 4, 1986). Rodriguez agrees to set up the servicing of CIA transport planes and other aircraft at the Ilopango Air Base in San Salvador, El Salvador. Rodriguez works out of Ilopango, helping the Salvadoran Air Force in its own counter-insurgency activities. Rodriguez was placed at Ilopango by Donald Gregg, a former CIA agent who now serves as the foreign policy adviser to Vice President Bush (see March 17, 1983). While in El Salvador, Rodriguez uses the alias “Max Gomez.” [FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS: CHAPTER 25: UNITED STATES V. ELLIOTT ABRAMS: NOVEMBER 1986, 8/4/1993]

Entity Tags: National Security Council, Donald Gregg, Felix Rodriguez, George Herbert Walker Bush, Oliver North, Central Intelligence Agency, Contras

Category Tags: Aid for Nicaraguan Contras, Iran-Contra Affair, Violation of US Law,Felix Rodriguez, George H. W. Bush, Oliver North, Donald Gregg

October 1985: North Helps Distribute Humanitarian Aid to Contras

The first meeting of the State Department’s Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office (NHAO) is held. Two aides to Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams (see April 19, 1985 and After and September 4, 1985) attend the meeting. During the meeting, National Security Council (NSC) officer Oliver North offers the services of former CIA agent Felix Rodriguez to assist in distributing the $27 million in humanitarian aid recently approved for the Contras (see August 1985). Rodriguez is helping North channel illegal funds to the Contras (see Mid-September 1985). The agreement is to channel the funds to the Contras through El Salvador’s Ilopango Air Base, Rodriguez’s center of operations. By early 1986, the legal NHAO fund distribution will merge with the illegal North fund distribution (see December 6, 1985 and April 4, 1986). [FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS: CHAPTER 25: UNITED STATES V. ELLIOTT ABRAMS: NOVEMBER 1986, 8/4/1993] Some of the $27 million is never used for humanitarian purposes, but instead used to buy weapons, both for the Contras and for themujaheddin in Afghanistan. [SPARTACUS SCHOOLNET, 12/28/2007]

Entity Tags: Oliver North, Elliott Abrams, Felix Rodriguez, Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office, Contras, US Department of State

Category Tags: Aid for Nicaraguan Contras, Iran-Contra Affair, Violation of US Law,Felix Rodriguez, Oliver North

January 9, 1986: North, CIA Official Discuss Possible Connection to Vice President

National Security Council officer Oliver North, running the secret and illegal network that diverts funds from US-Iranian arms sales to the Nicaraguan Contras (see December 6, 1985 and April 4, 1986), has a phone conversation with CIA official Alan Fiers (see Summer 1986). A diary entry by North documenting the conversation reads in part, “Felix talking too much about V.P. connection.” “Felix” is CIA agent Felix Rodriguez, a key member of North’s network (see May 27, 1987). It is not clear whether the “V.P.” notation refers to Vice President George H. W. Bush or to former CIA official Donald Gregg, now Bush’s foreign policy adviser and a liaison to Rodriguez. In later testimony before the Iran-Contra Congressional committee (see May 5, 1987), Gregg will deny that Bush’s office was involved in recruiting Rodriguez to work with North.[TIME, 7/22/1991] Gregg has a long and clandestine relationship with Rodriguez, going back as far as 1959, when the two were involved in “Operation 40,” a CIA-led attempt to overthrow Cuba’s Fidel Castro. [SPARTACUS SCHOOLNET, 2/3/2008]Gregg also worked with Rodriguez in covert operations during the Vietnam War.[SPARTACUS SCHOOLNET, 12/28/2007]

Entity Tags: Fidel Castro, Contras, Central Intelligence Agency, Alan Fiers, Donald Gregg, Felix Rodriguez, National Security Council, Oliver North, Joint House-Senate Iran-Contra Committee, George Herbert Walker Bush

Category Tags: Aid for Nicaraguan Contras, Iran-Contra Affair, Violation of US Law,House-Senate Committee, Alan Fiers, Donald Gregg, Felix Rodriguez, George H. W. Bush, Oliver North

August 12, 1986: Contra Liaison Claims Contras Being Sold Shoddy Goods; Indicates Link between Contras and Bush

Former CIA agent Felix Rodriguez, the liaison between the Nicaraguan Contras and the National Security Council (see Mid-September 1985), comes to Washington to argue that retired General Richard Secord (see November 19, 1985 and February 2, 1987) is providing shoddy airplanes and goods to the Contras at exorbitant prices. Rodriguez meets with his patron, Donald Gregg, the foreign affairs adviser to Vice President Bush (see March 17, 1983 andOctober 10, 1986). Gregg then meets with other administration officials to discuss Rodriguez’s concerns. Officials discuss Rodriguez’s claim that his “working w/VP [Bush] [is a] blessing for CIA,” indicating that despite later denials (see December 1986 and August 6, 1987), Bush is well aware of Rodriguez’s activities on behalf of the Contras and may be facilitating them. According to Gregg’s notes, he is particularly concerned that Rodriguez is “go[ing] around to bars saying he is buddy of Bush… we want to get rid of him from his [involvement] w[ith] private ops. Nothing was done so he still is there shooting his mouth off.” [FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS: CHAPTER 25: UNITED STATES V. ELLIOTT ABRAMS: NOVEMBER 1986, 8/4/1993]

Entity Tags: Donald Gregg, Contras, National Security Council, Richard Secord, George Herbert Walker Bush, Felix Rodriguez

Category Tags: Aid for Nicaraguan Contras, Iran-Contra Affair, Violation of US Law,Donald Gregg, Felix Rodriguez, George H. W. Bush, Richard Secord

Early September 1986: Costa Rica Shuts Down Contra Airstrip, Threatens Public Exposure

Costa Rica’s newly elected president, Oscar Arias Sanchez, a foe of the Nicaraguan Contras, is outraged to learn of the deal made by his predecessor for a Contra airstrip in the northern portion of his country (see Summer 1985). He stops its use for Contra resupply. On September 6, 1986, CIA agent Felix Rodriguez, the liaison for National Security Council officer Oliver North in the region (see Mid-September 1985), informs North and CIA official Alan Fiers that Arias intends to hold a press conference denouncing the airstrip, revealing its construction by North’s partner, retired General Richard Secord, and announcing that its existence is a violation of Costa Rican law. North discusses the impending conference with Fiers, Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, and the US Ambassador to Costa Rica, Lewis Tambs. They mull over informing Arias that he will never be allowed in the White House, and will never get any of the $80 million promised to Costa Rica by the US Agency for International Development (USAID) if the airstrip is revealed. Tambs passes along these threats, and the press conference is initially canceled. Fiers later testifies (see July 17, 1991) that he, North, and Abrams are worried that the public revelation of the airstrip will expose the connections between the Contras, North, and the White House. [FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS: CHAPTER 25: UNITED STATES V. ELLIOTT ABRAMS: NOVEMBER 1986, 8/4/1993] In late September, Costa Rica will publicly reveal the existence of the airstrip (see September 25, 1986).

Entity Tags: Felix Rodriguez, Alan Fiers, Contras, Elliott Abrams, Oscar Arias Sanchez,US Agency for International Development, Oliver North, Richard Secord, Lewis Tambs

Category Tags: Aid for Nicaraguan Contras, Geopolitics and Diplomacy, Iran-Contra Affair, Alan Fiers, Elliott Abrams, Felix Rodriguez, Oliver North, Richard Secord

October 9, 1986: Connections between CIA, US Government, and Contras Alleged

CIA cargo handler Eugene Hasenfus, in the custody of Nicaraguan officials after his transport plane filled with weapons and supplies for the Contras was shot down (see October 5, 1986), publicly states that he had made ten other trips to ferry arms and supplies to the Contras. Six of those were from the Ilopango airfield in El Salvador (see Mid-September 1985). He also states that he worked closely with two CIA agents, “Max Gomez” and “Ramon Medina.” “Gomez” is actually Felix Rodriguez, who serves as the liaison between the Contras and National Security Council officer Oliver North. “Medina” is another CIA operative, Rafael Quintero. Hasenfus says that Gomez and Medina oversaw the housing for the crews, transportation, refueling, and flight plans. The same day as Hasenfus’s public statement, Nicaraguan officials reveal that one of Hasenfus’s crew members, who died in the crash, carried cards issued by the Salvadoran Air Force identifying them as US advisers. And, the Nicaraguans claim, one of the crew members had a business card identifying him as an official with the US’s Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office (NHAO—seeOctober 1985). [FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS: CHAPTER 25: UNITED STATES V. ELLIOTT ABRAMS: NOVEMBER 1986, 8/4/1993; SPARTACUS SCHOOLNET, 12/29/2007]

Entity Tags: Felix Rodriguez, Contras, Eugene Hasenfus, Rafael Quintero, Nicaraguan Humanitarian Assistance Office, Oliver North

Category Tags: Aid for Nicaraguan Contras, Iran-Contra Affair, Violation of US Law,Eugene Hasenfus, Felix Rodriguez, Oliver North

October 10, 1986: Press Alleges Bush, Not CIA, Is Government Link to Contras

The US press reports that Vice President Bush, and not the CIA, is the US government link to the downed CIA flight intended to supply weapons to the Nicaraguan Contras (see October 5, 1986 and October 9, 1986). The San Francisco Examiner reports that Felix Rodriguez, the CIA liaison between the Contras and the White House (see Mid-September 1985), was assigned to El Salvador’s Ilopango airfield by Bush’s foreign policy adviser, former CIA official Donald Gregg (see January 9, 1986). [FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS: CHAPTER 25: UNITED STATES V. ELLIOTT ABRAMS: NOVEMBER 1986, 8/4/1993]

Entity Tags: Contras, Central Intelligence Agency, George Herbert Walker Bush, Donald Gregg, Felix Rodriguez

Category Tags: Aid for Nicaraguan Contras, Iran-Contra Affair, Violation of US Law,Donald Gregg, Felix Rodriguez, George H. W. Bush

October 10, 1986: State Department Official Repeats Lies about Contra Knowledge to Conservative Columnist

Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abramsis interviewed by conservative columnist Robert Novak and Novak’s partner, Rowland Evans. Novak, who is openly sympathetic to the Nicaraguan Contras, asks Abrams about his knowledge of the connections between the US government and the Contras as revealed by the downing of a CIA transport plane over Nicaragua (see October 5, 1986). Abrams, who provides false testimony to Congress today and in the following days, tells a similar story to Novak. Abrams goes further with Novak than he does with Congress, denying that any such person as “Max Gomez,” the CIA liaison to the Contras, even exists (Gomez is actually former CIA agent Felix Rodriguez—see October 10-15, 1986). “Whoever that gentleman is, he certainly isn’t named Max Gomez,” Abrams notes. Abrams also denies that “Gomez” has any connection to Vice President Bush (see October 11-14, 1986). Abrams adds that whoever this “Gomez” is, “he is not on the US government payroll in any way.” Novak asks if Rodriguez has any connection to the National Security Council or any other government agency, and Abrams says: “I am not playing games.… No government agencies, none.” In June 1987, Abrams will admit that he lied to Novak. [FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS: CHAPTER 25: UNITED STATES V. ELLIOTT ABRAMS: NOVEMBER 1986, 8/4/1993]

Entity Tags: Rowland Evans, Contras, Elliott Abrams, Robert Novak, National Security Council, Felix Rodriguez

Category Tags: Aid for Nicaraguan Contras, Iran-Contra Affair, Elliott Abrams, Felix Rodriguez

October 10-15, 1986: State Department, CIA Officials Lie to Congress about Government Support for Contras

Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams (see Late 1985 and After andSeptember 4, 1985) testifies three times to Congress that the Contra resupply operation, exposed by the downing of a CIA transport plane (see October 5, 1986 and October 9, 1986), is not a US government operation.There is no coordination whatsoever from any government official (see Summer 1985, Mid-September 1985, October 1985, Late 1985 and After, February 7-8, 1986, May 16, 1986, July 1986 and After, September 19-20, 1986, September 25, 1986, and January 9, 1986), and no one in the government knows who organized or paid for the transport flight that was shot down.

'Not Our Supply System' - Abrams tells the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that while he and other government officials are aware of the Contra resupply operation, “[i]t is not our supply system. It is one that grew up after we were forbidden from supplying the resistance, and we have been kind of careful not to get closely involved with it and to stay away from it.… We do not encourage people to do this. We don’t round up people, we don’t write letters, we don’t have conversations, we don’t tell them to do this, we don’t ask them to do it. But I think it is quite clear, from the attitude of the administration, the attitude of the administration is that these people are doing a very good thing, and if they think they are doing something that we like, then, in a general sense, they are right.” In testimony to the House Intelligence Committee, Abrams is asked by Chairman Lee Hamilton (D-IN), “Can anybody assure us that the United States government was not involved, indirectly or directly, in any way in supply of the contras?” Abrams responds: “I believe we have already done that, that is, I think, the president has done it, the secretary has done it [Secretary of State George Shultz], and I have done it.… Now again, this normal intelligence monitoring is there, but the answer to your question is yes.” Abrams and CIA officials Clair George and Alan Fiers tell the same falsehoods to a House Foreign Affairs subcommittee. “We don’t know,” Abrams asserts, “because we don’t track this kind of activity.”

No Knowledge of 'Gomez' - He also claims under questioning not to know the identity of “Max Gomez,” who he well knows is former CIA agent Felix Rodriguez (see Mid-September 1985). Senator John Kerry (D-MA) asks, “You don’t know whether or not [Gomez] reports to the vice president of the United States?” (see October 10, 1986). Both George and Abrams deny any such knowledge, though Abrams is highly aware of Rodriguez’s activities in El Salvador (he does not inform the committee of those activities). During the Congressional sessions, media reports identify Gomez as Rodriguez. [FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS: CHAPTER 25: UNITED STATES V. ELLIOTT ABRAMS: NOVEMBER 1986, 8/4/1993]

Entity Tags: Lee Hamilton, Elliott Abrams, Contras, Clair George, Alan Fiers, Felix Rodriguez, George Herbert Walker Bush, George Shultz, House Intelligence Committee, Ronald Reagan, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, John Kerry, House Foreign Affairs Committee

Category Tags: Aid for Nicaraguan Contras, Iran-Contra Affair, Violation of US Law,Alan Fiers, Donald Gregg, Elliott Abrams, Felix Rodriguez, George H. W. Bush, George Shultz, Oliver North, Ronald Reagan

October 11-14, 1986: State Department Official Denies Any Knowledge of Contra Connection to Vice President

After the press identifies former CIA agent Felix Rodriguez as Contra liaison “Max Gomez” (see October 10-15, 1986), and learns that Rodriguez reports to Vice President Bush’s foreign policy adviser, Donald Gregg (see October 10, 1986), Bush denies any knowledge of Rodriguez’s involvement with the Contras. Bush admits to having met Rodriguez a few times, but refuses to clarify what relationship, if any, they may have. Bush tells one reporter that Rodriguez is a US counter-insurgency adviser working with the government of El Salvador, an assertion strongly denied by the Salvadoran government. Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, who has lied repeatedly to Congress about the government’s role in supplying and supporting the Contras (see October 10-15, 1986), tells the House Intelligence Committee that he knows nothing of any link between Rodriguez and Bush that concerns the Contras. [FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS: CHAPTER 25: UNITED STATES V. ELLIOTT ABRAMS: NOVEMBER 1986, 8/4/1993]

Entity Tags: Elliott Abrams, Donald Gregg, House Intelligence Committee, Felix Rodriguez, George Herbert Walker Bush

Category Tags: Aid for Nicaraguan Contras, Iran-Contra Affair, Violation of US Law,Donald Gregg, Elliott Abrams, Felix Rodriguez, George H. W. Bush

December 17, 1986: State Department Official Claims Not to Know Contra Liaison

Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, testifying before the House Foreign Affairs Committee, says that before the Iran-Contra revelations of October 1986 (see October 5, 1986, October 10-15, 1986, and October 11-14, 1986) he had never even heard of CIA agent Felix Rodriguez, the liaison between the Nicaraguan Contras and the National Security Council (see Mid-September 1985). As he has done so many times before, Abrams is lying. When he took his position in July 1985 (see April 19, 1985 and After), Rodriguez was already working out of the Ilopango airfield in El Salvador. Notes taken by the US Ambassador to El Salvador, Edwin Corr, indicate that Abrams knew of Rodriguez by September 1985 at the latest (see September 4, 1985). During that month, Abrams and Corr discussed Rodriguez in at least one meeting. (Corr will later say he cannot recall any such meeting.) Rodriguez was also a frequent topic of discussion in meetings held in late 1985 by the Restricted Interagency Group (RIG—see Late 1985 and After) chaired by Abrams. And Abrams was aware of concerns within the government about Rodriguez’s involvement in disbursing humanitarian funds allocated by the US Congress to the Contras (see October 1985). [FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS: CHAPTER 25: UNITED STATES V. ELLIOTT ABRAMS: NOVEMBER 1986, 8/4/1993]

Entity Tags: Elliott Abrams, Contras, Edwin Corr, Restricted Interagency Group, Felix Rodriguez, National Security Council, House Foreign Affairs Committee

Category Tags: Aid for Nicaraguan Contras, Iran-Contra Affair, Violation of US Law,Elliott Abrams, Felix Rodriguez

May 27, 1987: CIA Operative Testifies, Turns Questioning into Anti-Soviet Diatribe

CIA operative Felix Rodriguez testifies before the Iran-Contra committee (see May 5, 1987). Rodriguez, a Cuban exile and former US Army officer, is notorious for his involvement in the execution of South American revolutionary Ernesto “Che” Guevara in 1967. Rodriguez also ran covert assassination operations for the CIA during the Vietnam War. Rodriguez’s connection to the White House was through Donald Gregg, the national security adviser to Vice President Bush (see March 17, 1983). Gregg had helped station Rodriguez at an airport in El Salvador, where Rodriguez could, under the pseudonym “Max Gomez,” manage the Contra resupply operation for Oliver North and Richard Secord (see Mid-September 1985 andNovember 19, 1985). CIA cargo handler Eugene Hasenfus (see October 5, 1986) told his Sandinista captors that “Max Gomez” was his contact with the CIA. Rodriguez’s testimony is potentially explosive, but committee member Dick Cheney (R-WY) has no interest in eliciting any such infomation. Instead, he invites Rodriguez to launch a well-scripted diatribe against allowing the Soviet Union to establish a Communist foothold in Latin America. [DUBOSE AND BERNSTEIN, 2006, PP. 73-74]

Entity Tags: Eugene Hasenfus, Richard Secord, Central Intelligence Agency, Felix Rodriguez, Donald Gregg, Richard (“Dick”) Cheney, Oliver North

Category Tags: Aid for Nicaraguan Contras, Iran-Contra Affair, Violation of US Law,House-Senate Committee, Dick Cheney, Donald Gregg, Eugene Hasenfus, Felix Rodriguez

October 7, 1991: Former State Department Official Pleads Guilty to Lying to Congress

Former Assistant Secretary of State Elliott Abrams, facing multiple counts of lying under oath to Congress about, among other things, his knowledge of the US government’s involvement in the resupply operation to the Nicaraguan Contras (see October 10-15, 1986), his knowledge of the role played by former CIA agent Felix Rodriguez in the resupply (see December 17, 1986), and his knowledge of third-party funding of the Nicaraguan Contras (see November 25, 1986), agrees to plead guilty to two misdemeanor charges of withholding evidence from Congress. Abrams agrees to the plea after being confronted with reams of evidence about his duplicity by investigators for special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh as well as from testimony elicited during the House-Senate investigation of 1987 (see July 7-10, 1987) and the guilty plea and subsequent testimony of former CIA agent Alan Fiers (see July 17, 1991). Abrams pleads guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress, to unlawfully withholding information from the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and the House Intelligence Committee, and admits lying when he claimed that he knew nothing of former National Security Council official Oliver North’s illegal diversion of government funds to the Contras (see December 6, 1985, April 4, 1986, and November 25-28, 1986). Abrams says that he lied because he believed “that disclosure of Lt. Col. [Oliver] North’s activities in the resupply of the Contras would jeopardize final enactment” of a $100 million appropriation pending in Congress at the time of his testimony, a request that was narrowly defeated(see March 1986). Abrams also admits to soliciting $10 million in aid for the Contras from the Sultan of Brunei (see June 11, 1986). [FINAL REPORT OF THE INDEPENDENT COUNSEL FOR IRAN/CONTRA MATTERS: CHAPTER 25: UNITED STATES V. ELLIOTT ABRAMS: NOVEMBER 1986, 8/4/1993]

Entity Tags: Elliott Abrams, Alan Fiers, Contras, Felix Rodriguez, House Intelligence Committee, Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Lawrence E. Walsh

Category Tags: Aid for Nicaraguan Contras, Iran-Contra Affair, Violation of US Law,Special Prosecutor, Alan Fiers, Elliott Abrams, Felix Rodriguez, Lawrence Walsh,Oliver North

http://www.historycommons.org/timeline.jsp?timeline=irancontraaffair&irancontraaffair_key_figures=irancontraaffair_felix_rodriguez

==

bs blog

http://blogs.cfr.org/abrams/

ctr terror fund?

http://washingtonexaminer.com/new-nonprofit-seeks-to-cut-off-funding-for-extremist-groups/article/2553778

==

vice bk: ch 4 cia contractor cargo kicker broke rule parachute captured 1986 SAM; asst sec of state e abrams ex socialist, married podh, lied to congress? dems did not believe but dc on comm; ollie n gave iranians bible and choc cake (hezbollah had hostages; RR lied to congress comm, then to ppl; AG found memo that said 12m fr4om arms sales wd go to contras 66 1st house/sen joint invest comm, wright deferred to exec, wanted it over quick, lost lev when took impeach off table 69; casey resign brain tumor then died, big brk for gop; hearing TV favored bad guys says spielberg 72 dc et al said taking away $ was congr negligence; dc absurd q of felix rodriguez, cia killed che 73 

question/praised abrams(pardoned b1 1992, tho he covered up 1k ppl massacre by el salv army at El Mozote) 74, later dc got him dep nat sec advisor 75 b2  ollie stack of WU telgrams, but co gave 1/2 off; mine nic harbor world ct ~; jw wanted unanimous, so dropped some tougher stuff, so gop spun as witch hunt, no big deal 81

==

ELLIOT ABRAMS

Role In Going To War: Abrams was one of the defendants in the Iran-Contra Affair, and he pled guilty to two misdemeanor counts of withholding information from Congress. He was appointed Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director on the National Security Council for Near East and North African Affairs during Bush’s first term, where he served as Bush’s chief advisor on the Middle East. His name surfaced as part of the investigation into who leaked the name of a undercover CIA operative Valerie Plame. Washington Post, [5/27/03, 2/3/05]

Where He Is Now: Abrams was promoted to deputy national security adviser in February of 2005. In that position, he has led a smear campaign to attack Speaker Nancy Pelosi for visiting Syria. Slate, [2/17/05; IPS, 4/9/07; Washington Post, 2/15/07]

Key Quote: “We recognize that military action in Iraq, if necessary, will have adverse humanitarian consequences. We have been planning over the last several months, across all relevant agencies, to limit any such consequences and provide relief quickly.” CNN, [2/25/03]

2x highlight

Abrams Key Denier of Human Rights Abuses by Salvadoran Government

Of the Romero assassination, Abrams told the Washington Post in 1993 [9] that "anybody who thinks you're going to find a cable that says that Roberto d'Aubuisson murdered the archbishop is a fool." But as the Post noted in that same article, the U.S. Embassy sent at least two such cables to Washington fingering d'Aubuisson -- the December 21, 1981 cable, for example, describes: "A meeting, chaired by Maj. Roberto d'Aubuisson, during which the murder of Archbishop Romero was planned. During the meeting, some of the participants drew lots for the privilege of killing the archbishop."

But Abrams is perhaps best known for denying one of the worst atrocities of the war, the massacre at El Mozote, where in December 1981 U.S-trained government soldiers marched into a village and murdered around 800 civilians, many of whom were women and children. The men were tortured before being shot, and girls as young as 10 were raped before having their throats slit. Abrams, who at the time was Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, dismissed reports published in the New York Times and Washington Post about the massacre, telling a Senate committee tasked with certifying the Salvadoran government's human rights record that the reports of deaths "were not credible" and suggesting the guerrillas had "significantly misused" the stories for propaganda. The U.N. Truth Commission later confirmed the newspapers' reports on the massacre, and the Salvadoran government (which elected its first left-wing president ever in 2009) officially apologized for the event in December of last year.

These and other denials helped justify another ten years of United States funding for the Salvadoran military and its death squads.The tiny country would receive $6 billion from the U.S. over the course of its civil war, making it the second-highest recipient of U.S. aid behind Israel during that period, despite mounting death tolls and continued atrocities.

Abrams has remained unrepentant about U.S. policy in El Salvador, **calling it** [9] "one of fabulous achievement." He was convicted in 1991 of two misdemeanors for unlawfully withholding information from Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal but was pardoned by the first President Bush.

Abrams, Neocons Passing the Torch to VP Pick Ryan

This week,The Daily Beastfirst reported [10] that Abrams' latest act is advising Republican GOP candidate Ryan on foreign policy. Abrams told the website Ryan "knows more about foreign policy than people may think, in view of his concentration on the economy." Other right-wing foreign policy experts told The Daily Beast that despite Ryan's professed fiscal conservatism, he, like Reagan, supports spending billions or trillions to preserve U.S. military power and international influence. 

Ryan has long been mentored by neoconservative Republican leaders who advanced U.S. policy in El Salvador. His first job in D.C. was as an aide to Sen. Bob Kasten of Wisconsin, a cheerleader for sending billions to El Salvador's brutal military government and who in the 1980s chaired the Senate foreign operations appropriations subcommittee responsible for approving those funds.

After Kasten lost his seat to Russ Feingold in 1992, Ryan became a speechwriter for the right-wing think tank Empower America, which was founded by Jeane Kirkpatrick and Jack Kemp. As a foreign policy adviser to Reagan in 1980 Kirkpatrick famously defended the rape, murder, and torture of four American Catholic missionaries (three of whom were nuns and one a lay missionary) at the hands of El Salvador's government forces, claiming "the nuns were not just nuns. The nuns were also political activists." Kirkpatrick went on to become Reagan's UN Ambassador. Kemp, who Ryan recently identified [11] as a key mentor, was also a major supporter of U.S. funding to El Salvador's military government.

==

U.S.-Funded War in El Salvador Casts Shadow over Romney/Ryan Campaign

by Brendan Fischer [1] — August 16, 2012 - 8:39am

• Topics: Election 2012 [2], Democracy [3], Politics [4]

Amidst reports that Mitt Romney launched Bain Capital with funds from investors tied to 1980s Salvadoran death squads, his new running mate Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) is getting foreign policy briefings from a man who actively covered-up some of the worst atrocities committed by those same death squads.The GOP's vice-presidential candidate also earned his political stripes working under neoconservative Republicans who funneled billions in U.S. aid to those military hitmen. Though the war in El Salvador was just one chapter in history, Romney and Ryan's relationship with that war may provide a snapshot into their worldview.

Between 1979 and 1992, an estimated 75,000 people were killed in the conflict in El Salvador and countless others were "disappeared" or displaced, an astonishing number for a country the size of Massachusetts. A United Nations Truth Commission estimated [6] that the right-wing, military-led government was responsible for 85 percent of the violence while the left-wing insurgency fighting against vast economic and political inequality, including farmers, teachers, priests and union activists, was responsible for only 5 percent. Much of the violence was attributable to clandestine military or paramilitary death squads, which committed countless assassinations and acts of brutal violence against suspected political dissidents. 

Recent reports suggest that some of the same members of the Salvadoran oligarchy that backed the death squads gave Romney the startup funds for Bain Capital.

Romney's Early Bain Capital Funders Tied to Salvadoran Death Squads

Photo from El Salvador's civil warLast week, the Huffington Post's Ryan Grim and Cole Stangler reported [7] on how Romney went to Miami in 1983, at the height of El Salvador's civil war, to raise $9 million from Salvadoran expatriate families to start Bain Capital. This seed money amounted to 40 percent of Bain's startup funds. Although Romney claimed that he had vetted the backgrounds of the investors, some of their families had been identified by the U.S. ambassador and others as closely tied to either death squads or death squad leader and ARENA Party founder Roberto d'Aubuisson (known as "Blowtorch Bob" for his use of blowtorches to torture political prisoners).

Archbishop Oscar Romero

D'Aubuisson was later found responsible for ordering the assassination of Salvadoran Archbishop Oscar Romero, a prominent advocate for the poor and critic of the Salvadoran government (who the Vatican has now placed in the process of canonization to become a saint). In the United States, though, the Reagan administration foreign policy team would actively deny d'Aubuisson's involvement in the assassination, as well as the Salvadoran government's involvement in other human rights atrocities, so as to justify a heavy flow of military aid to the country's government as part of Reagan's Cold War-era policy to suppress any chance of another Cuba emerging in Latin America. A key player in those official denials was Elliot Abrams, an Assistant Secretary of State under President Ronald Reagan who still boasts that he "supervised U.S. policy in Latin America and the Caribbean." [8]

In recent months, Abrams has been advising Romney's Vice Presidential candidate Paul Ryan on foreign policy.

Abrams Key Denier of Human Rights Abuses by Salvadoran Government

Of the Romero assassination, Abrams told the Washington Post in 1993 [9] that "anybody who thinks you're going to find a cable that says that Roberto d'Aubuisson murdered the archbishop is a fool." But as the Post noted in that same article, the U.S. Embassy sent at least two such cables to Washington fingering d'Aubuisson -- the December 21, 1981 cable, for example, describes: "A meeting, chaired by Maj. Roberto d'Aubuisson, during which the murder of Archbishop Romero was planned. During the meeting, some of the participants drew lots for the privilege of killing the archbishop."

Memorial at El Mozote

But Abrams is perhaps best known for denying one of the worst atrocities of the war, the massacre at El Mozote, where in December 1981 U.S-trained government soldiers marched into a village and murdered around 800 civilians, many of whom were women and children. The men were tortured before being shot, and girls as young as 10 were raped before having their throats slit. Abrams, who at the time was Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, dismissed reports published in the New York Times and Washington Post about the massacre, telling a Senate committee tasked with certifying the Salvadoran government's human rights record that the reports of deaths "were not credible" and suggesting the guerrillas had "significantly misused" the stories for propaganda. The U.N. Truth Commission later confirmed the newspapers' reports on the massacre, and the Salvadoran government (which elected its first left-wing president ever in 2009) officially apologized for the event in December of last year.

These and other denials helped justify another ten years of United States funding for the Salvadoran military and its death squads. The tiny country would receive $6 billion from the U.S. over the course of its civil war, making it the second-highest recipient of U.S. aid behind Israel during that period, despite mounting death tolls and continued atrocities.

Elliot AbramsAbrams has remained unrepentant about U.S. policy in El Salvador, calling it [9] "one of fabulous achievement." He was convicted in 1991 of two misdemeanors for unlawfully withholding information from Congress during the Iran-Contra scandal but was pardoned by the first President Bush.

Abrams, Neocons Passing the Torch to VP Pick Ryan

This week,The Daily Beastfirst reported [10] that Abrams' latest act is advising Republican GOP candidate Ryan on foreign policy. Abrams told the website Ryan "knows more about foreign policy than people may think, in view of his concentration on the economy." Other right-wing foreign policy experts told The Daily Beast that despite Ryan's professed fiscal conservatism, he, like Reagan, supports spending billions or trillions to preserve U.S. military power and international influence. 

Ryan has long been mentored by neoconservative Republican leaders who advanced U.S. policy in El Salvador. His first job in D.C. was as an aide to Sen. Bob Kasten of Wisconsin, a cheerleader for sending billions to El Salvador's brutal military government and who in the 1980s chaired the Senate foreign operations appropriations subcommittee responsible for approving those funds.

After Kasten lost his seat to Russ Feingold in 1992, Ryan became a speechwriter for the right-wing think tank Empower America, which was founded by Jeane Kirkpatrick and Jack Kemp. As a foreign policy adviser to Reagan in 1980 Kirkpatrick famously defended the rape, murder, and torture of four American Catholic missionaries (three of whom were nuns and one a lay missionary) at the hands of El Salvador's government forces, claiming "the nuns were not just nuns. The nuns were also political activists." Kirkpatrick went on to become Reagan's UN Ambassador. Kemp, who Ryan recently identified [11] as a key mentor, was also a major supporter of U.S. funding to El Salvador's military government.

Even if Romney can distance himself from the death squad-linked Salvadoran investors that provided the seed money for his vast wealth, Ryan's political upbringing and his being mentored by a man of Abrams' pedigree makes it clear that the tragedies of El Salvador's civil war and this dark chapter in U.S. history will continue to cast a shadow over the Romney - Ryan campaign.

Center for Media and Democracy • 520 University Avenue, Suite 260 • Madison, Wisconsin 53703

Phone: 608-260-9713 • Fax: 608-260-9714

Source URL: http://www.prwatch.org/news/2012/08/11710/us-funded-war-el-salvador-casts-shadow-over-romneyryan-campaign

Links:

 srcwtch:

Elliott Abrams works at the Council on Foreign Relations, as a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies.^[1] He is also best known for his hardline zionist advocacy, and he lists among the early neocons.^[2] In March 1980, Abrams married Rachel Decter, daughter of conservative pundits Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter.

He previously served as Deputy Assistant to President George W. Bush and Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy.^[3] In the Bush Administration, Abrams assisted Stephen J. Hadley "in work on the promotion of democracy andhuman rights ?!, and will provide oversight" to the National Security Council's directorate of Democracy, Human Rights, and International Organization Affairs and its directorate of Near East and North African Affairs. Abrams will work with Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Hadley, and "will maintain his involvement in Israeli/Palestinian affairs," the White House said.^[3]

"Abrams has served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Near East and North African Affairs since December 2002. Prior to holding that position, he was Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights and International Operations."^[3]

Abrams was first appointed to serve as a deputy national security advisor to President George W. Bush and the National Security Council. He also served as Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American affairs in the Reagan administration as Assistant Secretary of State under Ronald Reagan.

Controversy

PNAC

Abrams, considered to be a "neo-con", was a signatory of the 26 January 1998, Project for the New American Century sent to President Clinton.^[4]

Iran-Contra Scandal

Abrams was heavily involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. In 1991, Abrams was indicted by the Iran-Contra special prosecutor for giving false testimony before Congress in 1987 about his role in illicitly raising money for the Nicaraguan Contras. He pleaded guilty to two lesser offenses of withholding information to Congress in order to avoid a trial and a possible jail term.^[5]

He was pardoned by President George H.W. Bush along with a number of other Iran-Contra defendants on Christmas night 1992.^[6]

Profiles

• Elliott Abrams was appointed Dec. 3, 2002, as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Near East and North African Affairs, including Arab/Israel relations and U.S. efforts to promote peace and security in the region.^[7]

• Mr. Abrams began his service in the U.S. Government in the 1970s as Assistant Counsel to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, as Special Counsel to Senator Henry Jackson, and as Special Counsel and then Chief of Staff to Senator Daniel P. Moynihan. During the Ronald Reagan Administration, Mr. Abrams served as Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, and then as Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs.^[8]

• After Reagan left office in 1989, Abrams, like a number of other prominent neo-conservatives, was not invited to serve in the :{George H.W. Bush administration:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}:. Instead, he worked for a number of :{think tanks:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}: and :{eventually became head:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}: of the Ethics and Public Policy Center (EPPC) where he wrote widely on foreign-policy issues, including the Middle East, and the threats posed by U.S. secular society to Jewish identity. He also remained an integral part of the tight-knit neo-conservative foreign-policy community in Washington that revolved around one of his early mentors, :{Richard N. Perle:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}: and former :{UN:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}: Ambassador :{Jeane J. Kirkpatrick:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}: at the :{American Enterprise Institute:(style="background-color:#fff200"):}: (AEI).^{[citation needed]}

• "Before assuming his post at the State Department, he was an attorney with the law firm of Verner, Lipfert, Bernhard and McPherson of Washington, DC, in 1979 - 1981. He was special counsel to Senator Daniel Moynihan (D - NY) in 1977 - 1979. In 1973 - 1975 he was an attorney with the firm of Breed, Abbott and Morgan of Boston, MA."^[9]

• Elliott Abrams received his bachelor's degree from Harvard (1969), earned a master's in International Relations from the London School of Economics, and received his J.D. from Harvard Law School (1973).^[10]

Affiliations

• American Committee for Peace in Chechnya, Former Member;^[11]
• American Jewish Committee, Former Member, National Advisory Council;^[11]
• Beliefnet, Former Columnist;^[11]
• Center for Security Policy, Former Member, National Security Advisory Council;^[11]
• Committee on U.S. Interests in the Middle East, Former Member;^[11]
• Committee for the Free World, Member of 1985 Conference on Reagan-Gorbachev Summit in Geneva;^[11]
• Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf, Former Member (1998)^[11]
• Council on Foreign Relations, Former Member;^[11]
• Ethics and Public Policy Center, President 1996-2001;^[11]
• Francisco Marroquin Foundation, Former Chairman;^[11]
• Heritage Foundation, Alumnus of Heritage Foundation Resource Bank;^[11]
• Hudson Institute, Senior Fellow 1990-1996;^[11]
• Inter-American Foundation, board 1985-1990;^[11]
• Middle East Forum: Signatory of 2000 report urging military action against Syria;^[11]
• National Review, Former Contributing Editor;^[11]
• Nicaraguan Resistance Foundation, Former Chairman^[11]
• Project for the New American Century, Founding Member;^[11]
• Social Democrats, USA: Former Member; ^[11]
• U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, member and chairman 1999-2001.
• Former member, Independent Task Force on :{Columbia:(style="background-color:#ffff66;"):}:
• Former member, US Commission on International Religious Freedom ^[12]

Government Service

• National Security Council: Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Near East and North African Affairs, 2002-present ; Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations, 2001-2002^[11]
• U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom: Chairman, 2000-2001; Commissioner, 1999-2001^[11]
• State Department: Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, 1985-1989; Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs, 1981-1985; Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, 1981^[11]
• U.S. Senate: Chief of Staff for Sen. Daniel P. Moynihan, Special Counsel, 1977-1979; Office of Sen. Henry M. Jackson, Staffer/Special Counsel, 1975-1976^[11]
• Senate Permanent Subcommittee onInvestigations: Assistant Counsel, 1975^[11]

Private Sector

• Verner, Lipfert, Bernhard, & McPherson: Associate, 1979-1981^[11]
• Breed, Abbott, & Morgan: Attorney, 1973-1975^[11]

Education

• Harvard University: B.A., 1969^[11]
• London School of Economics: M.Sc., 1970^[11]
• Harvard Law School: J.D., 1973^[11]

Published Works

• Democracy How Direct?: Views from the Founding Era and the Polling Era, 2002 ISBN 0742523187
• The Influence of Faith, 2001 ISBN 0742507629
• International Religious Freedom (2001): Annual Report: Submitted by the U.S. Department of State, editor 2001 ISBN 0756713382
• Secularism, Spirituality, and the Future of American Jewry 1999 ISBN 0896331903
• Close Calls: Intervention, Terrorism, Missile Defense, and 'Just War' Today 1998 ISBN 0896331873
• Undue Process A Story of How Political Differences are Turned into Crimes 1998 ISBN 0029001676
• Honor Among Nations: Intangible Interests and Foreign Policy 1998 ISBN 0896331881
• Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America 1997 ISBN 0684825112
• Security and Sacrifice: Isolation, Intervention, and American Foreign Policy 1995 ISBN 1558130497
• Shield and Sword 1995 ISBN 002900165X

Resources and articles

Related Sourcewatch

• Elliott Abrams/Foreign Policy Hawk

References

1. ↑ [1]
2. ↑ RightWeb: profile
3. ↑ ^{3.0 3.1 3.2} President George W. Bush, "Personnel Announcement", Media Release, 2 February 2005.
4. �� Elliott Abrams et al, Letter to The Honorable William J. Clinton, Project for the New American Century, January 26, 1998.
5. ↑ Lawrence E. Walsh, United States v. Elliott Abrams, Chapter 25 from Final Report of the Independent Counsel for Iran/Contra Affairs, August 4, 1993.
6. ↑ Robert Parry, "Rehnquist's Legacy: A Partisan Court", Consortium News, September 7, 2005.
7. ↑ George W. Bush, "Zalmay Khalilzad, Elliot Abrahms named to new positions", Media Release, December 3, 2002.
8. ↑ Condoleezza Rice, "Statement by the Press Secretary", Media Release, June 28, 2001.
9. ↑ "Appointment of 17 Members of the Commission on the Bicentennial of the United States Constitution, and Designation of the Chairman", Media Release, June 25, 1985.
10. ↑ George W. Bush, "Personnel Announcement", Media Release, February 2, 2005.
11. ↑ ^{11.00 11.01 11.02 11.03 11.04 11.05 11.06 11.07 11.08 11.09 11.10 11.11 11.12 11.13 11.14 11.15 11.16 11.17 11.18 11.19 11.20 11.21 11.22 11.23 11.24 11.25 11.26 11.27} "Profile: Elliott Abrams", RightWeb, December 22, 2008.
12. ↑ 2000 Annual Report, U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, accessed September 20, 2007.

External articles

• Deputy National Security Advisor Elliott Abrams Schema-Root.org cross-referenced newsfeed.
• Appointments & Nominations, June 25, 1985, Ronald Reagan Archives, University of Texas.
• David Corn, "Elliott Abrams: It's Back!", The Nation, June 14, 2001.
• Jim Lobe, "Bush's trusty new Mideast point man," Asia Times, December 19, 2002: "Yet another Likudnik is moving to a position where they control Washington's agenda on the Mideast," said Rashid Khalidi, a Mideast historian at the University of Chicago. "This is a tragedy for the Israeli and American people." Supporters of Likud were naturally more enthusiastic. "I believe Abrams understands that this is a not a war over borders, but over Israel's existence, something that almost no one in the State Department acknowledges," Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, told the Jewish weekly Forward last week.
• Richard H. Curtiss, Elliott Abrams, Militant Zionist, Chosen for NSC Post (Side Bar), Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, January/February 2003.
• Jim Lobe, "Israel's Likud Scores Big With White House Appointment," Inter Press Service (RadioIslam.org), January 4, 2003.
• Richard Sale, "Staff change means Mideast policy shift," UPI (Washington Times) (RadioIslam.org), February 25, 2003.
• Michael Dobbs, "Back in Political Forefront", The Washington Post (truthout), May 27, 2003.
• Robert Parry, "Bush Taps Iran-Contra Figure Elliot Abrams to Promote Democracy" (transcript link to audio), Democracy Now!, February 4, 2005.
• Tom Barry, "Elliott Abrams: the Neocon's Neocon", CounterPunch, February 9, 2005.
• Michael Hirsh and Dan Ephron, "The Last Man Standing. With the neocons in disarray, Elliott Abrams may be their best hope for keeping President Bush onboard," Newsweek (MSNBC), December 4, 2006 (issue).
• William M. Leogrande and Jim Lobe, "Wright Redux. The flap over Nancy Pelosi's Syria trip echoes a 20-year-old fight with a previous Democratic House Speaker -- and is being driven by the same right-wing Republican hawks," The American Prospect, April 9, 2007. re Nancy Pelosi, Dick Cheney, and Newt Gingrich
• "The Architects of War: Where Are They Now?" Think Progress, July 2007.
• Ran HaCohen, Was Elliott Abrams Hitler��s Senior Advisor?, Antiwar.com, 16 September 2011.

Categories:

• All articles with unsourced statements
• Articles with unsourced statements
• Politics (U.S.)
• US government
• PNAC
• Neocons

 wikifluff:

Elliott Abrams (born January 24, 1948) is an American diplomat, lawyer and political scientist who served in foreign policy positions for U.S. Presidents, Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.^[7] While serving for Reagan, Abrams and retired U.S. Marine Corps officer Oliver North were integral players in the Iran-Contra affair.^[8]

He is currently a senior fellow for Middle Eastern studies at the Council on Foreign Relations.^[9] Additionally, Abrams holds positions on the Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf (CPSG), Center for Security Policy & National Secretary Advisory Council, Committee for a Free Lebanon, and the Project for the New American Century.^[10] He also was the president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington in 1996. Abrams is a current member of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Council and teaches foreign policy at Georgetown University as well as maintaining a CFR blog called “Pressure Points” about the U.S. foreign policy and human rights.^[8] In February 2014, Abrams, a commissioner of the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom, gave testimony before a House congressional committee that Christians globally are the most persecuted of the world religions.^[11]

During the Reagan administration, Abrams gained notoriety for his involvement in controversial foreign policy decisions regarding Nicaragua and El Salvador. During Bush's first term, he served as Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director on the National Security Council for Near East and North African Affairs. At the start of Bush's second term, Abrams was promoted to be his Deputy National Security Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy, in charge of promoting Bush's strategy of advancing democracy abroad. His appointment by Bush was controversial due to his conviction in 1991 on two misdemeanor counts of unlawfully withholding information from Congress during the Iran-Contra Affair investigation.

• 1 Early years
• 2 Assistant Secretary of State, 1980s
  • 2.1 El Salvador
  • 2.2 Nicaragua
• 3 Iran-Contra affair
• 4 Special Assistant to President Bush
  • 4.1 2002 Venezuelan coup
• 5 Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy
• 6 Affiliation history
  • 6.1 Institutional affiliations
  • 6.2 Editorial affiliations
  • 6.3 Public service
• 7 Books
  • 7.1 Government
  • 7.2 Religion
• 8 Notes
• 9 Further reading
• 10 External links

brams was born into a Jewish family in New York in 1948. His father was an immigration lawyer. He attended Harvard College in the late 1960s and was a roommate of Steven Kelman, founder of the Young People's Socialist League campus chapter. Together they penned an article on the 1969 Harvard strike for The New Leader, “The Contented Revolutionists.”.^[12] Abrams received his Bachelor of Arts from Harvard College in 1969, a master’s degree in international relations from the London School of Economics in 1970, and his J.D. from Harvard Law School in 1973. He practiced law in New York in the summers for his father, and then at Breed, Abbott and Morgan from 1973 to 1975 and with Verner, Liipfert, Bernhard and McPherson from 1979 to 1981.

Abrams worked as an assistant counsel on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations in 1975, then worked as a staffer on Senator Henry “Scoop” Jackson’s brief campaign for the 1976 Democratic Party presidential nomination. From 1977 through 1979, he served as special counsel and ultimately as chief of staff for the then-new senator Daniel Moynihan. Through Senator Moynihan, Abrams was introduced to Rachel**Decter**, the stepdaughter of Moynihan’s friend Norman Podhoretz, editor of Commentary. They were married from 1980 until her death in June 2013. The couple had three children: Jacob, Sarah, and Joseph.^[13]

Assistant Secretary of State, 1980s:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

Abrams first came to national prominence when he served as Reagan's Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs in the early 1980s and later as Assistant Secretary for Inter-American Affairs. His nomination to Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs was unanimously approved by the**Senate Foreign Relations Committee**on November 17, 1981.^[14] Abrams was Reagan's second choice for the position; his first nominee,Ernest W. Lefever, had been rejected by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on June 5, 1981.^[14]

During this time, Abrams clashed regularly with church groups and human rights organizations, including Human Rights Watch.^[15][16] and Amnesty International, over the Reagan administration's foreign policies. They accused him of covering up atrocities committed by the military forces of US-backed governments, such as those in El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala, and the rebel Contras in Nicaragua.

El Salvador:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

In early 1982, when reports of the El Mozote massacre of civilians by the military in El Salvador began appearing in U.S. media, Abrams told a Senate committee that the reports of hundreds of deaths at El Mozote "were not credible," and that "it appears to be an incident that is at least being significantly misused, at the very best, by the guerrillas."^[17] The massacre had come at a time when the Reagan administration was attempting to bolster the human rights image of the Salvadoran military. Abrams implied that reports of a massacre were simply FMLN propaganda and denounced U.S. investigative reports of the massacre as misleading. In March 1993, theSalvadoran Truth Commission reported that over 500 civilians were “deliberately and systematically” executed in El Mozote in December 1981 by forces affiliated with the Salvadoran government.^[18]

Also in 1993, documentation emerged suggesting that some Reagan administration officials could have known about El Mozote and other human rights violations from the beginning.^[19] However, in July 1993, an investigation commissioned by Clinton secretary of state Warren Christopher into the State department’s "activities and conduct" with regard to human rights in El Salvador during the Reagan years found that, despite US funding of the Salvadoran government that committed the massacre at El Mozote, individual US personnel “performed creditably and occasionally with personal bravery in advancing human rights in El Salvador.”^[20] Unrepentant Reaganite Abrams claimed that Washington’s policy in El Salvador was a ”fabulous achievement.”^[21]

Nicaragua:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

When Congress shut down funding for the Contras' efforts to overthrow Nicaragua's Sandinista government with the 1982 Boland Amendment, members of the Reagan administration began looking for other avenues for funding the group.^[22] Congress opened a couple of such avenues when it modified the Boland Amendment for fiscal year 1986 by approving $27 million in direct aid to the Contras and allowing the administration to legally solicit funds for the Contras from foreign governments.^[23]Neither the direct aid, nor any foreign contributions, could be used to purchase weapons.^[23] Guided by the new provisions of the modified Boland Amendment, Abrams flew to London in August 1986 and met secretly with Bruneian defense minister General Ibnu to solicit a $10-million contribution from the Sultan of Brunei.^[24][25]Ultimately, the Contras never received this money because a clerical error in Oliver North's office (a mistyped account number) sent the Bruneian money to the wrong Swiss bank account.^[25]

Iran-Contra affair:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

During investigation of the Iran-Contra Affair, Lawrence Walsh, the Independent Counsel tasked with investigating the case, prepared multiple felony counts against Abrams but never indicted him.^[25] Instead, Abrams cooperated with Walsh and entered into a plea agreement wherein he pled guilty to two misdemeanors of withholding information from Congress.^[26] He was sentenced to a $50 fine, probation for two years, and 100 hours of community service. However, Abrams was pardoned by President George H. W. Bush, in December 1992 (as he was leaving office following his loss in that yearin the U.S. presidential election). On February 5, 1997, the D.C. Court of Appeals publicly censured Abrams for giving false testimony on three occasions before congressional committees. Although a majority of the court voted to impose a public censure, three judges in the majority would have imposed a suspension of six months, and a fourth judge would have followed the recommendation of the Board on Professional Responsibility that Abrams be suspended for a year.

Special Assistant to President Bush:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

President George W. Bush appointed Abrams to the post of Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations at the National Security Council on June 25, 2001.^[27] Abrams was appointed special assistant to the President and the NSC’s senior director for Near East and North African Affairs on December 2, 2002.^[28] Some human rights groups and commentators considered his White House appointment repugnant due to his conviction in the Iran-Contra Affair investigation and his role in overseeing the Reagan administration’s foreign policy in Latin America which resulted in the deaths of hundreds of thousands.^[29][30]

2002 Venezuelan coup:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

The Observer has claimed that Abrams had advance knowledge of, and "gave a nod to," the Venezuelan coup attempt of 2002 against Hugo Chávez.^[31] However, a review by the State Department’s inspector general made the following conclusion: “Our government’s opposition to the use of undemocratic or unconstitutional means to remove President Chávez was repeated over and over again during the relevant period by key policymakers and spokespersons in Washington and by our representatives in Caracas in both public and private forums. And, far from working to foment his overthrow, the United States alerted President Chávez to coup plots and warned him of an assassination threat that was deemed to be credible.”^[32] Yet the U.S. government gave tacit approval to the coup initially, refusing to condemn the coup until after the president installed by the coup had already been forced to resign by the people.^[33]

Advisor for Global Democracy Strategy:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

On February 2, 2005, President George W. Bush appointed Abrams deputy national security adviser for Global Democracy Strategy.^[34] In his new position, Abrams became responsible for overseeing theNational Security Council’s directorate of Democracy, Human Rights,and International Organization Affairs and its directorate of Near East and North African Affairs.^[34]

Abrams accompanied Condoleezza Rice as a primary adviser on her visits to the Middle East in late July 2006 in the course of discussions relating to the 2006 Israel-Lebanon conflict.^[35]

Affiliation history:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

Institutional affiliations:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

• American Committee for Peace in Chechnya: Member
• NGO Monitor: member of the International Advisory Board^[36]
• American Jewish Committee: Former member, National Advisory Council
• Center for Security Policy: Former member, National Security Advisory Council
• Committee for the Free World: Member of 1985 conference on Reagan-Gorbachev summit meeting in Geneva
• Committee for Peace and Security in the Gulf: Former Member (1998)
• Committee on U.S. Interests in the Middle East: Former Member
• Council on Foreign Relations: Member
• Ethics and Public Policy Center: President, 1996–2002
• Heritage Foundation: Alumnus of Heritage Foundation Resource Bank
• Francisco Marroquin Foundation: Former chairman
• Hudson Institute: Senior Fellow, 1990–96

• Independent Task Force on Colombia: Former member
• Middle East Forum: Signatory of 2000 report urging military action against Syria
• Nicaraguan Resistance Foundation: Former chairman
• Project for the New American Century: Signatory of 1997 Statement of Principles and various other statements
• U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom: Former member
• National Endowment for Democracy: Board of Directors ^[37]

Editorial affiliations:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

• National Review: Former contributing author
• Policy Review: Former contributing author
• Beliefnet: Columnist

Public service:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

• U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom: Chairman, 2000–2001; Commissioner, 1999–2001
• Inter-American Foundation: nominated as member of Board of Directors for the 1985–90 term

Books:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

Government:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

• Democracy How Direct?: Views from the Founding Era and the Polling Era. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2002. p. 144. ISBN 0-7425-2318-7.
• Abrams, Elliott and Johnson, James Turner, ed. (June 1998). Close Calls: Intervention, Terrorism, Missile Defense, and "Just War" Today. Ethics and Public Policy Center. p. 389. ISBN 0-89633-187-3.
• Abrams, Elliott and Kagan, Donald, ed. (April 1998). Honor Among Nations: Intangible Interests and Foreign Policy. Ethics & Public Policy Center. p. 112. ISBN 0-89633-188-1.
• Security and Sacrifice: Isolation, Intervention, and American Foreign Policy. Hudson Institute. January 1995. p. 152. ISBN 1-55813-049-7.
• Shield and Sword: Neutrality and Engagement in American Foreign Policy. The Free Press. 1995. p. 256. ISBN 0-02-900165-X.
• Undue Process A Story of How Political Differences are Turned into Crimes. Free Press. October 1992. p. 320. ISBN 0-02-900167-6.

Religion:{:(style="margin-right:0px;margin-left:0px"):}:[edit:{]}:

• The Influence of Faith. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc. 2001. p. 256. ISBN 0-7425-0762-9.
• Abrams, Elliott, ed. (June 2004). International Religious Freedom (2001): Annual Report: Submitted by the U.S. Department of State. Diane Pub Co. p. 210. ISBN 0-7567-1338-2.
• Abrams, Elliott and Dalin, David, ed. (February 1999). Secularism, Spirituality, and the Future of American Jewry. Ethics & Public Policy Center. ISBN 0-89633-190-3.
• Faith or Fear: How Jews Can Survive in a Christian America. Free Press. June 1997. p. 256. ISBN 0-684-82511-2.

http://www.nndb.com/people/326/000024254/

Executive summary: Asst. Secy. of State involved in Iran-Contra

As Assistant Secretary of State for the Americas to Ronald Reagan, Abrams was deeply involved in the Iran-Contra scandal. Inexplicably appointed by George W. Bush to oversee the Palestine-Israel conflict.

Flew to London under the pseudonym Mr. Kenilworth and asked the Sultan of Brunei for a $10 million donation to the Iran-Contra startup. Plead guilty in 1991 to witholding information from Congress. Pardoned by**George H.W. Bush**for his Iran-Contra crimes.

In 2005, appointed by George W. Bush as Deputy National Security Adviser.

Father: (immigration attorney)

Wife: Rachel Abrams (m. Mar-1980)

Executive summary: Conservative activist

Father: Moshe Decter (b. 14-Oct-1921, d. 2007)

Father: Norman Podhoretz (stepfather)

Mother: Midge Decter

Sister: Naomi Munson

Sister: Ruthie Blum Leibowitz (Jerusalem Post columnist and features editor)

Brother: John Podhoretz

Husband: Elliott Abrams (m. Mar-1980, three children)

Then, Bosworth went on to say that the U.S. was not giving any military assistance to Guatemala, but I guess it was a couple weeks after that interview when we went down to Guatemala, I met a U.S. Green Beret, Captain Jesse Garcia, who was training the Guatemalan military in combat techniques, including what he called how—in his words, "how to destroy towns." This was apart from the weapons and U.S. munitions that I mentioned before, apart from the CIA trainers who were working in the CIA-built headquarters of the G-2, the military intelligence service that was doing the assassinations and disappearances.

AMY GOODMAN: The G-2 being the Guatemalan G-2. Now, today Stephen Bosworth is the dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts University. But before that, in 2009, well, he played a key role in the Obama administration.

ALLAN NAIRN: Yes, rather than being—you know, in what you might consider to be a normally functioning political system, if a high government official lied like that about matters of such grave, life-and-death importance and was involved in the supply of arms to terrorists, in this case the Guatemalan military, you would expect him at the minimum to be fired and disgraced, or maybe brought up on charges. But Bosworth was actually promoted. And under the Obama administration, Hillary Clinton chose him as the special envoy to North Korea. He’s been in the news a great deal in recent times because of his very prominent role there.

AMY GOODMAN: In 1995, Allan Nairn was interviewed on Charlie Rose about his piece in The Nation called "CIA Death Squad," in which he described how Americans were directly involved in killings by the Guatemalan army. He was interviewed alongside Elliott Abrams, who challenged what he was saying. Abrams had served as assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs under President Reagan from 1981 to 1985. This clip begins with Elliott Abrams.

ELLIOTT ABRAMS: Wait a minute. We’re not here to refight the Cold War. We’re here to talk about, I thought, a specific case in which an allegation is being made that—of the husband of an American and, another case, an American citizen were killed, and there was a CIA connection with—allegedly with the person allegedly involved in it. Now, I’m happy to talk about that kind of thing. If Mr. Nairn thinks we should have been on the other side in Guatemala—that is, we should have been in favor of a guerrilla victory—I disagree with him.

ALLAN NAIRN: So you’re then admitting that you were on the side of the Guatemalan military.

ELLIOTT ABRAMS: I am admitting that it was the policy of the United States, under Democrats and Republicans, approved by Congress repeatedly, to oppose a communist guerrilla victory anywhere in Central America, including in Guatemala.

CHARLIE ROSE: Alright, well, I—

ALLAN NAIRN: A communist guerrilla victory.

CHARLIE ROSE: Yeah, I—

ALLAN NAIRN: Ninety-five percent of these victims are civilians—peasant organizers, human rights leaders—

CHARLIE ROSE: I am happy to invite both of you—

ALLAN NAIRN: —priests—assassinated by the U.S.-backed Guatemalan army. Let’s look at reality here. In reality, we’re not talking about two murders, one colonel. We’re talking about more than 100,000 murders, an entire army, many of its top officers employees of the U.S. government. We’re talking about crimes, and we’re also talking about criminals, not just people like the Guatemalan colonels, but also the U.S. agents who have been working with them and the higher-level U.S. officials. I mean, I think you have to be—you have to apply uniform standards. President Bush once talked about putting Saddam Hussein on trial for crimes against humanity, Nuremberg-style tribunal. I think that’s a good idea. But if you’re serious, you have to be even-handed. If we look at a case like this, I think we have to talk—start talking about putting Guatemalan and U.S. officials on trial. I think someone like Mr. Abrams would be a fit—a subject for such a Nuremberg-style inquiry. But I agree with Mr. Abrams that Democrats would have to be in the dock with him. The Congress has been in on this. The Congress approved the sale of 16,000 M-16s to Guatemala. In ’87 and ’88—