United States News Digest
Kissinger Protégé Named U.S. Ambassador to Iraq
In announcing the appointment of current U.S. Ambassador to the UN John Negroponte as Ambassador to Iraq, President Bush praised Negroponte as having done a "really good job" of spreading "freedom and peace" around the world. A Kissinger protégé, who worked with Sir Henry during the Paris peace talks to end the Vietnam War, Negroponte, as Ambassador to the Philippines, Honduras, and Mexico, did not exhibit freedom and peace as his strong points.
His "service" in Honduras is illustrative. Negroponte used his 1981-84 stint as Ambassador for the sole purpose of establishing the drug-linked Contra operation there. As EIR documented in its 1996 report, "Would a President Bob Dole prosecute drug super-kingpin George Bush?", Negroponte was infamous for acting as an imperial proconsul. He crushed all Honduran opposition to the basing of the Contras in that country, and chose the notoriously corrupt Moonie agent, Gen. Gustavo Alvarez, as his "inside" man for the Contra operation. Several prominent Alvarez backers were arrested in 1984 for cocaine trafficking and coup plotting. Negroponte's wife, Diana Villiers-Negroponte, has her own dirty history as well. She was a top British Tory Party intelligence operative, descended from one of Scotland's oldest aristocratic families. While her husband served as Ambassador, she controlled access to refugee camps in Honduras set up for the Nicaraguan "Miskito" Indians, a group long controlled by the British, dating back to the 18th Century.
Bush "41" appointed Negroponte as Ambassador to Mexico in 1989, a move that scandalized Mexicans who knew of Negroponte's dirty past.
The Washington Post noted April 20 that Negroponte was a "contentious" appointment as Ambassador to the UN, precisely because of his role in Honduras, but then quotes unnamed Democratic Congressional staffers who insist that "the Honduras issue is ancient history."
Negroponte's appointment will have to be confirmed by the Senate.
Ridge Says 'Ratchet Up' Terror Alert
Speaking at an event in Las Vegas April 19, Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge said the government must "ratchet up" security, from now through the 2005 inauguration, not based on "specific or credible intelligence" but rather, on suspicion that high-profile political, economic, and athletic events are good targets, such as the upcoming World War II Memorial dedication, and the Democratic and Republican national conventions. He has a created new task force, comprised representatives of nine Cabinet departments, to coordinate government and private security through the inauguration, USA Today reported April 20.
Rep. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) ridiculed this: The Homeland Security Department, she said, "should not have to form a special task force to protect Americans during big events. It should know how to coordinate for the security of those events." Ridge also said he will expand promotion of awareness for people to prepare for attack and complete a database which identifies vulnerabilities.
Democratic Party Left Troubled by Kerry's 'Me-Too-ism'
The New America Foundation sponsored a presentation on April 20 of Chalmers Johnson's new book "Sorrows of Empire," which covers the disasters of Iraq, the economy, and the general collapse of republican principles. The first question to Johnson, from Steve Clemons, who heads the Foundation, was, "What do you think of the Kerry campaign? It appears more and more that the only differences from Bush on Iraq are cosmetic."
Johnson expressed the demoralization of this wing of the Democratic Party: "If Kerry is going to win, it will have to be on domestic issues. The best you can say is that he's not what General Zinni calls a 'chickenhawk.' I just finished scraping off my Howard Dean bumper stickerbut even Dean, although he was against the war, had nothing to say about what the positive military policy should be." Johnson knows LaRouche well, but typically refused to mention him, while crying that "the political system just isn't providing any avenue to solve this crisis," and babbled about the World Social Forum and Seattle 1999 as the only promising direction.
Johnson said that he resigned from the Council on Foreign Relations when they published Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations, saying that it were better published by the Nazis.
Is Rice Leaking Election Strategy?
National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice told Fox News on Sunday, April 19, that the government is bracing for possible terrorist attacks before the November Presidential election. Referencing the March 11 Madrid bombings, she said the opportunity for terrorists to influence the election may "be too good to pass up for them," and that "the terrorists might have learned, we hope, the wrong lesson from Spain."
Rice's warning coincided with that of former Spanish Prime Minister Jose Maria Aznar. He said, "I told George Bush, and Tony Blair and other political leaders to be extremely careful before elections ... and to be very vigilant."
Conservatives and Neo-Cons Split Over Iraq
The deterioration of the situation in Iraq has aggravated the divisions between old-line conservatives and neo-cons, across party lines. The New York Times quoted Richard Viguerie April 19, the conservative direct-mail guru, saying, "I can't think of any other issue that has divided conservatives as much as this issue in my political lifetime." Conservative talk-show personality and columnist Pat Buchanan issued another attack on the war policy, referring to Bush's statement that "the consequences of failure in Iraq would be unthinkable." But, he writes, Iraq may well be a "no-win" situation, with the population believing it is "the wrong war, in the wrong place, at the wrong time, with the wrong enemy," and Bush had "best begin to think the unthinkable." Rep. John Duncan (R-Tenn), one of the few Republicans who voted against the war, has called for Bush to declare victory and get out.
The right-wing Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol, meanwhile, applauded Kerry for his defense of the Bush policy in Iraq, saying, "I will take Bush over Kerry, but Kerry over Buchanan or any of the lesser Buchananites on the right," adding: "If we have to make common cause with the more hawkish liberals and fight the conservatives, that is fine with me, too."
Mimicking LaRouche, Nader Calls for Iraq Troop Withdrawal
Within hours of the mass distribution via e-mail of "The LaRouche Doctrine," outlining Lyndon LaRouche's solution to the crisis in Southwest Asia, including a call for the immediate withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq, political gadfly, and independent Presidential spoiler Ralph Nader called on April 19 for the U.S. to announce a full pullout of its troops from Iraq within six months, with international peacekeepers under the UN replacing them. "How do you separate the mainstream Iraqis from the insurgents when the mainstream Iraqis are now increasingly opposed to our presence there and increasingly, quietly or otherwise, supporting the insurgents? The way you do it is you declare you are getting out."
Nader called both President George Bush and presumptive Democratic Presidential nominee John Kerry "pro-war candidates." Mimicking LaRouche's "me too" polemic, Nader said of Kerry's call for more troops to Iraq: "Now he's got to out-Bush Bush."
Bush Initiative To Train Peacekeepers
The Bush Administration is planning train Africans and others to serve as military and police in "peacekeeping" operations. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy Doug Feith is a leading spokesman for this "British East India Company" approach to training colonials as the cannon fodder for the imperial regime. The "Global Peace Operations Initiative" will be officially announced soon, with a $660 million budget over five years. Africa is the primary target for recruits, but the planned 75,000 troops could serve anywhere in peacekeeping "by the UN or by others," according to Feith. Not surprisingly, the training would be done in part by private contractors.
Gestapo Education Bill Wending Its Way Through Congress
If the right wing, pro-Israeli Likud lobby has its way, international studies departments at American universities could soon become subject to gestapo-like oversight, in the form of an International Advisory Board to be created by a bill now wending its way through Congress. Under the bill, the board would be "authorized to study, monitor, apprise and evaluate a sample of activities" supported by Title VI of the 1965 Higher Education Act, "in order to provide recommendations to the Secretary (of Education) and the Congress for the improvement" of international studies programs, especially those dealing with the Middle East. The board is to "make recommendations that will assist the Secretary and the Congress to improve the programs under this title to better reflect the national needs related to homeland security, international education and international affairs..."
Neo-con Daniel Pipes, while minimizing his own role in pushing the bill, loves the idea of an oversight board. "Middle east studies are a failed field," he wrote in a Jan. 28 article posted on catholicexchange.com, "and the academics who consume these funds (authorized under the 1965 law) also happen to allocate them a classic case of unaccountability." His complaint about the board is that "it has only advisory, not supervisory powers," being specifically prohibited from considering curricula. He complains that professors can still teach politically one-sided courses without losing their funding. Other supporters of the bill include Stanley Kurtz, who writes for synarchist William Buckley's National Review and martin Kramer, a professor of Arab studies at the Moshe Dayan Center at Tel Aviv University. The bill's backers worry that too many university Arab studies programs are not sufficiently supportive of Israel's present policies.
Academic institutions are mobilizing against the bill. The American Association of University Professors, in a March 18 action alert to its members, charged that "the establishment of this board would be a major departure from the respect Congress has traditionally shown for academic freedom on campuses and would bring political monitoring directly into the classroom."
Several Moonie Publications Shutting Down
The Moonie-owned News World Communications is shutting down several of its publications, and laying off 86 staff members, allegedly because of a "restructuring" operation. Thirty-eight employees at the Spanish-language Noticias del Mundo were informed April 16 that the publication would shut down on April 30, because the paper is "in bad shape." In addition, the glitzy Washington, D.C.-based The World and I magazine, will close, laying off 31 employees, while the bi-weekly Insight on the News is laying off 17 people. No details are given on News World Communications' financial status, although its Vice President said the company was attempting to improve its "competitive standing." All of the Moonie publications have been operating in the red, from the outset, and one recent estimate was that Moon's other "business enterprises" were subsidizing the Washington Times to the tune of over $100 million a year. So this may have implications for the overall Moonie offshore dirty operations.
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