Masters of deceit

[JSalloum at aol.com]

Masters of deceit 


Convicted felons responsible for thousands of deaths are calling the shots at 
the White House 


Isabel Hilton

Thursday August 7, 2003

The Guardian 


The announcement that Admiral John Poindexter's latest brainwave - to 
encourage betting on the likelihood of a terrorist attack - had been terminated was 
characteristically bland. It began: "The Director of the Defense Advanced 
Research Projects Agency (DARPA) announced today that DARPA's participation in the 
Futures Markets Applied to Prediction (FutureMAP) program has been withdrawn" 

The language does not betray the repugnant nature of the project, but then 
Poindexter is expert at disguising repugnant projects in bland language. He came 
to prominence in the Reagan administration, where the word "freedom" was used 
to justify renewed support for Latin American military dictatorships guilty 
of some of the most egregious human rights abuses on the planet. President 
Jimmy Carter had frozen them out, but Ronald Reagan's election meant a renewed 
round of invitations to Pentagon cocktail parties for Latin American torturers. 


The tiny, impoverished countries of central America were, to the Reagan White 
House, the most pressing threat to the United States, through their 
impertinent insistence on trying to change their internal political arrangements, first 
through the ballot box and later through resort to arms. But in those days, 
even a president was not free to do exactly what he wanted. The US constitution 
gave the right to declare war to Congress, and Congress was cramping the 
Reagan administration's style in central America. 


In El Salvador, there was a leftwing insurgency that needed to be repressed, 
but there were congressional restrictions on the numbers of US military 
personnel the president could send. Old friendships, though, are worth a lot. The 
Argentine generals were happy to lend some spare killers to help out in El 
Salvador. (Washington was so grateful that the generals thought it would not object 
to their invading the Falkland Islands - but that's another story.) 


In Honduras a local band of killers was doing a good job under the protection 
of John Negroponte, then US ambassador in Tegucigalpa, now US ambassador to 
the United Nations. In Nicaragua, the Sandinistas had overthrown the US-backed 
Somosa dictatorship and had gone on to consolidate their power by winning an 
election. The problem was that Congress had voted the Boland amendment, which 
banned the administration from funding their favourite Nicaraguan terrorists, 
the Contras, who had been engaged to overthrow the Nicaraguan government. 


Poindexter, by then national security adviser, proved his worth with a 
breathtakingly simple scheme. The administration would sell arms to Iran and divert 
the proceeds to the Contras. Since both ends of the operation were highly 
illegal - Iran was also under a US arms embargo - it had to be secret. 


It worked for a while. The euphemistically named Office of Public Diplomacy 
planted articles in the US press depicting the Contras as democrats and freedom 
fighters and put the frighteners on any one who tried to report otherwise. 
But still journalists reported on the affair. By late 1986, it had begun to 
leak. 


In September 1996, President Oscar Arias of Costa Rica - a small central 
American country noted for its decision to abolish its army - found that the US 
was using his country as a supply base for the secret Contra operations. When he 
decided to call a press conference, Oliver North, a marine working for 
Poindexter, swung into action. As he reported to Poindexter in an email they later 
tried to destroy, North called President Arias to "tell him that if the press 
conference were held, Arias [one line deleted] wd never see a nickel of the 
$80m that McPhearson had promised him earlier on Friday". Oliver Tambs, another 
conspirator, "then called Arias and confirmed what I had said and suggested 
that Arias talk to Elliott (Abrams) for further confirmation. Arias then got the 
same word from Elliott. [one line deleted ] At 0300 Arias called back to 
advise that there wd be no press conference and no team of reporters sent to the 
airfield." 


But just a month later the Nicaraguans shot down a CIA supply plane. A month 
after that, a Lebanese newspaper reported Reagan's arms deals with Iran. A 
frenzy of shredding and the destruction of emails broke out, and it took a 
congressional investigation - during which Poindexter, Elliott Abrams, Caspar 
Weinberger, Colin Powell (now secretary of state) and Richard Armitage (now deputy 
secretary of state) lied - and a specially appointed independent counsel to get 
the full story. By then, though, as the independent counsel reported, the 
administration's web of deceit had achieved its objectives - to protect Reagan, 
vice-president George Bush and the rest from the consequences of their 
conspiracy. As the independent counsel put it, Poindexter and North were made "the 
scapegoats whose sacrifice would protect the Reagan administration in its final 
two years". 


Poindexter, North and two others were indicted on 23 counts of conspiracy to 
defraud the US and Poindexter was convicted on five felony counts of 
conspiracy, false statements, destruction and removal of records and obstruction of 
Congress. His conviction was reversed on the technicality that he had given 
immunised testimony to Congress. 


Elliott Abrams later pleaded guilty to withholding information from Congress. 
George Bush senior pardoned him; and Bush junior appointed him director of 
the National Security Council's office for democracy, human rights and 
international operations and then to his current job as director of Middle East affairs 
in the White House. The wars these men promoted had left 75,000 dead in El 
Salvador and 30,000-40,000 dead in Nicaragua, not to mention many thousands dead 
in Guatemala and Honduras. 


Poindexter, having fallen on his sword to save Reagan and Bush, moved into 
the private sector to pursue his passion for electronic surveillance. In the 
1980s, Poindexter had pioneered electronic sur veillance in the US through a 1984 
initiative known as National Security Decision Directive 145. This gave 
intelligence agencies the right to trawl computer databases for "sensitive but 
unclassified information", a power Poindexter later expanded to give the military 
responsibility for all computer security for both the federal government and 
private industry. 


It would be wrong to argue that convicted felons should not get a second 
chance. But this usually requires payment of a debt to society and even remorse, 
something Poindexter has never shown. Under this President Bush, Poindexter 
expanded the surveillance of US citizens to unprecedented levels, designing 
programmes that would not only track trillions of emails, text messages and phone 
calls but even send agents into public libraries to compile information on what 
Americans were reading. 


Back in Argentina, though, where the festering sore of crimes that were never 
cleansed through judicial procedures has haunted politics for decades, the 
new president, in a bold and surprising move, has removed legal obstacles to the 
extradition of more than 40 military officers wanted for torture, kidnapping 
and murder of various foreign citizens in the Dirty War. Lies and deceit, as 
they have learned in Buenos Aires, are enemies of freedom and democracy and 
generate more lies and deceit. President Nestor Kirchner's actions may yet put an 
end to a culture of past impunity that has poisoned the politics of the 
present. In Washington, under this administration, the crimes of the past have been 
the passport to power; the methods, far from being discarded, have merely 
been refined. 

isabel.hilton at guardian.co.uk