Masters of Deceit Calling the Shots in the White House

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

By Isabel Hilton
The Guardian
August 7, 2003
Comment

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program has been withdrawn"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.

Guardian Unlimited © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2003

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