The Bagman Cometh: Obama Embraces War Criminal's Endorsement
by Chris Floyd
Come, let's away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out;
And take upon's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,
In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.
Quote:I.
Democratic Party circles are in raptures over Colin Powell's endorsement of Barack Obama. One can see the heavily-blinkered logic behind their elation; now that our national politics has been reduced to a petty squabble over spoils among shifting factions in the imperial court, a nod from a consummate courtier like Powell is indeed a glittering prize for an ambitious prince.
But out in the real world, where the operations of imperial power have left smoking trails of murder and ruin across the globe, the "endorsement" of a man who played an indispensable role in the slaughter of more than a million innocent people in a war of Hitlerian aggression should be regarded as a thing of shame, and vociferously rejected by anyone with a scintilla of honor or morality.
In fact, it is not too much of a stretch to say that Colin Powell is more responsible for the mass murder spree in Iraq than any other person except George W. Bush, who gave the actual order for the hit. For it was Powell who "made the sale" for the Bush Faction's deceitful warmongering campaign, with his infamous February 2003 presentation to the UN, laying out the false evidence about Iraq's non-existent weapons of mass destruction. After that farrago of artfully delivered lies, the American Establishment – urged on by the fawning, bloodthirsty commentariat – lined up solidly behind the war. After all, if Colin Powell – so "reasonable," so "honorable," so "honest" and "bipartisan" – stood foursquare behind the Bush case for war, then it must be ironclad.
This was, again, the logic of courtiers, with little connection to reality. Powell's reputation as a wise, moderate, impartial statesman – the very thing that made him the most effective shill for the war crime in Iraq – was itself almost entirely a fiction. By the time he made his shameless UN appearance, Powell had already spent almost four decades as a bagman – and frontman – for some of the most vicious and ugly elements in American politics and government. From the My Lai massacre to Iran-Contra, from Washington's long and murderous collusion with Saddam to its long and murderous campaigns to remove him, Powell has been instrumental in perpetrating or covering up atrocities and abominations on a gigantic scale. [For details, see Robert Parry's investigation, "The Truth About Colin Powell."]
Since his departure from the Administration – after staying on long enough to see Bush reconfirmed in power – Powell and his legion of apologists have peddled the myth that he was "stabbed in the back" in his UN presentation: given a false bill of goods with assurances they were true, misled and manipulated by incompetent intelligence analysts and Machiavellian White House insiders, etc., etc. Such stories may help Powell sleep better at night, and they have certainly helped rehabilitate his fictional reputation to the extent that his endorsement is once more considered a worthy prize. But they suffer from one small defect: they are blatantly false.
Powell knew – knew beyond a shadow of a doubt – that he was offering rank lies, cooked intelligence and dubious assertion to the world at his UN presentation before the war. Earlier this year, Jonathan Schwarz provided a devastating demolition of Powell's UN testimony, showing how it was belied at almost every point by the actual intelligence reports – which Powell had read before the presentation. Powell knew the case for war against Iraq was riddled with holes – holes patched with outright fabrications and the knowing manipulation of data. He presented it anyway; he made the sale. And a million innocent human beings have die for it.
II.
But Powell was selling aggression against Iraq long before his UN fan-dance in February 2003. In fact, he was the mouthpiece that the Administration used in May 2002 – even before the White House began to "roll out the product" of a concentrated warmongering campaign – to signal Washington's firm intent to invade Iraq even if UN inspectors went into the country and found no weapons of mass destruction. The cat of war crime was out of the bag – and out in open – in the spring of 2002, and it was Powell who untied the strings.
Here's what I wrote on May 17, 2002, in The Moscow Times:
Quietly, without fanfare, in a bland statement issued by its most "moderate" front man, the Bush Regime crossed another moral Rubicon last week, carrying the once-great republic they have usurped deeper into the blood-soaked mire of international criminality.
The move – committing the United States of America to a policy of Hitlerian military aggression – was little noted at the time. A quick soundbite, maybe, on a couple of the more wonky TV news shows; a brief quote buried somewhere in the thick gray sludge of the "serious" papers. The Regime guaranteed its poison pill would go down sugarcoated by picking Secretary of State Colin Powell as its mouthpiece.
It was a masterstroke of propaganda, really. The former general has long been regarded by the "serious" media on both sides of the Atlantic as a "moderate" maverick on Bush's hard-right team. Liberal commentators praise Powell as a "restraining influence" on more bellicose insiders like Cheney and Rumsfeld, and a wise, guiding hand for a president unschooled in the subtleties of world diplomacy.
It's all a sham, of course. Powell is nothing more than a lifelong bagman for powerful interests. His willingness to play ball, to look the other way, has made him a convenient tool for the some of the most violent and undemocratic forces ever to pollute American society.
His first job on the Inside was an attempted whitewash of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam; it didn't quite work, but he won points for his obfuscatory efforts and went on to a plum job in the crime-ridden Nixon White House. Then came Iran-Contra, the criminal conspiracy of drug-running and terrorism operated directly out of the Reagan-Bush White House. Powell illicitly sent missiles to the terrorist regime of Ayatollah Khomeini, then helped with the ensuing cover-up. For this service, he was made head of the entire U.S. military.
He then directed the illegal American aggression against Panama, when President George H.W. Bush killed hundreds, perhaps thousands of innocent civilians in a hissy fit against his old CIA employee Manuel Noriega. Powell, like Bush, had long known Noriega was a murderous drug dealer, but they found him useful, and plied him with plaudits and cash – until Bush needed to prove his tough-guy cojones to Reaganite critics in the Republican Party....
So what better man to announce George W. Bush's adoption of Adolf Hitler's moral code? Powell sat down with the media sycophants on ABC's "This Week" and calmly – moderately – laid out the new doctrine. The subject, of course, was Iraq. The UN was working on a deal that would allow international inspectors back into the country to verify that Saddam Hussein no longer possessed weapons of mass destruction.
These inspections were vital because, as George W. never ceases to remind us, Saddam Hussein is so evil that he "gassed his own people." ...But Junior always omits the inconvenient fact that one year [the attack], Daddy Bush signed an executive order mandating closer U.S. ties to Saddam's regime. Daddy Bush showered Saddam with endless financial credits and mountains of "dual-use technology" – which the dictator duly used to develop his WMDs – right up until the day before Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Needless to say, Powell, as head of Daddy's military, was complicit in this lunatic operation and raised no demur, "moderate" or otherwise.
Flash forward to the present day. Junior Bush is now in the White House. For months, he has threatened military action against Iraq if Hussein fails to verify the destruction of his WMD capacity. (At the same time, of course, Junior undercuts international treaties that would require monitoring of his own biochemical warfare facilities. There's a good reason for that: the Regime is now preparing to develop offensive biochemical weapons, in contravention of international and U.S. law, the Village Voice reports.)
The world braces for another conflagration in the Mesopotamian sands. But then Saddam blinks. He starts talking with the UN. He renounces aggression. He tries to make up with Kuwait. Sooner or later, the inspectors will go back in – no cause for war now, right?
Wrong, Powell told the sycophants last week. The "moderate" secretary said that even if UN inspectors go in and verify compliance, the Bush Regime still "reserves its options" to do anything necessary, including military invasion, to effect a "regime change." Bush himself has already acknowledged that nuclear force is among those "options."
So there it is. The United States now openly claims the right to launch an all-out attack on any nation in the world whose regime it doesn't like – even if that nation is not engaged in active military aggression or terrorism – and even if the mere threat of aggression has been defused by UN monitoring.
No provocation necessary. No legality required. Just a thuggish elite raining death on the world, for profit and power, sowing hatred for the once-great nation they have hijacked – and ensuring more death and terror for its people.
This then is the bloodstained hand that Barack Obama has clasped so warmly, so triumphantly, on his march to power. As for Powell, he has proven himself once more the ultimate courtier. In the latest intramural tussle in the imperial court, his keen and practiced eye has picked out the coming man – and so he has jettisoned the faction he has served for so long, and latched on to the winning side yet again. (As he did previously for a while with Bill Clinton.) And why not? Powell has always been a faithful servant of America's militarist empire – no matter who its temporary manager might be.
Dawn Meredith Wrote:Powell was called on this in his Meet the Press interview yesterday.
He did not even look embarrassed!
Dawn
It's the old problem, Dawn, here and on your side of the water: unaccountable elites protected by tame media. I see no reason for optimism with regard to any improvement.
The Bagman Cometh: Obama Embraces War Criminal's Endorsement
by Chris Floyd
Come, let's away to prison:
We two alone will sing like birds i' the cage:
When thou dost ask me blessing, I'll kneel down,
And ask of thee forgiveness: so we'll live,
And pray, and sing, and tell old tales, and laugh
At gilded butterflies, and hear poor rogues
Talk of court news; and we'll talk with them too,
Who loses and who wins; who's in, who's out;
And take upon's the mystery of things,
As if we were God's spies: and we'll wear out,
In a wall'd prison, packs and sects of great ones,
That ebb and flow by the moon.
October 20, 2008
A great, new ethical dawn is set to break...
Obama: Powell will have a role in Adm.
Mon, 20 Oct 2008 15:41:56 GMT
Quote:Responding to Colin Powell's support, Democratic nominee Barack Obama says the four-star general could have a role in his Administration.
Appearing on NBC's "Today" Show on Monday, Obama said, "He will have a role as one of my advisers."
"Whether he wants to take a formal role, whether that's a good fit for him, is something we'd have to discuss," Obama said, according to AP.
Earlier on Sunday Powell, in an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press" expressed his strong support for Obama saying: "I think that Senator Obama brings a fresh set of eyes, fresh set of ideas to the table".
Endorsement of Obama by George bush's first secretary of state is said to boost the foreign policy and national security credentials of the presidential hopeful.
Meantime, Jimmy Carters' National Security advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski described Powell's endorsement of Obama as a comprehensive indictment of the Republican side. "I was impressed by the comprehensive indictment of the current Republican ticket that was implicit in Powell's statement," Brzezinski said.
A Reuters-C-SPAN-Zogby poll said Monday that Obama has led McCain by between two and six points in all 14 days of polling.
After the presidential "election" of 2000 and before its theft was finalized by the SCOTUS, General Tom appeared at George W. Bush's Crawford, Texas death camp and, for the cameras, extended his hand and said, "Congratulations, Mr. President-elect."
Bush illegally rose to office on the backs of the disenfranchised African-Americans of Florida.
I never understood the high regard for Powell even before the 2000 coup. My first memory of him is his gross insubordination--as Joint Chief of Staff--to President Clinton over the issue of gays in the military.
Now, after his antics at the UN, and his stint as lapdog to the regime, I'm just dumbfounded that everyone continues to genuflect.
Well, at least I know I didn't imagine his crimes, thank gawd, because of this thread, and because of this photo, and because of Tom Morello's great anthem:
"It's in the dead man's pocket
It's in the child's first sin
It's in the Constitution
Written in very small print It's in Colin Powell's lies
It's in the shaman's trance
It's in the cellar waiting
And it's in the best laid plans..."
Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien: Obama's New Advisor Stands By His War Crimes
by Chris Floyd
20 October 2008
Just to be clear, Barack Obama's brand-new foreign policy advisor, Colin Powell, wants you to know that he continues to support the decision to launch a war of aggression against Iraq in March 2003 -- an act that, according to principles established by the United States and its allies at Nuremberg in 1945, is a war crime punishable by death.
In fact, the only thing that Powell -- the wise and steady statesman, the "grown-up," the "moderate" -- can find to criticize in the conduct of the war he helped launch is the fact that it wasn't savage enough to begin with. We should have "surged" those sand monkeys from the git-go, he told CNN, as he aligned himself with the genocidal philosophy of noted moderate, grown-up legal philosopher Glenn "Gomer Says Hey" Reynolds, noted for his Augustinian endorsement of the "more rubble, less trouble" school of warcraft. From CNN, here are Powell's words from an exchange with reporters following his endorsement of Obama on Sunday:
Quote:I'm well aware of the role I played [in the Iraq war]. My role has been very, very straightforward. I wanted to avoid a war. The president agreed with me. We tried to do that. We couldn't get it through the U.N. and when the president made the decision, I supported that decision. And I've never blinked from that. I've never said I didn't support a decision to go to war.
Here is one outright lie right out of the gate -- a brazen, blazing, breathtaking lie: "We tried to do that [avoid the war]. We couldn't get it through the U.N." This is murderous bullshit of the highest order. Before the invasion, Bush and Powell claimed they were being forced to consider war because of Iraq's alleged non-compliance with past UN demands to destroy its WMD arsenal and programs. In late 2002, the UN duly authorized -- and Iraq accepted -- a vigorous program of inspections to verify compliance -- or discover non-compliance. This process was going on, successfully, with cooperation from the Iraqis, when George W. Bush ordered the UN inspectors out of the country, before they finished their work, so that he could launch a military invasion -- which was now unnecessary by the very criteria that he and Powell had set out publicly.
But the kibosh on the UN process was necessary precisely to preclude the possibility that the inspectors would discover the truth: there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, there were no active programs to develop WMD in Iraq, and all such programs had been dismantled years before. (Both the Clinton and Bush Administrations had mountains of evidence to support this conclusion, and almost nothing to refute it. Yet both encouraged this blood libel to increase in hysterical virulence year after year.) For if the UN had been allowed to complete its work in 2003, then the Bush administration's main public casus belli, the threat of WMD, would have evaporated.
So let's be clear about the facts. Bush and Powell did indeed get from the UN a perfect mechanism for avoiding war with Iraq -- if that had been their goal. Instead, Bush destroyed this process in order to launch the invasion -- and Powell supported that position. He still supports it today. He's "never blinked from it."
Here's more from the moderate, honorable man, who is now completely rehabilitated in the eyes of "progressives" everywhere. (Indeed, even the Guardian on Monday proclaimed him a figure "of enduring moral authority."). Powell:
Quote:And the war looked great until the 9th of April, when the statue fell, everybody thought it was terrific. And it was terrific. The troops had done a great job. But then we failed to understand that the war really was not over, that a new phase of the war was beginning. And we weren't ready for it and we didn't respond to it well enough...
We now see that things are a lot better in Iraq. Maybe if we had put a surge in at the beginning, it would have been a lot better years ago.....
It wasn't wrong to kneecap the UN and unilaterally invade a country that hadn't attacked you and slaughter their people and destroy their society and drive more than four million of them from their homes; no. What was wrong, according to the moderate grown-up, was not laying even more shock and awe on the victims from the beginning. "Surge" through even more of their houses, terrifying children and rounding up the menfolk in even larger concentration camps; "surge" them with even more hired sectarian killers; "surge" all over their sorry hides with even more "smart bombs" and "drone missiles" and 500-pound blockbusters; "surge" them with "fraternity pranks" like the Cabinet-approved regimen of physical and psychological torture that leaked briefly into the light at Abu Ghraib. Yes, the original invasion just wasn't tough enough, didn't kill and dispossess nearly enough people -- not for a moderate, steady figure of enduring moral authority like Colin Powell. Shoulda surged 'em harder. Shoulda closed our hearts to pity, as that guy with the funny little moustache used to say. (Now there's someone who knew how to surge!)
Powell then goes on with the by-now ritual praise of General David Petraeus and the "surge": the campaign of ethnic cleansing, bribing and arming of sectarian extremists, death squads, local government torture, and "close air support" in civilian areas that -- along with the indispensable role played by Iran in supporting the allies it shares with Washington in the Iraqi government -- has "reduced" the violence in Iraq to a level that approximates the very worst civil conflicts since World War II.
Of course, Obama shares this view of the surge, having recently declared it "a wild success." And we have every indication that Obama shares this further sentiment that Powell voiced in his remarks:
Quote:And so, my concern was not my past or what happened in Iraq, but where we're going in the future. My sole concern was where are we going after January 20 of 2009, not what happened in 2003.
Well, if I had committed a hanging offense in 2003, I'd want to concentrate on 2009 too. And Obama seems to concur; he wants to "move on," to avoid any unseemly "partisan" wrangles over the past. The fact that a gang of militarist extremists -- including good old moderate Colin Powell -- murdered a million innocent people in a blatant war crime committed in America's name is not something that would be "fruitful to pursue," to quote Obama's own ringing phrase about his adamant opposition to any impeachment proceedings against the Bush Faction.
But beyond Powell's understandable anxiety to shift attention away from the period of his criminal complicity, look again at this passage from his statement. Meditate on it, let it sink in deeply:
Quote:...my concern was not my past or what happened in Iraq, but where we're going in the future.
His concern is not "what happened in Iraq." This encapsulates perfectly the view of the entire bipartisan foreign policy establishment. They simply could not care less about what happened in Iraq: a million dead, four million dispossessed, social, economic, cultural ruin, torture, murder, destruction, suffering: It not their "concern." They do not give a damn. The only thing that matters is "where we're going in the future;" i.e., how can we -- not "we the people" but "we" the elite, "we" the deciders, "we" the wielders of imperial power -- retain our dominance, our privilege and the proper deference that is our due from the lesser peoples of the world.
And now this man -- a willing and defiantly unrepentant conspirator in mass murder, a lifelong servant and abettor of the worst excesses of a rampant militarism that has destroyed the constitutional republic and replaced it with a hideous "commander-in-chief" state -- is now going to be whispering in the ear of our "transformational" president-to-be, providing the "foreign policy wisdom" that the young prince still lacks.
This is the "change" we have been promised, the "change" that millions of people -- in America and around the world -- have desperately longed for: a proven liar and mass murderer, standing in the inner circle of power again, alongside the "anti-war" "progressive" -- just as he stood shoulder to shoulder with George W. Bush...and just as he would even now be standing shoulder to shoulder with manic militarist John McCain, if he were 10 points up in the polls.
Mr. Eric Blair once described this nightmare scenario very well: "Four legs good, two legs better."
