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Why the FBI Sent So Many Agents to Roger Stone's Home |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=50094"><span class="small">Chuck Rosenberg, Lawfare</span></a>
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Tuesday, 05 February 2019 09:20 |
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Rosenberg writes: "There seems to be some consternation about the number of FBI agents who executed the court-authorized search warrant at Stone's home."
Roger Stone, a former advisor to President Donald Trump, leaves the Fort Lauderdale Federal Courthouse on January 25, 2019. Stone was charged by the government of obstruction, giving false statements and witness tampering. (photo: Johnny Louis/Getty Images)
Why the FBI Sent So Many Agents to Roger Stone's Home
By Chuck Rosenberg, Lawfare
05 February 19
 n a previous article, I explained that it was entirely lawful and justified for the FBI to arrest Roger Stone. Though there are several reasons, I focused on one—the fact that Stone threatened to kill a witness. That threat alone supports law enforcement’s request for an arrest warrant, which a federal judge granted. The alternative—a summons that would permit Stone to voluntarily surrender—is not a matter of right, and Stone forfeited that privilege with his words and conduct.
Relatedly, there seems to be some consternation about the number of FBI agents who executed the court-authorized search warrant at Stone’s home. I do not know the precise number of special agents and other FBI personnel present, but Stone claimed there were 29 agents. Though that sounds like a lot, it could be about right—and wholly appropriate.
Contrary to reckless assertions, a law enforcement cadre of that size was neither excessive nor designed to send a “message” to Stone. Further, it would not have been ordered or suggested by Special Counsel Bob Mueller or FBI Director Chris Wray. Rather, those operational decisions—how many agents to send on a particular mission—would have been delegated to the FBI supervisors in Stone’s jurisdiction.
This delegation concerning the mechanics of the execution of the warrant is typical and proper. In broad strokes, the FBI could bring as many as 24 agents and other personnel to this type of search and arrest. The actual number will turn on the nature of the operation and the decisions made on the ground by local supervisors.
That seemingly large number is also designed to ensure the safety of the agents, the subject and the neighborhood in which the search is conducted. There are a couple of principles at play.
First, everyone—both the agents and the person being arrested—is safer if the FBI arrives with sufficient and significant force. If two agents show up, a subject might decide to fight or run. The odds—as the subject might calculate—of fighting and winning, or of fleeing, are not awful. If 30 agents arrive, and the home is literally surrounded, a subject is much less likely to make a bad choice and so the risk of flight or injury to everyone is lower.
Second, the more law enforcement personnel that are present, the more quickly and efficiently a home can be searched. Two dozen agents can finish their work and leave the neighborhood more quickly than two agents. Agents in the FBI are highly trained, and many will have specific skills and assigned duties at an arrest and search scenario. Remember, the FBI had two warrants that morning—one for Stone’s arrest and one to search his home—both authorized by a federal judge who found the government met the requisite Fourth Amendment probable cause standard. Having two warrants to execute, in and of itself, requires more agents.
Generally, the FBI would bring an entry team, an arrest team, a perimeter security team and an evidence response team. The entry team is usually the smallest, at around three to four agents, and the evidence response team the largest, perhaps with 10 to 12 agents and personnel. The entry team would approach the house and enter it, and then secure it so it is safe for others to go in. The security team, of six to eight agents, would ensure that bystanders could not approach, for their own safety and the safety of the agents inside the home. While the arrest team of maybe five to six agents was doing its work, the evidence response team would be responsible for collecting and processing evidence from the home, pursuant to the court-authorized warrant, and would likely include a photographer and a computer forensic expert or two.
Throw in a small team to transport Stone to the courthouse, an on-scene supervisor and, possibly, a public affairs officer, and that could add up to more than two dozen FBI personnel at and around Stone’s home.
The FBI would likely have coordinated with local police on the search, and that local department might help block streets and control traffic. So add in some additional cars and officers. Because the Stone home backs to water, it is possible that local police officers were there on a boat.
Conversely, a court-authorized search of an uninhabited storage shed would look very different. There would be no need for entry, arrest or transport teams, for instance, and so significantly fewer agents would be needed. Court-authorized searches occur every day around the country, and the FBI has well-established standard operating procedures for accomplishing them with the laudable goal of reducing risk of injury, flight or disruption.
Stone has made numerous false statements—including to Congress, for which he was charged with five federal felonies—and bizarre and absurd accusations in the press. But in a shocking development, his claim that 29 agents were present for the search of his home is probably true. He deserves some credit for that.
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Cory Booker Hates Public Schools |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=47735"><span class="small">Eric Blanc, Jacobin</span></a>
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Tuesday, 05 February 2019 09:14 |
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Blanc writes: "Nothing in Booker's past is as damning as his record on schools. For close to two decades, Cory Booker has been at the forefront of a nationwide push to dismantle public education."
Senator Cory Booker speaks during the Iowa Democratic Party's annual Fall Gala in Des Moines. (photo: Charlie Neibergall/AP)
Cory Booker Hates Public Schools
By Eric Blanc, Jacobin
05 February 19
There are many good reasons to oppose Cory Booker’s bid for the presidency. One of the main ones is his long-standing drive to destroy public education.
 en. Cory Booker (NJ–D) announced his presidential campaign last week. There’s plenty about Booker’s record worth examining, from his extremely cozy relationship with pharmaceutical companies to his bizarre public defense of Wall Street. But nothing in Booker’s past is as damning as his record on schools.
For close to two decades, Cory Booker has been at the forefront of a nationwide push to dismantle public education.
According to Booker, the education system is the main cause of our society’s fundamental problems, rather than, say, inequality and unchecked corporate power. As he explained in a 2011 speech, “disparities in income in America are not because of some ‘greedy capitalist’ — no! It’s because of a failing education system.”
Public schools, Booker continued, are also responsible for mass incarceration and racial injustice. To combat such evils, Booker has openly praised Republican leader Betsy DeVos’s organization American Federation for Children for fighting to win the final battle of the civil rights’ movement.
Scapegoating underfunded public schools for deeply rooted racial and economic problems makes little sense. But it’s been a ticket to the top for Cory Booker. In fact, it was by hitching his star to the corporate-backed “education reform” movement that Booker first rose to prominence.
The son of wealthy parents who were among IBM’s first black executives, Booker’s big political break came in September 2000, when he was tapped to give a keynote speech to the archconservative Manhattan Institute. Calling the Newark school system “repugnant,” Booker claimed there was “great evidence” that large groups of children “cannot succeed in the public school system.”
Yet rather than improving this system by increasing school funding or building public “community schools,” Booker made a hard case for charter schools as well as school vouchers, i.e., state funding for parents to pay for private schools. To give this pitch a social justice veneer, he quoted Frederick Douglas — “power concedes nothing without force” — and steeped his arguments in the language of racial justice.
Booker’s eloquent advocacy of corporate antiracism quickly caught the eye of wealthy hedge-fund investors interested in pushing privatization. In Dale Russakoff’s The Prize, a detailed account of philanthropic efforts to reform Newark’s public schools, Booker notes that though he “became a pariah in Democratic circles for taking on the Party orthodoxy on education,” his 2002 mayoral bid was boosted by “all these Republican donors and donors from outside Newark, many of them motivated because we have an African-American urban Democrat telling the truth about education.”
One of Booker’s main financial backers, Whitney Tilson, was honest about the profit motivations for large hedge-fund investors like himself. Charter schools, he explained to the New York Times, are the ideal philanthropic opportunity for such business leaders because “[h]edge funds are always looking for ways to turn a small amount of capital into a large amount of capital.”
While the over $3 million in campaign contributions Booker received from his school reform sponsors was not quite enough to buy him the 2002 election, Booker’s 2006 mayoral bid was victorious. Due in large part to his zealous commitment to privatization, Newark has gone from having less than 10 percent of students in charters in 2008, to over 33 percent today; by 2022, 44 percent of the city’s students are set to be schooled in these publicly financed but privately run institutions.
To “make Newark the charter school capital of the nation,” Booker in 2010 reached out to Republican governor Chris Christie and billionaire Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Christie agreed to cede Booker an exceptional degree of mayoral control over education; Zuckerberg then gave Booker a whopping $100 million for the project.
In Booker’s view, the plan would have to be pushed from the top down, since the process could be influenced by forces like teachers’ unions, for whom the extension of charter schools represent a mortal threat. “Real change has casualties and those who prospered under the preexisting order will fight loudly and viciously,” explained Booker in his memo to the governor.
Despite long-standing myths about the private sector’s efficiency, much of Zuckerberg’s money was squandered in thousand-dollar-a-day consultants and other ill-thought-out initiatives. And despite this massive private sector cash inflow, Booker’s reforms have done nothing to actually improve public education in Newark schools, even if one judges school quality through the dubious criteria of test scores. But these reforms did succeed in rolling back teacher union power, shrinking the public sector and undercutting democratic control over education.
One of Booker’s signature campaigns — orchestrated in conjunction with Cami Anderson, Newark’s infamously top-down superintendent — was to promote charters by closing underperforming public schools. Rather than trying to improve these through providing additional support, Booker argued that “I don’t think pouring new wine into old skins is the way. We need to close them and start new ones.”
During the fightback to save these schools, Ras Baraka — the principal of Central High School, one of Booker’s main targets — insisted that the mayor was pushing “a dismantling of public education.”
Another key Booker initiative was to impose “merit pay” in 2012, which tied teachers’ salaries to the evaluation of a panel composed primarily of non-educators. The policy — which was unfortunately accepted by union leaders including AFT president Randi Weingarten — has increased administrator power to discipline educators, pitted teachers against each other, and incentivized “teaching to the test.” Yet even from the highly questionable criteria of improving test scores, Newark’s merit pay policy has been a failure.
In 2013, Booker’s hedge-fund supporters in Democrats for Education Reform (DFER) doled out a quarter of a million dollars to elect him to the US Senate. As DFER executive director Joe Williams explained, the founders of the organization “knew each other before, but they got involved in politics together to support Cory Booker.” In Congress, Booker fulfilled the mandate of his corporate backers by supporting initiatives like the extension of Washington D.C.’s school voucher system. He also joined the advisory board of DFER, which has successfully pushed school reform with the Democratic Party and, more recently, has taken the lead in trying to stop the teachers’ strike wave.
Booker is not an anomaly in his party. To the contrary: the administration of DFER-backed Barack Obama and secretary of education Arne Duncan was deeply committed to school privatization. Under their watch, the number of charter schools nationwide doubled, and teachers’ unions in liberal cities like Chicago were forced to confront Democratic mayors just to stay afloat.
Donald Trump’s presidency and the recent upsurge in educator strikes has placed Booker and the Democratic Party establishment in a bind. Simultaneously appeasing corporate funders and an increasingly left-leaning working-class electorate is not an easy task. Under continued pressure from below, it might soon prove to be impossible.
Booker’s response has been to tone down his proselytizing for privatization and to reverse his long-standing support for Betsy DeVos, with whom he had served on the Alliance for School Choice board between 2004 and 2008. But there’s little evidence that his fundamental political commitments have changed. Though Booker voted against DeVos’s appointment as secretary of education, he was quick to explain on CNN that his stance on school reform hadn’t “changed one iota.”
In last Friday’s presidential campaign announcement, Booker highlighted the electoral support he had previously received by New Jersey teacher union leaders and declared his intention to run “the boldest pro-public school teacher campaign there is.” Since Booker explicitly defines “public school” as a body that is publicly financed, but not necessarily publicly run, such claims should be taken with a grain of salt.
Booker’s response to the recent Los Angeles teachers’ revolt was similarly equivocal. He professed his support for LA educators the very same week that he gave the keynote address at a charter school rally in New Orleans. Like the Democratic National Committee, Booker’s vague solidarity tweet failed to mention the word “charter” or “privatization.” But as union leaders and socialist politicians like Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have pointed out, LA teachers were primarily fighting to stop a billionaire-funded plan to privatize their public school system.
It’s a sign of the changing political winds that corporate Democrats like Booker are now obliged to gesture support for striking public school educators. Yet we shouldn’t confuse Democratic Party leaders’ words and deeds. Case in point is the party establishment’s recent pushback against Ocasio-Cortez’s fight for a Green New Deal.
Though Cory Booker is a serious threat to public education’s survival, in some ways we should be thankful that he is running for president. By throwing his hat into the ring, Booker has ensured that school privatization will become a central point of debate this primary season. Regardless of his rhetorical evolution over the coming months, Booker’s candidacy will be nothing less than a popular referendum on corporate education reform.
For the future of public schools, Booker must not only lose his presidential bid — he needs to lose big.
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White Earth Band of Ojibwe Legally Recognized the Rights of Wild Rice. Here's Why. |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=23540"><span class="small">Winona LaDuke, YES! Magazine</span></a>
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Tuesday, 05 February 2019 09:11 |
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Excerpt: "Manoomin, or wild rice, within all the Chippewa ceded territories, possesses inherent rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve, as well as inherent rights to restoration, recovery, and preservation."
Winona LaDuke. (photo: PSU)
White Earth Band of Ojibwe Legally Recognized the Rights of Wild Rice. Here's Why.
By Winona LaDuke, YES! Magazine
05 February 19
Finally, plant species have rights, too.
 anoomin (“wild rice”) now has legal rights. At the close of 2018, the White Earth band of Ojibwe passed a law formally recognizing the Rights of Manoomin. According to a resolution, these rights were recognized because “it has become necessary to provide a legal basis to protect wild rice and fresh water resources as part of our primary treaty foods for future generations.”
This reflects traditional laws of Anishinaabe people, now codified by the tribal government. White Earth’s action follows a similar resolution by the 1855 Treaty Authority.
The law begins: “Manoomin, or wild rice, within all the Chippewa ceded territories, possesses inherent rights to exist, flourish, regenerate, and evolve, as well as inherent rights to restoration, recovery, and preservation.”
The Rights of Manoomin include: “The right to clean water and freshwater habitat, the right to a natural environment free from industrial pollution, the right to a healthy, stable climate free from human-caused climate change impacts, the right to be free from patenting, the right to be free from contamination by genetically engineered organisms.”
The Rights of Manoomin are modeled after the Rights of Nature, recognized in courts and adopted internationally during the last decade. In 2008, Ecuador and Bolivia both added Rights of Nature clauses to their constitutions. In 2016, the Ho-Chunk Nation in Wisconsin became the first U.S. tribe to adopt the Rights of Nature, and in 2017 the Ponca Nation in Oklahoma became the second. Also in 2017, the New Zealand government granted the Whanganui River the full legal rights of a person as part of its settlement with the Whanganui iwi, a Maori people. That’s the third largest river in Aotearoa (“New Zealand”). India granted full legal rights to the Ganges and Yamuna rivers. The Himalayan Glaciers are also recognized as having rights to exist.
This work internationally is intended to bring jurisprudence into accordance with ecological laws and address the protection of natural ecosystems, which has fallen short in most legal systems. As the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature explains on its website:
“Under the current system of law in almost every country, nature is considered to be property, a treatment which confers upon the property owner the right to destroy ecosystems and nature on that property. When we talk about the ‘rights of nature,’ it means recognizing that ecosystems and natural communities are not merely property that can be owned, but are entities that have an independent right to exist and flourish. Laws recognizing the rights of nature thus change the status of natural communities and ecosystems to being recognized as rights-bearing entities with rights that can be enforced by people, governments, and communities.”
White Earth’s Rights of Manoomin is groundbreaking. “This is a very important step forward in the Rights of Nature movement,” Mari Margil, Associate Director of the Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund explains. “This would be the first law to recognize legal rights of plant species.” White Earth and the 1855 Treaty Authority worked with CELDF’s International Center for the Rights of Nature to develop the law.
The Rights of Manoomin reaffirms the Anishinaabe relationship and responsibility to wild rice, its sacred landscape, and traditional laws. Wild rice is also the only grain explicitly listed in a treaty as a guarantee.
“Treaties are the supreme law of the land and we Chippewa have (U.S.) constitutionally protected, usufructuary property rights to hunt, fish, trap, and gather wild rice,” explained Frank Bibeau, Executive Director of the 1855 Treaty Authority. “We understand that it is the individual tribal members’ usufructuary rights to gather food and earn a modest living that are essential to our lives and important for the success of future generations’ ability to maintain our culture and traditions, essentially to be Anishinaabe,” he added. “We understand that water is life for all living creatures and protecting abundant, clean, fresh water is essential for our ecosystems and wildlife habitats to sustain all of us and the manoomin.”
The Rights of Manoomin also provides for enforcement. The law declares it illegal for any business or government to violate the rights of manoomin, and declares invalid any permit or authorization or activity that would allow those rights to be violated. Offenses will be punishable under tribal law and offenders will be held financially liable for any damages to the manoomin or its habitat. The law grants powers of enforcement to the White Earth Nation and the 1855 Treaty Authority, and prohibits law enforcement personnel from arresting or detaining those directly enforcing these rights.
During the 165 years since the 1855 treaty, significant damage to Anishinaabe wild rice, waters, maple trees, and prairies has taken place due to state and federal mismanagement. Over 70 percent of the original wild rice territory is now damaged, and today proposals to change sulfate standards to accommodate mining projects and new pipeline projects threaten more wild rice. Ultimately these actions threaten the very existence of wild rice.
In U.S. case law, corporations are considered natural persons and protected legally. In the meantime, much of the “commons,” or natural world—including water, sacred places, and sacred landscapes—have not been protected. This law begins to address that inequality, and challenges the inadequacy of U.S. and Canadian legal systems. “Remember, at one time, neither an Indian nor a Black person was considered a human under the law,” Bibeau reminds us. “Legal systems can and will change,” and in the meantime, the Ojibwe move forward.
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RSN: Career War Criminal Elliott Abrams to Lead US on Venezuela |
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Written by <a href="index.php?option=com_comprofiler&task=userProfile&user=20877"><span class="small">William Boardman, Reader Supported News</span></a>
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Monday, 04 February 2019 15:17 |
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Boardman writes: "Some say history repeats itself. Mark Twain said history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. The January 25 appointment of convicted perjurer Elliott Abrams as the new US Special Envoy on Venezuela is evidence that history just goes on and on and on with ironic cruelty and relentless injustice."
Elliott Abrams. (photo: Manuel Balce Ceneta/AP)
Career War Criminal Elliott Abrams to Lead US on Venezuela
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
04 February 19
In 1985, an activist for the relatives of the disappeared [persons in Guatemala], named Rosario Godoy, was abducted by the army. She was raped. Her mutilated body was found alongside that of her baby. The baby’s fingernails had been torn out. The Guatemalan army, when asked about this atrocity, said, “Oh, they died in a traffic accident.”
When [US human rights official] Elliott Abrams was asked about this accident, he affirmed also that they died in a traffic accident. This activist raped and mutilated, the baby with his fingernails pulled out, Abrams says it’s a traffic accident.
ome say history repeats itself. Mark Twain said history doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. The January 25 appointment of convicted perjurer Elliott Abrams as the new US Special Envoy on Venezuela is evidence that history just goes on and on and on with ironic cruelty and relentless injustice. That would be especially true if you happen to have the world’s largest proven oil reserve, as Venezuela does.
The malign US interference in Venezuela goes back more than a century. For decades the idea of “Venezuelan democracy” was a US-inflected oxymoron. When Venezuela somehow elected Hugo Chávez president in 1999 – legitimately – turnout was 63%, and Chávez won 56% of the vote (both better numbers than the 2016 US presidential election). Chávez was a leader of failed coups in 1992 that tried to topple the corrupt kleptocracy of then-president Carlos Andrés Pérez, who had been elected promising to resist US meddling, only to become a corrupt tool of it (and impeached in 1993). The US responded to the democratic process in Venezuela with at least one coup attempt in 2002 and chronic economic warfare for two decades. Despite its oil, Venezuela has not prospered and remains a country of about 31 million people, one in five of whom are poor.
Venezuela is now in play once more, with no reasonably decent outcome in sight. Whichever vicious and corrupt side wins, most of the Venezuelan people are likely to lose. In a sense, it was ever thus. Presently, the US has taken sides with self-proclaimed Venezuelan interim president Juan Guaidó. On January 22, Guaidó leveraged his position as President of the Venezuelan National Assembly to make an ingenious but untested argument that the national presidency was “vacant” and he had a constitutional obligation to fill it (or something like that – try to find a coherent explanation of what actually happened). In an alternative reality, Venezuelan President Nicholas Maduro was re-elected president last May and sworn in on January 10. The Venezuelan constitution is invoked on both sides, and there appears to be no institution with sufficient authority to resolve the issue. The constitutional basis of Guaidó’s position is specious on its face, since he relies on Article 233 and none of its conditions apply. Guaidó asserts that the National Assembly, controlled by the opposition party, voided the May 2018 election results and that therefore when Maduro’s term expired on January 9, the presidency became vacant. On Maduro’s side is the Constituent Assembly, a murky institution created in 2017 that runs in parallel with the National Assembly. The CIA acknowledges that the “ruling party” controls the Constituent Assembly, but states: “The US Government [like 40 other countries] does not recognize the Assembly, which has generally used its powers to rule by decree rather than to reform the constitution.”
So of course when Juan Guaidó used the National Assembly’s power to rule by decree, the US rushed to recognize his somewhat imaginary government without hesitation, without analysis, without restraint. Even if there is no practical way to sort out the competing constitutional legalities in an orderly, peaceful way, the US might have given the rule of law at least lip service. Instead, the US polarizes the world further, demanding that other nations help make Venezuela worse. On January 26, US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo told the UN Security Council:
Now, it is time for every other nation to pick a side. No more delays, no more games. Either you stand with the forces of freedom, or you're in league with Maduro and his mayhem.
Whose mayhem? Whose economic sanctions? Whose periodic coup attempts? Pompeo embraces a version of the Big Lie about Venezuela we’ve been hearing for a long, long time. The day before he spoke at the UN, Pompeo announced the appointment of Attorney Elliott Abrams, a promising sign that the Venezuelan future will be dark and bloody. In his announcement, Pompeo invoked “the Venezuelan people” at least nine times, which should be warning enough. Pompeo said, complete with the contradiction as to which people will be served:
Elliott Abrams is coming aboard to lead our efforts on Venezuela…. Elliott’s passion for the rights and liberties of all peoples makes him a perfect fit and a valuable and timely addition…. Elliott will be a true asset to our mission to help the Venezuelan people fully restore democracy and prosperity to their country…. he is eager to advance President Trump’s agenda and promote the ideals and interests of the American people.
President Trump was talking about invading Venezuela in 2017, but was dissuaded by Rex Tillerson, then Secretary of State, and National Security Advisor Gen. H.R. McMaster. The idea is still not off the table, as National Security Advisor John Bolton recently confirmed (along with flashing his notepad with “5,000 troops to Colombia,” unexplained). Bolton is apparently one of the architects of the current coup effort in Venezuela, along with Pompeo and Vice President Mike Pence. Pence was on the phone assuring US support for Guaidó before he named himself president (on behalf of the Venezuelan people who were not involved).
Adding Elliott Abrams to this team does little to provide hope for the Venezuelan people. Contrary to Pompeo’s assertion, Abrams has never demonstrated “passion for the rights and liberties of all peoples,” least of all Palestinians. But Abrams’s demonstrated capacity for supporting subversion, torture, and mass killing does indeed make him “a perfect fit and a valuable and timely addition.” After all, Abrams represents the continuity of 40 years of genocidal US global policies. And he participated in many of them, as reported with devastating detail on Democracy NOW as well as the terror timeline in The Intercept, but not so much in mainstream media.
In 1981, at the age of 33, Abrams was unanimously confirmed by the Senate as Ronald Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs. Reagan’s first choice, Ernest Lefever, had been rejected in part for his view that the US should support vicious regimes if they were our allies.
Abrams managed to carry out that policy very well, starting in El Salvador in the early 1980s, when our Salvadoran government ally could carry out human rights violations and mass killings almost without reproach. The government killed nearly 75,000 people. No atrocity was worthy of Abrams’s condemnation. He had no sympathy for those seeking asylum from US-sponsored violence, telling Congress:
Some groups argue that illegal aliens who are sent back to El Salvador meet persecution and often death. Obviously, we do not believe these claims or we would not deport these people.
Overseeing US involvement in Guatemala, Abrams claimed to be equally oblivious to the human rights depredations of the government of Gen. Ríos Montt, a born-again evangelical Christian. He was a hero to the Reagan administration as his death squads helped kill some 200,000 Guatemalans. Ríos Montt was eventually convicted in a Guatemalan court of waging genocide against his own people. If there’s any evidence Abrams regrets his support for crimes against humanity, that evidence is well hidden. In 2017, his status as an unindicted war criminal was enough to keep Trump from naming him Secretary of State.
In 1983, Abrams supported the US invasion of Grenada. He also pushed for a full-scale invasion of Nicaragua, where he was already involved in the support of the terrorist Contras against the Sandinista government. When Congress cut off support to the Contras, Abrams was involved in the criminal activities of the so-called Iran-Contra operation that included selling drugs to support the Contras and shipping arms to Iran to support the Contras. Abrams escaped serious consequences for his crimes, pleading guilty in 1991 to two counts of lying to Congress. Without remorse, Abrams wrote what he thought of his prosecutors: “You miserable filthy bastards, you bloodsuckers.” The first President Bush pardoned him and five other Iran-Contra criminals on Christmas Eve 1992. (These pardons were supported by current attorney-general nominee William Barr.)
In 1985, the Reagan administration was aware that Panamanian president Manuel Noriega was a heavy drug dealer. When a former Panama health official was about to release what he said was proof of Noriega’s cocaine smuggling, Noriega’s agents seized and tortured the man, sawing off his head while he was still alive. When the news became public and caused a stir in the US, Abrams went out of his way to block Congressional hearings, claiming that Noriega was “being really helpful to us” with Nicaragua and that he was “really not that big a problem.”
Abrams was reportedly involved in the US-supported coup attempts against Chavez in Venezuela in 2002. In 2003, Abrams played a mysterious role in squelching a peace proposal from Iran that might have ended the US war against Iraq.
In 2006, Abrams was instrumental in suppressing the results of a legitimate democratic election. In support of the corrupt Palestinian Authority, the Bush administration pushed for elections in the West Bank and Gaza. To their surprise, Hamas won. In response, Abrams and others tried to organize a coup. Hamas effected a counter-coup, the Bush administration refused to recognize the election winners, and that US-enforced injustice is at the heart of suffering in Gaza now.
Everywhere Elliott Abrams goes, innocent people are left bleeding or dead. Objections among the predominant political and pundit classes are hard to find. The conventional wisdom, especially among Democrats, is to support the US coup attempt but object to any military intervention, as if that satisfied any standard of national sovereignty. Rep. Tulsi Gabbard seems to be alone in saying that the US “needs to stay out of Venezuela.” But now Elliott Abrams is our man for Venezuela. And that suggests that tens of thousands of Venezuelans will soon be having serious “traffic accidents.”
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV, print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America, Corporation for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award nomination from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work. Permission to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader Supported News.
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onald Trump says his 
