Freedom Socialist • Vol. 26, No.2 • April-May 2005Bush's brazen bullies, batch twoTorturers, hitmen, and Puritans make up second-term squad by Monica Hill
Old-school warmongers. Among the “new” faces, John Negroponte is one of the oldest. Bush's choice for Director of National Intelligence (DNI), still to be confirmed as of this writing, hails from the Reagan era and its grisly offensive against Central America in the 1980s. During Negroponte's tenure as ambassador to Honduras (1981 to 1985), U.S. military aid to that country leaped from $4 million to $77.4 million a year. To get that money, Ambassador Negroponte, required by law to certify that Honduras complied with human rights stipulations, regularly submitted whitewashed reports to Congress. The purpose of the “aid” was to pay off Honduras for allowing counterrevolutionary Nicaraguan forces (the contras) to operate on Honduran soil. Trained and funded by the U.S., they eventually overthrew the 1979 leftwing Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua. Through what came to be known as the Iran-Contra affair, the U.S. public learned all this a decade later. They also learned that the Reagan administration secretly sold arms to Iran and used the money to organize and fund an illegal war, carried out by mercenary anticommunist death squads, against the elected government in Nicaragua. In-depth reporting by the Baltimore Sun in 1995 verified reports of Negroponte's collusion and cover-ups. Negroponte denies there were death squads in Honduras and that he ever knew of tortures, murders and disappearances while he was there. Two decades later, his reports home as ambassador to Iraq were just as deceitful as his memos from Honduras during Reagan's reign. Another graduate of the court of “affable” Ronald Reagan is neoconservative John Bolton, nominated to be ambassador to the United Nations. Hardly known for diplomacy in word or deed, he keeps in his office a mock grenade labeled, “To John Bolton — World's Greatest Reaganite.” As Reagan's assistant attorney general, Bolton was pivotal to the Justice Department's withholding of information regarding the Iran-Contra affair. As under secretary of state for arms control and international security affairs in Dubya's first administration, Bolton led U.S. opposition to the UN's International Criminal Court. He derailed six- nation talks on North Korean nuclear capabilities by denouncing the Korean leader in very personal terms. Three years ago, he trumpeted the lie that Cuba had a biological-weapons program — a charge denied not only by Cuba, but by the U.S. State Department and CIA. Bolton's nomination signals a flagrant “America, right or wrong” stance to the entire international community. The power to twist, rewrite and ignore the law. “Just because he's Brown doesn't mean he's Down, gente.” With those pithy words, Latina blogger Marisa Arrona warns that Alberto Gonzales, the new attorney general, is no friend to the dispossessed. Neither the prominent Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund nor the Congressional Hispanic Caucus supported his nomination. Gonzales is infamous for approving an August 2002 Justice Department memo authorizing torture against “enemy combatants” while serving as Bush's White House counsel. Newsweek credits him with being “a prime architect of some of the Bush White House's most controversial legal stands.” These have included denying Geneva Convention protections to prisoners at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, defining torture so narrowly as to be meaningless, and declaring that U.S. citizens can be considered “enemy combatants” and locked up indefinitely without legal representation. Gonzales also helped write the infamous Patriot Act. And he drafted a White House report in 2002 that called for weakening affirmative action in college admissions. Gonzales was once a corporate lawyer in Houston, with clients including Enron and Halliburton. Bush, then governor of Texas, dubbed Gonzales his chief legal counsel (1995-1997). While in that job, Gonzales helped Bush amass a record 152 death penalty executions. The attorney wrote fact summaries on each clemency case, making sure that Bush had plenty of ammunition to vote thumbs down. According to an Atlantic Monthly article in 2003, “Gonzales repeatedly failed to apprise the governor of ... ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating evidence, even actual evidence of innocence.” A 33-year-old mentally retarded man was among the many executed on the basis of Gonzales' accommodating memos. One such memo in 1997 argued that Texas was exempt from the Vienna Convention, signed by Congress in 1969, and could therefore go ahead and execute a Mexican national without contacting Mexico. In 1999, Bush appointed Gonzales, who has no judicial experience, to the Texas Supreme Court. The new head of homeland security, Michael Chertoff, also had never previously served in the judiciary when Bush appointed him to be a federal appeals court judge in 2003. But Chertoff's claim to rightwing fame emanates from his earlier stint as chief of the Justice Department's criminal division. In that capacity, he presided over the unconstitutional detention of hundreds of U.S. residents from the Middle East and South Asia after the attacks of September 11. As evident in his prosecution of Zacarias Moussaoui, during which Chertoff argued to deny the defendant and his lawyers access to the main witnesses against him, our new security chief believes it's legitimate to exempt federal prosecutors from the law when it suits the administration's purposes. The education Terminator. The new secretary of education, Margaret Spellings, also has no background as a professional educator. (Could you see that coming?) But she, like Gonzales, is a loyal Texas friend of Bush, whom she followed to Washington, D.C., as his senior domestic policy adviser. The new education secretary's first official act was proudly described by the Christian News Service: “Spellings demanded PBS return money given for an educational program because it became a show that promoted the homosexual lifestyle.” The dastardly program, Postcards from Buster, is a cartoon about an 8-year-old rabbit who travels around the country with his dad, learning about different children and their various ways of life. One such child has (horrors!) lesbian parents. (See story on page 10.) Not surprisingly, Spellings is also an advocate of government funding for abstinence-only sex “education” to the exclusion of instruction on safe sex. Spellings was a key architect of Bush's No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), a program that holds schools “accountable” by imposing standardized tests and withdrawing federal funds, or even closing schools, if test scores are not high enough. The National Association of School Psychologists reports that “being held back in school has now replaced losing a parent as a child's number one fear — and being held back a grade or grades is one of the leading predictors of whether a student will drop out of school.” (See the FS article "The Hypocrisy of No Child Left Behind" ) Hell no! When it comes to the second-term old guard, Bush's uplifted third finger shows clearly through his retention of those most closely identified with the war against Iraq — a war opposed by most of the planet. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice President Richard Cheney and new Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice have each engaged in steady public deceit about this war. Their murderous war is an unprecedented travesty. They have set the standard for promoting the toxic White House agenda: Dismantle the New Deal and privatize public land, water and air, along with Social Security. Rescue U.S. capitalism and enforce its imperialist rule with unending warfare. Roll back the clock on women's rights, civil rights and civil liberties, and propel the U.S. further toward a police state. Bush has assembled his Cabinet with hardly a peep from Democrats in office. Nor will the Democrats mount any effective opposition to the bevy of reactionary judges ascending to federal positions. Hillary Clinton, among many others, is cuddling up to the anti-choice folks, and the country's ranking Democrat, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada, is pro-war and anti-abortion. The Democratic Party is not the answer to the rightward march of the U.S. government. If the next four years are to be any different than the past four, the hope lies instead with the millions of people who oppose this course resisting the Bush league at every step. |
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