The Reich Stuff

By Bill Berkowitz, AlterNet
May 6, 2004

Veteran of the Iran/Contra scandal, apologist for terrorists, Cuba basher, bullying Latin America envoy for President Bush, and lobbyist for the alcohol, tobacco and armaments industries – Otto Juan Reich has done it all, both inside and outside of government. This week, Reich announced that next month he will be leaving his post as the White House special envoy to the Americas and joining Team Bush’s reelection campaign. While it’s too soon to know how Karl Rove and company will use him, keep your eye on Florida where Reich has longtime connections to the right-wing Cuban exile community.


In late 2001, unable to get his nominee past the Senate, President Bush handed Reich, a native of Cuba and an alumnus of the Iran/Contra scandal, a recess appointment as Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere affairs. Reich’s term expired in December 2002; a month later, Bush found another spot for him on his Latin American team. Now, Bush figures Reich will be more useful in getting him re-elected.


Reich, along with Elliot Abrams and John Negroponte, was one of a trio of Iran/Contra alumni to re-emerge in the Bush Administration as Latin America policy operatives, something reporter Bart Jones pointed out in a January 2003 piece in the National Catholic Reporter. (In his new book “The Politics of Truth,” former Ambassador Joseph Wilson claims that Abrams, who still works with the administration, may have helped reveal to columnist Robert Novak that Wilson’s wife, Valerie Plame, was a CIA covert operative. Negroponte, a former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, has been nominated to become the first ambassador to Iraq after the June 30 so-called handover. He is expected to be confirmed by the Senate without being held accountable for his mishandling of human rights violations while working in Honduras during the 1980s.)


“There isn’t a single democratic leader in Latin America that doesn’t reject and deplore the role that our government played in Central America during the 1980s,” Robert White, a former U.S. ambassador to El Salvador, told Jones in 2003. “To choose men like Elliot Abrams and Otto Reich is an insult.” Larry Birns of the Washington, DC-based Council on Hemispheric Affairs called the trio the “least talented Latin America team either in Republican or Democratic administrations that I have witnessed in monitoring this scene for 35 years.”

more
http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=18627

Findarticle.com's got the National Catholic Reporter story...

Appointments insult human rights cause - appointment of John Negroponte, Otto Reich and Elliott Abrams

National Catholic Reporter, August 10, 2001

EXCERPT...

Otto Reich, who ran the Office of Public Diplomacy out of the State Department in the 1980s, also ought to be sitting before a congressional committee, again not for a confirmation hearing but to answer tough questions about his role in illegal domestic propaganda activities. During the 1980s, his office, taking orders from Oliver North, conducted a campaign to discredit opponents of the administration-funded contra war against the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

It is unsettling that someone whose idea of public service would include misinformation campaigns against fellow citizens should be rewarded with nomination as assistant secretary of state for the Western Hemisphere.

CONTINUED...

http://articles.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1141/is_36_37/ai_77556910

DU: Know Your BFEE!

The Nazis, KKKrs must be dancing in the street.

Thanks for digging that article up.
And am impressed with it being in the Catholic Reporter.

Nothing like the truth, eh?

Here's why the line "You can't handle the truth!" had such legs: It kept people from thinking about the real "What" the Nicholson character was talking about -- the "Minerals" the modern economy and our world and country need to survive. Now, who would teach good people to "think" like that? Oh, yeah!


CIA's Worst-Kept Secret

By Martin A. Lee
May 16, 2001

"Honest and idealist ... enjoys good food and wine ... unprejudiced mind..."

That's how a 1952 Central Intelligence Agency assessment described Nazi ideologue Emil Augsburg, an officer at the infamous Wannsee Institute, the SS think tank involved in planning the Final Solution. Augsburg's SS unit performed "special duties," a euphemism for exterminating Jews and other "undesirables" during the Second World War.

Although he was wanted in Poland for war crimes, Augsburg managed to ingratiate himself with the U.S. CIA, which employed him in the late 1940s as an expert on Soviet affairs.

Recently released CIA records indicate that Augsburg was among a rogue's gallery of Nazi war criminals recruited by U.S. intelligence shortly after Germany surrendered to the Allies.

SNIP...

The CIA reports show that U.S. officials knew they were subsidizing numerous Third Reich veterans who had committed horrible crimes against humanity, but these atrocities were overlooked as the anti-Communist crusade acquired its own momentum. For Nazis who would otherwise have been charged with war crimes, signing on with American intelligence enabled them to avoid a prison term.

CONTINUED...

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2001/051601a.html

BTW: You, goforit and all good DUers, CAN handle the Truth! And through DU and email and fax and cellphone and cablemodem and word of mouth we can spread it coast-to-coast, around the globe and up Pennsylvania Avenue: The BFEE is going down!

EDIT: HTML will last. BFEE will not.

There is still a "democracy" at work, whatever slivers are left to keep that light burning are very much ALIVE.

The "mainstream" media is evidencing an "openness" that it (for profits sake, I grant you) would not chance before.

I am angry. I am sad. I am terribly disappointed.

SO WHAT?!?!?!?!

What place do I choose to fall: hope or hopelessness?

We are all born with the capacity to do such horrible acts AND perform such awesome miracles. We are all drawn/subject to the "vision" of people who imagine our best and our worst.

you just keep on with that illusion. :eyes:

and get back to us. That being said, there is always hope and we should fight for freedom. :)

---

Read about the Right-Wing "Master Plan": http://www.zmag.org/chomsky/sam/sam-contents.html

Have you read "War is a Racket"?: http://lexrex.com/enlightened/articles/warisaracket.htm

They worship Bu'sh or Ba'al. Same thing.

We must spread the word and show how these creatures spawned from the loins of Satan worship Mammon, Slavery and Death -- just like their daddy does and grandaddies did.

Fortunately, not all Americans are Pod People. Towards victory:


The Bundle of Sticks
 
AN OLD man on the point of death summoned his sons around him to give them some parting advice. He ordered his servants to bring in a bundle of sticks, and said to his eldest son: “Break it.” The son strained and strained, but with all his efforts was unable to break the Bundle. The other sons also tried, but none of them was successful. “Untie the bundle,” said the father, “and each of you take a stick.” When they had done so, he called out to them: “Now, break,” and each stick was easily broken. “You see my meaning,” said their father.

“UNION GIVES STRENGTH.”

"Every year the workers of Latin America, Asia, Africa and Europe commemorate the massacre of the Chicago martyrs who on the 1st of May 1886, together with a million fellow workers, demanded recognition of the eight hour day.

…it seems regrettable and even absurd that in North America the 1st of May, with its symbolic significance, should be ignored"


MAY DAY - THE LABOR DAY
May 1st, International Workers' Day, commemorates the historic struggle of working people throughout the world, and is recognized in most countries. The United States of America and Canada are among the exceptions. This despite the fact that the holiday began in the 1880s in the USA, linked to the battle for the eight-hour day, and the Chicago anarchists.

The struggle for the eight-hour day began in the 1860s. In 1884, the Federation of Organized Trades and Labor Unions of the United States and Canada, organized in 1881 (and changing its name in 1886 to American Federation of Labor ) passed a resolution which asserted that "eight hours shall constitute a legal day's work from and after May 1, 1886, and that we recommend to labor organizations throughout this district that they so direct their laws as to conform to this resolution". The following year the Federation repeated the declaration that an eight-hour system was to go into effect on May 1, 1886. With workers being forced to work ten, twelve, and fourteen hours a day, support for the eight-hour movement grew rapidly. In the months prior to May 1, 1886, thousands of workers, organized and unorganized, members of the organization Knights of Labor and of the federation, were drawn into the struggle. Chicago was the main center of the agitation for a shorter day. The anarchists were in the forefront of the Central Labor Union of Chicago , which consisted of 22 unions in 1886, among them the seven largest in the city.
http://www.powertech.no/anarchy/mayday.html

Gahan Wilson did this thing titled :) in 1972. Talk about spot-on.



Too bad I can't find the original, but one that's most appropriate shows a fearless leader-type in a Nuremberg rally setting and all the banners and all the flags and all the armbands have :) .

"Was Your Family all Together for Thanksgiving?"

This drawing by Tom Francis Darcy originally appeared in the November 28, 1969 edition of Newsday. This depiction of the My Lai massacre in Vietnam accompanied an editorial criticizing American military action.

http://www.picturehistory.com/find/p/13047/mcms.html

... for a long time, now.



Some say since December 20, 2000...



Of course, you know from the way many keep time on DU it's going on 41 years, now.

Of course, you know from the way many keep time on DU it's going on 41 years, now.

same thing

BTW: Oliphant made a nice observation of the Little Turd from Crawford's recent tour of I-94:

Duh.

It's great to know Commie-hunter Otto is on the job. From the article:

Reich has been a hyperbolic critic of both Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Venezuela’s democratically elected president, Hugo Chavez. “He simply memorizes the names of those he considers to be communist, which means if you are for the normalization of relations with Cuba, you’re a communist,” Larry Birns told Bart Jones. “Reich is looking for villains. He’s looking for some commies."
(snip)

And he still has time left over to bully small countries!

This much is clear: Reich has made a career of harassing and threatening the hemisphere’s countries. During a visit to Barbados shortly after the invasion of Iraq, Reich didn’t disguise his displeasure with the decision of Caricom – the Caribbean Community – not to support the war. “It is not the kind of support that we expect from friends,” Reich said on Chat Room, the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation’s TV program. “We listen very carefully to what our friends say and we’re very disappointed by some of the statements. We’re not violating international law, neither is Great Britain or any of the other countries and I would urge Caricom to study very carefully not only what it says, but the consequences of what it says.”
(snip)

Glide in his stride..... front row, left, Otto.

:kick: