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https://www.unz.com/article/a-new-democrat-becomes-president/

 

A “New Democrat” Becomes President   RICHARD COOK 

Review of Jeremy Kuzmarov’s Warmonger: How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory from Bush II to Biden(Clarity Press, Atlanta, 2024), 423 pages.

Order at: https://www.claritypress.com/product/warmonger-how-clintons-malign-foreign-policy-launched-the-us-trajectory-from-bush-ii-to-biden/

 

William Jefferson Clinton—“Bill” Clinton—was inaugurated as the 42nd president of the United States on January 20, 1993. A Democrat, he was the first president to be elected from among the “Baby Boomer” generation.

Clinton’s youthful good looks, smiling persona, personal charisma, and presumed affiliation with the antiwar mood of the 1960s—stood in seeming contrast to the 12-year reign of two Republican conservatives—Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush—whose policies centered on war: Reagan’s trillion-dollar military buildup in opposition to what he called the Soviet Union’s “Evil Empire,” and Bush’s crusade against Saddam Hussein in Iraq, leading to what seemed to be a quick and decisive U.S. victory in the 1991 Gulf War that strangely stopped before U.S. forces reached the capital of Baghdad so that Saddam could be removed.

It also appeared that behind the patriotic resolve of Reagan and Bush the U.S. had “won” the Cold War. It was Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev with his policies of glasnost (“openness”) and perestroika (“restructuring”) who negotiated the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF)Treaty with the U.S., withdrew Soviet forces from Afghanistan in 1988, oversaw the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact in 1989, and allowed the Berlin Wall to come down, followed by Germany’s reunification. It was also Gorbachev who declared the end of communism and watched the Soviet Union dissolve into its component parts in 1991, the largest being, of course, Russia itself.

A phase of world history, where the nations of the world stood on the brink of possible reciprocal nuclear destruction for almost half a century, seemed to be over. A new era of peaceful cooperation and harmony seemed poised to begin. With the election of Boris Yeltsin as president of the Russian Federation in 1992, American advisers were ready to rush in to help in the building of a new Russian market economy. In the U.S., no less a figure than Vietnam-era Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had declared the possibility of a “peace dividend” that would cut America’s military budget in half.

As president, Clinton had perhaps the greatest opportunity ever handed to a U.S. chief executive to lead the nation and the world toward the creation of a new world of hope, opportunity, prosperity, and, yes, the peace that had eluded mankind seemingly forever. Clinton’s policies supposedly reflected a centrist “Third Way” philosophy, balancing political extremes under a large tent that was to include everyone. His appointments of women and minorities to state government positions while governor of Arkansas had anticipated in a positive way today’s “identity politics.” His business-friendly attitudes made him a “New Democrat.”

The word “hope” figured hugely in Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign. That was, after all, the name of the town in the stunningly backward state of Arkansas, where the new man of the hour was born and served as governor from 1979-1981 and 1983-1992. Even the hour hand on the millennium’s clock was about to turn, during this last decade of the 20th century, with its horrors of mass murder and global conflagration soon to fade away in the rear-view mirror.

 

After Clinton, Endless War and Financial Collapse

Yet, if we fast-forward into the first quarter of the 21st century, what do we see? First and foremost, we see a generation of endless war, kicking off with the attacks of September 11, 2001, an event that many view credibly as a false flag.

Soon came massively futile wars against Afghanistan and, again, Iraq, with attacks later launched against Libya, Syria, and other countries. We also see the explosion of low-grade hybrid conflict, especially in the Middle East, where the names of terrorist groups constantly change with uncertainty as to who actually is paying their bills. Then there’s the never-ending conflict in and around Israel.

But we also now can see that these wars had been telegraphed by the U.S./NATO bombings and assaults under Clinton in Bosnia, Serbia, Iraq, and other places. But these conflicts were often downplayed since under Clinton no American body bags were coming home. So if Clinton was a “warmonger,” as author Jeremy Kuzmarov demonstrates, this was not always immediately evident. Clinton’s “spin machine” was high-volume and high-speed.

We also see today the resurgence of Russia from its terrifying economic collapse during the Yeltsin years, being led after 1999 by Vladimir Putin. We then see the eruption of a massive conflict in Ukraine, with the U.S. having instigated, through a 2014 coup, a major proxy war against Russia on the European mainland.

We now have another violent outbreak involving Israel, at war, again, against the Palestinian population it had shunted into Gaza and increasingly smaller enclaves in the West Bank. Behind everything we sense the hidden hand of U.S. intelligence being involved in every conflict.

Today, both the Ukraine and Israel conflicts are so fraught with danger that commenters talk credibly about the dangers of igniting World War III.

On the economic front, after Clinton rode the longest period of U.S. prosperity in peacetime history, we saw the collapse of the dot.com bubble in 2000, followed by the steady erosion of U.S. finance behind an epidemic of “liars’ loans,” until the implosion of 2007-2009 led to government bailouts of $16 trillion just to right the ship.

So whatever we expected to happen during the Clinton years to assure that the world had really changed for the better and was going to stay that way, it did not. Had we blown our big opportunity? Why was Clinton not really the savior many had hoped he would be?

So were Clinton’s eight years in office an illusion? Were there things going on that led in a vastly different direction? Besides, of course, the obvious: Clinton’s dalliance with a White House intern that led to his impeachment, though he was acquitted in the Senate trial. But by then we had known Clinton was a bit of a rogue. For him, “bimbo eruptions” were not new.

Regarding domestic politics, Kuzmarov cites journalist Glen Greenwald, who wrote that Clinton helped turn “the Democratic Party from one of the working class to one of Wall Street, Silicon Valley, banks, credit card companies, and the military-industrial complex.”

 

Who Was the “Real” Bill Clinton?

Who, then, was the “real” Bill Clinton? Author Jeremy Kuzmarov tells us in his monumental history of Clinton’s presidency, which exposes Clinton as, essentially, a fake.

Kuzmarov is managing editor of CovertAction Magazine and the author of four previous books, including the groundbreaking exposé of President Barack Obama’s own administration of war and mayhem: Obama’s Unending Wars: Fronting the Foreign Policy of the Permanent Warfare State. (Clarity Press, 2019) Kuzmarov is also a respected scholar, with a PhD in history from Brandeis University, currently teaching at the University of Tulsa.

Writing about Clinton, with massive detail and matchless documentation, Kuzmarov discloses the violence of the Clinton era that lies behind claims by apologists, for instance, of “humanitarian” actions abroad, combined with a few extremely well publicized peacemaking efforts where Clinton claimed credit but that often proved futile in the long run.

The title of Kuzmarov’s new book is Warmonger: How Clinton’s Malign Foreign Policy Launched the U.S. Trajectory from Bush II to Biden, just published by Clarity Press. Kuzmarov is a rare example of the merging of scholarship and journalism, presenting a mass of documented detail in a clear, descriptive, narrative style. As the story line proceeds, we are taken deeper into disclosures that often lead to disturbing conclusions. The effect is both enlightening and exhausting, as the reader learns more and more about how U.S. governance behaved so disreputably during a time that today is often obscure in our recollection.

Kuzmarov shows us what by now is a familiar pattern in U.S. public life: the contrast between a politician with a smiling face and disarming manner, one who always has “plausible deniability,” presiding over a cesspool of low-grade conflict, secret interventions, covert violence, and often outright crime, as with the CIA’s perennial involvement with the world’s illicit drug trade.

This pattern was pioneered by Ronald Reagan and arguably carried forward by every president until Biden today, though some would exempt Trump. But it was with Clinton that the method, and the hypocrisy, may have reached epic levels.

Warmonger contains 13 chapters that tell the story. Many of the chapters include critical inside information about the CIA. There may be no better source than Kuzmarov, given his role as managing director of a revitalized CovertAction Magazinein prying open the lid of the crypt of CIA operations.

It is not the place of any review to try to re-tell the entire story, particularly with a history so long and complex as this one. The book itself is a “must-read” for anyone interested in the truth about the modern American trajectory into the geopolitical catastrophes unfolding today.

There are numerous instances that are crucial for anyone to know who wants to delve into Clinton’s past or the “real” history of the Clinton administration. This is especially so because of the prominence today of the Clinton Foundation and the role still being played by the loser of the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Rodham Clinton, in national and world affairs.

 

Clinton a CIA Asset

Chapter 1: “The Education of a Governor” starts with a 1992 quote from John Brummett, Arkansas Times columnist: “Clinton’s first impression knocks you out. You think this is the most impressive son of a bitch you’ve ever seen, gregarious, with a sense of humor. What a Governor! It’s a slick veneer. Some of us were talking about Slick Willie the other day, and we decided, well we know what he’s really like and what he’s done as governor, but hey he might make a good president.”

Brummett was not suggesting Clinton as a possible president as a compliment. Rather he was pointing out the contrast between “Slick Willie’s” public persona and his actual deeds during his lengthy Arkansas warm-up for the highest office in the land.

Perhaps most importantly, the reader needs to understand, as Kuzmarov documents, that Clinton was a CIA asset, even starting as early as his college days. This immediately brings to mind the title of Douglas Valentine’s celebrated book, The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt America and the World (Clarity Press, 2016). Valentine’s assessment was fully born out in Chapter 2 of Warmonger: “Bill Clinton and the Crimes of Mena: Made in Arkansas, Made in America.”

Clinton was a protégé of figures in high places, including Arkansas governor Winthrop Rockefeller. The Rockefeller connection put him at an early age in the same network as people like Henry Kissinger. His family circle in the notorious city of Hot Springs, Arkansas, had connections with organized crime, which figures at various points in Clinton’s political life as a source of campaign contributions. But it was his connections with the CIA that determined his future.

Kuzmarov documents these connections, including Clinton’s stint as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, but most telling perhaps is an incident taking place while Clinton was governor, when he was designated by the CIA as a likely future president. It happened in Mena, Arkansas.

While governor, Kuzmarov writes, “Clinton enabled the use of his state as a base for clandestine operations into Central America.”

During the Reagan years, in the days of “Iran/Contra,” the CIA oversaw a massive operation at the Mena Intermountain Regional Airport near the town of Mena in the Ouachita Mountains. There the CIA conducted activities devoted to training of guerrillas for engagement abroad and for the drug and weapons smuggling that became famous when Eugene Hasenfus was shot down over Nicaragua in 1986. Kuzmarov gives a detailed account of the Mena operation in which Clinton was intimately involved, including the proliferation of weapons-manufacturing factories in the surrounding area.

Kuzmarov writes of a man named Terry Reed, who “was a Missouri-born Air Force intelligence officer who in the early 1970s served with Air Force intelligence in Thailand as a member of Task Force Alpha, which controlled the secret air war in Laos and Cambodia…. In his 1995 book, Compromised: Clinton, Bush, and the CIA, Reed claims that he met with Clinton in July 1984 outside the Cantina Mexican restaurant in Little Rock, where Clinton gave him his blessing to undertake clandestine operations in Mexico with Barry Seal and Oliver North (AKA “Cathey”) in support of the Contra operations.”

Kuzmarov continues: “According to Reed, Clinton was glassy eyed and smoked a joint while seated on a captain’s chair on the street side of a van whose interior revealed a mobile command post equipped with an array of electronics. He urged Reed to toke on the joint, telling him, ‘Go on, I’m the commander-in-chief here, you won’t get busted.’”

Kuzmarov goes on: “Reed claimed that Clinton personally attended a meeting in an army bunker outside Mena whose participants included North, Felix Rodriguez, and one of CIA Director William Casey’s top lieutenants, ‘Robert Johnson,’ who he thought to be future Attorney General William Barr.”

Barr was a long-time CIA agent, starting in graduate and law school, later moving into the Reagan White House. He served as U.S. attorney general under Bush I in 1991-1993. Much later Barr again became attorney general under President Donald Trump in 2019-2020.

Regarding the meeting with Clinton, Terry Reed wrote, according to Kuzmarov, that Johnson “threatened to shut down the Mena operation because too much money was being skimmed off the top… and Clinton was giving out too many contracts…to Arkansas ‘good ole boys’ who lacked security clearances. The arrest of Clinton’s brother, Roger, had also brought unwanted scrutiny.

“In the meeting Johnson allegedly significantly referred to Clinton as ‘Mr. Casey’s fair-haired boy’ [referring to CIA Director William Casey] and said that ‘you and your state have been our greatest asset.’ He added that ‘the beauty of this, as you know, is that you’re a Democrat, and with our ability to influence both parties, this country can get beyond partisan gridlock. Mr. Casey wanted me to pass on to you that unless you fuck up and do something stupid, you’re No. 1 on the short list for a shot at the job you’ve always wanted.’”

This incident makes clear who it is that actually selects U.S. presidents: Hint: it is not “We the People.”

 

Clinton as President

Evidently having satisfied the CIA as to his qualifications, Bill Clinton was elected president of the United States in November 1992. The rest of this review covers just a few of the vast number of imperial/criminal enterprises carried out by Clinton and his associates during his eight-year presidential reign that lay the groundwork for the 21st century explosion of endless U.S. wars and today’s possible lemming-like march toward Armageddon.

 

Clinton Fomented the Balkan War to Destroy Yugoslavia

In Chapter 3: “Clinton’s Dirty War in the Balkans,” Kuzmarov explains how a critical part of instigating the Balkan War was U.S. covert action. The aim was to secretly arm the population of Bosnian Muslims to facilitate their attacks on the Serbs residing within their borders, then later to do the same with the Albanian Muslims in the Kosovo province of Serbia.

U.S. action in the Balkans was a proxy war to destroy the nation of Yugoslavia. It thus anticipated the future U.S. proxy war against Russia in Ukraine which has similar goals.

Such wars reflected what Kuzmarov calls “an imperial mindset.” He writes that this mindset “was apparent in the May 1997 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR), which laid the foundation for an era of endless war by announcing that the U.S. would no longer be bound by the UN Charter’s prohibition against the threat or use of military force for purposes other than self-defense.” Soon afterwards, “Clinton enthused that ‘We have people on the seas, people in foreign countries, all over the world, on every continent, we are everywhere.’”

It was during the Clinton years that political figures began to call the U.S. “the indispensable nation.” On the connection between military strength and economic dominance, Kuzmarov cites New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman as writing: “The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas…The hidden fist is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy, and Marine Corps.”

At the same time, Clinton succeeded in keeping U.S. forces out of the ground conflict in the Balkans while providing most of the airpower in pummeling Serbian targets, including hospitals, schools, and other civilian infrastructure. U.S. military contractors were able to use the war to experiment with vast new generations of military hardware, including electronic surveillance and tracking devices, battlefield drones, chemical weapons, cruise missiles, and smart bombs.

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The Balkan regions had been unified after World War II to form the communist state of Yugoslavia, led by war hero Josip Broz Tito, who died in 1980. While sympathetic toward the Soviet Union, Yugoslavia was fiercely independent and a leader of the world’s non-aligned movement. It consisted of an often-uneasy alliance of distinct ethnicities and religions dominated by the Orthodox Serbs from the capital region of Belgrade but also including Roman Catholics, Croats, and the Muslim populations of several regions.

Kuzmarov refers back to the Nicaragua operation Clinton oversaw while governor, then explains how similar things were done in the Balkans:

“Bill Clinton, as discussed, was recruited as a CIA intelligence asset at Oxford, and as Governor of Arkansas helped to oversee and cover up an illegal arms, drugs, and gun running operation to the Nicaraguan Contras, which was in violation of the 1984 Boland amendment. As President, Clinton again performed a role that he was used to: overseeing a clandestine-arms smuggling operation. This time it was through Iran to Muslim-Croat forces in Bosnia, and was carried out in violation of a UN arms import embargo that had been adopted by the Security Council in September 1991. On April 27, 1994, Clinton approved the plan to deliver arms from Iran despite not only the arms embargo, but also the Clinton administration’s own policy of trying to isolate Iran because of its alleged support for international terrorism.”

How was this covert operation carried out?

According to Kuzmarov: “It was coordinated by the National Security Council without informing Congress or the intelligence community. To make the deliveries—which were packaged as ‘humanitarian assistance’—U.S. officials cooperated with regional mafias and used cargo aircraft associated with a CIA front company, Southern Air Transport, avoiding use of U.S. Air Force planes.”

Once the U.S. began to bomb Serbian military facilities in the Bosnian theater in Operation Deliberate Force, Kuzmarov writes that the action saw the direct participation of the U.S. vice-chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the office of the CIA director in Langley, VA. U.S. bombing included 10,000 rounds of depleted uranium, which had disastrous long-term adverse health effects on the local populations.

Similar to supporting the Muslim and Croat forces in Bosnia against the Serbs, the U.S. also gave massive aid to Albanian Muslims in Kosovo, a Serbian province, where partisans had formed the Kosovo Liberation Army, or KLA. One source of funding was CIA drug money. While making often dubious allegations of Serbian “ethnic cleansing,” the U.S. launched another gigantic bombing attack, Operation Noble Anvil.

The goal again was to devastate the ethnic Serbs and make it impossible ever to reassemble the Yugoslav nation or anything resembling it in the Balkan region. The war ended with Kosovo still a province of Serbia but with considerable autonomy as it emerged “at the center of the international drug trade and prostitution rings in Europe.” A newly-built U.S. military base, the gigantic Camp Bondsteel, came to house Kosovo’s main prison. Soon U.S. businesses were in the region being guarded by the U.S. military while building pipelines.

The shattering of any Serbian-led nation was later made permanent by the admission of Balkan “statelets” into NATO—Slovenia in 2004, Albania and Croatia in 2009, Montenegro in 2017, and North Macedonia in 2020. These would join previously admitted Romania and Bulgaria and long-time members Greece and Turkey in cementing U.S. control of Southeastern Europe.

President Bill Clinton was 100 percent complicit in the planning and execution of this phase of what we know today as Globalism, though he gave only hints in public. Even then, any U.S. military action was always given the “humanitarian” sheen. Clinton and his top aides like Strobe Talbott and Madeline Albright were especially prone to citing British failure to stop Hitler before he launched World War II and carried out the Holocaust in justifying military action against whomever they claimed were the “bad guys.”

 

Clinton Oversaw the Looting of Russia

At the start of Chapter 4, “The Failed Crusade to Remake Russia,” Kuzmarov writes:

“In March 2000, the Republican-controlled House of Representatives released a damning 286-page indictment of Clinton’s Russia policy entitled ‘Russia’s Road to Corruption: How the Clinton Administration Exported Government Instead of Free Enterprise and Failed the Russian People.’ Written with input from eight congressional committee chairmen, the report highlighted how Clinton’s policy was carried out by a troika consisting of a) Vice President Al Gore, b) Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers, and c) Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott, an old Oxford friend of Clinton’s with family connections to the CIA who had enthused in the 1980s that the ‘United States was turning the tables on Moscow by aiding the mujahidin rebels [in Afghanistan] to the tune of many millions of dollars per year.’

“Excluding Congress and the Russian legislature from their decision-making, the troika pushed for the transformation of formerly state-owned monopolies through an ill-planned privatization program and subsidized corrupt officials through an elaborate foreign aid program, which propped up a government whose policies were bankrupting the Russian people. The quality of economic advice that the Clinton administration offered was so bad and results so dismal that 81 percent of Russians believed it was ‘purposely designed to make Russia a second-rate power.’ When Clinton addressed the Russian Duma in 1999, only a third of the representatives showed up, and Clinton was ‘jeered and insulted’ both ‘inside and outside the chamber.’”

The Russian privatization program was overseen by a working group from Harvard University under contract to USAID, a CIA-front, carrying out a version of economic “shock therapy” that previously had failed in Bolivia. Kuzmarov writes that the two lead Harvard “consultants” were dismissed when they “were found to have used their management of a U.S. foreign aid program to promote their own personal business investments.” Later they were required to pay fines of $2 million each by a U.S. federal court.

Kuzmarov continues: “The privatization scheme resulted in ‘the largest giveaway of a nation’s wealth in history,’ according to Mortimer Zuckerman, owner of the U.S. World & Report (2011), and the ‘biggest robbery of the century, perhaps of human history,’ according to Russia’s Deputy Prime Minister for Finance, Boris Fyodorov. Russia’s gold reserves were looted and its wealth taken by predatory financial interests and mafia-connected oligarchs who were able to purchase state-owned companies for a fraction of their actual cost. Over $150 billion left the country in just six years, much of it to be stored in Western or offshore banks. Russian poverty and inequality rose dramatically during that time, with the decline of the social safety net.”

By 1998, Russia had defaulted on its debt and devalued its currency. The population was devastated. In some places, vodka was the only viable currency. Millions were thrown out of work; many committed suicide. President Boris Yeltsin suppressed political opposition with Clinton’s support, and when he ran for re-election in 1996, it was U.S. funding of Russia’s budget deficits and teams of American campaign consultants affiliated with the National Endowment on Democracy that kept him in power. Kuzmarov quotes Bill Clinton as saying of Yeltsin, “I want this guy to win so bad it hurts.” Time ran a cover story: “Yanks to the Rescue.”

Later it came to light that Yeltsin had been guided by the CIA throughout his political career going back to the 1970s. When he resigned and handed over the reins of government to his vice-president, Vladimir Putin, in 1999, he told the Americans not to worry. While Yeltsin’s public approval rating had plummeted to two percent, he told his U.S. advisers that Putin was an “administrator” who wouldn’t be changing anything.

But by the end of his presidency, Bill Clinton would betray former Secretary of State James Baker’s previous promise to Gorbachev by overseeing the admission into NATO of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999, with others to follow, which began to lay the groundwork for the 21st century escalation of tensions. It was part of an unspoken U.S. plan to keep Russia weak and in limbo as it began to ring that country with new military outposts and foment anti-Russian unrest in former Soviet components like Georgia, Ukraine, Chechnya, and the Central Asian “stans”—Uzbekistan, etc. Russophobia prevailed. In the words of senator and future U.S. president Joe Biden, Russia would “never have a seat at the table.”

Nevertheless, with Vice President Al Gore working with the Yeltsin government on trade relations, U.S. oil companies invested heavily in development of Arctic oil fields. Kuzmarov writes: “Organized crime came to control up to 50 percent of the Russian economy and infiltrated the highest levels of the state, looting tons of diamonds, jewels, silver, and gold from the Russian National Treasury.”

When Clinton took office in 1993, relations with a significantly weakened Russia had landed on his doorstep, a package neatly tied with a festive bow. Kuzmarov masterfully weaves the tale of how the Clinton administration did everything possible to subvert and control the U.S.’s greatest rival after the half-century Cold War standoff that had dominated global geopolitics for nearly a half-century.

But Clinton did nothing to incorporate a harmonious, democratic Russia into the world’s community of nations for the sake of a future of world peace. Instead, he treated Russia as a carcass to be picked clean by a greedy horde of businesspeople and criminals, both Russian and American, overseen by Harvard academics, U.S. politicians, and, as always, the CIA. The reaction to this inept assault came with the resurgence engineered by Putin and his political allies, leading to the crisis over Ukraine today.

 

Clinton Broke the U.S. Pledge Not to Expand NATO Eastward

As noted above, Clinton reneged on the pledge given by U.S. Secretary of State James Baker to Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev that the U.S. would not extend NATO “one inch eastward.” This was in exchange for Gorbachev’s agreement that East and West Germany would be allowed to reunite as a NATO member.

Clinton, however, oversaw the accession into NATO of Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic in 1999. With Clinton soon finishing his two terms in office in January 2001, the geopolitical implications were left to Bush II/Cheney and subsequent administrations.

Few commentators have noted that what I think we can call this U.S. “Drang Nach Osten,” or “Drive to the East,” bore a strong resemblance to the similar hoped-for geopolitical expansion carried out by Germany under Adolph Hitler, against whom the Western Allies, along with the Soviets, went to war in World War II. Now, Germany was a part of NATO, with NATO’s only justification being potential war against Russia. So what did Clinton and his successors think was supposed to happen next?

Kuzmarov covers these events in Chapter 5: “NATO Expansion: A Strategic Blunder of Epic Proportions.”

Kuzmarov writes: “In an April 2022 essay in The Atlantic, Clinton tried to defend the policy of NATO expansion by claiming that it was designed to bolster Europe’s security if Russia returned to ‘ultranationalism’ and past ‘aspirations to empire like [in the era of] Peter the Great and Catherine the Great.’ This ipso facto justification is consistent with the pattern of Western leaders exaggerating Russia’s purported expansionist designs. It further evades the fact that NATO expansion fit with a larger policy that was designed to capitalize on the collapse of the Soviet Union to advance American regional power, undercut Russian influence in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, and keep Russia weak.

“This policy bore the imprint of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Jimmy Carter’s former National Security Council adviser and Albright’s mentor, who saw control over Eurasia as key to global domination and consolidation of the U.S. empire—which was far vaster and more aggressive than any projected Russian one.”

Now, in 2024, nations in the Collective West, starting with the shrill voices of the Balkan states, admitted to NATO in 2004, continuing through Poland, then extending west to Germany, the U.K., and even to U.S. President Joe Biden, are all screaming and waving their arms about the threat of an expansionist Russia as Russia thrashes Ukraine in its “special military operation,” which is a consequence of the U.S.-sponsored Maidan coup of 2014. This despite the fact that Russia shows no sign at all of such intentions and that its capacity to take on a united NATO in an all-out war is questionable.

Kuzmarov also points out that in the 1996 presidential election, Clinton was trying to make a strong appeal in the Midwest where large numbers of voters were of Polish and East European heritage. He was also on the receiving end of campaign donations from U.S. oil companies involved in exploration in the Black and Caspian Sea basins. The aerospace industry and big Wall Street banks and investment firms had visions of dollar signs dancing before their eyes whenever NATO expansion was mentioned.

Kuzmarov concludes that: “Containment doctrine author George F. Kennan warned that NATO expansion would amount to a ‘strategic blunder of epic proportions’ and the ‘most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era,’ as it would ‘inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion, restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations,’ and ‘impel Russian foreign policy in a direction decidedly not to our liking.’”

The American public didn’t seem to care. So Clinton moved ahead to set the stage for what may be, as the 21st century proceeds, global disaster.

 

Other Clinton Maneuvers

Kuzmarov’s catalogue of Clinton-era debacles continues to move through 423-pages (including endnotes and index) of meticulous documentation and sobering prose. Among the dozens of additional topics covered are the following.

 

Southeast Asia

Financial imperialism in Southeast Asia saw a successful rebellion against the Washington Consensus and IMF austerity measures led by Malaysia’s Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamed; meanwhile, the Clinton administration continued to build up its military presence on the East Asian rim as a containment measure against China.

Massive arming of Taiwan with U.S. weapons also took place, laying the groundwork for today’s escalation of tensions with mainland China over when—or if—the U.S. would follow through on its commitment eventually to support Chinese reunification. U.S. arms sales to Japan and other Pacific rim nations also soared.

Throughout the 1990s, the Clinton administration used the National Endowment for Democracy to engage in covert action to promote pro-U.S. regime change in Cambodia, Myanmar, Mongolia, and other Asian countries. Economic sanctions were also beginning to be used as a major tool of low-grade warfare; for instance, against North Korea. There CIA agents worked to sabotage North Korean agriculture. The U.S. also went to the brink of war over North Korea’s tiny nuclear program.

The 1997 Asian financial crisis plunged Southeast Asia into poverty and allowed U.S. companies to buy bankrupt companies and banks at bargain basement prices. Any country with what the U.S. perceived as leanings toward socialism and away from privatization, neoliberalism, etc., was subject to these tools of subversion and coercion.

 

Offshoring of Jobs

Colossal offshoring of American jobs by free-trade agreements like NAFTA undercut the domestic productivity of countries like Mexico, leading to the crisis in illegal immigration that continues to plague the U.S.

With mainland China, outsourcing of American jobs would grow drastically, especially after admission of China to the World Trade Organization, a measure opposed by U.S. organized labor. China would also be counted on to invest its profits in the purchase of U.S. Treasury bonds; eventually China would become the world’s second largest holder of U.S. government debt, after Japan.

Drug Trafficking

While shielding drug kingpins from exposure, Clinton presided over growth of drug trafficking in Arkansas and worldwide and the opening of the Mexican border, while elevating enforcement and penalties at the level of users and local distributors.

U.S. prisons began to be filled by blacks under “three-strikes-and-you’re-out” sentencing rules. The Clinton administration also began to fund state and local police agencies for purchase of large quantities of military-style equipment, including night-vision helicopters. Yet among U.S. drug users, overdose deaths had begun its decades-long climb.

The U.S. also facilitated a huge growth of drug usage in Russia, as well as drug trafficking in Kosovo, Afghanistan, Turkey, Cambodia, Peru, and Colombia. In Mexico, the government used drug revenues to pay off U.S. bank loans.

Even though the CIA had long been involved in drug-related crime, it was during the Clinton administration that today’s oceanic worldwide drug crisis really gained traction, along with the crime and political corruption associated with it. Clinton-era bank deregulation also facilitated global money laundering; some say it’s illicit drug money that keeps the bankrupt Western banking system afloat. In Latin America and elsewhere, privatization and free market policies of the IMF and World Bank have left local populations with few alternatives to drug production merely to survive.

 

Middle East

Of Clinton’s bombing campaign against Iraq, testifying to the failure of George H.W. Bush’s Gulf War to resolve the U.S. relationship with Iraq, Secretary of State Madeline Albright said on network TV that the deaths of 500,000 Iraqi children due to disease and starvation were “worth it.”

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Kuzmarov provides a lengthy account of Clinton’s drive for U.S. hegemony in the Middle East: “In 1983, the U.S. military possessed no military bases anywhere in the Middle East. By the mid-2000s, U.S. Central Command at McDill Air Force base in Tampa, Florida, had built up a military footprint of over 125 bases across the region. Journalist Chip Gibbons compared Clinton to a ‘relay runner’ who handed off to George Jr. the hawkish baton passed on to Bush by his father, especially with regards to Iraq. This is an apt analogy for Clinton’s foreign policy in the Middle East more broadly, which set the groundwork for the post-9/11 War on Terror.”

Clinton’s chief target was Iraq, but, amazingly, the initial goal was not so much for the U.S. to profit from Iraq’s oil, but to keep it from competing with sources like the British North Sea and Azerbaijan. It was also under Clinton that the U.S. now began to conjure up tales about alleged Iraqi possession of “Weapons of Mass Destruction,” including enough of one chemical agent supposedly sufficient to kill every person on earth.

Clinton also proceeded to beat the war drums against Iran, which the U.S. had been doing since the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Kuzmarov notes of Iran that “American policy…was driven largely by Israeli interests.” The U.S. also sold large quantities of arms to Turkey, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia, including torture equipment. Meanwhile, the Saudis gave lavish donations to the Democratic National Committee. Note that at a time when the Clinton administration was using trade deals to export jobs overseas, for instance to Vietnam where some workers earned six cents an hour, the U.S. weapons industry was becoming America’s largest and most profitable manufacturing sector, dealing in huge contracts with the growing list of de facto “allies.”

While the U.S. pivot toward the Middle East during Clinton’s two terms saw a burgeoning U.S. military and economic presence, it also provoked resistance and blowback that mushroomed into what became the Bush/Cheney “War on Terror.” The U.S. and its client state of Israel still view themselves as the innocent parties in this epochal conflict where what Americans see are hordes of Islamic fundamentalists—“Islamists”—inexplicably resenting the takeover of their society and resources.

Meanwhile. academics sought to justify the massive level of violence coming from this part of the world by citing the supposed existence of a “Clash of Civilizations,” with Israelis claiming to be the “Chosen People” and Christian Zionists going so far as to picture the conflict in terms of “End Times,” the “Rapture,” or even “Armageddon.”

Many of the “terrorist” incidents during Clinton’s two terms had some measure of CIA or FBI involvement, making it impossible to determine which were false flags and which not. But they all kept the news media busy churning up public fear and conditioning citizens for the coming horrors of 9/11 and its aftermath that continues today. Writes Kuzmarov: “Clinton effectively framed the struggle against terrorism in apocalyptic and morally righteous terms, which helped condition the public to accept a more aggressive, militarized response.”

 

Israel

Next, we have Clinton’s relations with the state of Israel, which Kuzmarov covers in Chapter 10: “Clinton and Israel: The Most Pro-Israeli President Since Truman.” U.S. relations with Israel in the 1990s were keyed to the 1993 Oslo Accords, touted in the media as an epochal breakthrough for peace but ridiculed by others as a capitulation to Israel by Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, without getting much in return. The accords collapsed when Israel’s Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated and his replacement Benjamin Netanyahu took over in an Israeli reign of provocations and brutality that continues today and has been labeled as genocide.

The U.S., through a secret CIA training program, taught the new Palestinian Authority how to police and oppress their own people, as the Israeli hold on the West Bank and Gaza ramped up. Under Clinton, weapons sales and giveaways to Israel soared, while Israel itself built its own hi-tech industries with intelligence and military applications.

Kuzmarov writes that: “Noam Chomsky points out that Clinton’s increased support for Israel was a consequence of the end of the Cold War and disappearance of the Soviet Union as an ally of the Arab states and was combined with a dual containment policy aimed at both Iran and Iraq who threatened joint American-Israeli regional hegemony.”

Despite displaying sympathy at times toward the Palestinians, Clinton actually weakened the ability of the U.S. to hold Israel to account. Kuzmarov says he “did a disservice both to the country and to the Jewish people by giving Israeli leaders a false sense of invincibility by virtue of their unlimited backing by the United States.” This “unlimited backing” was repeated in the message delivered by President Joe Biden to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu when Israel embarked on the current genocidal attacks on Gaza. Biden’s “blank check” has enabled more crimes against humanity—partly the result of the Clinton presidency when multiple steps were taken into today’s abyss.

 

Africa

The next two chapters of Warmonger cover Africa: Chapter 11: “Clinton and Africa: Black African Lives Didn’t Really Matter,” and Chapter 12: “The U.S. Assault on the African Heartland: U.S. Collusion in the Rwandan Genocide and Congo Wars.”

The drama of Africa’s relationship to Europe and America extends far back in history but is most pertinent today in the way the Western powers have replaced their colonization of that gigantic continent, and their centuries-long seizure of black African slaves, with new patterns of economic exploitation through such mechanisms as IMF and World Bank lending, self-serving investment by international corporations, and taking sides in proxy wars. One sub-Saharan African nation that seems to be on its way to escaping the ravages of neocolonialism may be South Africa, possibly due to its membership in the Russian/Chinese-sponsored BRICS+.

But despite well-publicized gestures like appointing Jesse Jackson special envoy for “democracy promotion,” Kuzmarov writes that “Clinton was ultimately no real friend of Africa. According to Human Rights Watch, his administration adopted a ‘selective approach to human rights’ and turned a ‘blind eye in African countries considered to be strategically or economically important.’ The Pentagon at the same time began planning a network of military installations across the continent from Somalia to Senegal, which began to be built after 9/11.”

Further, “Clinton heralded Paul Kagame of Rwanda, Meles Zenawi of Ethiopia, and Yoweri Museveni of Uganda as ‘part of a new generation’ of African leaders committed to democracy,” though, “In 1998, Museveni and Kagame, the two ‘great democrats,’ invaded and plundered the Democratic Republic of Congo with U.S. backing, causing what Glenn Ford characterized as ‘the worst genocide since World War II.’”

Kuzmarov also covers Clinton’s disastrous “Black Hawk Down” incident in Somalia; intervention on behalf of oil interests in Sudan and the August 1998 bombing of the al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant in Khartoum; U.S. support of a “special relationship whereby [oil-rich] Nigeria served as a base for training Africans to carry out clandestine operations across the continent on behalf of outside interests”; assistance and adviser support for the Nigerian dictatorship of Sani Abacha; interference in an extended civil war in Liberia; massive involvement in the massacres, genocides, and resource lootings in Uganda, Rwanda, and Congo; exploitative vaccination programs by U.S. Big Pharma; and failure to ease Africa’s foreign debt of $130 billion.

The stories of U.S. and Western exploitation of Africa, privatization of the public commons, and plundering of its resources go on and on. Kuzmarov summarizes by writing:

“Ghanian President Kwame Nkrumah’s 1965 book, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, provided a sophisticated framework for understanding how Western capitalist interests were intent on penetrating and exploiting the African continent even after the European countries had relinquished their formal colonies.

“Had he still been alive in the 1990s, Nkrumah would have recognized the Clinton administration’s policies as a perfect embodiment of what he had warned against. Clinton carried out classic neocolonial policies by aggressively trying to open up Africa to foreign economic exploitation while ramping up U.S. military intervention under the cover of peacekeeping operations that utilized primarily African proxy forces.

“Clinton’s policies ultimately helped pave the way for Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden administration policies that resulted in a major expansion of the U.S. military footprint in Africa. Under Clinton, the promised new era of enlightenment and African renaissance never came to pass, as wars backed by the West festered, new dictators rose, and African economies remained underdeveloped and vulnerable to exploitation.”

 

Latin America

Finally, in Chapter 13: “The Third Conquest of Latin America,” Kuzmarov provides his take on how the U.S. under Clinton moved to renew and secure its hold on its traditional southern playground of Mexico and Central and South America. He had already covered relations involving Clinton’s half-hearted engagement in the interdiction of drug traffic and the dire effects of NAFTA on ordinary Mexicans. He now writes: “A long-term goal was the establishment of a new free-trade zone for all of the Americas, the Free-Trade Agreement of the Americas (FTAA), which was christened in 2005.” He adds that: “Latin America became a crucial showpiece for a new dollar diplomacy in the 1990s and received loads of high-tech weaponry that was used to repress social movements.”

Further, Kuzmarov adds that “According to historian Greg Grandin, Clinton carried forward the legacy of Ronald Reagan in presiding over the ‘third conquest’ of Latin America, resulting from large scale privatization programs beginning in the 1980s that led to the selling off of Latin American state assets to private capitalists and intensified looting of its resources by multinational corporations and foreigners.” Meanwhile, “Unemployment rates nearly doubled from 4.6% in 1990 to 8.6% in 1999 and forested areas were depleted at a rate two times greater than in the rest of the world.”

Clinton destroyed rice cultivation in Haiti in favor of Riceland Foods, headquartered in Arkansas and a campaign donor. Through the chaotic changes of government in the 1990s, U.S. control over Haiti grew, along with the usual neoliberal privatization and investment measures. Exploitation of Haiti continued after Clinton left office through actions of the Clinton Global Initiative.

In Cuba, which had fallen on hard times with the fall of the Soviet Union, Clinton’s targeting of Fidel Castro for regime change failed, even as he tightened the U.S. trade embargo and engaged the National Endowment for Democracy, USAID, and the CIA in subversion. Clinton’s electoral support from Florida’s Cuban-American voters shot up in the 1996 election.

Clinton also supported reactionary forces in El Salvador, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and elsewhere in favor of the same type of financial/military oppression the U.S. had been practicing for decades. Predictably, leftist movements now began to re-emerge across the region. Today, especially with China emerging as a player in Western Hemisphere economies and Brazil becoming a charter member of BRICS+, Latin America is increasingly divided between its long heritage as a U.S. footstool and a region on the opposite side of the geopolitical fence from the U.S. as part of the “Global South.”

 

Conclusion

Kuzmarov’s last chapter presents his final assessment of the foreign policy elements of Clinton’s presidency with the descriptive title: “Laying the Groundwork for the U.S. Foreign Policy Disasters That Followed.”

 

History’s Judgment on Clinton

In my own book, Our Country, Then and Now, recently published by Clarity Press, I explain in detail, using open sources, how in 1940-1941 the Council on Foreign Relations, even then the most influential “think tank” in the history of the U.S., was putting together a detailed plan whereby the U.S. would gain military domination over the entire world through the coming World War II and its aftermath. This domination by force of arms was intended as a vehicle for economic and financial control by Western oligarchs.

The plan has been carried forward relentlessly since then, the only bump in the road being the shortened term of President John F. Kennedy, who had a different vision, but was disposed of by the powers-that-be by assassination and cover-up.

The plan was executed, first, by war against Germany and Japan. Next, the U.S. engaged against its World War II ally, the Soviet Union, in a Cold War lasting 45 years. With the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991, the U.S. set out to complete its self-defined mission of global conquest by the subjugation of Europe, via its domination of NATO, then the Far East, the Middle East, and Africa, while extending its already powerful hegemony over Latin America. The entire U.S. establishment set out to execute the plan, led by the CIA, military, and diplomatic corps, all heavily infiltrated by what we now call “Neocons,” with the private sector fully engaged behind Wall Street and the banks, including the Federal Reserve and the multinational corporations, down to hamburger flippers like Burger King, and soft-drink purveyors like Coke and Pepsi.

President Bill Clinton was 100 percent part of that plan, though he was exceptionally good at hiding it—but not from the millions of people around the world whose lives he ended or harmed by his actions; nor those who played along with growing U.S. hegemony and benefitted from it—including the military and intelligence establishments of the nations who became U.S. clients or customers.

Jeremy Kuzmarov has done a masterful job in documenting and explaining this period of U.S. history, so I’ll give him the last word:

“This all prefigured the rhetoric and strategy of George W. Bush and other post-9/11 leaders, marking Clinton as an important bridge figure between the Reagan-Bush I era and Bush II-Obama-Trump-Biden eras, including in helping to condition the American public to accept heavy handed, unlawful, and often dubious foreign policy methods.”…

“A key part of Clinton’s legacy is the slippery slope he created that inexorably led to the later foreign policy excesses of the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations, which now are continued by the Biden administration. Thanks to Clinton’s legacy, the U.S. has sacrificed millions of lives and trillions of dollars fighting unjustifiable and unwinnable wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Syria—and now in Ukraine, which could very easily turn nuclear. Rather than being one of the best presidents in American history, Clinton should rank near the bottom with others of this generation. Clinton’s charisma and charm may have won over the voters of his day, but historians and contemporary commentators should not be blind to the fact that his deleterious policies set in motion the beginning of America’s imperial decline.”

In this outstanding chronicle of presidential actions boding ill for the future, Jeremy Kuzmarov drives home again and again that Bill Clinton’s deceit in posing as a humanitarian, while furthering the objective of U.S. world conquest at any cost, made him probably the most impactful CIA operative in history.

 

 

Richard C. Cook is a retired U.S. federal analyst who served with the U.S. Civil Service Commission, FDA, the Carter White House, NASA, and the U.S. Treasury. As a whistleblower at the time of the Challenger disaster, he broke the story of the flawed O-ring joints that destroyed the Shuttle. Cook documented his story in his book “Challenger Revealed.”

After serving at Treasury, he exposed the disastrous flaws of a monetary system controlled by private finance in his book “We Hold These Truths: The Hope of Monetary Reform.” As an adviser to the American Monetary Institute and while working with Congressman Dennis Kucinich, he advocated the replacement of the Federal Reserve System with a genuine national currency. 

His latest book is “Our Country, Then and Now” (Clarity Press, 2023). 

https://www.claritypress.com/product/our-country-then-and-now/

“Every human enterprise must serve life, must seek to enrich existence on earth, lest man become enslaved where he seeks to establish his dominion!”

Bô Yin Râ (Joseph Anton Schneiderfranken, 1876-1943), Translation by Posthumus Projects Amsterdam, 2014.

 

https://www.unz.com/article/a-new-democrat-becomes-president/

 

 

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FREE JULIAN ASSANGE NOWWWWWWWWWW....................

 

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 Secret cable: CIA orchestrated Haiti’s 2004 coup     JEB SPRAGUE AND KIT KLARENBERG A classified diplomatic cable obtained by The Grayzone reveals the role of a veteran CIA officer in violently overthrowing Haiti’s popular President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 2004. 

A spectacular jailbreak in Gonaïves, Haiti in August 2002 saw a bulldozer smash through the local prison walls, allowing armed supporters of Amiot “Cubain” Métayer, a gang leader jailed weeks earlier for harassing Haitian political figures, to overrun the facility. Métayer escaped, as did 158 other prisoners. Among them were perpetrators of the April 1994 Raboteau massacre, which left dozens of Haitians dead and displaced. The victims were supporters of popular anti-imperial President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

Documents released to The Grayzone under FOIA – no doubt unintentionally – reveal that the jailbreak was part of a complex US intelligence operation, aimed at undermining Aristide’s presidency. At the heart of this operation was Janice L. Elmore, a CIA operative working under cover as a Department of State “Political Officer” in the Port-au-Prince US Embassy at the time.

The breakout set in motion a violent regime change campaign, which ultimately ousted Aristide from office on February 29 2004. After being deposed and flown to South Africa, Aristide claimed to have been “kidnapped” by US forces and directly accused Washington of orchestrating the plot. His nation quickly transformed into a despotic failed state, as ruthless paramilitaries ran roughshod over the population. US Marines and later UN troops were deployed to “keep the peace,” which, in practice, meant violently cracking down on not only armed anti-coup militants but also outraged demonstrators and civilians.

In 2022, the former French ambassador to Haiti admitted that France and the US did, in fact, orchestrate the “coup,” which he acknowledged was “probably” due to Aristide’s repeated demands that Haitians be returned the $21 billion in reparations they’d forcibly paid their former slave masters in Paris since 1825. The former ambassador told the New York Times that with Aristide in exile, “it made our job easier” to undermine Haitians’ demands for a refund.

US officials have repeatedly denied any involvement in Aristide’s overthrow, claiming they only intervened afterwards to restore order. But the secret diplomatic cable obtained by The Grayzone tells a very different story.

Dispatched from the US embassy in Port-au-Prince in September 2002 by then-US Ambassador Brian Dean Curran, the file places Elmore, apparently a veteran CIA operative, in a meeting with disloyal local police officers and coup plotters in Gonaïves the night prior to the jailbreak. 

The file reads as confirmation of high-level US government involvement in the 2004 coup in Haiti, and raises profound questions about American involvement in other recent regime change campaigns throughout the hemisphere.

 Aristide exiled, supporters massacred

In December 1990, 37-year-old charismatic Catholic priest Jean-Bertrand Aristide was elected by landslide in Haiti’s first-ever democratic presidential election. Swept into office on a platform of democratization and national sovereignty, Aristide sought to enact a form of liberation theology – a Christian philosophy advocating freeing the downtrodden via revolution.

But just seven months after his inauguration, Aristide was marched at gunpoint from Port-au-Prince’s Presidential palace by members of Haiti’s US-trained armed forces, and forced into exile. Over the next three years, the country was ruled by a brutal junta, and thousands were butchered by the army, police, and fascist paramilitaries. 

This reign of terror reached its zenith on April 22 1994, when military and paramilitary forces attacked the strongly pro-Aristide neighborhood of Raboteau, in Gonaïves. Many residents had been participating in large-scale demonstrations demanding the return of their President ever since his removal. In a savage dawn raid, soldiers went house-to-house, beating and arresting residents, including children, while firing indiscriminately at passersby and those who attempted to flee. When the shooting stopped, at least 30 locals were dead.

Raboteau was far from the only massacre carried out by Haiti’s military junta during Aristide’s exile. But it did produce the very first trial for crimes against humanity in the country’s history. In September 2000, 53 out of 59 defendants were convicted of mass murder for their role in the violence. Among them were the 1991 coup leaders, found guilty in absentia. 

As the New York Times reported at the time, “The trial was a landmark for Haiti, a step in bringing to justice an elite tier of military and paramilitary officers and their cohorts for human rights abuses committed during a period of violent military rule after the overthrow of the former president.”

Under mounting public pressure at home and across the Caribbean, Washington committed to returning Aristide’s elected government on October 15 1994. To ensure this, over 20,000 US troops briefly occupied the country alongside a small contingent from CARICOM. The return of the elected government brought an end to the massacres. The Aristide government was finally able to begin reforming the police and disbanding the country’s notoriously repressive army, while launching school construction projects and other programs benefiting the poor.

These projects continued after Aristide’s successor René Préval won the presidency in 1996. Though Préval disappointed many of the popular movement’s supporters after appearing to embrace privatization, it seemed the country would get back on track when Aristide secured nearly 92% of the votes in a landslide election and was returned to office in 2001.

Within months, however, US President George W. Bush imposed crippling sanctions on Haiti, moving to freeze World Bank and IMF loans, while blocking Port-au-Prince from US aid and development assistance. Washington justified the destructive measures by claiming there were irregularities in the election, pointing to figures in the country’s opposition who boycotted the vote. Yet polls showed voters strongly supported Aristide and rejected the boycott.

Undeterred, Aristide’s government quickly set about mobilizing the poor, fostering neighborhood truces, bolstering healthcare and education systems, doubling the minimum wage, and holding accountable paramilitaries and their financiers. The President also re-established diplomatic ties with Cuba, paving the way for the deployment of Cuban medical brigades to Haiti.

Though popular among average Haitians, the programs were seen as a dire political threat by local opposition figures and their backers in Washington. The Bush Administration embraced a development assistance embargo, which successfully pressured most NGOs and other governments to cut off aid. And the National Endowment for Democracy, a US intelligence cutout established to influence elections abroad, began organizing disunited opposition parties into a single umbrella group under the guise of “democracy promotion.”

Soon enough, a violent paramilitary campaign erupted, targeting government infrastructure in Port-au-Prince, before spreading to rural areas which strongly supported Lavalas, the movement associated with Aristide. Amid the tumult, the spectacular jailbreak was carried out in Gonaïves in August 2002, and Métayer was freed alongside dozens of paramilitaries and anti-government gangsters.

 The smoking gun

Starkly stamped “recommend denial in full,” a previously-undisclosed cable was dispatched from the US embassy in Port-Au-Prince to the desk of Secretary of State Colin Powell on September 18 2002. It records how a “confidante” of Aristide, Pere Duvalcin, had approached the diplomatic mission, and “complained” that a US embassy vehicle was spotted in Gonaïves the night before the jailbreak. According to the cable, the Dominican Republic’s ambassador to Haiti noted Aristide himself had raised this issue, pointing to a US official named Janice Elmore as an orchestrator of the instability.

The cable reveals how immediately prior to the jailbreak, Elmore suddenly informed embassy officials that she had meetings in Cap-Haïtien, “and would return by road.” The officials “cautioned her about traveling in Gonaïves and our ban on travel there.” In response, she said she would merely be “transiting” the area, adding that she would be accompanied by a police escort.

The embassy’s Deputy Chief of Mission, Luis Moreno, made no mention of Elmore stopping or “conducting any business” there, which would be “against embassy procedures.” The official further urged her to “be very careful and exercise good judgment.”

While Elmore apparently never mentioned her activities in Gonaïves subsequently, Aristide’s confidante offered a wealth of sensitive insight. Duvalcin claimed Elmore met with law enforcement officials close to Dany Toussaint, a local political figure who had served in the military, headed Haiti’s interim police force, and was once Aristide’s personal bodyguard. The charismatic and power hungry Toussaint gained a reputation as a political chameleon. As has been documented, he went behind Aristide’s back to coordinate with the US embassy and local power brokers on his own plans to oust the President and assume control of Haiti’s popular movement.

Hinting at possible friction within the embassy, Ambassador Curran is quoted in the document as insisting, “the [State] Department has designated me as the only person who should talk to Toussaint – and only with specific instructions from Washington.” In comments on Elmore’s meetings in Gonaïves, which appear to indicate she was acting off script, Curran wrote: “Elmore never mentioned that she had been in Gonaïves prior to or after the incident involving [Amiot] Cubain [Métayer].”

At the time, American officials were under explicit orders not to travel to much of Haiti, including Gonaïves. After flouting this directive, Elmore “had other contacts with questionable individuals” in Gonaïves, the Dominican ambassador reportedly told the embassy.

These “questionable individuals” included Hugues Paris, described in the cable as “a Haitian with ties to coup plotters.” He appears to have played a behind-the-scenes role in the jailbreak, and was one of a number of key wealthy backers of a death squad known as the FLRN, which took over part of the country in the lead-up to the February 2004 coup. Years before, Paris was accused of serving as a commercial advisor to Raoul Cedras, the head of the brutal military junta that governed Haiti for three years following Aristide’s overthrow in 1991.

According to the diplomatic cable, the Dominican ambassador said Aristide had mentioned Elmore’s visit to Gonaïves in a discussion. The Haitian president believed Elmore’s activities in the seaside city “were evidence of a covert plan to undermine his regime.”

 Apparent CIA plotter mobilizes “questionable individuals” in Haiti

From the tone and language employed by the author of the cable, it is clear US diplomats in Haiti were well aware Elmore might be stirring up trouble. But the document offers little evidence they were interested in ascertaining the exact nature of her activities.

Instead, it suggests embassy officials were more concerned with determining whether Elmore’s cover had been blown, and if her phone had been tapped by the Haitian government. According to the document, US diplomats approached a former representative of private security company DynCorp to learn more about intercept capabilities of local security services. Their source confirmed Port-au-Prince was capable of monitoring in-country phone calls, and the embassy believed Haitian authorities were “specifically targeting [Elmore]…considering her to be a rich source of information,” due to “her contacts in the police.”

In this context, Elmore’s contact with elements loyal to Dany Toussaint is particularly striking. The cable reveals that the night before the President departed for Taiwan on diplomatic business, “someone from the embassy had called Toussaint, warning him that Aristide planned to have him arrested while Aristide was out of the country,” according to Aristide’s confidante. The unidentified confidante was reportedly “sent to calm” Toussaint, who “threatened civil war, if any attempt was made” to incarcerate him.

Evidently, Elmore was well acquainted with “questionable individuals” in Haiti who had an interest in Aristide’s downfall, and were later implicated in the February 2004 coup. That she met with them and their allies the night before the Gonaïves jailbreak is close to smoking gun proof of US foreknowledge of that act, and a strong indication the foundations of Aristide’s forced expulsion were being consciously laid well in advance.

A former US embassy staffer in Port-au-Prince who spoke anonymously with The Grayzone described Elmore as stridently “anti-Aristide,” and married to a member of a US special operations force. Elmore also appears to have been well-informed about other aspects of the destabilization campaign targeting the Aristide government.

According to a 2001 Department of State email obtained by The Grayzone, Elmore was looped into sensitive discussions about the US economic war on Haiti. State Department apparatchiks coordinated with an Inter American Development Bank official as they sought to counter claims made by Haiti’s government over blocking and delay of loans and disbursements. Elmore had a front-row seat to this, demonstrating her quiet influence over Washington’s anti-Aristide’s efforts.

 Elmore named as player in CIA cocaine conspiracy

Closer inspection of Elmore’s background directly implicates the CIA in the conspiracy. In fact, she was specifically identified as a CIA officer by a DEA agent during a December 1997 Department of Justice probe into the Reagan administration’s clandestine use of cocaine trafficking to covertly finance its dirty war in Nicaragua.

DoJ officials reviewed testimony and documents provided by former DEA special agent Celerino Castillo, who attempted to infiltrate organizations controlling El Salvador’s cocaine trade. He claimed to have uncovered incontrovertible evidence that the CIA operation to supply Nicaragua’s fascist Contras “also smuggled drugs to help finance the war,” but encountered a “wall of resistance” trying to alert his counterparts at the CIA and the US embassy. A superior, he alleged, warned him to “leave it alone.”

Castillo explicitly named Elmore as the CIA operative in El Salvador to whom he reported during this time. She confirmed his timeline when subsequently grilled by the DoJ, but claimed to have merely served as the local embassy “narcotics coordinator.” She also admitted he “briefed her on several occasions concerning drugs in El Salvador, and made general allegations that the Contras were involved in narcotics trafficking.” However, she asserted, “no evidence had been developed to substantiate that rumor.”

Elmore was subsequently interviewed behind closed doors by the House Intelligence Committee about her knowledge of CIA drug trafficking. Her testimony has never been released. At the time, former LAPD narcotics investigator Michael C. Ruppert charged thatwhile in El Salvador, she “routinely met” with “military and political leaders” and “used sexual liaisons to gather intelligence and protect drug operations.” Ruppert described Elmore as a CIA officer operating undercover as a State Department embassy political officer. 

Elmore’s Linkedin profile indicates that in addition to her work as a political officer, she was also employed by the aviation and police development programs of the State Department’s Bureau of International Narcotics and Law Enforcement Affairs. A State Department newsletter from April 1986 shows Elmore was named in a US Senate foreign service nomination. Between 1993 and 1994 she attended the Inter-American Defense College (IADC) in Washington, DC, which has ties to the Organization of American States (OAS). Like other US programs that train police and army officers from across the Western Hemisphere, the school has a history of grooming individuals involved in coups, death squads, and US-sponsored intelligence programs. 

Since retiring in 2006, Elmore’s LinkedIn profile shows she has worked as a consultant as well as Director of Research and Analysis at SOL Worldwide. The firm’s now defunct websiteexplained that its “personnel have worked around the world, supporting US initiatives”. This included a Afghanistan National Police (ANP) Local National Interpreter and Translator Program, and a Bosnian Federal Ministry of the Interior (FMOI) Curriculum Development and English Training. 

The website also describes SOL Worldwide carrying out “Flexible Operational Readiness and Support…for projects ranging from construction and security to logistics, transportation, and life support” giving examples of operations in Dubai, the U.S. Mexican border, El Salvador, Haiti, Sudan, Turkey, and Southern Afghanistan. The website further explains, “various trainings and support services were offered for “multinational corporations supporting operations in Africa, Latin America, and Southwest Asia.”

In the wake of coup, mass graves, mass murder, zero accountability

On January 1 2004, the bicentennial celebration of Haiti’s independence was held in Gonaïves, where the country’s independence from France had been declared in 1804. The gathering was attended by Aristide and notable guests such as South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki, the only foreign head of state to resist a French and US-led boycott of the event.

While large crowds celebrated, police clashed violently with local putschists attempting to wreck the bicentennial gathering. Brian Concannon, executive director of the Institute for Justice and Democracy in Haiti, was present in Gonaïves that day. He told The Grayzone that the outbreak of violence “was all part of a plan painstakingly constructed for years.”

“The prison break and the violence on January 1 were all deliberate steps toward the eventual coup,” Concannon explained. “The skirmishes weakened the government, scared its supporters, and emboldened the opposition. The police were already stretched thin trying to protect the border against the paramilitary invaders and managing the deliberately provocative protests, which were synchronized. The next step was to stir unrest in Gonaïves, which opened up a third front for the police and forced them to divert resources.”

By mid-February 2004, initial skirmishes between fascist paramilitaries and local authorities had descended into all-out war. Putschists in Gonaïves teamed up with anti-Aristide ex-police and paramilitary figures who descended on the country from the Dominican Republic, where they had been protected for years.

The legitimate government deposed, the US and allies installed a new Prime Minister: Gonaïves-born Gérard Latortue, a former World Bank official living in Boca Raton, Florida at the time. Meanwhile, paramilitaries reigned supreme in the streets of Haiti, murdering and imprisoning anti-coup protesters with impunity. A study published by Lancet Medical Journalfound approximately 8,000 people were murdered in the greater Port-au-Prince area in the 22 months following the coup. A University of Miami Human Rights Investigationdocumented mass murder by police and UN occupation forces, as well as mass graves, cramped prisons, hospitals with no medicine, corpse-strewn streets and maggot-infested morgues.

Haiti’s public administrators, judiciary, and security forces were subsequently purged of any and all officials still loyal to democracy. Mass layoffs and attacks on anti-coup labor unionswere commonplace. Dissident journalists faced assassination and arrest, while the government’s L’Union newspaper and Aristide Foundation for Democracy’s Kreyòl language newspaper Diyite were forcibly shuttered. Meanwhile, those responsible for the Raboteau massacre and other paramilitary crimes were shielded from prosecution.

A request for comment by The Grayzone to the Facebook account of Janice Elmore and email address displayed on SOL Worldwide’s now-defunct website have gone unanswered. Elmore was not available at the phone number listed there.

The State Department refused our request for comment, referring us instead to the CIA, which has not responded to an email query.
https://thegrayzone.com/2024/03/01/secret-cable-cia-haiti-coup/

 

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