Other Officials' Profiles

George Argyros

by Ben Ehrenreich, Nov. 9, 2001 (from Mother Jones)
President Bush wants real estate tycoon George Argyros to be America's next ambassador to Spain--even though thousands of his tenants are suing him for allegedly bilking them out of millions of dollars. Why didn't Argyros' questionable business practices come up? Committee spokesperson Lynn Weil said the senators had already been briefed on the issue and chose not to delve into it further.

Argyros is best known as the former owner of the Seattle Mariners. In Republican circles, however, he is known as the man who raised a reported $30 million for Bush's campaign coffers.

Richard Lee Armitage

A specialist in southeast Asia and the middle east, Armitage, an adviser to Bush during the campaign, has been nominated for the position of Deputy Secretary of State. Armitage is a close personal friend of Secretary of State Colin Powell, and has a long relationship with the Bushes--both I and II.

Born in 1945, Armitage graduated from the Naval Academy and served in Vietnam. Armitage is president of Armitage Associates L.C., and formerly served on the Board of Directors of General Dynamics.

Fluent in Vietnamese, he organized the removal of the South Vietnamese navy after the fall in 1975. In 1975, he served as a Pentagon consultant in Teheran. He was foreign policy adviser to the Reagan campaign. From 1981 to 1983 he was Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for East Asia and Pacific Affairs in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. In the Pentagon from June 1983 to May 1989, he served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, with a role in Middle East security. From 1992 to 1993 he was the Bush appointee for Assistant Secretary of Defense for the Office of International Security Affairs, with the personal rank of ambassador. He worked on U.S. assistance activities for the Newly Independent States (NIS) of the former Soviet Union.

Bush the elder nominated Armitage to be secretary of the Army, but Armitage withdrew his name before the hearings. According to a recent In These Times article, shortly before the hearings writer Jim Naureckas showed a draft of an article documenting Armitage's intimate relationship with a Vietnamese woman in Virginia who had been convicted of running an illegal gambling operation for a Republican senator. It was enough to sink Armitage.

Earlier, as Assistant Secretary of Defense, Armitage had been involved in the Iran-Contra scandal of the late 1980s. According to independent counsel Lawrence Walsh, the evidence was short of airtight, but Armitage had been party to the meetings with General Richard Secord and Oliver North--activities Armitage denied.

Armitage headed a study group on Japan under the auspices of the military-sponsored Institute for National Strategic Studies. The group, consisting mostly of military and intelligence personnel, released its report, The United States and Japan: Advancing Toward a Mature Partnership, last October. The report finds much about Japan to criticize, and urges the U.S. to pressure Japan into making vast changes in its economic and military systems, but laments that the Japanese are, "averse to radical change, except in circumstances where no other options exist."

Whether Armitage is as arrogant in his new role is uncertain, but clearly neither Bush nor Powell is alarmed at either his history or his prescriptions.

John R. Bolton, the undersecretary of state for arms control and international security affairs, represents the right wing of the foreign policy establishment. How right? In January 2001, Jesse Helms endorsed Bolton: "John Bolton is the kind of man with whom I would want to stand at Armageddon, if it should be my lot to be on hand for what is forecast to be the final battle between good and evil in this world."

Bolton, a senior vice president for pubic policy research with the American Enterprise Institute, was spotted in the thick of the battle for the White House during the contested presidential election. Press photographers snapped him with other Bush stalwarts counting hanging chads in Palm Beach.

Bolton's other battles, at least in recent years, have centered on Taiwan and the United Nations. In a clear break with Washington's long-standing "one-China" policy, Bolton advocates that Taiwan be recognized as an independent state and be given a seat in the United Nations. In 1994, Bolton opened his testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee by declaring, "I believe that the United States should support the efforts of the Republic of China on Taiwan to become a full member of the United Nations."

Such views set him apart not only from the Democrats but also from the Bush, Sr. administration. When Senator John Kerry (D-MA) raised the Taiwan issue at Foreign Relations Committee confirmation hearings last month, Bolton dissembled, "It's not my function to advocate diplomatic recognition for Taiwan and it would be inappropriate for me to do so."

Yet on the AEI website, Bolton's views remain clearly spelled out. He writes that "diplomatic recognition of Taiwan would be just the kind of demonstration of U.S. leadership that the region needs and that many of its people hope for… The notion that China would actually respond with force is a fantasy, albeit one the Communist leaders welcome and encourage in the West."

And, according to the Washington Post (April 9, 2001), Bolton is motivated by more than his ultra-rightwing ideology. He's also been on the payroll of the Taiwan government. According to the Post, over a period of three years in the 1990s and at the time he promoting diplomatic recognition of Taiwan before various congressional committees, Bolton was paid a total of $30,000 by the government of Taiwan for "research papers on UN membership issues involving Taiwan." Bolton has denied that his testimony was in any way tied to the fee paid by the Taiwanese.

A Yale-educated lawyer, Bolton has held a variety of posts in both the Reagan and Bush Sr. administrations at State, Justice and USAID. Besides his tenure at the pro-business AEI, Bolton was a senior fellow at the equally right-wing Manhattan Institute in 1993.

Bolton's hardline and right-wing credentials were affirmed in 1999 when he signed a statement prepared by the Project for the New American Century criticizing the Clinton administration for its failure to offer unequivocal support of Taiwan. The statement, signed by other neoconservative and right-wing luminaries such as William Kristol, William Buckley, Paul Weyrich, James Woolsey, Paul Wolfowitiz, William Bennett, and Elliott Abrams, called for a "state-to-state" relationship with Taiwan.

Additional evidence of Bolton's extreme, take-no-prisoners worldview is not difficult to find. He is a prolific writer and speaker.

In an article for the right-wing Weekly Standard (10/4/99) entitled "Kofi Annan's UN Power Grab," Bolton excoriates the UN Secretary General for trying to limit warfare and to establish the supremacy of UN forces. In Bolton's words, "If the United States allows that claim to go unchallenged, its discretion in using force to advance its national interests is likely to be inhibited in the future."

On U.S. arrears to the UN, Bolton proclaimed, "[M]any Republicans in Congress--and perhaps a majority--not only do not care about losing the General Assembly vote but actually see it as a 'make my day' outcome. Indeed, once the vote is lost… this will simply provide further evidence to may why nothing more should be paid to the UN system." Not surprisingly, Bolton is also a hard-line opponent to U.S. peacekeeping missions, whether under the UN or unilaterally. When George W. Bush denounced the use of the military for so-called "nation building," he was repeating Bolton's criticism of the Clinton administration's efforts in Somalia and elsewhere. Nonetheless, Bolton did favor the bombing of Serbia--which was presumably not nation building, nor was it pursued under UN auspices. On North Korea, Bolton has declared that the U.S. should make "it clear to the North that we are indifferent to whether we ever have 'normal' diplomatic relations with it, and that achieving that goal is entirely in their interests, not ours."

After the Senate voted not to ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty (CTBT), Bolton declared categorically, "CTBT is dead." Here he's at odds with much of the American public. Public opinion polls consistently show that more nearly 80% of Americans support a ban on all underground tests.

Bolton's reputation has the advance man for the right wing has continued to grow during his tenure in the George W. administration. Although his office has no purview over human rights or international justice issues, he was the one to sign the letter to Kofi Annan in May 2002 renouncing any role for the U.S. in the International Criminal Court. Bolton has been a staunch advocate of the administration's revival of the "Star Wars" missile defense system, and its rejection of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty.

A speech by Bolton at the Heritage Foundation, also in early May 2002, signaled that the administration may be targeting Cuba in its war on terrorism. His "Beyond the Axis of Evil" speech claimed, without any evidence, that Cuba was developing biological weapons and sharing its expertise with other U.S. enemies.

Raymond J. Burghardt
Nominated to be Ambassador to Vietnam, August 23, 2001
By Andrew Wells-Dang

The characters who inhabited the National Security Council during the Reagan years have traveled a variety of paths since. The most committed ideologues of the Ollie North and Elliott Abrams species have, if anything, grown more ideological since. Others have moderated: Donald Gregg, who served as then-Vice President Bush's security advisor, now directs the Korea Society in New York and promotes reconciliation between the North and South. Raymond F. Burghardt Jr., Latin American director at NSC from 1985-87, may well belong somewhere in the middle.

But Ray Burghardt has a substantial load of baggage from the days of the cold war. He was involved in the pacification campaigns in Vietnam and Central America. He was neck deep in the planning and execution of the Iran-contra scandal, including a stint as a secret emissary. Whether this will impact on his confirmation hearings is uncertain, but if there is opposition to making Burghardt ambassador to Vietnam, it will certainly focus on his days with North and Abrams.

Burghardt began his career as an Asian specialist. Following his admission into the U.S. Foreign Service in 1969, he was posted to Saigon and was assigned as an assistant development advisor to the U.S. Agency for International Development. As part of the so-called Saigon-Guatemala Shuttle, he was then assigned as political officer in Guatemala City (June 1973). U.S. military and civilian personnel sought to use their experience fighting communism in Vietnam as what Gen. Maxwell Taylor termed a "laboratory" for the pacification campaigns in Central America. Burghardt continued to bounce back and forth between Asia and the Americas for the next decade, including stints as political officer at the consulate in Hong Kong and in Honduras under Ambassador John Negroponte, a friend from Saigon days.

In January 1985, following Ronald Reagan's re-election to the presidency, Burghardt was detailed to the National Security Council, where he worked closely with such well-known figures as Robert McFarlane, Admiral John Poindexter, Abrams, and North. More than 20 secret memos were jointly drafted and/or signed by Burghardt and North in 1985 alone. During the first six months of his tenure at NSC, Burghardt served as a covert emissary to Honduran President Suazo, pressuring him to accept large amounts of U.S. assistance in return for political support of the Nicaraguan resistance. He and North then developed a strategy to cover up this offer from Congress. Burghardt remained in close communication with contra leaders Adolfo Calero, Arturo Cruz, and Alfonso Robelo, as well as with Panamanian strongman Manuel Noriega.

On April 9, 1985, North's personal notebook describes a call from Burghardt mentioning the "exclusivity of Israeli offer" and "asking for reciprocity," then describing the flight arrangements for a trip to Tel Aviv. North and Burghardt were seeking "third-country assistance" to provide "lethal aid … arms and ammunition" to the Nicaraguan contras. According to historian John Prados, "There was more to be gained from playing along with North than from bucking him. Burghardt played along. The power of operations was seductive."

None of the primary documents of the Iran-contra scandal mention Burghardt in anything more than a minor supporting role. He was never called to testify before Congress or the independent counsel's office for his actions. However, Burghardt's actions while at NSC show that he understood and helped to formulate the main components of the strategy: finding third-country support for the contras and concealing these maneuvers from Congress and the American people.

Having escaped the consequences of the Iran-contra debacle, Burghardt returned to his Foreign Service career, and shuttled back to Asia. Beginning with a temporary position in Beijing following the Tiananmen Square massacres in 1989, he moved on to deputy chief of mission at the U.S. Embassies in Seoul (1990-3) and Manila (1993-6). From 1997-9, he served as consul general in Shanghai, then most recently as director of the American Institute in Taiwan, the unofficial U.S. embassy on the island. There is no evidence to suggest that Burghardt's Asian career since the 1980's has been anything less than professional, but the Iran-contra past did come back to haunt him once when his nomination to be U.S. ambassador to Mongolia was withdrawn. Given the recent confirmation of his associate Negroponte, Burghardt's chances look better this time around.

William J. Burns, Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs

William J. Burns, Bush's new secretary of state for Near Eastern Affairs, has signaled he intends to continue the U.S. policy of active involvement in the region, with a bias toward Israel. In his confirmation hearings, Burns coupled his acknowledgement that both Israel and Palestine have "legitimate aspirations" with a reaffirmation of America's "unshakable commitment to Israel's security and well-being."

Burns' position is particularly important because of Secretary Powell's dislike of sending "special envoys" to contentious regions, as was common during the Clinton administration. Therefore, Burns will most likely lead any negotiating teams in the area. In early June, just after Burns' confirmation, Secretary of State Powell dispatched Burns to the region.

Burns, 45, does not come into the Middle East without credentials. Burns worked on Near Eastern Affairs under Secretary Powell at the National Security Council, and he most recently held the position of ambassador to Jordan. He speaks Arabic, Russian, and French, and he received an International Relations degree from Oxford University. His career has been with the State Department, including the office of the Deputy Secretary of State and as head of political affairs in Moscow.

Despite his Foreign Service credentials, he has been heralded as a relatively new face in the Middle East peace process, one who doesn't carry as much political baggage as some of the older advisors who tried--and failed--to broker deals. As a negotiator, Burns has won praise for his capacity to listen rather than lecture.

Although the Bush administration initially signaled it intended to step back from active involvement in the Middle East, Buns has argued clearly for a strong U.S. role. "Active American engagement in the Middle East is a necessity, not an option," Burns stated during his confirmation hearing. Although Burns has yet to publicly show his hand, there are no signs that he will make any drastic changes in traditional U.S. policy. The U.S. is widely criticized for trying to be an impartial negotiator in the region while at the same time giving more military and economic assistance to Israel than to any other country in the world.

Burns will also be the point person on Iraq, another U.S. policy quagmire. UNICEF estimates that at least 4,500 Iraqi children are dying every month as a result of international sanctions spearheaded by the United States. Burns was a key proponent of Secretary Powell's proposal to the UN for a shift to "smart sanctions" which were supposed to lift prohibitions on imports of civilian goods while keeping out any supplies that could be used in weapons of mass destruction. The U.S. and Britain withdrew this proposal after Russia threatened a Security Council veto. (see http://www.fpif.org/briefs/vol6/v6n01iraq.html and http://www.fpif.org/papers/iraq/index.html for a more comprehensive review of Iraq policy).

Gordon England, Secretary of the Navy

Gordon England, who has received Senate confirmation as the 72nd Secretary of the Navy, continues the Bush administration's trend of corporate appointees. The Department of Defense leadership is now stacked with private businessmen experienced in industries such as energy, oil, and electronics.

England comes to the Pentagon after a long career with General Dynamics, most recently as an executive vice president. A major defense contractor, General Dynamics focuses on producing information systems, shipbuilding and marine systems, and land and amphibious combat systems for the United States and its allies. Its military contracts include nuclear-powered submarines for the Navy and tanks for the Army.

England adds more of that good ol' military technology to the mix. According to the Washington Times, England will be helping his branch to carry out orders such as "developing futuristic weapons to counter new types of threats emerging in the post-Soviet world."

Before joining General Dynamics in 1966, England was an engineer with Honeywell, working on the Gemini Space Program, a transitional step between the pioneering Mercury and the Apollo Programs. He also served as program manager for Litton Industries on the Navy's E-2C Hawkeye aircraft.

With no actual military service experience, England will have to rely on his corporate engineering background. After graduating from the University of Maryland in 1961 with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering, England earned a master's degree in business administration from the M. J. Neeley School of Business at Texas Christian University in 1975. He is a member of three fraternities: Beta Gamma Sigma (business), Omicron Delta Kappa (leadership) and Eta Kappa Nu (engineering). England also served as a member of the Defense Science Board and as vice chair of the National Research Council Committee on the Future of the U.S. Aerospace Industry.

Walter Kansteiner, Assistant Secretary of State for Africa

Andrew W. Marshall

His actual title is rather obscure: director of the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment, a think tank under the direction of the undersecretary of defense for policy. But Andrew W. Marshall is currently wielding a great deal of power. That's because George W. has designated Marshall-a favorite of Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld-to make a quick but politically important strategic review of likely threats to the U.S., the nature of future wars and how we can fight simultaneously, and the forces we need to do so. And to have it ready within a month or two.

That such a vast undertaking is even remotely possible is testament to Marshall's life's work. While portraying himself as an iconoclastic reformer, Marshall has been in the business since 1949, when he started out as a nuclear strategist for the Rand Corporation. For the past 28 years he's headed the little-known Office of Net Assessment. And during most of that time he has been in the business of criticizing military policy as short-sightedly focused on "fighting the last war." At 79, this is Marshall's last shot at making his futuristic visions into national policy.

President Bush delivered his signature campaign speech on defense policy at the South Carolina military academy, the Citadel, where he said, "Today, our military is still more organized for cold war threats than for the challenges of a new century." Those were Marshall's words and tune, and now Bush is promoting Marshall's vision onto the world's dominant military.

What, precisely, Marshall's strategic review will say is anybody's guess (according to Inside the Pentagon, the news blackout on the review "reaches to the most senior levels of the military"). Yet Marshall's paper trail over his long career suggests that his visions include the risk of bringing wars into being.

Marshall has been a main proponent of the "Revolution in Military Affairs" (RMA), a term he borrowed from a Soviet General Staff member and adapted to describe the need to concentrate on information warfare and precision-guided munitions. "Rather than closing with an opponent," he said in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee in May, 2000, "the major mode will be destroying him at a distance." But Air Force Magazine rebuked Marshall in an editorial saying, "Tell this to the Bosnians." In other words, while Marshall proposes to build his high-tech systems of long-range power projection, real conflicts continue to fester on the ground unaffected and unabated by them.

His enthusiasm for high-tech warfare has led him to raise the possibility of canceling some existing programs-most often mentioned is the F-22 fighter plane, at $182 million a copy. The "next-generation" systems he would put in their place would, of course, be all but certain to cost even more. Beginning in 1995, his office began sponsoring an RMA Operational Concept Wargaming Program, which has explored space-based warfare and "multi-theater global war." He is also a strong proponent of an expansive version of National Missile Defense. Such plans have the effect of provoking others to react; China cites these plans in its recent announcement to increase its military spending by 17 percent, and to accelerate its missile program.

Marshall's record as a prognosticator of future threats has not been impressive. As late at 1988 he headed a commission which judged that the Soviet Union would be the main U.S. military competitor for the next 20 years.

When this position proved unsustainable, even for him, he quickly settled on China as the next threat. In the summer of 1999, his "Asia 2025" report envisioned China and India dividing Asia into spheres of influence at America's expense. "China," according to the report, "will be a persistent competitor of the United States. A stable and powerful China will be constantly challenging the status quo in East Asia. An unstable and relative[ly] weak China could be dangerous because its leaders might try to bolster their power with foreign military adventurism." As Robert Kaiser of the Washington Post noted, the report "rejects the view that Chinese-American relations might evolve gently or fruitfully."

The question is to what extent Marshall's visions of futuristic wars and weapons to fight them will be allowed to dominate U.S. military policy, as well as becoming the self-fulfilling prophecies for the conflicts they envision.

John Negroponte, UN Ambassador

John Dimitri Negroponte, Bush's choice for U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, certainly has plenty of diplomatic experience. His foreign service career spans nearly four decades and includes eight postings on several continents. His first overseas assignment was to the U.S. embassy in Saigon in the mid-1960s, and since the 1980s, he has been ambassador to Honduras, Mexico, and the Philippines. Negroponte speaks four foreign languages: Vietnamese, Greek, French, and Spanish. And, in keeping with the rest of the Bush team, he also has some corporate expertise; most recently he was executive vice president for global markets at McGraw-Hill.

But his resumé conceals the darker side of Negroponte. This may explain why the ambassador has, since his nomination, been ducking requests for press interviews, especially from reporters with some historical memory. As New Republic assistant editor Sarah Wildman put it, with Negroponte's nomination, "human rights activists did a collective double take." Indeed, Negroponte has a reputation, even among some U.S. diplomats who served with him, both for "doggedly defending U.S. interests overseas" and for "making sure human rights don't get in the way." Wildman finds this particularly problematic, since "one of the primary responsibilities of George W. Bush's new ambassador to the United Nations will be to berate countries like China, Burma, and Afghanistan for their violations of human rights."

The Negroponte nomination is coupled with Bush's decision to downgrade the United Nations ambassadorship position by depriving it of Cabinet rank. This decision raises concerns that the Republican White House will become as hostile to the UN as congressional conservatives have been since the 1994 Republican takeover. U.S.-UN tensions eased in the final months of the Clinton administration after Washington managed to strike a deal to pay the bulk of its UN dues, but now there are fears that the Bush team will seek to denigrate and defund the international organization.

Negroponte, the son of a Greek-American shipping magnate, was born in London in 1939, graduated from Yale, and entered the Foreign Service in 1960. From 1971 to 1973, Negroponte was the officer-in-charge for Vietnam at the National Security Council (NSC) under Henry Kissinger. In 1987, during the administration of George Bush the elder, Negroponte returned to the NSC to work under Colin Powell as deputy assistant to the president for national security affairs. Within two years, he was back in Latin America; Bush appointed Negroponte ambassador to Mexico, where he served from July 1989 to September 1993. There, he officiated at the block-long, fortified embassy and directed, among other things, U.S. intelligence services to assist the war against the Zapatista rebels of Chiapas.

But it was during his tour as ambassador to Honduras that Negroponte earned his reputation for being soft on human rights abuses. From 1981 to 1985, Negroponte was U.S. ambassador to Honduras, where he helped prosecute the contra war against Nicaragua and helped strengthen the military dictatorship in Honduras. Under the helm of General Gustavo Alvarez Martínez, Honduras's military government was both a close ally of the Reagan administration and was disappearing dozens of political opponents in classic death squad fashion. Negroponte's predecessor, Ambassador Jack Binns, had repeatedly warned Washington to take a stand to stop the killings. In one cable, Binns reported that General Alvarez was modeling his campaign against suspected subversives on Argentina's "dirty war" in the 1970s. Indeed, Argentine military advisers were in Honduras, both advising Alvarez's armed forces and assembling and training a contra army to fight in Nicaragua. President Reagan responded by removing Binns and putting in Negroponte, who, writes Eric Alterman in an MSNBC.com piece, "turned a deliberate blind eye to a murderous pattern of political killings."

On Negroponte's watch, diplomats quipped that the embassy's annual human rights reports made Honduras sound more like Norway than Argentina. Former official Rick Chidester, who served under Negroponte, says he was ordered to remove all mention of torture and executions from the draft of his 1982 report on the human rights situation in Honduras. In a 1982 letter to The Economist, Negroponte wrote that it was "simply untrue to state that death squads have made their appearance in Honduras." The Country Report on Human Rights Practices that the embassy submitted to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee took the same line, insisting that there were "no political prisoners in Honduras" and that the "Honduran government neither condones nor knowingly permits killings of a political or nonpolitical nature."

Yet, according to a four-part series in the Baltimore Sun, in 1982 alone the Honduran press ran 318 stories of murders and kidnappings by the Honduran military. In a 1995 series, Sun reporters Gary Cohn and Ginger Thompson detailed the activities of a secret CIA-trained Honduran army unit, Battalion 316, that used "shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves." In 1994, Honduras's National Commission for the Protection of Human Rights reported that it was officially admitted that 179 civilians were still missing.

During Negroponte's tenure, U.S. military aid to Honduras, a country of five million, skyrocketed from $3.9 million to $77.4 million. Much of this largesse went to assure the Honduran army's loyalty in the battle against political leftists throughout Central America. Embassy reports to Washington singled out for particular praise army chief Alvarez, a School of the Americas graduate who was direct commander of Battalion 316.

In 1996, when Negroponte was sent to Panama as the U.S. negotiator regarding military bases, the Human Rights Research Center of Panama objected. Negroponte, they said, covered up human rights abuses and, according to the BBC, "knew about the CIA-trained Honduran army unit that tortured and killed alleged subversives." In a 1997 roundtable gathering at the Center for International Policy, Sun reporter Cohn noted that Negroponte was central to the human rights violations. Said Cohn, "He was ambassador when the worst of the abuses were taking place. He knew everything that was going on." "Not exactly the moral sensibility you want in a UN ambassador," notes New Republic's Wildman.

Even today, Negroponte is unrepentant, arguing that, given the political realities, his hands were tied. As he told CNN, "Some of these regimes, to the outside observer, may not have been as savory as Americans would have liked; they may have been dictators, or likely to [become] dictators, when you would have been wanting to support democracy in the area. But with the turmoil that [was there], it was perhaps not possible to do that."

Richard N. Perle

Richard Perle graduated from the University of Southern California, and has an MA in political science, Princeton University. Since 1987 he has been a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington specializing in: Defense, Intelligence, National security, Europe, Middle East and the Russian region. Perle directs AEI's Commission of Future Defense. He was also the chairman of a Council on Foreign Relations study group on nonlethal options in overseas contingencies.

Perle got his start in politics in 1969 as an aide to Washington Senator Henry 'Scoop' Jackson. He drafted the Jackson-Vannik Amendment, which linked Soviet trade concessions to liberalized emigration. He was assistant secretary of defense for international security policy from 1981 to 1987 under Reagan. Perle was responsible for "theater and strategic nuclear weapons policy, trade and technology exports, European and North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) policy, and negotiations between the United States and its western allies and the Soviet Union."

He was Chairman and chief executive officer, Hollinger Digital, Inc. and Director, Jerusalem Post. He is an active media pundit.

Otto Reich, Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs

On March 22, the Bush administration nominated Otto Reich, an inside player in the 1980s Iran-contra conspiracy, to the post of assistant secretary of state for western hemisphere affairs. This is the highest ranking U.S. administration official overseeing North and South America.

Currently, Otto Reich is a well-connected corporate lobbyist representing liquor, tobacco, and arms industries. He's also a vice president of an apparel industry-created sweatshop "monitoring" group widely viewed as a dodge. However, Reich is being nominated for the post not because he's another unsavory lobbyist, but rather because he's a friend of the Bush family and, more importantly, because he's a high-profile Cuban-American. The nomination of Reich is regarded as a political payoff to the right-wing Cuban faction, which has held U.S.-Cuba policy hostage for decades and which was an important factor in George Bush's Florida strategy last fall.

Reich, who is director of the Washington-based Center for a Free Cuba, is politically obsessed with one issue: Cuba. He has lobbied consistently to tighten the economic embargo on the island, hoping one day to provoke an uprising against Fidel Castro. The policy of isolating Cuba and punishing its people has bred widespread contempt for U.S. diplomacy in Latin America. As a strategy for removing the Castro regime, it has not worked for 40 years, and there is no reason to believe it will work now.

Reich not only opposes easing trade sanctions with Cuba--which puts him at odds with two powerful and largely conservative organizations, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce and the American Farm Bureau Federation--he opposes all forms of contact. He even denounced the Baltimore Orioles-Cuba baseball match, claiming in the St. Petersburg Times that it "trivializes the situation there. It's like playing soccer in Auschwitz."

Reich was vocal as well during the Elian Gonzales affair, accusing Fidel Castro of "running" U.S. foreign policy and of preventing Elian's father from coming to Florida. "Juan Gonzales is living, in effect, in a plantation where Fidel Castro is the slave owner, and Fidel Castro decides what everybody in Cuba thinks and says," he declared on the Rivera Live TV show. In reality, Juan Gonzales did come to the U.S., where he repeatedly made clear that his goal was to get his son and return home.

Reich's nomination also invokes the ghosts of a particularly divisive scandal. During the early 1980s, when the Reagan administration met a rising tide of domestic opposition to its wars in El Salvador and Nicaragua, Reich headed a propaganda department in the State Department called the Office of Public Diplomacy. This unit was staffed with CIA and Pentagon "psychological warfare" specialists and reported to Oliver North. The function of the operation was to mislead the American public by disseminating false information, discrediting reporters whose work the Reagan administration did not like, and exploiting other propaganda tactics normally used to confuse and manipulate the populations of enemy countries. Congressional probes of the Iran-contra scandal later identified numerous illegalities and led to the closure of the Office of Public Diplomacy.

Reich's only diplomatic posting was as a single-term ambassador to Venezuela from 1986-89, at the height of the Iran-contra scandal. Leading Venezuelan politicians spoke out against Reich's appointment, and the Venezuelan government tried unsuccessfully to block his nomination. Press reports at the time accused Reich of "converting" the U.S. embassy into a "center for anti-Panama" aggregation, of pressuring the Venezuela government to take a harder line against the leftist Nicaraguan government, and of being an "anti-Castro activist."

State Department cables show that Reich also closely monitored the case of Orlando Bosch, a Cuban-American terrorist who was jailed in Venezuela as the accused mastermind of the 1976 bombing of an Air Cuba plane. The Venezuelan government released Bosch while Reich was ambassador, and President Bush, Sr., pardoned the anti-Castro terrorist shortly afterwards.

More recently, as a corporate lobbyist, Reich has been involved with the Bacardi rum company and the U.S.-Cuba Business Council, a nonprofit organization backed by Bacardi. Bacardi has paid Reich more than $600,000, according to public records recently cited in the New York Times. In addition to lobbying for Bacardi, Reich has represented the British-American Tobacco company. He also assisted the Lockheed Martin Corporation in its attempt to sell F-16 fighter planes to Chile, breaking a 20-year policy of U.S. restraint in keeping high-tech military equipment out of Latin America. And Reich is vice-chairman of the Worldwide Responsible Apparel Program, or WRAP, an apparel industry front group characterized as an artifice for clothing importers to avoid serious scrutiny of their factories in developing countries.

If confirmed, Reich will help oversee the notorious Helms-Burton Act, a law he helped draft. While working for Bacardi, he successfully lobbied to slip Section 211 into the 1998 Omnibus Appropriations Bill, thus stripping Cuba of trademark protection. Helms-Burton has fueled serious trade friction with the European Union, and Section 211 prompted the European Union to bring a legal action against the U.S. at the World Trade Organization. This shadow dance of corporate and nonprofit interests and activities may be lucrative for Reich and his corporate clients, but it hasn't benefited either the U.S. business community or the American people.

Even as the nomination is being considered, U.S.-Cuba relations are taking another nosedive. For the past 40 years--despite the most extreme U.S. provocations--the Cuban government has respected U.S. trademark protection. But now, the Cuban government has announced that Cubans will begin making a Bacardi-named rum of their own. Moreover, the Cubans, in retaliation for the Reich-inspired trademark attack, will produce AIDS pharmaceuticals without regard to the American patent. As a result of Reich and his backers, American companies now find themselves in a trade war they didn't ask for and may not win.

With U.S.-Latin American relations poised at a fork in the road between an improving regionwide, trade-based relationship or an escalating American military engagement in Colombia, Reich is the wrong man, with the wrong instincts, pursuing the wrong interests, at the wrong time.

Also see:
Otto Reich’s Dirty Laundry
By Alec Dubro

Certainly the Bush team knew that nominating Otto Juan Reich for assistant secretary of state for hemisphere affairs would be trouble. After all, the aggressively rightwing Cuban American had been a key player in the Iran-contra scandal by heading the notorious Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD) in the State Department. There he manufactured op-eds that were passed off to the U.S. media under the name of Nicaraguan rebel leaders as he berated editors and journalists he deemed too soft on the Sandinistas or too tough on the Reagan administration.

In recent years, Reich has also associated himself with some of America’s least favorite industries: liquor, tobacco, and armaments. He’s a lobbyist for Bacardi, British American Tobacco, and Lockheed Martin. He’s also remained in the propaganda business. From the U.S. Cuba Business Council and other organizational springboards, Reich broadcasts the exile line, denouncing baseball exchanges, and the return of Elian Gonzalez and trade delegations to Havana.

Almost as soon as Reich’s name was floated, the reaction set in. Liberal groups with a memory of Iran-contra mobilized to stop the nomination, claiming that Reich had only one current interest in the hemisphere and that is the return to Cuba of capitalism.

But even mainstream newspapers, such as the San Antonio Express-News declared their dismay: “Like a disturbing dream from a not-so-distant past, he floats up out of a time when Ollie North was running guns to the Nicaraguan Contras and Robert McFarlane was bearing a key, a cake, and a Bible to stiff-necked Iranian ayatollahs.”

A very bad man for the top slot in Latin America policy. more

Policy Alert:
Reich Confirmation Process: Let the Debate Begin

Condoleezza Rice, National Security Adviser

Condoleezza "Condi" Rice, is the first woman to be nominated as National Security Adviser. According to Salon magazine, she "calls herself an 'all-over-the-map Republican' who considers herself 'very conservative' on foreign policy."

Over the past two decades, though, she has come to identify with the Bush family brand of foreign policy-support for the energy, armament, and financial industries, and a rejection of isolationism.

Rice grew up in segregated Birmingham, Alabama a child prodigy who could play classical piano, dance ballet, ice skate, and speak French.

She enrolled at the University of Denver at the age of 15, graduating at 19 with a BA in political science. There, she took Soviet studies with Joseph Korbel, the father of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and became a Russian scholar. She then obtained an MA at Notre Dame and a Ph.D. from Denver's Graduate School of International Studies. Rice went to Stanford in 1981 to study arms control and became a tenured professor in political science as well as a Hoover Institution national fellow.

In 1986, she went to work for the Reagan administration on nuclear strategic planning at the Joint Chiefs of Staff as part of a Council on Foreign Relations fellowship. In 1989 she returned to Washington to become director of Soviet and East European affairs at the National Security Council. She also became assistant to president Bush for national security affairs and senior director for Soviet affairs at the National Security Council. President Bush once introduced Rice to Mikhail Gorbachev saying, "This is Condoleezza Rice. She tells me everything I know about the Soviet Union."

After Bush left office, Rice became senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, the youngest-ever provost of Stanford University, and a member of the boards of Chevron, the Hewlett Foundation, and Charles Schwab. She is also a member of J.P. Morgan's international advisory council where she has met with some of the world's most powerful CEOs. In 1995, Chevron honored her by naming its largest fleet tanker the Condoleezza Rice; she also owns a reported $250,000 of Chevron stock.

Rice was chosen for her loyalty as much as her undeniable talent and experience. She has been close to the Bush family, including former first lady Barbara, since her stint at the State Department. And, over the past two years, she has become one of the most frequent overnight guests at the Governor's mansion in Austin. During the presidential campaign, she even advanced the dubious claim that Bush is "someone of tremendous intellect."

Rice claims to put America first. "American foreign policy in a Republican administration should refocus the United States on the national interest," she said in Foreign Affairs magazine. "There is nothing wrong with doing something that benefits all humanity, but that is, in a sense, a second-order effect." Yet her circle of associates favor a highly regulated globalized economy and she was part of the team that introduced Bush Sr.'s New World Order. The New York Times (11/17/00) reported that Rice said, "it might be necessary to set up international police forces to carry out peacekeeping functions that are now the responsibility of soldiers."

This is totally unpalatable to the ideological far right, who see Rice as an agent of the United Nations. From the left, though, she often sounds like a cold warrior who hasn't caught up with the changes during the Clinton administration. She knows little about the developing world, although she apparently retains an implacable hatred for Cuba.

On the other hand, Rice was among several who encouraged candidate Bush to recommend unilateral cuts in the U.S. nuclear arsenal, while at the same time urging a robust national missile defense system.

For the foreseeable future, Rice is unlikely to champion any national security changes outside the well-trodden middle ground. How she will react to the next crisis, and what she will recommend is still unknown.

James G. Roche, Secretary of the Air Force

The appointment of James G. Roche, Ph.D. as the 20th Secretary of the Air Force once again confirms President Bush's fondness for big business leaders. Not only does Roche have a long history both on Capitol Hill and with the Pentagon, but also an extensive resume with Northrop Grumman Corporation, the giant defense contractor headquartered in Baltimore. "What I bring to the job is the understanding of a military warrior culture and the business world," Roche said in summing up his qualifications.

Roche joined Northrop in 1992, serving most recently as corporate vice president and president of the Electronic Sensors and Systems Sector. This division develops defense electronics and systems, airspace management systems, precision weapons, marine systems, space systems, and automation and information systems.

Three of Northrop Grumman's recent business deals highlight that the corporation is certain to play a large role in the future proliferation of military technology. According to American City Business Journals, in early 2001, the Electronics Sensors and Systems Sector received a $300 million contract to provide radar equipment to Boeing, a major Pentagon supplier of airplanes and other equipment. In two major acquisitions in October 2000, Northrop took over Sterling Software and Federal Data Corporation, both leading suppliers of information technology services to the federal government.

Before entering the private sector, Roche served (1983-84) as Democratic staff director of the Senate Armed Services Committee and as principal deputy director of the policy planning staff at the State Department. Earlier, he was a senior professional staff member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (1979-81) and assistant director of the Office of Net Assessment at the Pentagon (1975-79).

In short, although a Democrat, Roche fits the Bush administration mold: he is a strong supporter of military expansion through technology, and a veteran of big business. He'll be quite comfortable alongside his counterparts Thomas White, Secretary of the Army, and Gordan England, Secretary of the Navy. Together they will form a sort of executive board for which Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfield sits as the CEO.

Roche has served as a member of the Secretary of Defense's Policy Board and has been connected to two of leading establishment think tanks, the Council on Foreign Relations and the London-based International Institute of Strategic Studies. He is also affiliated with the Conquistadores Del Cielo (an aviation executives' organization), the Military Order of the Carabao (comprised of officers who served in U.S. conflicts in Pacific and Indian Ocean countries), and the American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics.

Roche has big plans for the Air Force. He's high on recruitment and wants to attract new airmen, citing a commitment to improving the everyday lives of the Air Force's personnel. "We want service in the Air Force to be fulfilling for people throughout their whole career, not just for part of it," he said at his Senate confirmation hearings. The new budget called for a $33 million increase for recruiting and retention programs.

Roche also emphasizes developing cutting-edge technology, and advocates the building of weapons that are "far more precise, far more lethal," according U.S. Air Forces in Europe News Service in June, 2001.

George Schultz

George Pratt Schultz was born in New York City in 1920. He has a BA from Princeton, and a Ph.D. in industrial economics from MIT. He served in the U.S. Marine Corps during World War II.

He was a member the economics department faculty at M.I.T. and then in 1957 went to the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business as professor of industrial relations in 1957. He was Dean of the Graduate School of Business from 1962 to 1968. Under the Eisenhower administration, Schultz was on the President's Council of Economic Advisers, and later as a consultant to the Secretary of Labor.

Schultz held three major posts in the Nixon administration: Secretary of Labor, the first Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Treasury Secretary from 1972-74. He was Secretary of State under Reagan and Bush from 1982 to 1989.

Thomas E. White, Secretary of the Army

As the nation's 18th Secretary of the Army, Thomas E. White, a former executive with the disreputable Enron Corporation, declared that he was now ready to "transform the entire army," among other things. With a $70 billion budget, he pledges that he will work to adopt sound business practices--an historically unprecedented innovation in a military branch notorious for poor accounting and cost overruns.

White, in fact, is no novice to the Army, having 23 years of military experience under his belt. In 1967, after graduating from West Point, White became a commissioned Army officer, doing tours in Vietnam. He also served as commander, 1st Squadron, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment; commander, 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, V Corps; and executive assistant to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He retired from the Army in 1990 with the rank of brigadier general.

Until his confirmation as Secretary of the Army, White served as vice chairman of Enron Energy Services, and as a member of Enron's executive committee. He was chairman and chief executive officer for Enron Operation Corporation and was also responsible for the Enron Engineering and Construction Company, the division responsible for building a controversial international pipeline in Bolivia and other power projects, as well as construction of domestic pipelines.

In an article in The Progressive, Pratap Chatterjee writes that both Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have criticized Enron for collaborating with police who brutally suppressed protests at the company's giant power plant in western India. Enron has also been involved in the controversial Cuiaba Integrated Energy Project in Bolivia. Enron and Shell own fifty percent of Transredes, Bolivia's hydrocarbon pipeline transport company. In January 2000, the oil pipeline erupted, dumping an estimated 10,000 barrels of refined crude oil and gasoline into the Desaguadero River, which supports indigenous communities. As an Enron executive, this international pipeline was White's direct responsibility.

At home, Enron and Bush have scratched each other's backs. According to Chatterjee, Enron and its executives were the largest contributors to George W. Bush's presidential campaign, giving a total of over $550,000. As governor, Bush granted the Enron methanol plant in Pasadena, Texas special concessions, allowing the company to pollute without a permit and giving it immunity from prosecution for violating some environmental standards.

White pledges he wants to focus on modernizing the Army, and he states, "I view the Army's transformation as entirely consistent with an increased emphasis on the future for Asia Pacific." White, like others in the Bush administration, see U.S. security strategy shifting from Europe and toward Asia, where they view China as a growing military threat.

White also advocates building more high tech hardware. In a June 12 Associated Press article, Pauline Jelinek writes that White supports "converting four Trident submarines into cruise missile carriers; enhancing the B-2 bomber to carry more bombs; accelerating the production of the high-flying Global Hawk unmanned spy plane; developing a stealthy joint long-range cruise missile; and developing a new long-range precision strike capability."

Paul Wolfowitz

Paul Wolfowitz, Ph.D., is Dean and Professor of International Relations at The Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington.

From 1973-1977, Wolfowitz held a variety of positions in the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency including Special Assistant to the Director for the Strategic Arms Limitation Talks. From 1977 to 1980, he was Director of Policy Planning for the Carter State Department, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense. From 1982 through 1986, he was Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. From 1986 to 1989 Wolfowitz was the U.S. Ambassador to the Republic of Indonesia. During the Bush administration, Wolfowitz was Dick Cheney's Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, the principal civilian official responsible for strategy, plans and policy.

Also see:
Paul Wolfowitz, Reagan’s Man in Indonesia, Is Back at the Pentagon
by Tim Shorrock

In an unguarded moment last May, Richard Holbrooke opened a foreign policy speech in Italy with a fawning tribute to his host, Paul Wolfowitz, the dean of the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

Wolfowitz was a senior diplomat in the Reagan and first Bush administrations, having succeeded Holbrooke in 1983 as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs. President Bush recently appointed him to the number two spot in the Defense Department.

In his new position of deputy secretary, Wolfowitz will have day-to-day control over the Pentagon and a perch to play out his hard-line views on theater missile defense (TMD), which he supports; North Korea, which he views as the rogue nation TMD was designed for; Iraq, where he wants the United States to arm the opposition; and China, which, according his comments to the New York Times last year, he sees as “the major strategic competitor and potential threat to the United States.” Wolfowitz will also play a key role in forming and shaping new military alliances—a job he took to with relish in the waning years of the cold war.

Holbrooke, a senior adviser to Al Gore, was clearly aware that either he or Wolfowitz would be playing important roles in next administration. Looking perhaps to assure Europe of the continuity of U.S. foreign policy, he told an audience in Bologna last year that Wolfowitz’s “recent activities illustrate something that’s very important about American foreign policy in an election year, and that is the degree to which there are still common themes between the parties.” more

Robert B. Zoellick, Trade Representative

Robert B. Zoellick, a seasoned foreign policy overachiever, emerged as George Bush's U.S. Trade Representative at a January 11 press conference in Washington. Zoellick described his views of the world thusly. "As the president-elect said during the campaign, free trade is about freedom. It's important for our economy but also for America's other interests and values throughout the world."

What sort of Trade Representative will Zoellick make? The most likely answer is, unsurprising. He's a known quantity, to the Bush family, to the State Department and to the established think tanks which will be busily formulating the new trade positions. These will not, in all probability, differ greatly from the Clinton positions, but they may have a more jingoistic and even more evangelical air to them. Zoellick himself is both jingo and evangelical. Last year, for instance, he wrote in Foreign Policy:

And, "Finally, a modern Republican foreign policy recognizes that there is still evil in the world -- people who hate America and the ideas for which it stands. Today, we face enemies who are hard at work to develop nuclear, biological, and chemical weapons, along with the missiles to deliver them. The United States must remain vigilant and have the strength to defeat its enemies. People driven by enmity or by a need to dominate will not respond to reason or goodwill. They will manipulate civilized rules for uncivilized ends."

But Zoellick doesn't just pontificate on the glory of U.S. power in a hostile world. He also takes the time to turn a profit. A recent biographical sketch noted that, "Mr. Zoellick serves on the boards of Alliance Capital, Said Holdings, and the Precursor Group. He is a member of the advisory boards of Enron and Viventures, a venture fund."

Yet, these tasks are presumably not time-consuming because Zoellick's principal activities are more in the realm of academic policy. Zoellick was the President and CEO of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, and is on the board of the Center for Foreign Relations. Previously, he was a Research Scholar at Harvard University, A Fellow and Board Member of the German Marshall Fund of the U.S., and a Senior International Advisor at Goldman Sachs.

Not enough? He has also spent an inordinate amount of time in government, Republican government. From 1985 to 1988, Mr. Zoellick served at the Reagan Treasury Department as Counselor to Secretary Baker, Executive Secretary of the Department, and Deputy Assistant Secretary for Financial Institutions Policy. During the Bush Administration. Zoellick was Counselor of the Department of State and Under Secretary of State for Economics. He later served as Deputy Chief of Staff at the Bush White House. Mr. Zoellick was also appointed the President's personal representative for the G-7 Economic Summits in 1991 and 1992.

A native of Illinois, Zoellick received a B.A. from Swarthmore, a J.D. magna cum laude from the Harvard Law School and a Master of Public Policy degree from Harvard University's Kennedy School of Government in 1981.

Clearly , Zoellick is an above average functionary. He is assiduous and at times innovative. According to the New York Times: "He is most widely remembered in foreign policy circles for being the United States' representative at the multiparty negotiation over the future of divided Germany. He persuaded the Bush administration to embrace German unity despite the qualms of allies and alarm in the former Soviet Union."

Despite Bush's attempt to portray himself as a parochial Texan, his choice in this case, as in most of his cabinet picks, is a thoroughly entrenched Washington insider. Zoellick is in every sense of the word, a professional.