|| -----Original Message-----
|| From: Kevin Robert Dean
||
||
|| http://www.ddh.nl/pipermail/wereldcrisis/2001-October/001284.html
||
Here's a somewhat bigger fish:
Note: Dubya had to retract the Otto Reich nomination.
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2001/nov2001/reic-n24_prn.shtml -------------------------------- As the Bush administration exhorts governments throughout the world to line up behind its “war on terrorism,” it is pressuring the US Senate to push through confirmation of a nominee to a key foreign policy position whose own links to terror and an illegal CIA propaganda operation have raised concerns even among the usually docile Democratic leadership.
The name Otto Reich topped the list of 18 nominees submitted last month by Secretary of State Colin Powell. He is one of a group of veterans of the illegal covert wars fought by Washington in Central America under the Reagan administration in the 1980s who are now reassuming key posts in the US foreign policy establishment.
(...)
An anti-Castro Cuban émigré and an extreme right-wing political ideologue, he joined the Reagan administration as a deputy director of the Agency for International Development for Latin America. In 1983, he was tapped to head the Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD), ostensibly serving as an advisor to then-Secretary of State George Shultz.
In reality, the office worked as an arm of the covert operation led by Lt. Col. Oliver North, the Reagan administration National Security Council official who directed a network of ex-military and CIA officials, Cuban counterrevolutionaries and mercenary gangsters to supply, train and supervise the contras. Reich’s office essentially utilized the methods of propaganda and psychological warfare associated with CIA operations abroad, and turned them against the American people in an attempt to sway public opinion on US policy in Central America.
Reich was responsible for floating false news reports to justify US aggression against Nicaragua. This included the phony claim in 1984 that the Soviet Union was shipping sophisticated MiG fighter aircraft to the Central American country. Even as State Department and CIA officials advised the government that the allegation was patently false, Reich’s OPD set up dozens of background briefings for media outlets aimed at bolstering the claim.
(...)
In 1987, the Reagan-appointed Comptroller General of the US issued a legal opinion, concluding that the OPD under Reich had broken the law by “using funds for publicity or propaganda purposes not authorized by Congress” and had “engaged in prohibited, covert propaganda activities designed to influence the media and the public to support the administration’s Latin American policies.”
(...)
Emerging unscathed from the investigations into the contra support network, Reich was named US ambassador to Venezuela. There, he established his most direct connection with terrorism, becoming an advocate for Orlando Bosch, a fellow right-wing Cuban émigré who was jailed in Venezuela for 11 years for organizing the 1976 bombing of an Air Cubana flight that claimed the lives of 73 people, including the entire Cuban Olympic fencing team, which was returning from an international competition in Caracas.
Bosch had transferred the base of his terrorist activities from the US to Venezuela. He was compelled to move after he violated a parole agreement stemming from his conviction for firing a bazooka at a Polish freighter in Miami harbor.
Through a bizarre appeals process, widely believed to have been greased by bribe money from the CIA and pressure from US Ambassador Reich, Bosch was released a year after Reich arrived in Caracas. Though the US State Department officially listed him as an undesirable, classified cables indicate that Reich attempted to secure a US visa for Bosch. In September 1987, the terrorist wrote a letter to a congress of Cuban right-wingers, effusively thanking his “compatriot,” the US ambassador. (...) -------------------------------- And this is from http://www.counterpunch.org/homeland1.html : -------------------------------- November 8, 2001
A CounterPunch Special Report
Homeland Insecurity: Phoenix, Chaos, The Enterprise, and The Politics of Terror In America
by Douglas Valentine
(...)
To cover these illegal terror operations--and a separate, immense covert action, which involved the recruitment and training of Moslem mercenaries, including Osama bin Laden, to repel the 1980 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, and thus bleed the Soviet Union into oblivion--Casey penetrated the Office of Public Diplomacy within the State Department. A totally illegal CIA domestic operation, Casey's hijacking of the Office of Public Diplomacy enjoyed the tactic approval of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Part of the reason for this incredible oversight was the fact that CIA officer Robert Simmons was staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee. During the Vietnam War, Simmons had advised a CIA Interrogation Center for 18 months in Phu Yen Province. Today, unbelievably, he is now a Congressman from Connecticut. Totally sympathetic to Casey's policy, Simmons was unable to provide any information about illegal CIA covert actions, including the mining of Nicaraguan harbors, to those Committee members who might have objected. Thanks to Simmons and the Committee's chairman, Senator Barry Goldwater (R-AZ), the Office of Public Diplomacy, under Otto Reich, had free reign to inundate the media with black and gray propaganda, thus protecting all of Casey's illegal activities.
"A staff report by the House Foreign Affairs Committee (September 7, 1988) summarized various investigations of Mr. Reich's office and concluded that "senior CIA officials with backgrounds in covert operations, as well as military intelligence and psychological operations specialists from the Department of Defense, were deeply involved in establishing and participating in a domestic political and propaganda operation run through an obscure bureau in the Department of State which reported directly to the National Security Council rather than through the normal State Department channels. Through irregular sole-source, no-bid contracts, S/LPD established and maintained a private network of individuals and organizations whose activities were coordinated with, and sometimes directed by, Col. Oliver North as well as officials of the NSC and S/LPD. These private individuals and organizations raised and spent funds for the purpose of influencing Congressional votes and U.S. domestic news media. This network raised and funneled money to off-shore bank accounts in the Cayman Islands or to the secret Lake Resources bank account in Switzerland for disbursement at the direction of Oliver North. Almost all of these activities were hidden from public view and many of the key individuals involved were never questioned or interviewed by the Iran/Contra Committees."" {11}
The Office of Public Diplomacy was so successful in manipulating the media, that it was able to convince the public that Reagan had not approved the funding of the illegal Contras from profits from illegal secret arms sales to Iran--even after he confessed to the crime, with a glistening Hollywood tear in his eye, on national TV in November 1986. Likewise all Congressional investigations into the Iran-Contra scandal were successfully subverted, and George Bush was elected president in 1988, despite his integral role in what was the most egregious violation of the Constitution in American history. What amounted to a military coup went unpunished, due to the success of the CIA's psychological warfare capabilities, and its near absolute control of the major American media.
The current Bush Administration, incidentally, is considering nominating Otto "Third" Reich as Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs. (...) 11 See the National Security Archive website for Public Diplomacy and Covert Propaganda: The Declassified Record of Ambassador Otto Juan Reich, by Thomas Blanton, March 2001. (...) -------------------------------- Robert Parry also talked about Otto Reich's black ops in the Office of Public Diplomacy: http://www.totse.com/en/politics/central_intelligence_agency/162602.html
Thank God all those conspiracies are over now so we don't have to get down and dirty, right Carroll?