Independent journalist Allan Nairn and American Conservative correspondent Kelley Beaucar Vlahos:
John McCain’s list of official and formal policy advisers includes former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, General Colin Powell, William Kristol of The Weekly Standard, and former CIA Director James Woolsey. One of Mitt Romney’s top advisers is Cofer Black, the former CIA official who now serves as vice chair of Blackwater Worldwide. Vice President Dick Cheney’s daughter Elizabeth is advising Fred Thompson.
McCain has General Alexander Haig, who oversaw the US policy of mass terror killings of civilians in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua and Honduras, when American nuns and religious workers were abducted, raped and murdered by the Salvadoran National Guard. General Haig said those nuns died in an exchange of gunfire, the pistol-packing nuns. He has a younger—McCain has a younger adviser, Max Boot, who now points to El Salvador, where 70,000 civilians were killed by American-backed death squads, as a model counterinsurgency, a model for what the US should be doing today. Henry Kissinger advises McCain, as he advises many others. And Kissinger, of course, was responsible for mass death in Cambodia, Vietnam, Chile, countless other places. Bud McFarlane from the Reagan administration, who was a key backer of the Contras. Brent Scowcroft, who these days is popular with some liberals because he opposes—he opposed the Iraq invasion, who is a leader of the realist school—the realist school basically says, yes, kill civilians, but make sure you win the war, as opposed to the Bush-Cheney school, which has been killing civilians but losing the war, as the US has been doing until recently in Iraq and is now starting to do in Afghanistan—Scowcroft was the one who, during the Bush 1 administration, went to China right after the Tiananmen Square massacre and reassured the Chinese leadership, “Don’t worry about it, we’re still behind you. [vi]”
Concerned? I am
Now you should ask yourself for what interests, to what purposes, and for whose benefit he would use the expanded powers of the US President – powers so extensive that they have made the rule of international law as well as domestic law optional for the president and the executive branch, as long as the war without end continues.
And that, in itself, will be for as long as the president decides.
Republicans have no choice but to back McCain or break party colors – or not vote at all.
The neocons and lobbyist representing Jewish Americans who feels Iran should be neutered through use of US Military preemptively, have already pretty much abandoned the lame duck incumbent president for McCain.
In Iraq, the US troop withdrawal has been put on ice and a US backed Iraq Government clamp down on Shiite groups is ready to be flared up into an expansion of the war which would benefit McCain’s chances in an election where national security and military matters will be core issues.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
