Night Owls, a themed open thread, appears at Daily Kos seven days a week
Eric Alterman at The Nation writes—Confirmed: Elliott Abrams’s Defense of Mass Murder Was Based on Lies. Abrams, who admitted he had lied about his role in the Iran-contra affair and got a judicial wrist-slap and subsequently a presidential pardon for it, is currently the U.S. Special Representative for Venezuela:
[...] Although they had the country behind them, few Democrats were willing to risk taking the blame should El Salvador should go communist, as Nicaragua appeared to be doing. To avoid responsibility, they devised a face-saving plan to demand that the Reagan administration undergo a process of “certification” to demonstrate that the Salvadorans were making progress in respecting human rights. In January 1982, just as the Reagan administration was preparing to make its very first certification, the White House found itself faced with reports of a massacre in the village of El Mozote, in the tiny, guerrilla-friendly canton of Morazan.
On the day before the first hearing, January 26, 1982, Raymond Bonner of The New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto of The Washington Post simultaneously reported on an incident in which each hundreds of unarmed civilians had been summarily murdered by uniformed Salvadoran soldiers. (Bonner put the number of victims between 722 and 926.) Neither reporter had seen the massacre take place, and both noted that their guides to the site had been associated with the guerrillas. Yet the journalists saw the corpses firsthand, and photographer Susan Meiselas documented many of them as well.
Immediately, the administration and its allies went to war with reporters and their publications to try to prevent the story from mucking up their proxy war. It sent out its own investigators, who never reached the area after they refused a guided tour from the guerrillas. As one of them later admitted to the journalist Mark Danner, “In the end, we went up there and we didn’t want to find that anything horrible had happened.” So they didn’t. The assistant secretary of state for Inter-American Affairs, Thomas Enders, took their tentative conclusions and insisted that there was “no evidence to confirm that government forces systematically massacred civilians in the operations zone, or that the number of civilians remotely approached the seven hundred and thirty-three or nine hundred and twenty-six victims cited in the press.” Without any independent confirmation, Elliott Abrams—who, at 33, was Reagan’s assistant secretary of state for human rights and humanitarian affairs—also took up the cause. The El Mozote case “is a very interesting one in a sense,” he remarked to the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, “because we found, for example, that the numbers, first of all, were not credible, because as Secretary Enders notes, our information was that there were only 300 people in the canton.”
Abrams’s argument was deliberately misleading. News reports had been clear: The mass killing had taken place in several hamlets. This particular argument was of a piece with the rest of the administration’s McCarthyite strategy to discredit the massacre’s existence. [...]
In 1993 after a U.N. truth commission scrutinized more than 22,000 atrocities that happened during a dozen years of civil war in El Salvador and concluded that 85 percent of these could be attributed to the Reagan-backed right-wing military and its death-squad pals, Abrams dared say, "The Administration's record on El Salvador is one of fabulous achievement." That’s one way to describe it—MB.
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QUOTATION
“We invoke the words of Jefferson and Lincoln because they say something about our legacy and our traditions. We do this because we recognize our links to the past--at least when they flatter us. But black history does not flatter American democracy; it chastens it. The popular mocking of reparations as a harebrained scheme authored by wild-eyed lefties and intellectually unserious black nationalists is fear masquerading as laughter. Black nationalists have always perceived something unmentionable about America that integrationists dare not acknowledge --that white supremacy is not merely the work of hotheaded demagogues, or a matter of false consciousness, but a force so fundamental to America that it is difficult to imagine the country without it.”
~~Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (2017)
TWEET OF THE DAY
BLAST FROM THE PAST
At Daily Kos on this date in 2003—No conclusive evidence:
Well, even as administration officials hype Powell's "Adlai moment" at the UN next week, there is still some dampening of expectations:
Officials cautioned that no one photo or piece of evidence will conclusively prove the administration's case; instead, they describe what they say will be an accumulation of damning details. ''What we're showing is a pattern of behavior,'' a senior administration official said. ''You're not going to have pictures of warheads.
I think I am finally resolved to the fact that war is inevitable. It's a shame that Bush is so hell-bent on going to war that he will risk the lives of thousands to do so, and all on circumstantial evidence.
Obviously Saddam is a brutal dictator, and I'm sure he's got things to hide. But is he a threat to U.S. national security—worth throwing away lives and treasure to depose? That case has not been made. And it won't be made. But that's irrelevant to an administration that keeps using discarded "evidence" of a nuclear program (the aluminum tubes) and a hypothetical link to Al Qaeda to justify a war that even super-hawks like Normal Schwarzkopf won't buy.
On today’s Kagro in the Morning show: Day 1 of questions was mostly low-lights. But what low-lights! Greg Dworkin gets us started, with Dershowitz's fascism, Paul's trolling, and Cruz still hated by all. Can the White House bury Bolton's book? Surprise! Weirdo Yovanovich tracker guy is a weirdo.