Don Rumsfeld Bats Both Ways
By Chris Floyd 10/10/06 "ICH
Information Clearing House " -- --
In February 2003, I
wrote a column for the Moscow
Times detailing Don Rumsfeld's personal – and profitable
– connection with North Korea's nuclear program. Today
Greg
Saunders at This Modern World notes (from a
Guardian story from May
2003), that the Bush Administration continued to shove money
toward Rumsfeld's corporate cronies, allowing them to help
accelerated North Korea's nuke push – even as the Dear Leader
(theirs, not ours) was kicking out weapons inspectors and
withdrawing from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty.
What I wrote more
than three years ago unfortunately still holds true today. The
nuclear blast test that North Korea conducted this week is not
only the result of the Bush Administration's incompetent and
sinister diplomatic philosophy – which seems to consist solely
of provoking unfriendly regimes into countermeasures which can
then be used as excuses for war-profiteering "regime change"
assaults – but also stems from the overwhelming lust for loot
that lies behind the noble rhetoric of the third-rate goons of
the Bush Gang.
Swing Blades
(Originally published in
the Feb. 28, 2003 edition of The Moscow Times; the version
here excerpted from the book,
Empire Burlesque.)
It's a well-known
fact – oft detailed in these pages – that the boys in the
Bush Regime swing both ways. We speak, of course, of their
proclivity – their apparently uncontrollable craving – for
stuffing their trousers with loot from both sides of
whatever war or military crisis is going at the moment.
That's why it
came as no surprise to read last week that just before he
joined the Regime's crusade against evildoers everywhere
(especially rogue states that pursue the development of
terrorist-ready weapons of mass destruction), Pentagon
warlord Donald Rumsfeld was trousering the proceeds from a
$200 million deal to send the latest nuclear technology –
including plenty of terrorist-ready "dirty bomb" material –
to the rogue state of North Korea, the Swiss paper
Neue Zurcher Zeitung
reports.
In 1998, Rumsfeld
was citizen chairman of the Congressional Ballistic Missile
Threat Commission, charged with reducing nuclear
proliferation. Rumsfeld and the Republican-heavy commission
came down hard on the deal Bill Clinton had brokered with
North Korea to avert a war in 1994: Pyongyang would give up
its nuclear weapons program in exchange for normalized
relations with the United States, plus the construction of
two non-weaponized nuclear plants to generate electricity.
The plants were to be built by an international consortium
of government-backed business interests called KEDO.
Rum deal, said
Rummy: those nasty Northies would surely turn the peaceful
nukes to nefarious ends. What's more, even the most
innocuous nuclear plant generates mounds of radioactive
waste that could be made into "dirty bombs" – hand-carried
weapons capable of killing thousands of people. The
agreement was big bad juju that threatened the whole world,
Rumsfeld declared.
Of course, that
didn't prevent him from trying to profit from it. Even while
he was chairing commission meetings on the "dire threat"
posed by the Korean program, Rumsfeld was junketing to
Zurich for board meetings of the Swiss-based energy
technology giant, ABB, where he was a top director. And what
was ABB doing at the time? Why, negotiating that $200
million deal with North Korea to provide equipment and
services for the KEDO nuclear reactors, of course!
Yes, nuclear
proliferation is ugly stuff – but you might as well squeeze
a few dollars from it, right? A smart guy always plays the
angles – and, as the hero-worshiping American media never
stop telling us, Rumsfeld is one smart guy.
In fact, he's so
smart that he's now playing dumb. A Pentagon spokesman says
Rumsfeld "can't recall" discussing the Korean deal at ABB
board meetings. And his erstwhile ABB corporate colleagues
say that it's possible the subject never came up. Of course
it didn't; going into the nuclear business with a Communist
tyranny that very nearly launched a nuclear war against the
West just four years before, in a deal that involved
high-level negotiations with the governments of the United
States, South Korea, Japan and the European Union – that's
certainly the kind of thing that would be handled by a
couple of junior executives in a branch office somewhere.
Nothing for the bigwigs – especially hard-wired government
players like Rumsfeld – to trouble their pretty heads about.
A perfectly reasonable explanation.
And so Rumsfeld
joins the roster of Bush Regime boardroom honchos who once
trumpeted their "business savvy" as selling points for their
aspirations to national leadership but now claim to have
been "hands-off" figureheads who had no idea what their
companies were up to. Bush, in his sinkhole of insider
trading and stockholder scamming at Harken; Cheney, making
fat deals with Saddam Hussein (yes,
after the Gulf War)
and muddying up the corporate books at Halliburton; Army
Secretary Thomas White, gaming the power grid and stealing
millions for Enron in the manufactured California "energy
crisis" – all of them went from mighty moguls to mere "front
men" the instant their corruption was brought to light. None
of it was their fault; nothing ever is.
Whatever happened
to Bush's much-trumpeted "era of responsibility?" These guys
are not only chiselers, hustlers, hypocrites and war
profiteers – they're a bunch of gutless wonders as well. So
you'll pardon us if we are just the tiniest bit cynical
about the "moral arguments for war" and other such buckets
of warm spit this gang is now forcing down the world's
throat.
Postscript
And what became
of that 1994 pact with North Korea? UN inspectors entered
the country to make sure the weapons program was put on ice.
Pyongyang signed a number of lucrative deals with various
politically-connected Western firms, like ABB, to build the
promised energy plants, while waiting for the normalization
of relations with the United States to begin – a move which
many thought would set North Korea on a course toward
China-style "moderation" of its monolithic regime.
But normalization
never came. Clinton, pressured by rightwing forces (such as
Rumsfeld's commission) who opposed any truck whatsoever with
godless commies, did his usual folding number, with much
windy suspiration of forced breath – and no action. The KEDO
companies pocketed Pyongyang's cash but dithered about the
actual construction. Pyongyang – while not exactly a font of
smiling cooperation itself – concluded that the pact was
being deep-sixed. This suspicion was confirmed when Bush
took office, calling Korean leader Kim Jong Il a "pygmy" and
declaring the county part of the "Axis of Evil."
Pyongyang then
accelerated its weapons program, kicked out the UN
inspectors, and is now threatening to unleash a nuclear war
if Bush, a la Iraq, makes a "pre-emptive strike."
A dicey
situation, sure – but at least Don Rumsfeld made some money
out of it.
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