|
NVUSA Home 7 Covenants Global Sept. 11 Webliography gMoses Academic Home American Nonviolence Syllabus Mail to: Greg Moses |
Nonviolence USA Special FeatureCopWatchA Look at Players in PowerBecause we need to think carefully about the requirements of democracy in a New World Order
I present the following archaeology into the life and work of Frank Carlucci in order to help frame what concerns me and many others at this critical time in history. The example of Mr. Carlucci is taken at random to raise a larger structural concern. Just as Mr. Carlucci, the manager of global affairs and master of fortunes, pays close attention to organizational structures and personal relations that produce unprecedented accumulations of power, so do we citizens of the so-called New World Order, demand our right to pay close attention to the organizational structures of actual power, lest the powers accumulated by certain persons, in the name of public service or consumer demand, begin to contravene our ability as citizens to maintain our right to collectively control by democratic means the great powers of state and commerce that we have collectively created and placed at their disposal. In this respect we do not beg anyone's permission. We demand the right to jealously guard our responsibilities, despite the dangers of the current climate or the lack of support that we find in the leadership of the Democratic Party of the USA or the generally corrupted press. --gm (11/27/2002)
Frank Carlucci attracted my attention for his connection to Majority Whip of the US Senate, Mitch McConnell (R-Kentucky). According to a Louisville Courier-Journal article of June 24, 2001, by reporters Al Cross and Mark Pitsch, McConnell's most prominent financial support comes from two companies, Ashland and Brown-Forman. The Brown-Forman Company distills fine whiskeys of medicinal quality such as Old Forester, Jack Daniels, and Southern Comfort. Ashland is a global leader in, 'highway construction, chemical and thermoplastic distribution, specialty chemicals, motor oil and car-care products.' Carlucci shows up as a director of the globetrotting and McConnell-supporting Ashland Corporation. According to the bio provided by Ashland, 'Mr. Carlucci, 71, is chairman of The Carlyle Group. He was Secretary of Defense of the United States from 1987 to 1989. He is chairman of the board of Neurogen Corporation and a director of Kaman Corporation, Pharmacia Corp., SunResorts, Ltd. and Texas Biotechnology Corporation.' Francis Schor in an article for Counterpunch (Feb. 1, 2002) provides a helpful rundown of Carlucci's career, including his presence in the vicinity of regime changes that ended the life and rule of the Congo's first elected Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and Brazil's President Joao Goulart. Lumumba and Goulart were replaced in turn by dictators Sese Seko Mobutu and Castelo Branco. While serving as National Security Advisor to President Ronald Reagan, Carlucci helped negotiate the INF treaty that removed some nuclear weapons from Europe. Carlucci later recalled that the final agreement was negotiated, 'with just George, Shevardnadze and me sitting in George’s office.' [See Brookings oral history below.] Schor reports that Carlucci was a college buddy of Donald Rumsfeld, who today serves his second term as US Secretary of Defense. In another Counterpunch report (May 21, 2002), Schor discusses how Carlucci's Carlyle group provided an organizational umbrella for two families, the Bush's and Bin Ladin's, to work together on their fortunes. Asia Times reporter Tim Shorrock informs us in his dispatch of March 19, 2002, that, 'Carlucci, in addition to his many other corporate directorships, is the chairman of the board of the US-Taiwan Business Council that sponsored [the March 2002] defense summit [between the US and Taiwan]. The council is a coalition of US multinational corporations that do business in both Taiwan and China, including Boeing, General Electric, Honeywell and Babcock & Wilcox. Indeed these are the sorts of arrangements that lead conspiracy theorists into their theories. Al Martin for instance speculated in the early days of the George W. Bush administration that the President was trying to resurrect RAG-1 or the Restricted Access Group 1. According to Martin's report the RAG-1 group was chaired by Vice President George Bush during the Iran-Contra days and included as members Richard Armitage, Frank Carlucci, and Elliott Abrams. As for Iran-Contra, Carlucci makes a repeated point of saying that when he was National Security Advisor he took steps to contain the perogatives of Ollie North [see oral history below.] Martin was worried early, according to a page archived by Google, that, "The reconstitution of this access group would indicate that even more egregious covert illegal activities in the future are going to take place - an acceleration of the rearming of China in order to make China the New Designated Enemy of the 21st Century. This policy will be stepped up and even more egregious acts will be committed." (BTW an outdated web address for Al Martin's article today points to a page at Conspiracy Digest, where viewers are encouraged to buy a book by Uri Dowbenko entitled BUSHWHACKED: INSIDE STORIES OF TRUE CONSPIRACY. And if you want to see something wierd, try typing this address into your browser "www.carlucci.org") Returning to the story about Carlucci, New York Times reporter Leslie Wayne recounts that Carlucci organized the Carlyle group as a defense-contracting conglomerate by picking up distressed companies and turning them into new opportunities for profit. Furthermore, reports Wayne, in an article archived by Truthout (March 5, 2001), Carlucci, 'said he met in February [2001] with his old college classmate Donald H. Rumsfeld, the secretary of defense, and Vice President Dick Cheney, himself a defense secretary under former President Bush, to talk about military matters--at a time when Carlyle has several billion-dollar defense projects under consideration.' Of course, there was no lobbying involved, says Carlucci. Of course not. While serving as National Security Advisor and Secretary of Defense in the later years of the Reagan administration, Carlucci worked closely with Colin Powell. In the early months of the Bush II administration, Carlucci directed publication of a 60-page report for the Brookings Institution on State Department Reform, that encouraged strong Congressional cooperation and backing for the new Secretary of State Colin Powell. Today Carlucci serves on a Brookings task force known as the Volcker Commission which in January, 2003, will announce the need for 'bold action' in reform of federal employment. The Commission is named, of course, for former Federal Reserve Chair Paul Volcker, who spoke in July, 2002, about his talented 'club' of experts. Said Volcker, 'What else, I ask, but a genuine sense of growing crisis would bring the Chief Justice of the United States himself and one of his colleagues to spend much of an afternoon in a public meeting with the small, self-appointed, private National Commission on the Public Service? Their plea for attention to the threat to the independence and quality of the federal judiciary implicit in the systematic erosion of judges’ real income has even broader implications, with comparable problems in the Executive Branch and the Congress.' Participating in a Brookings Institution oral history project, Carlucci once said: Let me start off with a story. When Ronald Reagan asked me to be national security adviser, he didn’t say he was asking me because he had confidence in me or I knew something about foreign policy. He said, 'I am asking you, Frank, because you’re the only person that Cap and George can agree on.' And I had the Cap Weinberger/George Shultz feud to deal with, particularly on a whole series of backlogged arms control decisions. Colin Powell, my deputy at the time, made me sit down and go through these arms control decisions, and the minor ones we decided ourselves, particularly where Cap and George could agree, but the large ones inevitably had to go to the president. I can remember sitting in a steamy Miami hotel room waiting for the Pope with Howard Baker and the president going through maybe fifty of these esoteric decisions.... If the job is to be done right, I also think it’s important that the National Security Council not be in an operational role, a problem that the Tower Commission pointed out. What I found when I came in was that Oliver North was quite operational. We had to back the NSC out of that role because, once you became operational, you couldn’t be the honest broker. Or listen to this exchange with Brent Scowcroft: SCOWCROFT: I have the sense that there’s another problem. That is that the NSC system was really developed to serve an activist president in foreign policy, and the current president is not by nature an activist in foreign policy. He deals with it when he has to. I don’t know that the system works all that well when you don’t have the president there all the time, because by himself the national security adviser can’t really do it. He’s junior to all the other people. He needs that moral authority. If we’re moving into a period now where we have presidents less interested in foreign policy, I don’t know that we will have an effective one. CARLUCCI: It depends on who you elect next time. SCOWCROFT: That’s right. And while we're digging into this report, listen to Colin Powell, who says that during one period of time, 'Shultz, Carlucci, and I met every morning when we were all in town. Alone. Every single morning. It was Shultz’s idea....And so every morning before either one of them went to his office – before George went to C Street [as Secretary of State] or Frank went across the river [as Secretary of Defense] – they came to the West Wing in the White House [where Powell had taken Carlucci's place as National Security Advisor]. We had coffee at my table at seven o’clock and we discussed everything.': POWELL: Another point I would add is that the model I’ve just described worked well for me and I think for Carlucci. I think it’s a pretty good, objective model. At the end of the day, the duty of the National Security Council staff and the assistant is to mold themselves to the personality of the president. And that is why it has to remain a flexible organization with no statutory organization or devices in it, with no requirement for the adviser to have to appear before congressional hearings, and with no other congressional strictures on it other than designating that there will be an executive secretary or secretary of the National Security Council staff. The NSC has to mold itself to the will and desire and feelings of the president. And if the president wants to stiff the Pentagon from time to time, then he ought to do it. He’s the president. |
|
Top NVUSA Home Global Sept. 11 Webliography gMoses Academic Home American Nonviolence Syllabus Mail to: Greg Moses |