Skip to main content

Top Obama Adviser Has Long Ties to Neocons - by Michael Flynn

Top Obama Adviser Has Long Ties to Neocons - by Michael Flynn: "When Wolfowitz was tapped to head the State Department's Policy Planning Staff after the election of Ronald Reagan, he included Ross in his team of assistants, which, according to Mann, would go on to become, over the next two decades, 'the heart of a new neoconservative network within the foreign policy bureaucracy.'

Other Wolfowitz team members from that time included I. Lewis Libby, a Washington lawyer who later became notorious as the disgraced former chief aide to Vice President Dick Cheney; James Roche, President George W. Bush's Air Force secretary who resigned after being implicated in the Boeing tanker leasing scandal; Zalmay Khalilzad, U.S. ambassador to the UN and post-invasion ambassador to Iraq; Alan Keyes, the perennial Republican presidential candidate; and Francis Fukuyama, the 'end of history' theorist and erstwhile neoconservative ally who turned against the faction after the Iraq invasion.

Ross' close association with neoconservatives has deepened over the years, becoming especially pronounced in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks. He supported the invasion of Iraq and, during the run-up to the 2008 presidential elections, repeatedly teamed up with writers from groups like the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) to craft hard-line policies toward Iran."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Evidence of torture used in Iraq | Special Reports | Guardian Unlimited Politics

Evidence of torture used in Iraq | Special Reports | Guardian Unlimited Politics : "The Foreign Office says the 'government, including its intelligence and security agencies, never use torture for any purpose' ( MI5 and MI6 to be sued for first time over torture, September 12). The evidence in the public domain from the court martial into the death of Baha Mousa and the serious abuse of 10 other Iraqi civilians is clear in establishing this is not true. UK armed forces went into Iraq with a written policy that allowed hooding, and with a policy of training interrogators to use hooding, stressing and sleep deprivation to gain intelligence. Iraqi civilians were routinely hooded in up to three sandbags - and even old plastic cement bags. When Baha Mousa died in September 2003, partly as a result of abuse while hooded, common sense dictates that at least at that point those in positions of responsibility within the civil service and military would have acted to change the poli...