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CounterPunch
March 4,
2003
Swing Blades
Rumsfeld Filled His Pockets with Pyongyang's
Nuclear Loot
By CHRIS FLOYD
It's a well-known fact--oft detailed in this column--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, 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 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 multimillionaires who once trumpeted their "business
savvy" as selling points for their right 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 1: Losing the Plot 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 most observers 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.
Postscript 2: Red Don Rising The Korean
caper was not the first time Rummy signed up for both teams,
of course. There is the little matter of his former financial
tryst with the leaders of Communist China -a most Bushian affair,
featuring ruling family members profiting from Daddy's government
power.
It happened on this wise. A few months
after Rumsfeld joined the Bush Regime stable, the American master
of war bagged an estimated $500,000 by cashing in his joint investment
with Jiang Mianheng, son of former Chinese president Jiang Zemin.
The pair had been partnered in Shanghai's Red Flag Software,
which is used by the godless Chinese commies to, er, block attempts
by American spies to penetrate Beijing's computer networks. Naturally,
Red Rum was not bothered by these national security considerations--not
when there was easy money to be had.
Politically-Connected Insiders of the
World, Unite!
Chris Floyd
is a columnist for the Moscow Times and a regular contributor
to CounterPunch. He can be reached at: cfloyd72@hotmail.com
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