Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Wax Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America and by God we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been who's win?
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing they army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys online, John Schwartz from the Tiny Revolution.
Great blog, a great chronicler of many of our wars over these past decades now.
And here at The Intercept, Elliott Abrams, Trump's pick to bring democracy to Venezuela has spent his life crushing democracy.
Welcome back to the show.
John, how are you?
Well, I'm very good.
I'm so happy to have the chance to talk about Elliott Abrams and remind people who may have forgotten about him and bring the good news to people who never knew about him in the first place.
Yeah, man, I'll tell you what.
Well, this is the spotlight today on antiwar.com for the very reason that you did such a great job of trashing this guy in a way that, boy, does he deserve.
Well, go ahead, man.
Take us through this.
I'll stop and interrupt if I think that I have to, to ask something.
All right.
Well, Elliott Abrams served in the Reagan administration and also the George W. Bush administration.
But to understand where he's coming from, you really need to go back to the very beginning for him.
As I say in this article, one of the grimmest moments of US foreign policy, you could say in all history, but certainly in the last 40 years, was the massacre that took place in El Salvador, starting on December 11th, 1981, in a small mountain village.
The Salvadoran military showed up.
This was a unit that had been literally created and trained by the US Army.
If I'm remembering correctly, it was at the School of the Americas where they were trained, which I think was then still in Panama.
And they just started killing absolutely everyone that they found in this village, men, women, and children.
They took the women and girls from age 10 up and separated them and took them into the hills, raped them all before they killed them.
There was a witness who talked about a soldier taking a three-year-old child and tossing him into the air and impaling him on his bayonet.
It was just, as I say, one of the most horrifying examples of one of our client militaries acting like this that there is.
And so again, that was December 11th.
Then Elliott Abrams began a new job in the Reagan administration the next day, December 12th.
And his new title was Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs.
So you might imagine that someone with that job would be like, oh my God, we've really got to find out what happened, expose it, and make sure it never, ever happens again.
Elliott Abrams did exactly the opposite.
He snapped into action and did everything possible to cover the whole thing up.
He was one of the leaders of the cover up in the Reagan administration.
And even to this day, I don't think he's ever acknowledged what actually happened there, even though it's one of the best investigated examples of this that there is.
And he spent the rest of his career doing exactly this.
The U.S. directly does horrible things, supports our client states in doing horrible things.
Elliott Abrams is often there in the planning.
If he's not, he's there to make sure that the world never hears about it afterwards.
Mm hmm.
All right.
So you talk about, well, you know what, even I was just a kid then and I'm old.
Tell us about the Reagan administration's secret wars in Latin America.
Yeah, this is something that, you know, now it is a long time ago now, like it's getting up to 40 years ago.
But the whole story of Latin America in general and specifically Central America is extremely grim.
Yeah, there's a lot of U.S. history where American leaders thought that we were going to literally take over Central America and incorporate it into the United States, that there used to be a dream of having what was called a golden circle of slave states.
And Central America was going to be part of that.
It was going to be part of the central, the golden circle that was going to go, you know, sort of like from Florida around, you know, through the Gulf Coast.
And then we were going to take over Mexico and Central America and the Caribbean.
And they would all be slave states, all part of America, and would all have, you know, a kind of plantation based economy.
And Central America ended up, for the most part, with that kind of plantation based economy.
You know, the interesting thing about Central America is that Costa Rica is one of the very few places there that is not a horrendous nightmare for regular people to live in.
And that's because it's so mountainous that it was never really possible to establish plantation style agriculture there.
But it was in El Salvador and Guatemala and Nicaragua and Honduras.
And, you know, these are sort of where the term banana republics come from, where, you know, U.S. corporations would essentially take over the countries and set up everything about the countries to work just for the profit of these multinationals.
And so that's been true for a hundred years.
And the Reagan administration came into office, and this was just after a successful revolution in Nicaragua, which was pretty rare because we made sure to squelch any kind of revolutionary impulses in Central America, you know, for a long, long time.
And it was understandably threatening to the Reagan administration because there were lots of other people in the surrounding countries, you know, in Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, who would look at a revolution and be like, hey, we'd like to get some of that for ourselves.
And so they were very, very, very determined to crush any attempt to change the status quo in those countries and also roll back what had happened in Nicaragua.
And Elliott Abrams was right in the middle of that.
He was one of the architects of that policy.
And it involved a level of brutality that is very, very, very difficult to understand or imagine.
You know, one thing that I said in this article is that there really is nothing like this going on today in terms of the imaginativeness and cruelty of the violence, except maybe you could say ISIS.
But it was just absolutely pathological.
There was a, I think, a forensic scientist who at one point, you know, recently, I think in the last 10 years, went down to excavate some of the mass graves from Guatemala in particular.
And he said, you know, it's a shame that Jeffrey Dahmer never got to come to Guatemala because he would have ended up as a top general.
It's really, it's kind of beyond the ability of human beings to imagine, but they did it.
And Elliott Abrams was, you know, standing behind it all the while, and it would not have happened like this without people like him.
So it's just an unbelievably sad and ugly story.
And he succeeded.
You know, he has said that he thinks that what he did to El Salvador and the rest of the region was a fabulous achievement.
You know, one example that I mentioned this article because it is so astonishing, but emblematic of what happened during this time period is there's a Catholic priest reported at the time about a peasant woman in El Salvador, who had left her three small children in the care of her mother and sister at home.
I think she was like going out to bring lunch to her other kids and husbands like working on fields.
And she came back and the Salvadoran National Guard had decapitated all five of the people there, her three children and her mother and sister.
Their bodies were sitting around a table.
And the National Guard had taken the hand of each body and put it on top of its former head as though the body was stroking its head.
And the youngest, like the toddler was 18 months old, like the hand apparently kept slipping off.
So they nailed it onto her head.
Like that's the kind of thing that we were supporting in Central America that Elliott Abrams was supporting at the time.
So as I say, it's just like, it's, it's really beyond the imagination of most people to, to look at what actually happened there.
But it did happen.
And that's Elliott Abrams for you.
Yeah, well, and you don't have to be a fan of Daniel Ortega to be against that.
And in fact, Congress made it illegal for the US government to spend money on these death squads.
So instead, they had the Israelis sell some missiles to the Ayatollah, who were also, Reagan was backing Saddam Hussein against the Ayatollah in Iran at the time in the Iran-Iraq War.
But anyway, sold them some missiles, get some hostages released, and then take the excess profits and reinvest it back into these death squads.
And no one will ever know the wiser.
Yeah, and that was, that was the Iran-Contra affair.
Elliott Abrams was involved in that too, in some of the documentation that was, you know, made public after the Iran-Contra investigation concluded.
You know, Elliott Abrams was also involved in talking with the Israelis about, you know, the Israelis were going to provide Spanish language trained instructors who would help the militaries of Central America do this kind of thing when it was harder for the United States military to do that because of prohibitions from the US Congress, as you mentioned.
You know, another Elliott Abrams involvement, which is extremely funny, is that they, you know, with the shutdown from US government funding, they were going and trying to get other, like super right-wing governments to help support what they wanted to do and get the money from them.
So, you know, so they would go around to the Saudis, etc.
Elliott Abrams got a pledge of $10 million from the Sultan of Brunei.
But when he went to make the arrangements using the code name Kenilworth, he gave the Sultan of Brunei the wrong Swiss bank account number.
And so the Sultan of Brunei wired this $10 million to somebody with a Swiss bank account.
Yeah, he sure wasn't, you know, Mrs. Abrams, Rachel, which by the way, was Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter's daughter.
So he is not Norman Podhoretz' son-in-law.
Jim Loeb once wrote a great article called All in the Neocon Family, where he talked about how you could fit most of these people at one Thanksgiving dinner table.
That's all the axis of Midge Decter.
What a Thanksgiving it would be.
Yeah.
This actually, like, I think that was a genuine mistake.
And I think that it was like Fawn Hall, almost no one will remember this.
Now, Fawn Hall was Oliver North's secretary.
And they at least, you know, formally blamed it on her of like, you know, typing it wrong when they gave the account number to Elliott Abrams.
But I think you're really right to point to the family that Elliott Abrams is a part of, because they are truly something.
Like, so you mentioned his wife, Rachel, who is the daughter of Norman Podhoretz and Midge Decter.
She was also the sister of John Podhoretz.
And so this is the milieu in which Elliott Abrams existed.
It's like the bosom of his family.
John Podhoretz, I think, during the Iraq War, he said the real problem was that we, you know, just hadn't killed every Sunni man between, I don't know, whatever the ages were, 18 and 49 or something.
He sure did say that.
Yeah.
And Midge Decter, you know, his mother, and hence Elliott Abrams' mother-in-law, explained very straightforwardly and admirably, like, why do you think we're in Iraq?
Like, we're there for their oil, which we need.
You know, we're not there for sweetness and light.
So she was straightforward about it, and so was John.
And so their explanation, you know, in this family was, well, you know, we need that oil.
We want that oil.
So we're going to kill every Sunni adult man in Iraq.
And then directly for the benefit of Iran.
So then we'll just have to turn around and back Al-Qaeda again, as he supported in Syria, for example, in order to try to make up for the fact that they had just scored what in their own perception has to be an own goal for the Iranian Ayatollah that they all hate so much.
But anyway, you know what?
So before we get to the Gaza Strip coup and all that, um, talk about Rios Montt in Guatemala and Elliott Abrams rolling back in him.
Right.
Well, Guatemala is, is absolutely as ugly a story as El Salvador, which is saying quite a lot.
Uh, you know, we, we have meddled in Guatemala for a hundred years.
There was, you know, like something of a democratic government in Guatemala after World War II, which alarmed us deeply.
And so obviously we had to do something about that.
And in 1954, the CIA overthrew the government of Guatemala.
Uh, we installed a dictator.
There were just dictatorships from there on forwards.
Uh, it's called a civil war.
Like it was really just the Guatemalan government killing Guatemalans.
And, uh, I think for like 25 years between 1960 and the mid 1990s, uh, this lasted like 200,000 Guatemalans were killed.
And that's the equivalent of maybe 8 million people in America.
Uh, now in the early 1980s, Rios Montt was the president of Guatemala and, uh, he was engaged in this extremely brutal military offensive against indigenous Guatemalans.
Um, you know, we're almost all peasants and there were some complaints about this.
The United States had imposed an arms embargo.
You know, we weren't sending arms to Guatemala anymore.
Elliott Abrams was upset about this.
We need to give the good people in Guatemala, uh, the weapons they need to do what they're doing.
And so he was calling for the embargo to be lifted.
He said that Rios Montt had brought considerable progress.
Uh, I think it was on the McNeil-Lehrer news hour, Abrams said, you know, if we take the attitude, don't come to us until you're perfect.
You know, we're going to just, we're just going to walk away from this problem until Guatemala has a perfect human rights record.
Then we're going to be leaving in the lurch, people there who are trying to make progress.
And specifically he talked about Rios Montt.
Uh, he said that Rios Montt had brought about a tremendous change in the attitude of the government toward the Indian population.
So that's what was happening at the time in the early 1980s.
That's what, what Abrams was defending.
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All right.
Now talk about the time that before George H. W. Bush invaded Panama in order to stab Noriega in the back.
Wow.
That's a pretty big dagger.
Um, talk about Elliott Abrams role in helping Manuel Noriega, uh, cover up a torture murder.
Oh yes.
Well, just, just before we get to that, the whole point about Elliott Abrams defending Rios Montt in the 1980s is that I'm sorry, man, I thought you were done about that.
Oh yeah.
No, there's, there's, there's just the denouement, which is that, you know, years later, Rios Montt was convicted of committing literal genocide.
And so this, this is what Elliott Abrams had described as considerable progress.
And you know what, you're right to kind of point out that this was just as horrible as essentially anything that the American government has done in the post World War II era, the, the coup and the aftermath in Guatemala and Americans know virtually nothing about it, but it's so huge and so important.
But anyway.
Yeah.
And the consequences are with us to this day.
I mean, one of the reasons why there are people so desperate to get to the United States from Central America, one of the big, big reasons is that we just ravage their societies.
And they are still suffering the effects.
MS-13 is blowback from refugees that came from El Salvador to LA, and then got involved in gang culture that was at the height of the, the CIA supplied cocaine epidemic there and the gang wars over it since the same government supplying it also kept it illegal and in the black market.
And so that was where they grew up was in, you know, gang infested LA at the height of the crack epidemic and the Crips and Bloods wars and all that.
And then Bill Clinton kicked them all out again and sent them all back to El Salvador, where they grew this insane criminal network, this massive gang that put their former selves to shame.
And then they came back again.
Right.
But anyway, it's so- Nevermind.
All I need to know is I need my government to protect me from them.
That's all.
Yeah.
It really is like if Americans really knew what we'd done, it's very much like, you know, just like setting somebody's house on fire and then locking them inside.
Yeah.
It's, it's, it's just horrendous.
And anyway, you asked about Panama.
Yeah.
This is also very bad.
Manuel Noriega, before he was Adolf Hitler, he was the Reagan administration's little sock puppet.
That's right.
You know, people have completely forgotten this now to the degree anyone remembers it at all.
You know, of course, the US invaded Panama to remove Noriega from power in 1989.
But what had happened throughout the 1980s before that was that he was a close ally of ours.
And the reason for that is that he was helping us, you know, support and train the Contras.
And we were very happy with what he was doing, despite the fact that we were well aware that he was massively involved in the cocaine trade in Panama.
And so one of the things I mentioned in this article is that in 1985, there was a sort of well-known political figure in Panama named Hugo Spadafora.
And he had been the vice minister for health.
He was popular.
A lot of people saw him as being sort of part of the opposition to Noriega.
And he had what he believed to be clear proof of Noriega's involvement in the drug trade.
He was planning to go to Panama City to release it publicly.
When he was on his way there, he was picked up by troops loyal to Noriega.
There are actually apparently US surveillance intercepts of Noriega talking to his goons about what to do with Spadafora.
And Noriega said that they should deal with him like you would deal with a rabid dog.
And I don't think you would do this to a rabid dog.
You know, they tortured him in just unbelievably gruesome ways, and then cut off his head while he was still alive, and then tossed his body out in a garbage sack, if I'm remembering correctly, and nobody ever found his head.
No one knows where his head ended up.
And this was so horrifying that even Jesse Helms, not known for his leftist political sympathies, wanted to have hearings about what was going on in Panama.
And this is where Elliott Abrams came in.
He tried to stop these hearings from ever happening, telling him that Noriega was being really helpful.
He really was not that big a problem.
And the Panamanians have promised they're going to help us with the Contras.
And if you have the hearings, it'll alienate him.
And who would want to alienate someone who tortures someone to death and decapitate them?
Not America, not Elliott Abrams.
Man.
All right.
So then Bush Jr. hires him, and he's involved in the attempted coup.
It was a coup for a day or two.
Does that count as a coup or an attempted coup?
I don't care.
In Venezuela against Hugo Chavez.
Go ahead and tell us about his role in that.
Yeah, that's right.
You know, a lot of people in Washington thought that he was done for because he did plead guilty to two counts of withholding information from Congress during the Iran-Contra affair.
So Reagan leaves office in 1989.
Was he not one of the ones pardoned by Bush Sr.?
What happened was, you know, so he pled guilty.
He left with the Reagan administration.
He didn't have a position in the George Bush No.
1 administration from 89 to 93.
But he was pardoned.
Bush was on his way out the door.
He pardoned Elliott Abrams.
And so, you know, sure, he was pardoned, but he was still seen as damaged goods in lots of Washington.
And so the more naive D.C. insiders were surprised to find that he was back in business as soon as George Bush No.
2 took office in 2001.
So he made him part of the National Security Council staff.
And by 2002, you know, there was a lot of anger in Washington at Hugo Chavez.
And there was a brief coup in which Chavez was removed from office, but he had so much popular support that he was able to regroup and get back into power, you know, within just a couple of days.
And it's not completely clear, you know, this was not that long ago in government document terms.
It's not completely clear exactly how the U.S. was involved.
There are, you know, I'm actually looking back at some of the documents now.
But almost certainly, like, if history is any guide, there was some involvement.
And there was reporting at the time that that, you know, Abrams was the main U.S. official who was in touch with the people in Venezuela.
So he had something to do already with, you know, a previous attempt at a Venezuelan coup.
And there's no reason to expect things would be any different this time.
Yeah.
You know, I just interviewed Greg Pallast, and he was talking about how he has the documents and the tapes and God knows what about that coup.
But I didn't cross-reference in my brain in time to ask him, hey, was Elliott Abrams in there?
I'll have to follow up on that, but that's your guide.
Yeah, no, thank you for mentioning that.
I would love to talk to Greg Pallast about that.
I'll have to find out what he has.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, Iraq War II, I'm not sure if you have an Iraq War II section in your article here, but he was one of the main neocon operators in the, especially the first term of the Bush Jr. administration.
Yeah.
You know, to be honest, I think that there were so many people, so many people who wanted Iraq in the Bush administration at that time that, you know, if Elliott Abrams had not been there, it still would have happened.
Well, no question about that.
But he was still one of them though.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so we can put that onto his charge list too.
Now, I forget, what was his position?
You have him, he's the deputy secretary or something.
He was at state or, oh, he was on the NSC.
Yeah, he was on the- In 2002 and three?
Right.
Because those are positions that don't require congressional approval.
Uh-huh.
And so, you know, I think there's a reason for that, which is that they were concerned that they wouldn't be able to get it given the fact that he'd lied to Congress, that Congress wouldn't be like, oh, they're like, this is somebody we want to approve to put back into power.
His titles were first, he was senior director for democracy, human rights, and international operations.
And then he was finally, he was Bush's deputy national security advisor for global democracy strategy.
So whenever Elliott Abrams is there talking about democracy, you better keep your head down.
Yeah, for real.
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Um, all right now, so I'm looking at the, uh, RightWeb piece and they're talking about, um, which RightWeb, for people who aren't familiar, RightWeb has biographies of all the neocons.
It's not every right winger in the world.
It's the neocons, but it's all of the neocons.
And they're these in-depth biographies and they're really just great.
And I'm not sure who all is behind them.
In fact, I think I just read the other day who's behind them, who wrote most of these things.
Oh, it was Peter Sertow had written most of these things from foreign policy and focus or wait, is that where he is?
He's a, well, anyway, that's his name.
Sertow was the guy who wrote a lot of these, but they're just incredible.
And, um, anyway, he, he has a whole bit here about what a Hawk Abrams was on Israel, Palestine in the whole Bush administration before the Gaza bombshell, which you mentioned.
Yeah, that's right.
I mean, Elliot Abrams has like his whole life, like, like on Israel, like he has been, let's say, extremely conservative and that did not change when he joined the Bush administration.
And it was part of his portfolio, you know, during some of his period in office there.
So he was involved in that before 2006, but 2006 is, is when he really made his presence known at a crucial time.
It's amazing that this has been reported in a huge story with documentation in Vanity Fair and is just totally lost to history.
No one ever talks about it, but, you know, what happened was that, uh, the Bush administration was anxious for there to be uh, elections in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank because, uh, you know, like sort of our clients, uh, they're like, like people don't really understand is that the, all the people like Arafat who are seen as the terrifying terrorist revolutionaries really have actually been our clients and really Israeli clients.
Like, like the job we gave them was to squelch regular Palestinians, which is how colonialism usually works.
Like you find, uh, members of the group that you're colonizing and you put them in charge.
You like, you don't rule over them directly.
And so, uh, they needed some legitimacy for, for our clients, uh, who are mostly based in the West Bank and they thought that they would obviously win any elections.
And so they pushed for elections in early 2006.
The elections happened.
Hamas won to the surprise of everyone, I think probably including Hamas.
And this was not acceptable.
Like that, this was not supposed to happen.
Uh, Condoleezza Rice was involved.
Elliott Abrams was involved.
They're like, okay, well, we unfortunately had these elections.
We got the wrong results.
So now we're going to overturn them.
We're going to, uh, create a militia that is going to go into Gaza and is going to, uh, squelch Hamas for us.
And then we're going to have our buddies in power as was always intended.
And it was really, you know, pretty bleak and cruel on our side, on all sides.
Uh, George Tenet's, uh, favorite guy, um, was, was the head of the militia there and Hamas, you know, like are not idiots and they realized what was being planned.
And, uh, after various murders, uh, torture by our friends, uh, Hamas struck first really before the coup could get organized and took everything over themselves.
And so ever since then, that's been seen as a, a quote, coup by Hamas, but it was really them preempting a coup by, uh, by our friends.
Yeah.
Well, and so, you know, I wonder, I know that in the beginning, um, right before that election for six weeks or eight weeks, or maybe more before that election, the Israelis who collect all the border taxes refused to hand them over to Fatah or the PLA.
Um, and so they couldn't buy up their votes.
Everyone was in, you know, all the patronage was essentially canceled or on hold until the election, which really tilted everything.
Um, and maybe they would have won anyway, but that certainly didn't help.
Um, the PLA side, uh, you know, at best it was a terrible blunder that backfired by these idiots, but you know, possibly it was designed to do, uh, what it did, uh, in terms of splitting, I guess, you know, depends on who you ask of, you know, Abrams, as you're saying, they tried to do this, um, this coup in Gaza to, to overthrow Hamas, but that may have been, I think what the Israeli government wanted was to see Hamas in control of Gaza and, um, and the PLA in charge of the West bank to keep them even further divided and separated and unable to work together or, or, uh, form a united front, you know, that was Ariel Sharon, you know, Ariel Sharon's aide, um, Dov Weissglass said the whole point from them withdrawing from the Gaza strip in the first place was to put the peace process in formaldehyde to, to stop going along with the so-called roadmaps to peace and all the step-by-steps it was supposed to be to give independence, but get out of Gaza early in order to stir everything up and mix everything up and prevent the Oslo Accords from being carried out essentially.
Uh, yeah, that is a very interesting point about the border taxes and the, the, uh, PLA not being able to pay everybody off in the way they usually do.
I'm sure you've heard the description of Israeli policy, uh, is, is often that they, uh, you know, set their own hair on fire and then try to put it out with a hammer.
Yeah.
And it's one of those $9,000 hammers and we have to pay for it.
Exactly.
Like who, who the hell knows what they're thinking?
You know, like you, you have never seen like a greater morass of, uh, you know, sort of bizarre fantasy and incompetence and then, you know, ultra violence, the, the kinds of things that they do, uh, which I guess makes sense to them at the time.
But, uh, anyway.
It sure, it doesn't put them in a very good position to nowadays be crying all about Hamas day in and day out as though Hamas is nothing but a suicide bomber brigade.
And it ain't their fault that Hamas has so much power and authority in the first place.
And of course, never even mind all the histories that have been written about the deliberate decision made by the Israeli government in years past to abet the rise of Hamas for just this reason to divide the Palestinians and create a right wing religious alternative to the more secularist PLA.
Right.
Yeah.
And so, uh, the, as you say, it ended up with a situation which is terrible for Palestinians.
You know, from the perspective of right-wing Israelis, it's, it's not ideal because they would like just Palestinians just to disappear completely.
But, you know, a second best option is for Palestinians to be politically divided and for there to be no way for the Palestinians in Gaza and Palestinians in the West bank to, to link up and work together.
And so that was the final consequence of what Abrams was involved in, in 2006.
And as I say, it's just been totally written out of history.
Nobody ever mentions it.
Nobody ever talks about it in the present day.
Yeah.
Well, and of course this kind of stuff is written about, but never discussed on TV, even, you know, in the worst part of the Bush years where this stuff was being written about quite a bit, there's still, you know, and that's what always counts is, is what TV has to say about these people.
So as far as they're concerned, he's a former public servant who's come back to the job.
You know, they never heard anybody criticize him before.
He's kind of funny looking, but other than that, you know.
He's an experienced Latin American hand.
Yeah, there you go.
He knows exactly what he's doing.
And importantly, you point out here, he's been a bigwig, a senior fellow of some type, I guess, I don't know exactly what his rank is, you know, in realistic terms, but at the Council on Foreign Relations for many years.
So you might think a guy like him would be stuck palling around with Frank Gaffney over at the Center for Security Policy or some ghetto like that, but the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, but here he's been at Park Avenue all this time.
Yeah.
I mean, as I say in this article, the sad and frightening reality is you look at the true savagery of Elliott Abrams's career, and you have to realize that he is not an outlier.
Like he's a respected member of the foreign policy establishment.
You don't get more respected than the Council on Foreign Relations.
He started his career working for two Democratic senators, Henry Jackson and Daniel Moynihan.
He's been on all kinds of various prestigious boards.
He was a member of the US Commission on International Religious Freedom.
He's on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy.
He's taught at Georgetown School of Foreign Service.
You know, this is what the center right of the US foreign policy establishment is.
And, you know, if you want to indict Elliott Abrams, which we all should want to do, I certainly do, we have to indict all of these people as well.
Yeah.
Well, there's that clip of, was it your article that had the clip of him on Charlie Rose maniacally laughing?
Yes.
It's quite disturbing.
I hope people can watch that and listen to him chuckle.
He's chuckling at the idea of being prosecuted for war crimes, because, you know, he says correctly, like that would mean putting all the American officials who won the Cold War in the dock.
And that, you know, that's pretty much true.
And, you know, to him, that's hilarious and preposterous.
I think to a lot of people on earth, they would hear that and be like, wow, that sounds good.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, there are a lot of people who won the Cold War in a lot of different ways, and not all of them were murderers and abettors of murderers and accessories after the fact to murderers and illegal arms dealers.
It's not uniformly true.
At the top levels, at the top levels, you know, it's hard to find officials who, you know, you couldn't legitimately charge with crimes.
But anyway, you know, it's a fair point from Abrams.
And to him, it's hilarious.
I think to the rest of the world, it would sound, you know, pretty reasonable.
Right.
And then, of course, one thing that's notable about that to me, too, is Charlie Rose, who now he's finally gone because of, you know, his personal problems and sexually harassing people and this kind of thing.
But he spends that whole conversation going, gentlemen, gentlemen, let's not talk about that.
Let's not talk about that.
Come on, man.
What is this?
Let them talk about it.
The one guy's making serious charges.
The other guy's laughing about it.
It clearly is confident that he has a proper retort and can handle himself.
Why can't Charlie Rose just stay out of it?
I hate that guy.
Anyway, I'm glad he's been forced into retirement.
What a chump.
Yeah, me too.
I feel like just as an interviewer, I always found him to be like bizarrely incompetent, like leaving all politics aside.
And you really see that in that clip, as you said.
Yeah, absolutely.
Anyway, kind of weird place to leave the interview.
But oh, I know.
I'll ask you this then.
So what about the future?
This guy's got the what does it mean that he has the Venezuela envelope or whatever folder, file cabinet over there at the State Department now?
Yeah, well, what it means is that we at least know what the intentions of the Trump administration are, even if we don't know how exactly they're going to be able to carry them out.
What they're going to do is they're going to brutalize Venezuela.
They're going to try to put in as hard right a government as they can.
And all the while, they are going to be speaking in extremely unctuous terms about how much they care about Venezuelans and human rights.
Hey, tell me this, you know, I really have not watched TV in a while now.
And so I really am and I quit Twitter too.
So I really kind of am out of the stream of things as far as opinion goes.
I still read the news, you know, but I wonder, overall, what's the reaction to Trump?
Is he doing the right thing bravely protecting the people of Venezuela?
Or is this another example of he serves the interests of Vladimir Putin, who we know is on the other side of this issue or what?
I think in general, people are thrilled, you know, that that finally, Trump is showing some true, humane wisdom.
Yeah, like shooting, shooting Tom Hawk missiles at Assad.
This is his presidential moment.
Exactly.
Like, he's finally come around to this is a man we can work with.
It's funny about the liberals, right?
In order to prove they're not commies, they embrace the very worst part of liberalism, which is the tolerance for all this corporate business based imperialism.
It's just pretty ugly and sad.
It is pretty ugly.
You know, there are a small number of democratic congressmen and congressmen.
I mean, after all, it's a left wing government that's being attacked here.
You would think that they would and one that they sort of have felt some connection with or not, you know, or at least sympathy for over these years since Chavez came to power and that kind of thing, right?
There's got to be some skepticism in there somewhere.
As Donald Trump, after all, you know, right wingers felt that way about Obama.
Right wingers are like, well, I like war, but not with this guy in charge.
I don't, you know?
Yeah, I will say like Ro Khanna, who's a congressman from California, has been pretty explicit and clear.
So there are a teeny tiny number of people who are saying like, look, you know, the best thing the United States can do for ourselves and for Venezuela is to just leave them alone.
And, you know, here's why.
And so it's a tiny step forward from the past where like even that wouldn't have happened.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
I got news for you.
Bad news.
I read his thing in, I guess the Washington Post, where at the end he says, yeah, we ought to have dialogue and talks as a means to an end of regime change that, yeah, we definitely need to do that and get rid of him.
And talk should only be temporary toward that goal or, you know, some kind of horrible caveat at the end there.
I'm paraphrasing terribly, but something like that.
You know, I have not read his op-ed and I'll have to do that.
That sounds very distressing and also very much like the Democratic Party.
Yeah.
And he is one of the most anti-war of them.
So he's really good on Yemen, for example, but.
All right.
Listen, great to talk to you again, John.
Great work here.
Yes.
Well, thanks very much for giving me the chance to talk about it again.
I hope that people can read this article, follow all the documentation about it.
Like Abrams really is one of the worst of the worst and it's important to pay attention to.
Absolutely.
All right.
Thanks again, man.
All right.
Bye-bye.
All right, you guys.
That's John Schwartz.
He's at TheIntercept.com.
Elliott Abrams, Trump's pick to bring democracy to Venezuela has spent his life crushing democracy.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
Find me at LibertarianInstitute.org, at ScottHorton.org, AntiWar.com and Reddit.com slash Scott Horton Show.
Oh, yeah.
And read my book, Fool's Errand, Timed and the War in Afghanistan at Fool'sErrand.us.
