Colin Powell – a dodgy dove

BUSH’S FIRST Secretary of State, Colin Powell, has resigned. Powell had
significant differences with the neo-conservative hard-liners who dominate
Bush’s cabinet. He thought more long-term about the future of capitalism but
when it came to the crunch he toed the line for US imperialism.

A former field commander in Vietnam, Powell was the top uniformed military
figure in the USA. He was the main architect of the 1990-91 Gulf War against
Saddam Hussein and oversaw, as chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the huge
growth of US military power under George Bush senior.

After he became Bush junior’s Secretary of State, his low point was
speaking at the United Nations in February 2003, trying to get the fig-leaf of
UN support for Bush’s war.

Powell’s speech relied on unproven and speculative accusations – he quoted
forged documents to show that Saddam’s dictatorship had tried to buy uranium
from the African state of Niger.

He singled out for praise a student’s thesis written 12 years earlier as
proof that Saddam still had weapons of mass destruction in 2003 after one war
and years of weapons inspections and punitive sanctions.

Powell did his worst to link Saddam to terror movements and especially to
Osama bin Laden even after Hans Blix the chief UN weapons inspector said there
was no such evidence.

This mishmash of lies and distortions led the Daily Mirror to carry the
headline "Dodgy tape, grainy videos, great rhetoric but where’s the proof
Colin – Not Enough!"

His replacement, Condoleezza Rice may have fewer arguments with Bush and Co
but Powell’s role ‘selling’ the war to dubious world leaders using his
authority as a ‘moderate’ helped send the world into a new epoch of war and
terror.


Bush swaps one reactionary for another

COLIN POWELL wasn’t the first of Bush’s cabinet members to resign. The
first casualty was the crude, racist John Ashcroft who gave up the US
attorney-general post. But Bush showed how reactionary his second term could
be when he replaced him with the equally vicious Alberto Gonzales.

Attorney-generals decide on legal matters including civil and human rights
in the USA. Gonzales was already Bush’s chief counsel. In this role, he agreed
to a US Justice Department memo in 2002 that ruled that laws prohibiting
torture "do not apply to the president’s detention and interrogation of enemy
combatants."

An earlier Gonzales memo said that "the war against terrorism is a new kind
of war". This "new paradigm" makes the Geneva Convention’s strict limitations
on questioning of enemy prisoners "obsolete" and indeed "quaint."

These legal thoughts provided a judicial backing for mistreatment of
prisoners at Guantanamo and camps such as Abu Ghraib.

Gonzales, a former Texas Supreme Court judge, was Bush’s adviser and
secretary of state when the president was governor of Texas. He wrote a memo
on the facts of every death penalty case but it seems Gonzales failed to point
out such details as "ineffective counsel, conflict of interest, mitigating
evidence, even actual evidence of innocence" for condemned prisoners.

The new attorney-general’s contempt for the law can also be seen in who
backs him politically. Energy company Enron – whose rise and spectacular fall
showed up the greed, fraud and corruption of finance capital – and Enron’s law
firm were Gonzales’ biggest contributors in 2000.

The energy industry gave him $100,000 after he gave them positive judgments
in the Supreme Court, helping to create the unregulated sleaze-ridden
environment where Enron could, very briefly, blossom. Gonzales will oversee US
anti-trust investigations and corporate crime cases.

Bush’s Patriot Act greatly expanded US police powers, including that of
accessing private medical records etc. without telling the victim. The Act
expires at the end of 2005 but Bush’s administration, with Gonzales at the
helm, is trying hard to make this act permanent.

US workers should mobilise against this reactionary nonsense which
threatens civil rights worldwide and endangers the hard-won rights of the
American working class.