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.
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