Wheels within Wheels? Walker.
> by Mark Ames and Matt Taibbi
>
> Years from now, when the war in Serbia is over and the dust has settled,
> historians will point to January 15, 1999 as the day the American Death
> Star became fully operational.
>
> That was the date on which an American diplomat named William Walker
> brought his OSCE war crimes verification team to a tiny Kosovar village
> called Racak to investigate an alleged Serb massacre of ethnic Albanian
> peasants. After a brief review of the town's 40-odd bullet-ridden
> corpses, Walker searched out the nearest television camera and
> essentially fired the starting gun for the war.
>
> "From what I saw, I do not hesitate to describe the crime as a massacre,
> a crime against humanity," he said. "Nor do I hesitate to accuse the
> government security forces of responsibility."
>
> We all know how Washington responded to Walker's verdict; it quickly
> set its military machine in motion, and started sending out menacing
> invitations to its NATO friends to join the upcoming war party. How
> Russia responded is less well-known. One would assume that it
> began preparations for a diplomatic strategy in the event of war, which
> it probably realized was inevitable. But in Russia's defense and
> intelligence communities, the sight of William Walker uncovering Serb
> atrocities on television almost certainly provoked a different, and more
> dramatic, reaction. It probably sent a chill up the community's
> collective spine, and pushed its generals into rapid preparations for a
> new cold war with the United States. As connoisseurs in the art of
> propaganda and the use of provacateurs, they recognized a good job
> when they saw one. And, more importantly, they knew who William
> Walker was.
>
> Since the outbreak of war in the Balkans, most people in the West have
> already read news reports raising the possibility that Russia may commit
> troops, weapons, or even its nuclear arsenal to aid Yugslavia in its war
> against NATO. But few people overseas are aware yet of why Russia is
> talking about going to war with us.
>
> We've been told that it's a race thing, that Russians are only upset
> about U.S. policies in Serbia because their fellow Slavs are being
> bombed. We've also heard that this is just another chapter in the sore-
> loser syndrome, that Russians are bitter about the NATO bombing
> because it has forced them to face the stinging reality of their
impotence
> to defend even their former satellite states. If these reports are to be
> believed, Russia's military leaders are considering war with superpower
> America because their feelings have been hurt.
>
> These stories overlook the fact that Russia has, or at least thinks it
> has, a real reason to be considering military resistance to NATO, even in
> its severely weakened state. And that reason is that much of the military
> and political leadership in this country believes sincerely that the
> Yugoslavia bombing is just the first chapter in an ambitious American
> campaign for world domination. Even the soberest of Russian generals is
> now inclined to consider military intervention on behalf of Serbia on the
> purely pragmatic grounds that it would be cheaper and easier to try to
> stop the U.S. now rather than later, when it might be too late.
>
> "The people in the Russian military believe sincerely that they need to
> try to stop the U.S. now, before it goes on a real rampage around the
> world," said military/defense analyst Pavel Felgenhauer. "That the U.S.
> is striving for world domination, no one has any doubt."
>
> Most Americans laugh off the idea of themselves as burgeoning world
> dictators, and would dismiss Russian fears as paranoia. But what most
> Americans don't realize is that the United States, through its
> prosecution of the NATO bombing and in its foreign policy in general,
> has given foreigners plenty of reasons to see conspiracy and military
> ambition behind everything we do.
>
> One good example is the role of the mysterious William Walker in
> starting the war. As it turns out, even the most cursory review of the
> background of our chief "verifier" would inspire almost any foreign
> government to regard the entire Yugoslavia campaign as a cynical,
> unabashed act of imperialist aggression. For if William Walker is not
> a CIA agent, he's done a very bad job of not looking like one.
> Judge for yourself:
>
> Walker's Background
>
> According to various newspaper reports, Walker began his diplomatic
> career in 1961 in Peru. He then reportedly spent most of his long
> career in the foreign service in Central and South America, including a
> highly controversial posting as Deputy Chief of Mission in Honduras in
> the early 1980s, exactly the time and place where the Contra rebel
> force was formed. The Contra force was the cornerstone of then-CIA
> Director William Casey's hardline anti-Communist directive, and
> Honduras was considered, along with El Salvador, the front line in the
> war with the Soviet Union. From there, Walker was promoted, in 1985,
> to the post of Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Central America.
> This promotion made him a special assistant to Assistant Secretary of
> State Elliot Abrams, a figure whose name would soon be making its
> way into the headlines on a daily basis in connection with a new
> scandal the press was calling the "Iran-Contra" affair.
>
> Walker would soon briefly join his boss under the public microscope.
> According to information contained in Independent Counsel Lawrence
> Walsh's lengthy indictment of Abrams and Oliver North, Walker was
> responsible for setting up a phony humanitarian operation at an airbase
> in Ilopango, El Salvador. This shell organization was used to funnel
> guns, ammunition and supplies to the Contra rebels in Nicaragua.
>
> Despite having been named in Walsh's indictment (although he was never
> charged himself) and outed in the international press as a gunrunner,
> Walker's diplomatic career did not, as one one might have expected,
> take a turn for the worse. Oddly enough, it kept on advancing. In 1988,
> he was named ambassador to El Salvador, a state which at the time
> was still in the grip of U.S.-sponsored state terror.
>
> Walker's record as Ambassador to El Salvador is startling upon review
> today, in light of his recent re-emergence into the world spotlight as
> an outraged documenter of racist hate-crimes. His current posture of
> moral disgust toward Serbian ethnic cleansing may seem convincing
> today, but it is hard to square with the almost comically callous
> indifference he consistently exhibited toward exactly the same kinds of
> hate crimes while serving in El Salvador.
>
> In late 1989, when Salvadoran soldiers executed six Jesuit priests,
> their housekeeper, and her 15 year-old daughter, blowing their heads off
> with shotguns, Walker scarecely batted an eyelid. When asked at a
> press conference about evidence linking the killings to the Salvadoran
> High Command, he went out of his way to apologize for chief of staff
> Rene Emilio Ponce, dismissing the murders as a sort of forgiveable
> corporate glitch, like running out of Xerox toner. "Management control
> problems can exist in these kinds of situations," he said.
>
> In discussing the wider problem of state violence and repression
> --which in El Salvador then was at least no less widespread than in the
> Serbia he monitored from October of last year until March of this year
> --Walker was remarkably circumspect. "I'm not condoning it, but in
> times like this of great emotion and great anger, things like this
> happen," he said, apparently having not yet decided to audition for the
> OSCE job.
>
> Finally, in what may be the most amazing statement of all, given his
> current occupation, Walker questioned the ability of any person or
> organization to assign blame in hate crime cases. Shrugging off news
> of eyewitness reports that the Jesuit murders had been committed by
> men in Salvadoran army uniforms, Walker told Massachusetts
> congressman Joe Moakley that "anyone can get uniforms. The fact
> that they were dressed in military uniforms was not proof that they
> were military."
>
> Later, Walker would recommend to Secretary of State James Baker
> that the United States "not jeopardize" its relationship with El
> Salvador by investigating "past deaths, however heinous."
>
> This is certainly an ironic comment, coming from a man who would later
> recommend that the United States go to war over...heinous deaths.
>
> One final intriguing biographical note: Walker in 1996 hosted a ceremony
> in Washington held in honor of 5,000 American soldiers who fought
> secretly in El Salvador. While Walker was Ambassador of El Salvador,
> the U.S. government's official story was that there were only 50
> military advisors in the country (Washington Post, May 6, 1996).
>
> A Spooky Choice
>
> With a background like this, it seems implausible that Walker would be
> chosen by the United States to head the Kosovar verification team on the
>
> basis of any established commitment to the cause of human rights. What
> seems more likely, given Walker's background, is that he was chosen
> because of his proven willingness to say whatever his government wants
> him to say, and to keep quiet when he is told to keep quiet-- about
> things like a gunrunning operation, or the presence of 4,950 undercover
> mercenaries (whose existence he regularly denied with a straight face)
> in the banana republic where you are Ambassador.
>
> The Iran-Contra incident isn't the only thing in Walker's background
> which gives reason for pause. Another is his curious ability to remain in
> Central and South America throughout virtually his entire diplomatic
> career.
>
> Not since before the fall of China has the State Department allowed its
> career people to remain in one place for any significant length of time.
>
> After the Chinese Revolution, the State Department enacted what has
> come to be known as the Wriston reform, which dictated that Department
> employees be rotated out of their posts every few years. With this
> reform, the government was hoping to put an end to a problem which
> they termed "quiet-itis"--the development of "excessive" sympathies
> towards the culture of one's host countries.
>
> With the Wriston act, the U.S. government eventually got exactly what
> it wanted--a State Department characterized by fortress-like embassy
> compounds, in or around which Americans live amongst themselves in
> monolingual, isolationist bliss, counting the hours until they're
> rotated out to their next job in Liberia, or Peru, or wherever. As a
> result, most State employees see three or four different posts in
> different corners of he world every ten years. It is well-known among
> career foreign service people, though, that one of the few exceptions to
> this rule are the CIA agents in the embassies. Our intelligence people
> take longer to develop their contacts, and in order to preserve these
> "personal relationships" (bribe-takers don't like to change bagmen), they
> tend to hang around longer.
>
> Walker was in Latin America virtually throughout his entire career,
> until he arrived in Kosovo. He had no experience in the region which
> qualified him to head the verification team in Yugoslavia. Furthermore,
> he spent the entire 1980s occupying high-level State positions in
> Central America, under the Reagan and Bush White Houses, when
> the region was the source of more East-West tension than in any other
> place in the world, and Central American embassies were the most
> notoriously CIA-penetrated embassies we had. You can draw your
> own conclusions.
>
> Nonetheless, one need not prove that Walker is a CIA agent to make
> the case that the United States made a serious error in judgement in
> appointing him. Whether or not he was sent to Kosovo to guarantee that
> evidence of ethnic cleansing would be "discovered", and whether there
> even exists a covert plan, of which Walker might be part, to install a
> semi-permanent U.S. military force in the Balkans, it is bad enough
> that other countries might identify Walker according to their own
criteria
> and assume the worst. And assume they will, according to political
> analysts familiar with the story.
>
> "Ambassador Walker's record in El Salvador does not a priori
> invalidate his testimony on the massacres in Kosovo, but it certainly
> does compromise his reliability as an objective witness," said James
> Morrell, research director for the Washington-based Center for
> International Policy.
>
> "No question about it, they should have chosen someone else," said
> Felgenhauer. "If this guy was working for Ollie North, then that's all
> anyone in Russia is going to need to know, anyway."
>
> There is a widespread belief not only in Russia, but in other countries,
> that Walker's role in Racak was to assist the KLA in fabricating a Serb
> massacre that could be used as an excuse for military action. Already,
> two major mainstream French newspapers--Le Monde and Le Figaro--
> as well as French national television have run exposes on the Racak
> incident. These stories cited a number of inconsistencies in Walker's
> version of events, including an absence of shell casings and blood in
> the trench where the bodies were found, and the absence of
> eyewitnesses despite the presence of journalists and observers in the
> town during the KLA-Serb fighting.
>
> Eventually, even the Los Angeles Times joined in, running a story
> entitled "Racak Massacre Questions: Were Atrocities Faked?" The
> theory behind all these exposes was that the KLA had gathered their
> own dead after the battle, removed their uniforms, put them in civilian
> clothes, and then called in the observers. Walker, significantly, did not
> see the bodies until 12 hours after Serb police had left the town. As
> Walker knows, not only can "anybody have uniforms", but anyone
> can have them taken off, too.
>
> The story of William Walker's involvement in the war is just one of a
> rapidly-growing family of tales cataloguing the incompetence and
> arrogance of the United States and its allies throughout the Kosovo
> conflict. Even if it isn't proof of some as-yet-unreleased sinister plan
> to secure a permanent military presence in the Balkans, the fact that
> the United States didn't even care to avoid the appearance of
> impropriety in its search for Serb atrocities says a lot about our
> approach to international relations. It says, "Go ahead and think the
> worst about us. We don't care. We've got more bombs than you do."
> If that's the sum of our entire policy, it's only a matter of time before
a
> place like Russia decides to strike first. They won't wait for us to
> send the next Walker.
>
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