Deep Blade Journal

Reagan-era arms official David Emery emerges as Republican gubernatorial contender in Maine

Emery

An old nemesis is fixing to run for governor of Maine in 2006. David Emery was the opponent of Democrat Tom Andrews in the 1990 race for Maine’s 1st District Congressional seat. It was a political race in which I became deeply involved on Tom’s behalf. Tom won. He became one of the most progressive members ever to represent Maine in the US Congress.

Later, Tom lost to Olympia Snowe in the 1994 race to replace George Mitchell, who retired from the US Senate in 1995. He has had many distinguished positions since, including with the Win Without War coalition in 2003.

Image of button from the 1990 Andrews campaign.

Seeing Emery in public again, slithering out of his hole as a Republican opinion analyst, brings back a flood of memories of the Reagan years. Some of those memories appear in this letter I wrote, that was published in the now-defunct Maine Times (October 19, 1990):

A naysayer to peace

I feel the need to remind voters about the record of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency (ACDA) during the tenure of Republican 1st District Congressional candidate David Emery as its deputy director.

Emery worked for ACDA from 1983 to 1988, under director Kenneth Adelman. Both were appointed by Ronald Reagan.

When Kenneth Adelman appeared, many of the agency’s diminished resources were used to wage a public relations campaign against arms control, particularly the 1972 anti-ballistic missile (ABM) treaty with the Soviet Union.

With much fanfare and media attention, they accused the Soviets of cheating.

The irony was hard to miss. The United States trotted out arms control chief Adelman to raise public anti-Soviet feelings by calling them liars and cheats while busily preparing to test a series of Star Wars missile defense schemes in violation of the treaty.

None of the allegations ever amounted to much, including the ballyhooed Krasnoyarsk radar. The Congress, with the support of senators George Mitchell and William Cohen and Rep. Joseph Brennan, stopped the Reagan administration from abrogating the ABM treaty.

So Emery now speaks of how he is “proud of the role that the Reagan and Bush administration have played” in the “greatest contribution to peace and stability on this planet that has happened this century.”

It is an odd kind of pride in arms control that allowed Emery to help with one of the most vicious attacks against it of the last decade. Emery unfairly takes way too much credit for the easing of tensions Which accompanied the INF treaty and subsequent collapse of key cold war battle lines.

Emery was always one of the nay-sayers to peace, a weapons advocate. Meanwhile, his opponent in the 1st District Congressional race, state Senator Tom Andrews of Portland, sponsored the Nuclear Weapons Freeze resolution in the state legislature, exposed the absurdity of “crisis relocation planning” for nuclear war and was an early supporter of the successful citizen-initiated referendum calling on the Navy to halt cruise missile testing in Maine.

Eric T. Olson
October 1990

Note the appearance Kenneth Adelman, Emery’s old boss. Adelman, of course, became the Pentagon’s most truculent pre-war promoter of the cakewalk theory of the Iraq occupation.

US Administration sets limits on how much Central Asian people can yearn in the era of Bush-inspired democratic movements

Via Atrios, I see the Washington Post is reporting today that

Defense officials from Russia and the United States last week helped block a new demand for an international probe into the Uzbekistan government’s shooting of hundreds of protesters last month, according to U.S. and diplomatic officials.

This is an utterly amazing news story. Here is another snip from it:

One official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he is not authorized to discuss the matter, said Rumsfeld caused great surprise by saying — after being told in this discussion that the British language was consistent with stated U.S. policy and should be embraced — that he was unaware of the policy, had not participated in meetings about it and did not want to press for its inclusion in the communique.

The communique nixed by Rumsfeld would have endorsed a “independent, transparent” international investigation into the Andijan massacre carried out by Uzbek forces one month ago. Evidently, the Pentagon has gone to war and prevailed over the State Department over US policy. Terror War basing in Uzbekistan has come out more important than human beings and their political rights.

How Myers kept the aid flowing last year
Here’s yet another good one from the same story:

A senior State Department official, who called The Washington Post at the Defense Department’s request, denied any “split of views.” But other government officials depicted this week’s spat over the communique as a continuation of frictions that erupted last summer, when then-Secretary of State Colin L. Powell would not certify that Uzbekistan had met its human rights obligations. The decision led to a cutoff of $18 million for U.S. training for Uzbekistan’s military forces.

Weeks later, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, visited Tashkent, the Uzbek capital, and criticized that decision as “very shortsighted”; he also announced that the United States would give $21 million for another purpose — bioterrorism defense.

Myers and Rumsfeld deserve to be brought up on charges for courting the criminal Karimov regime in contravention of all decency.

HRW lays it out
Meanwhile, a new report on Uzbekistan has been issued by Human Rights Watch. HRW’s report “details the Uzbek government’s indiscriminate use of lethal force against unarmed people, describes government efforts to silence witnesses, and places the events against the background of Uzbekistan’s worsening human rights record.”

PRESIDENT BUSH: “All who live in tyranny and hopelessness can know: the United States will not ignore your oppression, or excuse your oppressors. When you stand for your liberty, we will stand with you.” (January 20, 2005)

Dick Cheney calls Gitmo torture a “myth”. Deep Blade Journal responds with this guest post from Mike Walls. Thanks, Mike.

GUEST POST: Libyan Man from Sussex, England tortured at Guantánamo
I read in my local evening newspaper (The Evening Argus, Brighton, England) about a 35-year-old Libyan man who has been detained at Guantánamo Bay since 2002. Omar Deghayes has as yet not been charged with any crime, but in the Orwellian nether region of the Bush Administration where international law does not apply, where the Geneva Convention does not apply and where rules and regulations can be dispensed with, we are, to quote one David Rivkin, “releasing people because we’re humanitarian, we’re compassionate”. For Omar Deghayes, however, this outpouring of “humantarianism”, when in reference to its true correlate, namely torture, is described as follows in the Evening Argus, a Brighton newspaper:

The prisoner [Omar] complained of having a hose stuck up his nose until he was drowning, electric shock torture and being placed in a room painted with black and white stripes, containing a glass wall, behind which were snakes.

Mr Stafford Smith added his client had been told his wife would be
sold into prostitution when he was first taken into custody.

This is all further proof that Amnesty’s usage of the term “Gulag” to describe the US prison archipelago across the Middle East and elsewhere, was correct. And even if the head of Amnesty may be accused of a degree of hyperbole, no doubt engendered by the horrors described by former Gitmo inmates, he can in no shape or form be accused of downright mendacity, the likes of which we have been exposed from Rivkin and his neocon coalition in recent years.

It is vitally important that more and more of these tragic accounts are reported, so that the body of evidence may one day overwhelm lackeys of the Bush war and mould public opinion and, who knows, shape future policy decisions. Fortunately for Omar, MP George Galloway’s Respect Party are to bring this issue up in Parliament at the next parliamentary meeting and pressure is being put on Brighton’s local New Labour MP to act quickly on this. Let us keep our fingers crossed for Omar and others like him in the hope that true humanitarianism may come their way.
–Mike Walls

Deep Blade returns after an incredible week+ away at our local film and television school in Rockport, Maine. There is a lot to post, so let’s get on with it…

Summer days ahead: We broke 80°F today

Out-of-control vines in front of the house were cleaned out today. This should give the soil a chance to dry out.

Compost heap: All the vining stuff from the space shown in the first photo is on top on the left.

Snap peas are emerging. They are way behind last year’s crop, which was standing about a half meter on this date.

Deep Blade Note
This is the last posting until perhaps Sunday June 12. I may be able to do Friday garden blogging one week from today, but probably not. I’ll be at an intensive video camera workshop all next week. Please feel free to post Comments here on any topic you like. Until we meet again…