Karen Hughes At The State Dept... Is This Where She Always Wanted To Be?

althecat

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Mon Mar-14-05 07:36 PM
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Karen Hughes At The State Dept... Is This Where She Always Wanted To Be?

In the news today...

Announcement of Nominations of Karen P. Hughes as Under Secretary of State for Public Diplomacy and Public Affairs and Dina Powell as Assistant Secretary of State For Educational and Cultural Affairs http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO0503/S00246.htm

We have something of a pattern emerging here - the administration has now appointed North Korean hornets nest poker John Bolton to the UN, Iran/Contra felon and Central America torture advocate Negroponte as intelligence Tsar, torture apologist Gonzales as AG, and Miss Rice "We never considered planes being used as weapons... (except in these memos)" as SoS - and now GWBs closest personal confidant is to becoem some sort of State Dept. propaganda supremo.

It seems to me that this administration is preparing for some hell of an onslaught on the rest of the world - and Latin America in particular.

But back to Karen Hughes new job.

Her being in the State department reminds me of something.

Remember if you will the sudden departure of Karen from the White House. It came in April 2002. She said it was for family reasons, but nobody really beleived that.

But for me it was timing of her departure which really interested me.

On the 19th of April we published an editorial about Colin Powell.

US Secretary of State Colin Powell, on returning to the United States from his peace mission to the Holy Land, should immediately resign.

Not because his mission was a failure - in fact considerable progress might have been made if that had been the intention of the rest of his administration. And Powell himself did an admirable job of lining up all his ducks in Madrid before confronting Sharon on his home territory.

Rather Colin Powell, formerly the only member of the Bush Administration with any credibility, ought to resign because he has been duped by his colleagues and used as a smokescreen.

Colin Powell�s peace mission, and his boss�s sudden change of heart on Israeli aggression, was nothing more than a smokescreen.

The real action was down in Venezuela, where it now appears US interests were engaged in engineering a coup against the elected President Hugo Chavez.

.... Was the US�s chief diplomat aware of the imminent coup in Venezeula when he left for his round of shuttle diplomacy in the Holy Land?

If he was then he looks as if he is a complete hypocrite.

And if he was not aware, then it looks as if he is being kept in the dark in critical areas of foreign policy by his colleagues.

.... perhaps Powell�s colleagues wanted to get him out of the way so they could get up to their dirty little games without him getting in the way?

Now, when Hughes suddenly resigned a couple of weeks later it occurred to me that her departure might just be a condition imposed by Powell that he stay on.

For Hughes to return now that Powell is gone, and to immediately take up a role in the State Dept, makes some peculiar sense if this were so.

You can sort of imagine who Powell must have felt on returning from his ME peace mission to discover that not only was he kept in the dark by his cabinet colleagues and clearly a few folks in his own department - Otto Reich for one.

And then to discover that Karen Hughes - a lowly presidential advisor - was up to her neck in the real action while he was being used as Otto's chump.

And now of course we have a whole series of Latin American hawks back in the ascendency. And for me at least Karen Hughes being among them - arguably the woman closest to * after Kaura - makes me very nervous for the likes of Hugo Chavez.

anyways...

just a few thoughts.

al