"Another Wolf for Russia"-- Asia Times

[TexasLawyer]

Mar 18, 2005

Another Wolf for Russia
By John Helmer

MOSCOW - And the Academy Award for the best fascist dictator goes to - Adolf Hitler! Woody Allen cracked that joke once at the expense of the US habit of making awards out of self-congratulation of the least worthy type. Were anyone to dare in the same spirit, they might award the new US nominee to head the World Bank, Paul Wolfowitz, the title of the worst American ever to hold such an international post.

But wait a minute. Wolfowitz is hardly an American at all, having spent much of his time as a career Washington warmonger under investigation by US counter-intelligence and security agencies as an agent for a foreign power, for whose benefit he is suspected of supplying intelligence, cash, weapons, and other favors. In US law books, these may be crimes against the state, possibly espionage, even treason, but not crimes against humanity, for which Wolfowitz has encouraged his favorite small state to commit and encouraged his addled (if not yet treasonous) president to commit in the first of the great Middle Eastern wars.

For Russia, against whom Wolfowitz has been waging war since he got out of short pants, the nomination of Wolfowitz as president of the World Bank presents something of a dilemma, and something of an opportunity.

Borrow from a war criminal?

During the first post-Soviet decade, the World Bank under James Wolfensohn was one of the many instruments the United States, as the World Bank's dominant shareholder, used to destroy the economic foundations of its rival superpower; pay stipends to Russian quislings; oblige the Russian government to incur sizable debts for the privilege of being advised to dismantle its systems of command and control; and transfer the nation's most valuable resources into the hands of a dozen individuals eager to betray their country for personal profit.

Not without reason was Wolfensohn's favorite Russian Victor Chernomyrdin - the prime minister who enriched himself through creating Russia's largest company, Gazprom. Wolfensohn was waging war by other means: Chernomyrdin was his collaborator; and the Russian treasury paid in full - principal and interest - for its defeat. This arrangement couldn't last. And indeed, when the revival of the feeble Russian state began to challenge the value and terms of the World Bank's operations in Russia, Wolfensohn decided to commission an assessment of the effectiveness of the programs he himself had promoted in Russia. Wolfensohn could have engaged Joseph Stiglitz, the World Bank's chief economist and Nobel Prize winner. But by the time Russia had grown skeptical of Wolfensohn, and called a halt to new borrowings from him, Stiglitz had become a ferocious critic of everything Wolfensohn had done, or tried to do.

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http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Central_Asia/GC18Ag02.html

[LibertyorDeath]

1. Very interesting especially this.....

"But wait a minute. Wolfowitz is hardly an American at all, having spent much of his time as a career Washington warmonger under investigation by US counter-intelligence and security agencies as an agent for a foreign power, for whose benefit he is suspected of supplying intelligence, cash, weapons, and other favors."

[acmavm]

2. Hey, what's all this about? This really interests me. It should everyone!!

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If the Federal Bureau of Investigation were permitted to disclose all it knows, Wolfowitz may not be the American he claims to be. And with a record like his, it may be a violation of the US statutes to borrow from Wolfowitz. In US jurisprudence, it is not just immoral to make covenants with war criminals, it is criminal.

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