President Joe Biden on Monday quietly nominated Elliott Abrams to serve on a bipartisan diplomacy commission, a move that human rights advocates condemned as outrageous given the longtime Republican official’s past as a defender of Latin American death squads and cheerleader for murderous U.S. foreign policy interventions.
“A totally indefensible decision from Biden,” MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan wrote on Twitter, pointing to Abrams’ guilty plea stemming from the Reagan-era Iran-Contra scandal and his broader record in Latin America.
Most recently, Abrams served as the Trump administration’s special envoy to Iran and Venezuela. During a 2019 House Foreign Affairs Committee hearing, Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.) grilled Abrams on his role in the Reagan administration’s policy in El Salvador, whose U.S.-backed military carried out the largest massacre in modern Latin American history in 1981 in and around the village of El Mozote.
Omar noted during the 2019 hearing that Abrams “later said that the U.S. policy in El Salvador was a ‘fabulous achievement.'”
After recounting the appalling details of the El Mozote killings—in which around 140 children were murdered — Omar asked Abrams, “Do you think that massacre was a ‘fabulous achievement’ that happened under our watch?”
“That is a ridiculous question, and I will not respond to it,” Abrams fumed in response. “I am not going to respond to that kind of personal attack, which is not a question.”
Abrams attempted to downplay the El Mozote massacre shortly after it occurred, telling the U.S. Senate that news reports of the gruesome killings were “not credible” and were being misused by anti-government forces.
In response to news of the Biden administration’s decision to nominate Abrams to the State Department’s Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy, former longtime Human Rights Watch executive director Kenneth Roth wrote that Abrams’ “most notorious public diplomacy is downplaying the 1981 El Mozote massacre of 1,000 people by U.S.-trained-and-equipped Salvadoran military units.”
Raymond Bonner, a former New York Times correspondent in El Salvador, wrote for The Atlantic in 2019 that “the Reagan administration, with Abrams as point man, routinely defended the Salvadoran government in the face of evidence that its regular army, and allied right-wing death squads, were operating with impunity, killing peasants, students, union leaders, and anyone considered anti-government or pro-guerrilla.”
“Abrams went so far as to defend one of the death squads’ most notorious leaders, Roberto D’Aubuisson, who was responsible for the murder of Archbishop Óscar Romero while he was saying Mass, in March 1980,” Bonner added.
The Biden White House predictably failed to mention the sordid details of Abrams’ record in its nomination announcement, offering a sterilized biography that lists off the notorious figure’s previous government roles: Assistant Secretary of State for International Organization Affairs, Human Rights, and Latin America under Ronald Reagan, a senior director of the National Security Council under George W. Bush, and special representative for Iran and special representative for Venezuela under Donald Trump, among others.
According to its website, the Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy is tasked with “appraising U.S. government activities intended to understand, inform, and influence foreign publics and to increase the understanding of, and support for, these same activities.”
Abrams must be confirmed by the U.S. Senate to serve on the commission.
Slate journalist Alex Sammon slammed Biden’s nomination of Abrams for the position as “obscene” and “unconscionable.”
“Elliott Abrams, enemy of human rights, apologist for mass murder, should have no place within spitting distance of any Democratic administration in any capacity,” Sammon argued.
Truthout Is Preparing to Meet Trump’s Agenda With Resistance at Every Turn
Dear Truthout Community,
If you feel rage, despondency, confusion and deep fear today, you are not alone. We’re feeling it too. We are heartsick. Facing down Trump’s fascist agenda, we are desperately worried about the most vulnerable people among us, including our loved ones and everyone in the Truthout community, and our minds are racing a million miles a minute to try to map out all that needs to be done.
We must give ourselves space to grieve and feel our fear, feel our rage, and keep in the forefront of our mind the stark truth that millions of real human lives are on the line. And simultaneously, we’ve got to get to work, take stock of our resources, and prepare to throw ourselves full force into the movement.
Journalism is a linchpin of that movement. Even as we are reeling, we’re summoning up all the energy we can to face down what’s coming, because we know that one of the sharpest weapons against fascism is publishing the truth.
There are many terrifying planks to the Trump agenda, and we plan to devote ourselves to reporting thoroughly on each one and, crucially, covering the movements resisting them. We also recognize that Trump is a dire threat to journalism itself, and that we must take this seriously from the outset.
After the election, the four of us sat down to have some hard but necessary conversations about Truthout under a Trump presidency. How would we defend our publication from an avalanche of far right lawsuits that seek to bankrupt us? How would we keep our reporters safe if they need to cover outbreaks of political violence, or if they are targeted by authorities? How will we urgently produce the practical analysis, tools and movement coverage that you need right now — breaking through our normal routines to meet a terrifying moment in ways that best serve you?
It will be a tough, scary four years to produce social justice-driven journalism. We need to deliver news, strategy, liberatory ideas, tools and movement-sparking solutions with a force that we never have had to before. And at the same time, we desperately need to protect our ability to do so.
We know this is such a painful moment and donations may understandably be the last thing on your mind. But we must ask for your support, which is needed in a new and urgent way.
We promise we will kick into an even higher gear to give you truthful news that cuts against the disinformation and vitriol and hate and violence. We promise to publish analyses that will serve the needs of the movements we all rely on to survive the next four years, and even build for the future. We promise to be responsive, to recognize you as members of our community with a vital stake and voice in this work.
Please dig deep if you can, but a donation of any amount will be a truly meaningful and tangible action in this cataclysmic historical moment.
We’re with you. Let’s do all we can to move forward together.
With love, rage, and solidarity,
Maya, Negin, Saima, and Ziggy