Posted on 06/28/2005 4:23:26 PM PDT by CHARLITE
"If and when these reforms are enacted, Mr. Speaker, the world will be safer and stronger, the American people will be assured their money is being well-spent, and the United Nations charter to prevent wars, protect human rights, and advance the cause of human freedom will be reaffirmed." So declared House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas) on June 17 in his concluding remarks in support of H.R. 2745, the United Nations Reform Act of 2005.
It must be tempting indeed for a great many folks to believe that merely passing a piece of legislation could transform the United Nations from a corrupt sinkhole of tyrants, thugs, and thieves, and a bastion of world government schemers, into a paragon of global virtue and righteous governance. UN reform, it seems, has become a near universal obsession, with Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives all in agreement that the UN must be reformed — and soon. It appears they only disagree on how to do it.
But in the current debate on the subject, some of the most important questions aren't even being asked. For instance, is the UN even worth reforming? Was it ever worth reforming? Even more important, can it be reformed? Is it a good idea gone bad, or was it a bad idea from the beginning? And, if the UN was bad from the start, if it is an inherently dangerous, fatally flawed institution, do we really want to "enhance" it and "strengthen" it, as UN reformers are proposing?
The current reform drive is being fueled by a series of UN scandals that have been keeping the UN's professional spinmeisters and their allies in Congress and the media operating in nonstop damage control mode. Last December 60 members of Congress called on United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan to resign from his UN post. Among the legislators urging him to step down were eight members of the House International Relations Committee and nine members of the House Appropriations Committee, which provides the UN with 22 percent of its operating budget each year. The issue that galvanized many of these Senate and House members to demand Annan's departure was his ongoing arrogant and high-handed effort to thwart congressional probes into the multi-billion dollar Iraq oil-for-food fiasco.
Annan repeatedly refused to turn over documents to congressional committees and ordered UN employees not to cooperate with U.S. investigations into the scandal, which has become infamous as the biggest swindle in the history of humanitarian aid. For cover, he claimed that the congressional probes would interfere with the UN's own investigation, which was being led by his pal Paul Volcker, former chairman of the Federal Reserve. The Volcker-run "Independent Inquiry Committee" dragged its feet and, as its critics predicted, finally issued a report that turned out to be a whitewash.
Annan claimed total exoneration. Then on June 14 a memo surfaced showing Annan's direct personal connection to the scandal, reigniting calls for Annan's scalp — just as he was preparing to host the world's heads of state at the Millennium Goals Summit in New York City in September.
Surfeit of Scandals
Without a doubt, the United Nations is suffering one of the worst public relations nightmares of its inglorious 60-year existence. At every turn, it seems, the organization's seamy underbelly is being exposed, belying the claims of UN defenders that it is a noble institution in pursuit of global peace and compassionate aid for the destitute and downtrodden of the world. These are but a few of the outrages, in addition to the Iraq oil-for-food scandal, that are feeding America's growing anti-UN sentiment:
• Blue-helmeted UN "peacekeepers" and other UN personnel are under fire for sexually exploiting and raping young girls in the Congo and the Central African Republic over the past several years.
• Human rights workers are now charging that UN troops knowingly and intentionally gunned down unarmed civilians in a crowded market in Congo's Ituri province in March.
• Ruud Lubbers, the UN High Commissioner for Refugees who was accused of sexual harassment, was let off the hook by his pal Kofi Annan, even though an internal investigation pointed to Lubbers' guilt. Lubbers resigned in February after news reporters revealed what Annan had covered up.
• In April, Canadian billionaire Maurice Strong resigned as Kofi Annan's Special Envoy to North Korea, amid charges of ties to the oil-for-food scandal through Korean businessman Tongsun Park, whom U.S. prosecutors are accusing of acting as an "unregistered agent" of Saddam Hussein. Strong, who served as secretary-general of the UN's 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, is a longtime personal friend of and senior adviser to Annan.
• The UN claims to be the world's premier defender of human rights, but its infamous Human Rights Commission is an outrageous assortment of tyrannical dictatorships notorious for terror, torture, and genocide — such as China, Cuba, Libya, Russia, Sudan, Syria, Vietnam, and Zimbabwe. Not surprisingly, the commission, which freely criticizes the U.S., cannot even manage to condemn slavery and slaughter in Sudan or gross human rights violations in Zimbabwe.
"United" Behind the UN
These and other travesties are severely taxing America's tolerance levels for the United Nations. However, just as public revulsion for the UN is beginning to crystallize into genuine opposition, a strange alliance of left-wing Democrats and neo-conservative Republicans is riding to the UN's rescue, with various proposals to strengthen the misbegotten world body in the name of reform.
Riding point for the UN "reform" chorus is a bipartisan task force created by the U.S. Congress last December and led by former House of Representatives Speaker Newt Gingrich, a Republican, and former U.S. Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, a Democrat. On June 15, the Gingrich/Mitchell task force released its findings and recommendations in a 145-page report entitled, American Interests and UN Reform.
"As it approaches its 60th anniversary, the United Nations needs reform and reinvigoration," the report states. "Otherwise, the organization risks declining credibility, and its own future will be at risk." According to the report: "New, adapted, and reformed institutions, authorities, and mechanisms are needed if the United Nations is to meet today's challenges. Such reform is necessary and desirable. With a U.S. president and a Congress united in their desire to advance our national interests, the United Nations can be reformed to meet these new challenges and lofty — but significant — goals of its Charter."
"Lofty goals" of the UN Charter? Why such reverence for the document authored by convicted traitor Alger Hiss and Soviet official V.M. Molotov, one of Stalin's top henchmen? The charter's rhetorical appeals to ending the scourge of war and reaffirming faith in fundamental human rights do not alter the fact that the UN was designed to establish the framework of an incipient world government that gradually would be empowered and transformed into a global, socialist dictatorship. That was the "high purpose" of Stalin's agents Hiss and Molotov, as well as the "lofty goal" of the American one-worlders of the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) who collaborated with them in the conspiratorial venture.
Allen W. Dulles, a CFR founder who would head the CIA under President Eisenhower, coauthored a booklet in 1946 asserting that "the ultimate need for an organization stronger than the United Nations must be clear to any thoughtful observer." Dulles regretted there was at the time "no indication that American public opinion … would approve the establishment of a super state, or permit American membership in it. In other words, time — a long time — will be needed before world government is politically feasible." His brother, John Foster Dulles, also a CFR founding member, as well as fellow U.S. delegate with Alger Hiss at the UN's San Francisco founding conference, likewise noted that the infant UN was a work-in-progress that would take many years to complete. John Foster Dulles, who became Eisenhower's first secretary of state, wrote in his 1950 book War or Peace: "The United Nations represents not a final stage in the development of world order, but only a primitive stage. Therefore its primary task is to create the conditions which will make possible a more highly developed organization."
Treacherous Trail
The Gingrich/Mitchell task force recommendations, some media commentators were surprised to find, actually mirror many of the "reforms" proposed by Kofi Annan himself earlier in the year, including providing the world body with immense new military forces for the new UN function of "peacebuilding." However, the media people would not have been surprised in the least if they had realized that the Gingrich/Mitchell and Annan proposals, as well as several other recent reform plans, all came from the same source: Pratt House, the CFR's New York headquarters. Over the past several years, a series of CFR-led reform schemes have emerged to offer solutions to the obvious defects and corruption endemic in the UN. All of these schemes began with the premise that the UN is absolutely indispensable to world peace and security, and all advocate vastly expanding the jurisdiction, financial resources, powers, and enforcement capacity of the UN.
Newt Gingrich and George Mitchell are both longtime CFR members and their 10-member task force of "distinguished Americans" includes seven other CFR members. The task force's efforts were cosponsored by the United States Institute for Peace, a left-wing disarmament think tank that is a front for the CFR and is run by Richard H. Solomon (CFR).
Under increasing pressure over the oil-for-food scandal and other mounting scandals, Kofi Annan appointed two groups to come up with reform plans for the UN. One of them is a 350-member panel known as the Millennium Project, headed by Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs (CFR). The second group, called the High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, is a 16-member brain trust that includes these sterling characters: Quian Qichen, longtime foreign minister for Communist China, who still defiantly justifies his regime's 1989 massacre of students at Tiananmen Square and China's ongoing genocidal policies and repression in Tibet; Yevgeny Primakov, former Soviet KGB chief and the Kremlin's terror master for the Middle East; Gro Harlem Brundtland, former vice president of the Socialist International; and former National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, a longtime CFR Insider.
Kofi Annan drew on these two CFR-guided UN reports to draft his own reform plan, issued earlier this year under the title, In Larger Freedom: Towards Development, Security and Human Rights for All. Thus, over the past couple years, we have seen a proliferation of UN reform proposals, giving the appearance of thoughtful ferment, global discussion, and consensus, when in reality we have been treated to a parade of proposals hand-scripted by a group of CFR elites. Yet, critical mention of the CFR connection is taken by "conservatives" such as Rush Limbaugh and William F. Buckley (CFR) as proof positive that one is a "conspiracy kook," akin to a believer in alien abductors from outer space.
However, there is no getting around the conspiratorial activities of the Pratt House elite concerning the UN over the past six decades. Soviet spy Alger Hiss, who presided as the secretary-general of the UN's founding conference, was a CFR member, as were more than 40 of his fellow U.S. delegates at the conference. These "Founding Fathers" of the UN and their fellow CFR globalists who have succeeded them have made unmistakably clear over and over again that they intend to put an end to U.S. sovereignty and independence and to submerge the U.S. in a one-world government. One of the most unequivocal and detailed plans for this treason is to be found in a 1962 study by Lincoln P. Bloomfield (CFR) for the U.S. State Department (headed then by CFR members). Entitled, A World Effectively Controlled by the United Nations, the Bloomfield study provided a blueprint for achieving that very objective.
In the document's opening passage, Bloomfield writes:
A world effectively controlled by the United Nations is one in which "world government" would come about through the establishment of supranational institutions, characterized by mandatory universal membership and some ability to employ physical force. Effective control would thus entail a preponderance of political power in the hands of a supranational organization.... [T]he present UN Charter could theoretically be revised in order to erect such an organization equal to the task envisaged, thereby codifying a radical rearrangement of power in the world.
Professor Bloomfield, who realized that his classified study was for fellow Insiders and not for public consumption, dared to be more candid than his CFR comrades were when speaking to the unwashed. He said: "Finally, to avoid endless euphemism and evasive verbiage, the contemplated regime will occasionally be referred to unblushingly as a 'world government.'" The Bloomfield study is one of the strongest, but far from the only, open admissions that confirm the historical record of continuous betrayal of America (and our allies) by the Pratt House one-world elite. Like the slime trail that leads to a slug, virtually every trail of American policy disasters leads back to the Council on Foreign Relations. Which should cause every sensible American automatically to suspect any proposals for UN "reform" offered by the CFR brain trust and its affiliates.
New Congressional Assault
On June 17 the U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 2745, the United Nations Reform Act of 2005, by a vote of 221 to 184. The bill was presented as the response of Republican conservatives to the ongoing outrages of the UN. However, beneath the anti-UN rhetoric, which is calculated to win support from conservative constituents, is a deadly scheme not to curtail, limit, or abolish powers or funding for the UN or any of its sprawling agencies, but, instead, to increase its powers.
In his Texas Straight Talk column for June 13, Rep. Ron Paul of Texas warned of the immense threat posed by the legislation:
This week Congress will vote on a bill to expand the power of the United Nations beyond the dreams of even the most ardent left-wing, one-world globalists. But this time the UN power grabbers aren't European liberals; they are American neo-conservatives, who plan to use the UN to implement their own brand of world government.
The "United Nations Reform Act of 2005" masquerades as a bill that will cut U.S. dues to the United Nations by 50% if that organization does not complete a list of 39 reforms. On the surface any measure that threatens to cut funding to the United Nations seems very attractive, but do not be fooled: in this case reform "success" will be worse than failure. The problem is in the supposed reforms themselves — specifically in the policy changes this bill mandates.
Congressman Paul warns that the proposed legislation (which has not yet been considered by the Senate) opens the door for the UN to routinely become involved in matters that have never been part of its charter. Specifically, he points out, the legislation redefines terrorism very broadly for the UN's official purposes — and charges it to take action on behalf of both governments and international organizations.
Moreover, the legislation also supports Kofi Annan's proposal to create a UN Peacebuilding Commission, which was endorsed by the CFR's Gingrich/Mitchell task force and the UN's own reform panels. This new creation, says Rep. Paul, will serve as the UN enforcement arm "for the internationalization of what were formerly internal affairs of sovereign nations."
G. Vance Smith, president and CEO of The John Birch Society, notes that this is not the first time that conservatives have been deluded into doing the work of our nation's enemies by supporting phony UN "reform" efforts. "It's amazing," notes Mr. Smith, "that despite all the vast documentation available on the subversive origins of the UN Charter and the UN's incredibly rancid record over six decades that thinking Americans could once again fall for the UN 'reform' ploy. What conceivable reform could make the UN Charter compatible with the U.S. Constitution? Will replacing Kofi Annan and even a few hundred other UN bureaucrats cure the rot at the core of the UN? How will giving the UN more powers and duties, larger budgets, additional institutions, and more bureaucrats do anything to help America or to solve the UN's fundamental flaws? Do genuine UN opponents really want a UN that is bigger, stronger, and functions more 'efficiently?'"
Genuine UN opponents? No! But there are plenty of phony neo-conservatives pretending to be UN opponents who definitely want a vastly expanded and empowered UN. Despite President George W. Bush's frequent criticisms of the UN, he has been a more lavish supporter of the world organization than any previous president. His argument with the UN over Iraq was that the UN was not exercising enough power. He also paid the U.S. back dues, without demanding reform of any of the practices that had led us to stop payment; renewed U.S. membership in UNESCO, which we had abandoned 20 years before because of its subversive agenda; pledged $15 billion to the UN's corrupt and misguided AIDS program; signed the UN POPs Convention that virtually outlaws the beneficial insecticide DDT, which has now led to the further infection of millions by malaria and other deadly diseases; and unconstitutionally capitulated to WTO rulings against federal and state laws.
Now, President Bush has indicated that he will accept jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court and has proposed the establishment of a 75,000-man UN army called the Global Peace Operations Initiative (GPOI), to be funded and equipped largely from the already overstrained U.S. military budget and force assets. With his cabinet and top echelons of his administration filled with CFR members, President Bush is certain to come out strongly in favor of UN "reform" proposals in Congress that would strengthen and expand the UN, while further weakening the U.S.
"All of the so-called UN reform proposals are dangerous traps that, ultimately, would cause great harm to America," warns the Birch Society's Vance Smith. For 60 years the UN's founders and their one-world successors have been trying to build the UN into an all-powerful world government. "There's no honest way of getting around the fact that the UN is UNAmerican, UNacceptable, UNrepentant, UNregenerate, and UNreformable," says Mr. Smith. "That is why we are more determined than ever to continue pressing and expanding our decades-long campaign to 'Get US out!' of the United Nations, and get the United Nations out of the U.S."
If only the terrorists had hit little further up town, there'd have been more support for the war AND a UN clean up.
WRONG, Mr. DeLay. I as an 'American people' will never be assured of how my money is spent so long as the UN is involved.
On another note, can't the NYC Planning Commission come up with a solid economic development plan or Turtle Bay? Does the UN pay any real estate taxes?
"God doesn't like moderates, Rev 3:15-16"
Unbelievably great statement! I would simply adore having a bumper sticker quoting your tagline!
Thanks!
Char :)
Abolish the UN ping!
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