Dear Senate Foreign Affairs Committee and the U.S. Senate at large,
We, the undersigned faith, human rights, foreign policy, and social justice organizations, request that you not confirm Elliott Abrams to the State Department Bipartisan Advisory Commission on Public Diplomacy.
We oppose Abrams’s appointment to the commission for the following non-exhaustive reasons:
Under Abrams’ watch, over the 12 years of the Reagan/Bush Sr. administrations, 75,000 Salvadorians were killed. This includes the horrific El Mozote massacre in 1981, in which killed more than 800 people–including 140 children–were murdered. Despite this, in 1994, Abrams referred to the U.S.’s record on El Salvador as a “fabulous achievement.”
While serving as Assistant Secretary of State for Human Rights and Humanitarian Affairs at the State Department, Abrams covered up the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador in 1980.
Abrams defended the brutal Guatemalan Rios Montt regime, which oversaw the mass murder, rape, and torture of scores of indigenous Ixil Mayan people in the 1980s.
Abrams helped keep dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier in power in Haiti, leading to ongoing human rights abuses and suffering.
As part of the Restricted Interagency Group, Abrams was aware of the U.S.’s covert military support for the right-wing Contras and encouraged foreign countries to contribute to the rebel group in Nicaragua. He was convicted in 1991 of lying to Congress about his involvement.
Abrams was a major cheerleader of the disastrous Iraq war. In 1998, he led the submission of a letter to President Clinton by the Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative organization, encouraging him to depose Saddam Hussein.
As George Bush’s aide on the National Security Council, Abrams was unabashedly one-sidedly pro-Israel, and a staunch opponent of an independent Palestinian state.
He portrays illegal Israeli settlements as natural and innocuous, falsely smears criticism of Israel by human rights groups as antisemitism, welcomes Evangelism Zionist (white “Christian“ nationalist) support – despite their belief in a biblical injunction to bring about Armageddon – for Israel’s status quo as being good for American Jews, and dismisses American Jewish leaders’ concerns regarding Israel’s far-right racist extremist government as “hysterics” of a “privileged” group.
Abrams championed the U.S. overthrow of Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi in 2011.
Far from behaving as a diplomat, Abrams did everything he could to scuttle the Iran Nuclear Deal.
In 2019, as part of the Trump administration, Abrams, in contradiction of the Vienna Convention, supported an attempted coup in Venezuela.
For the sake of all the people harmed by Abrams – Archbishop Romero’s parishioners, the families of those murdered in El Mozote, the Ixil Mayan people, the Iraqi people, the Palestinian people, and many more – we call on you not to grant Abrams another absolution for all his destruction and lies by placing him in another U.S. administration. Abrams’s victims call out from the ground. Hearing their cries, we are called to act and respond and as such, we ask that you vote against the confirmation of Elliott Abrams.
Sincerely,
Initiated by the
Fellowship of Reconciliation-USA