Madeleine Korbel Albright

Born in Prague in 1937, Madeleine Albright fled with her father, a Czech diplomat who used his U.N. status to gain political asylum for his family in the US in 1948. With a B.A. from Wellesley College (1959), Albright went to graduate school at Columbia University where she earned a Master's (1968) and PhD degree (1976) under the tutelage of the Cold-War ideologue, Zbigniew Brzezinski.

In 1978, Albright joined the National Security Council (NSC) at the invitation of her mentor, Brzezinski, who was National Security Advisor to President Carter, 1978-1981. The NSC was instrumental in initiating and coordinating US covert actions and foreign policy destabilization operations. Responsible for human rights atrocities around the world, the national security apparatus’ collaboration with dictatorships further institutionalized repression (coups, torture, massacres and "disappearing"). Examples include Chile, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Indonesia, Philippines and Zaire. During her tenure at the NSC, and through later associations, Albright supported major US interventions that led to millions of innocent deaths through US sanctioned military deconstructions of Angola, East Timor, Grenada, Sierra Leone, Zimbabwe and elsewhere.

In the 1980's Albright was Senior Fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS), an influential think-tank that has institutionalized devastating neoliberal doctrines, such as structural adjustment for Africa, Asia and Latin America, and peddled the Ballistic Missile Defense (Star Wars) initiatives. In 1989, Albright assumed the Presidency of the Center for National Policy, a think-tank responsible for further institutionalizing permanent warfare.

Beginning in 1993, Albright served as US Permanent Representative to the UN, on the White House staff and the NSC. Her direct support of the invasion of Somalia led to the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people. In April 1994, she blocked all humanitarian intervention to stop genocide in Rwanda. Her support of overt US policy intransigence and covert military operations helped facilitate the mutilation and rape of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan and Congolese women. Albright led the opposition to the re-election of UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali after he condemned US policy on Central Africa. Her pugnacious disposition was rewarded in 1996 when she was sworn in as US Secretary of State. She quickly earned distinction as the highest ranking woman in the US government to be accused of crimes against humanity.

Albright became a major architect of foreign policy in the Clinton Administration. During her first year as Secretary of State, US Special Forces were deployed for 2325 secret missions in 167 countries with countless loss of human life and major setbacks to freedom, democracy and world peace.

Albright contributed to major US foreign policy realignments on Africa, supporting destabilization, genocide, the privatization of war and private mercenary companies. She played a pivotal role in the two US sponsored military invasions of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (Zaire) in 1996 and 1998: subsequent destabilization has killed over four million people. In her 1997 Africa tour, she heaped praise on Africa's most repressive dictatorships, calling them "beacons of hope committed to democracy, open markets and the rule of law."

In the oil-rich Republic of Sudan, Albright sanctioned the 1998 US cruise-missile attack on the Al-Shifa pharmaceutical plant: the US claimed it was a “chemical weapons plant,” but has produced no evidence to support the assertion. However, it was well known that Al-Shifa was the only source of 90 percent of the basic medicines of the war-ravaged country. The clandestine US military role in the Sudan has contributed to the deaths of more than one and a half million people from a war and a lack of medicine in that country.

Elsewhere, Albright’s foreign policy has been equally damaging. She was a major player in the military destabilization of Yugoslavia, leading the charge to devastate the eastern European landscape, institutionalize despair and destroy countless human lives. She has played a key role in the destabilization of the Middle Eastern countries of Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Turkey and Palestine. In South America, Albright helped to secure lucrative “development" contracts for multinational corporations. Three years ago in Bogota, for example, she negotiated the implementation of Plan Colombia, a US military deconstruction responsible for chemical defoliation, flagrant human rights violations, and official US government sanctioned terrorism and war. 

Albright was elected in 2002 to Chairman of the Board of the National Democratic Institute for International Affairs, an institution designed to legitimate foreign elections manufactured and manipulated by the US State Department for corporate and private interests. She remains a member of the Trilateral Commission, an elite corporate fraternity of intelligence and defense insiders responsible for devastating environmental and social policies, the institutionalization of a permanent warfare economy, and the concomitant US pursuit of empire.  

~ keith harmon snow