The outlawing of narcotic drugs at the start of the Twentieth Century, the turning of the matter from public health to social control, coincided with American’s imperial Open Door policy and the belief that the government had an obligation to American industrialists to create markets in every nation in the world, whether those nations liked it or not.
Civic institutions, like public education, were required to sanctify this policy, while “security” bureaucracies were established to ensure the citizenry conformed to the state ideology. Secret services, both public and private, were likewise established to promote the expansion of private American economic interests overseas.
It takes a book to explain the economic foundations of the war on drugs, and the reasons behind the regulation of the medical, pharmaceutical and drug manufacturers industries. Suffice it to say that by 1943, the nations of the “free world” were relying on America for their opium derivatives, under the guardianship of Harry Anslinger, the Commissioner of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN).
Narcotic drugs are a strategic resource, and when Anslinger learned that Peru had built a cocaine factory, he and the Board of Economic Warfare confiscated its product before it could be sold to Germany or Japan. In another instance, Anslinger and his counterpart at the State Department prevented a drug manufacturer in Argentina from selling drugs to Germany.
At the same time, according to Douglas Clark Kinder and William O. Walker III in their article, “Stable Force In a Storm: Harry J. Anslinger and United States Narcotic Policy, 1930-1962,” Anslinger permitted “an American company to ship drugs to Southeast Asia despite receiving intelligence reports that French authorities were permitting opiate smuggling into China and collaborating with Japanese drug traffickers.”
Federal drug law enforcement’s relationship with the espionage establishment matured with the creation of CIA’s predecessor organization, the Office of Strategic Services. Prior to the Second World War, the FBN was the government agency most adept at conducting covert operations at home and abroad. As a result, OSS chief William Donovan asked Anslinger to provide seasoned FBN agents to help organize the OSS and train its agents to work undercover, avoid security forces in hostile nations, manage agent networks, and engage in sabotage and subversion.
The relationship expanded during the war, when FBN executives and agents worked with OSS scientists in domestic “truth drug” experiments involving marijuana. The “extra-legal” nature of the relationship continued after the war: when the CIA decided to test LSD on unsuspecting American citizens, FBN agents were chosen to operate the safe houses where the experiments were conducted.
The relationship was formalized overseas in 1951, when Agent Charlie Siragusa opened an office in Rome and began to develop the FBN’s foreign operations. In the 1950s, FBN agents posted overseas spent half their time doing “favors” for the CIA, such as investigating diversions of strategic materials behind the Iron Curtain. A handful of FBN agents were actually recruited into the CIA while maintaining their FBN credentials as cover.
Officially, FBN agents set limits. Siragusa, for example, claimed to object when the CIA asked him to mount a “controlled delivery” into the U.S. as a way of identifying the American members of a smuggling ring with Communist affiliations.
As Siragusa said, “The FBN could never knowingly allow two pounds of heroin to be delivered into the United States and be pushed to Mafia customers in the New York City area, even if in the long run we could seize a bigger haul.”1
And in 1960, when the CIA asked him to recruit assassins from his stable of underworld contacts, Siragusa again claimed to have refused. But drug traffickers, including, most prominently, Santo Trafficante Jr., were soon participating in CIA attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro.
As the dominant partner in the relationship, the CIA exploited its affinity with the FBN. “Like the CIA,” FBN Agent Robert DeFauw explained, “narcotic agents mount covert operations. We pose as members of the narcotics trade. The big difference is that we were in foreign countries legally, and through our police and intelligence sources, we could check out just about anyone or anything. Not only that, we were operational. So the CIA jumped in our stirrups.”
Jumping in the FBN’s stirrups afforded the CIA deniability, which in turn affords it impunity. To ensure that the CIA’s criminal activities are not revealed, narcotic agents are organized militarily within an inviolable chain of command. Highly indoctrinated, they blindly obey based on a “need to know.” This institutionalized ignorance sustains the illusion of righteousness, in the name of national security, upon which their motivation depends.
As FBN Agent Martin Pera explained:
Most FBN agents were corrupted by the lure of the underworld. They thought they could check their morality at the door – go out and lie, cheat, and steal – then come back and retrieve it. But you can’t. In fact, if you’re successful because you can lie, cheat, and steal, those things become tools you use in the bureaucracy.
Institutionalized corruption began at headquarters, where FBN executives provided cover for CIA assets engaged in drug trafficking. In 1966, Agent John Evans was assigned as an assistant to enforcement chief John Enright.
“And that’s when I got to see what the CIA was doing,” Evans said. “I saw a report on the Kuomintang saying they were the biggest drug dealers in the world, and that the CIA was underwriting them. Air America was transporting tons of Kuomintang opium.” Evans bristled. “I took the report to Enright. He said, ‘Leave it here. Forget about it.’
“Other things came to my attention,” Evans added, “that proved that the CIA contributed to drug use in America. We were in constant conflict with the CIA because it was hiding its budget in ours, and because CIA people were smuggling drugs into the US. We weren’t allowed to tell, and that fostered corruption in the Bureau.”
Heroin smuggled by “CIA people” into the U.S. was channeled by Mafia distributors primarily to African-American communities. Local narcotic agents then targeted disenfranchised blacks as an easy way of preserving the white ruling class’s privileges.
“We didn’t need a search warrant,” explains New Orleans narcotics officer Clarence Giarusso. “It allowed us to meet our quota. And it was on-going. If I find dope on a black man, I can put him in jail for a few days. He’s got no money for a lawyer and the courts are ready to convict. There’s no expectation on the jury’s part that we have to make a case.
So rather than go cold turkey, the addict becomes an informant, which means I can make more cases in the neighborhood, which is all we’re interested in. We don’t care about Carlos Marcello or the Mafia. City cops have no interest in who brings dope in. That’s the job of the federal agents.”
The Establishment’s race and class privileges have always been equated with national security, and FBN executives dutifully preserved the social order. Not until 1968, when Civil Rights reforms were imposed upon government bureaucracies, were black FBN agents allowed to become supervisors and manage white agents.
The war on drugs is largely a projection of two things: the racism that has defined America since its inception, and the government policy of allowing political allies to traffic in narcotics. These unstated but official policies reinforce the belief among CIA and drug law enforcement officials that the Bill of Rights is an obstacle to national security.
Blanket immunity from prosecution for turning these policies into practice engenders a belief among bureaucrats that they are above the law, which fosters corruption in other forms. FBN agents, for example, routinely “created a crime” by breaking and entering, planting evidence, using illegal wiretaps, and falsifying reports. They tampered with heroin, transferred it to informants for sale, and even murdered other agents who threatened to expose them.
All of this was secretly known at the highest level of government, and in 1965 the Treasury Department launched a corruption investigation of the FBN. Headed by Andrew Tartaglino, the investigation ended in 1968 with the resignation of 32 agents and the indictment of five. That same year the FBN was reconstructed in the Department of Justice as the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD).
But, as Tartaglino said dejectedly, “The job was only half done.”
First Infestation
Richard Nixon was elected president based on a vow to restore “law and order” to America. To prove that it intended to keep that promise, the White House in 1969 launched Operation Intercept along the Mexican border. This massive “stop and search” operation so badly damaged relations with Mexico, however, that National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger formed the Ad Hoc Committee on Narcotics (the Heroin Committee) to coordinate drug policy and prevent further diplomatic disasters.
The Heroin Committee was composed of cabinet members represented by their deputies. James Ludlum represented CIA Director Richard Helms. A member of the CIA’s Counter-Intelligence staff, Ludlum had been the CIA’s liaison officer to the FBN since 1962.
“When Kissinger set up the Heroin Committee,” Ludlum recalled, “the CIA certainly didn’t take it seriously, because drug control wasn’t part of their mission.”
Indeed, as John Evans noted above, and as the government was aware, the CIA for years had sanctioned the heroin traffic from the Golden Triangle region of Burma, Thailand and Laos into South Vietnam as a way of rewarding top foreign officials for advancing U.S. policies. This reality presented the Nixon White House with a dilemma, given that addiction among U.S. troops in Vietnam was soaring, and that massive amounts of Southeast Asian heroin were being smuggled into the U.S., for use by middle-class white kids on the verge of revolution.
Nixon’s response was to make drug law enforcement part of the CIA’s mission. Although reluctant to betray the CIA’s clients in South Vietnam, Helms told Ludlum: “We’re going to break their rice bowls.”
This betrayal occurred incrementally. Fred Dick, the BNDD agent assigned to Saigon, passed the names of the complicit military officers and politicians to the White House. But, as Dick recalled, “Ambassador [Ellsworth] Bunker called a meeting in Saigon at which CIA Station Chief Ted Shackley appeared and explained that there was ‘a delicate balance.’ What he said, in effect, was that no one was willing to do anything.”
Meanwhile, to protect its global network of drug trafficking assets, the CIA began infiltrating the BNDD and commandeering its internal security, intelligence, and foreign operations branches. This massive reorganization required the placement of CIA officers in influential positions in every federal agency concerned with drug law enforcement.
CIA Officer Paul Van Marx, for example, was assigned as the U.S. Ambassador to France’s assistant on narcotics. From this vantage point, Van Marx ensured that BNDD conspiracy cases against European traffickers did not compromise CIA operations and assets. Van Marx also vetted potential BNDD assets to make sure they were not enemy spies.
The FBN never had more than 16 agents stationed overseas, but Nixon dramatically increased funding for the BNDD and hundreds of agents were posted abroad. The success of these overseas agents soon came to depend on CIA intelligence, as BNDD Director John Ingersoll understood.
BNDD agents immediately felt the impact of the CIA’s involvement in drug law enforcement operations within the United States. Operation Eagle was the flashpoint. Launched in 1970, Eagle targeted anti-Castro Cubans smuggling cocaine from Latin America to the Trafficante organization in Florida. Of the dozens of traffickers arrested in June, many were found to be members of Operation 40, a CIA terror organization active in the U.S., the Caribbean, Central and South America, and Mexico.
The revelation that CIA drug smuggling assets were operating within the U.S. led to the assignment of CIA officers as counterparts to mid-level BNDD enforcement officials, including Latin American division chief Jerry Strickler. Like Van Marks in France, these CIA officers served to protect CIA assets from exposure, while facilitating their recruitment as informants for the BNDD.
Many Cuban exiles arrested in Operation Eagle were indeed hired by the BNDD and sent throughout Latin America. They got “fantastic intelligence,” Strickler noted. But many were secretly serving the CIA and playing a double game.
Second Infestation
By 1970, BNDD Director Ingersoll’s inspections staff had gathered enough evidence to warrant the investigation of dozens of corrupt FBN agents who had risen to management positions in the BNDD. But Ingersoll could not investigate his top managers while simultaneously investigating drug traffickers. So he asked CIA Director Helms for help in building a “counter-intelligence” capacity within the BNDD.
The result was Operation Twofold, in which 19 CIA officers were infiltrated into the BNDD, ostensibly to spy on corrupt BNDD officials. According to the BNDD’s Chief Inspector Patrick Fuller, “A corporation engaged in law enforcement hired three CIA officers posing as private businessmen to do the contact and interview work.”
CIA recruiter Jerry Soul, a former Operation 40 case officer, primarily selected officers whose careers had stalled due to the gradual reduction of forces in Southeast Asia. Those hired were put through the BNDD’s training course and assigned to spy on a particular regional director. No records were kept and some participants have never been identified.
Charles Gutensohn was a typical Twofold “torpedo.” Prior to his recruitment into the BNDD, Gutensohn had spent two years at the CIA’s base in Pakse, a major heroin transit point between Laos and South Vietnam. “Fuller said that when we communicated, I was to be known as Leo Adams for Los Angeles,” Gutensohn said. “He was to be Walter DeCarlo, for Washington, DC.”
Gutensohn’s cover, however, was blown before he got to Los Angeles. “Someone at headquarters was talking and everyone knew,” he recalled. “About a month after I arrived, one of the agents said to me, ‘I hear that Pat Fuller signed your credentials’.”
Twofold, which existed at least until 1974, was deemed by the Rockefeller Commission to have “violated the 1947 Act which prohibits the CIA’s participation in law enforcement activities.” It also, as shall be discussed later, served as a cover for clandestine CIA operations.
Third Infestation
The Nixon White House blamed the BNDD’s failure to stop international drug trafficking on its underdeveloped intelligence capabilities, a situation that opened the door to further CIA infiltration. In late 1970, CIA Director Helms arranged for his recently retired chief of continuing intelligence, E. Drexel Godfrey, to review BNDD intelligence procedures. Among other things, Godfrey recommended that the BNDD create regional intelligence units (RIUs) and an office of strategic intelligence (SI0).
The RIUs were up and running by 1971 with CIA officers often assigned as analysts, prompting BNDD agents to view the RIUs with suspicion, as repositories for Twofold torpedoes.
The SIO was harder to implement, given its arcane function as a tool to help top managers formulate plans and strategies “in the political sphere.” As SIO Director John Warner explained:
We needed to understand the political climate in Thailand in order to address the problem. We needed to know what kind of protection the Thai police were affording traffickers. We were looking for an intelligence office that could deal with those sorts of issues, on the ground, overseas.
Organizing the SIO fell to CIA officers Adrian Swain and Tom Tripodi, both of whom were recruited into the BNDD. In April 1971 they accompanied Ingersoll to Saigon, where Station Chief Shackley briefed them. Through his CIA contacts, Swain obtained maps of drug-smuggling routes in Southeast Asia.
Upon their return to the U.S., Swain and Tripodi expressed frustration that the CIA had access to people capable of providing the BNDD with intelligence, but these people “were involved in narcotics trafficking and the CIA did not want to identify them.”
Seeking a way to circumvent the CIA, they recommended the creation of a “special operations or strategic operations staff” that would function as the BNDD’s own CIA “using a backdoor approach to gather intelligence in support of operations.” Those operations would rely on “longer range, deep penetration, clandestine assets, who remain undercover, do not appear during the course of any trial and are recruited and directed by the Special Operations agents on a covert basis.”
The White House approved the plan and in May 1971, Kissinger presented a $120 million drug control proposal, of which $50 million was earmarked for special operations. Three weeks later Nixon declared “war on drugs,” at which point Congress responded with funding for the SIO and authorization for the extra-legal operations Swain and Tripodi envisioned.
SIO Director Warner was given a seat on the U.S. Intelligence Board so the SIO could obtain raw intelligence from the CIA. But, in return, the SIO was compelled to adopt CIA security procedures. A CIA officer established the SIO’s file room and computer system; safes and steel doors were installed; and witting agents had to obtain CIA clearances.
Active-duty CIA officers were assigned to the SIO as desk officers for Europe and the Middle East, the Far East, and Latin America. Tripodi was assigned as chief of operations. Tripodi had spent the previous six years in the CIA’s Security Research Services, where his duties included the penetration of peace groups, as well as setting up firms to conduct black bag jobs. Notably, White House “Plumber” E. Howard Hunt inherited Tripodi’s Special Operations unit, which included several of the Watergate burglars.
Tripodi liaised with the CIA on matters of mutual interest and the covert collection of narcotics intelligence outside of routine BNDD channels. As part of his operational plan, code-named Medusa, Tripodi proposed that SIO agents hire foreign nationals to blow up contrabandista planes while they were refueling at clandestine air strips. Another proposal called for ambushing traffickers in America, and taking their drugs and money.
Enter Lucien Conein
The creation of the SIO coincided with the assignment of CIA officer Lucien Conein to the BNDD. As a member of the OSS, Conein had parachuted into France to form resistance cells that included Corsican gangsters. As a CIA officer, Conein in 1954 was assigned to Vietnam to organize anti-communist forces, and in 1963 achieved infamy as the intermediary between the Kennedy White House and the cabal of generals that murdered President Diem.
Historian Alfred McCoy has alleged that, in 1965, Conein arranged a truce between the CIA and drug trafficking Corsicans in Saigon. The truce, according to McCoy, allowed the Corsicans to traffic, as long as they served as contact men for the CIA. The truce also endowed the Corsicans with “free passage” at a time when Marseilles’ heroin labs were turning from Turkish to Southeast Asian morphine base.
Conein denied McCoy’s allegation and insisted that his meeting with the Corsicans was solely to resolve a problem caused by Daniel Ellsberg’s “peccadilloes with the mistress of a Corsican.”
It is impossible to know who is telling the truth. What is known is that in July 1971, on Howard Hunt’s recommendation, the White House hired Conein as an expert on Corsican drug traffickers in Southeast Asia. Conein was assigned as a consultant to the SIO’s Far East Asia desk. His activities will soon be discussed in greater detail.
The Parallel Mechanism
In September 1971, the Heroin Committee was reorganized as the Cabinet Committee for International Narcotics Control (CCINC) under Secretary of State William Rogers. CCINC’s mandate was to “set policies which relate international considerations to domestic considerations.” By 1975, its budget amounted to $875 million, and the war on drugs had become a most profitable industry.
Concurrently, the CIA formed a unilateral drug unit in its operations division under Seymour Bolten. Known as the Special Assistant to the Director for the Coordination of Narcotics, Bolten directed CIA division and station chiefs in unilateral drug control operations. In doing this, Bolten worked closely with Ted Shackley, who in 1972 was appointed head of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division. Bolten and Shackley had worked together in post-war Germany, as well as in anti-Castro Cubans operations in the early 1960s. Their collaboration would grease federal drug law enforcement’s skid into oblivion.
“Bolten screwed us,” BNDD’s Latin American division chief Jerry Strickler said emphatically. “And so did Shackley.”
Bolten “screwed” the BNDD, and the American judicial system, by setting up a “parallel mechanism” based on a computerized register of international drug traffickers and a CIA-staffed communications crew that intercepted calls from drug traffickers inside the U.S. to their accomplices around the world. The International Narcotics Information Network (INIS) was modeled on a computerized management information system Shackley had used to terrorize the underground resistance in South Vietnam.
Bolten’s staff also “re-tooled” dozens of CIA officers and slipped them into the BNDD. Several went to Lou Conein at the SIO for clandestine, highly illegal operations.
Factions within the CIA and military were opposed to Bolten’s parallel mechanism, but CIA Executive Director William Colby supported Bolten’s plan to preempt the BNDD and use its agents and informants for unilateral CIA purposes. The White House also supported the plan for political purposes related to Watergate. Top BNDD officials who resisted were expunged; those who cooperated were rewarded.
Bureau of Narcotics Covert Intelligence Network
In September 1972, DCI Helms (then immersed in Watergate intrigues), told BNDD Director Ingersoll that the CIA had prepared files on specific drug traffickers in Miami, the Florida Keys, and the Caribbean. Helms said the CIA would provide Ingersoll with assets to pursue the traffickers and develop information on targets of opportunity. The CIA would also provide operational, technical, and financial support.
The result was the Bureau of Narcotics Covert Intelligence Network (BUNCIN) whose methodology reflected Tripodi’s Medusa Plan and included “provocations, inducement to desertion, creating confusion and apprehension.”
Some BUNCIN intelligence activities were directed against “senior foreign government officials” and were “blamed on other government agencies or even on the intelligence services of other nations.” Other BUNCIN activities were directed against American civic and political groups.
BNDD officials managed BUNCIN’s legal activities, while Conein at the SIO managed its political and CIA aspects. According to Conein’s administrative deputy, Rich Kobakoff, “BUNCIN was an experiment in how to finesse the law. The end product was intelligence, not seizures or arrests.”
CIA officers Robert Medell and William Logay were selected to manage BUNCIN.
A Bay of Pigs veteran born in Cuba, Medell was initially assigned to the Twofold program. Medell was BUNCIN’s “covert” agent and recruited its principal agents. All of his assets had previously worked for the CIA, and all believed they were working for it again.
Medell started running agents in March 1973 with the stated goal of penetrating the Trafficante organization. To this end the BNDD’s Enforcement Chief, Andy Tartaglino, introduced Medell to Sal Caneba, a retired Mafioso who had been in business with Trafficante in the 1950s. Caneba in one day identified the head of the Cuban side of the Trafficante family, as well as its organizational structure.
But the CIA refused to allow the BNDD to pursue the investigation, because it had employed Trafficante in its assassination attempts against Fidel Castro, and because Trafficante’s Operation 40 associates were performing similar functions for the CIA around the world.
Medell’s Principal Agent was Bay of Pigs veteran Guillermo Tabraue, whom the CIA paid $1,400 a week. While receiving this princely sum, Tabraue participated in the “Alvarez-Cruz” drug smuggling ring.
Medell also recruited agents from Manuel Artime’s anti-Castro Cuban organization. Former CIA officer and White House “Plumber” Howard Hunt, notably, had been Artime’s case officer for years, and many members of Artime’s organization had worked for Ted Shackley while Shackley was the CIA’s station chief in Miami.
Bill Logay was the “overt” agent assigned to the BUNCIN office in Miami. Logay had been Shackley’s bodyguard in Saigon in 1969. From 1970-1971, Logay had served as a special police liaison and drug coordinator in Saigon’s Precinct 5. Logay was also asked to join Twofold, but claims to have refused.
Medell and Logay’s reports were hand delivered to BNDD headquarters via the Defense Department’s classified courier service. The Defense Department was in charge of emergency planning and provided BUNCIN agents with special communications equipment. The CIA supplied BUNCIN’s assets with forged IDs that enabled them to work for foreign governments, including Panama, Venezuela and Costa Rica.
Like Twofold, BUNCIN had two agendas. One, according to Chief Inspector Fuller, “was told” and had a narcotics mission. The other provided cover for the Plumbers. Orders for the domestic political facet emanated from the White House and passed through Conein to “Plumber” Gordon Liddy and his “Operation Gemstone” squad of exile Cuban terrorists from the Artime organization.
Enforcement chief Tartaglino was unhappy with the arrangement and gave Agent Ralph Frias the job of screening anti-Castro Cubans sent by the White House to the BNDD. Frias was assigned to International Affairs chief George Belk. When Nixon’s White House chief of staff H.R. “Bob” Haldeman sent over three Cubans, Frias interviewed them and realized they were “plants.” Those three were not hired, but, Frias lamented, many others were successfully infiltrated inside the BNDD and other federal agencies.
Under BUNCIN cover, CIA anti-Castro assets reportedly kidnapped and assassinated people in Colombia and Mexico. BUNCIN’s White House sponsors also sent CIA anti-Castro Cuban assets to gather dirt on Democratic politicians in Key West. With BUNCIN, federal drug law enforcement sank to new lows of political repression and corruption.
Novo Yardley
The Nixon White House introduced the “operations by committee” management method to ensure control over its illegal drug operations. But as agencies involved in drug law enforcement pooled resources, the BNDD’s mission was diluted and diminished.
And, as the preeminent agency in the federal government, the CIA not only separated itself from the BNDD as part of Bolten’s parallel mechanism, it rode off into the sunset on the BNDD’s horse. For example, at their introductory meeting in Mexico City in 1972, Ted Shackley told Latin American division chief Strickler to hand over all BNDD files, informant lists, and cable traffic.
According to Strickler, “Bad things happened.” The worst abuse was that the CIA allowed drug shipments into the U.S. without telling the BNDD.
“Individual stations allowed this,” SIO Director John Warner confirmed.
In so far as evidence acquired by CIA electronic surveillance is inadmissible in court, the CIA was able to protect its controlled deliveries into the U.S. merely by monitoring them.
Numerous investigations had to be terminated as a result. Likewise, dozens of prosecutions were dismissed on national security grounds due to the participation of CIA assets operating around the world.
Strickler knew which CIA people were guilty of sabotaging cases in Latin America, and wanted to indict them. And so, at Bolten’s insistence, Strickler was reassigned. Meanwhile, CIA assets from Bolten’s unilateral drug unit were kidnapping and assassinating traffickers as part of Operation Twofold.
BNDD Director Ingersoll confirmed the existence of this covert facet of Twofold. Its purpose, he said, was to put people in deep cover in the U.S. to develop intelligence on drug trafficking, particularly from South America. The regional directors weren’t aware of it. Ingersoll said he got approval from Attorney General John Mitchell and passed the operation on to John Bartels, the first administrator of the DEA. He said the unit did not operate inside the U.S., which is why he thought it was legal.
Ingersoll added that he was surprised that no one from the Rockefeller Commission asked him about it.
Joseph DiGennaro’s entry into the covert facet of Operation Twofold began when a family friend, who knew CIA officer Jim Ludlum, suggested that he apply for a job with the BNDD. Then working as a stockbroker in New York, DiGennaro met Fuller in August 1971 in Washington. Fuller gave DiGennaro the code name Novo Yardley, based on his posting in New York, and as a play on the name of the famous codebreaker.
After DiGennaro obtained the required clearances, he was told that he and several other recruits were being “spun-off” from Twofold into the CIA’s “operational” unit. The background check took 14 months, during which time he received intensive combat and trade-craft training.
In October 1972 he was sent to New York City and assigned to an enforcement group as a cover. His paychecks came from BNDD funds, but the program was reimbursed by the CIA through the Bureau of Mines. The program was authorized by the “appropriate” Congressional committee.
DiGennaro’s unit was managed by the CIA’s Special Operations Division in conjunction with the military, which provided assets within foreign military services to keep ex-filtration routes (air corridors and roads) open. The military cleared air space when captured suspects were brought into the U.S. DiGennaro spent most of his time in South America, but the unit operated worldwide. The CIA unit numbered about 40 men, including experts in printing, forgery, maritime operations, and telecommunications.
DiGennaro would check with Fuller and take sick time or annual leave to go on missions. There were lots of missions. As his BNDD group supervisor in New York said, “Joey was never in the office.”
The job was tracking down, kidnapping, and, if they resisted, killing drug traffickers. Kidnapped targets were incapacitated by drugs and dumped in the U.S. As DEA Agent Gerry Carey recalled:
We’d get a call that there was ‘a present’ waiting for us on the corner of 116th Street and Sixth Avenue. We’d go there and find some guy, who’d been indicted in the Eastern District of New York, handcuffed to a telephone pole. We’d take him to a safe house for questioning and, if possible, turn him into an informer. Sometimes we’d have him in custody for months. But what did he know?
If you’re a Corsican drug dealer in Argentina, and men with police credentials arrest you, how do you know it’s a CIA operation? DiGennaro’s last operation in 1977 involved the recovery of a satellite that had fallen into a drug dealer’s hands. Such was the extent of the CIA’s “parallel mechanism.”
The Dirty Dozen
With the formation of the Drug Enforcement Administration in July 1973, BUNCIN was renamed the DEA Clandestine Operations Network (DEACON 1). A number of additional DEACONs were developed through Special Field Intelligence Programs (SFIP). As an extension of BUNCIN, DEACON 1 developed intelligence on traffickers in Costa Rica, Ohio and New Jersey; politicians in Florida; terrorists and gun runners; the sale of boats and helicopters to Cuba; and the Trafficante organization.
Under DEA chief John Bartels, administrative control fell under Enforcement Chief George Belk and his Special Projects assistant Philip Smith. Through Belk and Smith, the Office of Special Projects had become a major facet of Bolten’s parallel mechanism. It housed the DEA’s air wing (staffed largely by CIA officers), conducted “research programs” with the CIA, provided technical aids and documentation to agents, and handled fugitive searches.
As part of DEACON 1, Smith sent covert agent Bob Medell “to Caracas or Bogota to develop a network of agents.” As Smith noted in a memorandum, reimbursement for Medell “is being made in back-channel fashion to CIA under payments to other agencies and is not counted as a position against us.”
Thoroughly suborned by Bolten and the CIA, DEA Administrator Bartels established a priority on foreign clandestine narcotics collection. And when Belk proposed a special operations group in intelligence, Bartels immediately approved it. In March 1974, Belk assigned the group to Lou Conein.
As chief of the Intelligence Group/Operations (IGO), Conein administered the DEA Special Operations Group (DEASOG), SFIP and National Intelligence Officers (NIO) programs. The chain of command, however, was “unclear” and while Medell reported administratively to Smith, Conein managed operations through a separate chain of command reaching to William Colby, who had risen to the rank of CIA Director concurrent with the formation of the DEA.
Conein had worked for Colby for many years in Vietnam, for through Colby he hired a “dirty dozen” CIA officers to staff DEASOG. As NIOs (not regular gun-toting DEA agents), the DEASOG officers did not buy narcotics or appear in court, but instead used standard CIA operating procedures to recruit assets and set up agent networks for the long-range collection of intelligence on trafficking groups. They had no connection to the DEA and were housed in a safe house outside headquarters in downtown Washington, DC.
The first DEASOG recruits were CIA officers Elias P. Chavez and Nicholas Zapata. Both had paramilitary and drug control experience in Laos. Colby’s personnel assistant Jack Mathews had been Chavez’s case officer at the Long Thien base, where General Vang Pao ran his secret drug-smuggling army under Ted Shackley’s auspices from 1966-1968.
A group of eight CIA officers followed: Wesley Dyckman, a Chinese linguist with service in Vietnam, was assigned to San Francisco. Louis J. Davis, a veteran of Vietnam and Laos, was assigned to the Chicago Regional Intelligence Unit. Christopher Thompson from the CIA’s Phoenix Program in Vietnam went to San Antonio. Hugh E. Murray, veteran of Pakse and Bolivia (where he participated in the capture of Che Guevara), was sent to Tucson. Thomas D. McPhaul had worked with Conein in Vietnam, and was sent to Dallas. Thomas L. Briggs, a veteran of Laos and a friend of Shackley’s, went to Mexico. Vernon J. Goertz, a Shackley friend who had participated in the Allende coup, went to Venezuela. David A. Scherman, a Conein friend and former manager of the CIA’s interrogation center in Da Nang, was sent to sunny San Diego.
Gary Mattocks, who ran CIA counter-terror teams in Vietnam’s Delta, and interrogator Robert Simon were the eleventh and twelfth members. Terry Baldwin, Barry Carew and Joseph Lagattuta joined later.
According to Davis, Conein created DEASOG specifically to do Phoenix program-style jobs overseas: the type where a paramilitary officer breaks into a trafficker’s house, takes his drugs, and slits his throat. The NIOs were to operate overseas where they would target traffickers the police couldn’t reach, like a prime minister’s son or the police chief in Acapulco if he was the local drug boss. If they couldn’t assassinate the target, they would bomb his labs or use psychological warfare to make him look like he was a DEA informant, so his own people would kill him.
The DEASOG people “would be breaking the law,” Davis observed, “but they didn’t have arrest powers overseas anyway.”
Conein envisioned 50 NIOs operating worldwide by 1977. But a slew of Watergate-related scandals forced the DEA to curtail its NIO program and reorganize its covert operations staff and functions in ways that have corrupted federal drug law enforcement beyond repair.
Assassination Scandals
The first scandal focused on DEACON 3, which targeted the Aviles-Perez organization in Mexico. Eli Chavez, Nick Zapata and Barry Carew were the NIOs assigned.
A veteran CIA officer who spoke Spanish, Carew had served as a special police adviser in Saigon before joining the BNDD. Carew was assigned as Conein’s Latin American desk officer and managed Chavez and Zapata (aka “the Mexican Assassin”) in Mexico. According to Chavez, a White House Task Force under Howard Hunt had started the DEACON 3 case. The Task force provided photographs of the Aviles Perez compound in Mexico, from whence truckloads of marijuana were shipped to the U.S.
Funds were allotted in February 1974, at which point Chavez and Zapata traveled to Mexico City as representatives of the North American Alarm and Fire Systems Company. In Mazatlán, they met with Carew, who stayed at a fancy hotel and played tennis every day, while Chavez and Zapata, whom Conein referred to as “pepper-bellies,” fumed in a flea-bag motel.
An informant arranged for Chavez, posing as a buyer, to meet Perez. A deal was struck, but DEA chief John Bartels made the mistake of instructing Chavez to brief the DEA’s regional director in Mexico City before making “the buy.”
At this meeting, the DEACON 3 agents presented their operational plan. But when the subject of “neutralizing” Perez came up, analyst Joan Banister took this to mean assassination. Bannister reported her suspicions to DEA headquarters, where the anti-CIA faction leaked her report to Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson.
Anderson’s allegation that the DEA was providing cover for a CIA assassination unit included revelations that the Senate had investigated IGO chief Conein for shopping around for assassination devices, like exploding ashtrays and telephones. Conein managed to keep his job, but the trail led to his comrade from the OSS, Mitch Werbell.
A deniable asset Conein used for parallel operations, Werbell had tried to sell several thousand silenced machine pistols to DEACON 1 target Robert Vesco, then living in Costa Rica surrounded by drug trafficking Cuban exiles in the Trafficante organization. Trafficante was also, at the time, living in Costa Rica as a guest of President Figueres whose son had purchased weapons from Werbell and used them to arm a death squad he formed with DEACON 1 asset Carlos Rumbault, a notorious anti-Castro Cuban terrorist and fugitive drug smuggler.
Meanwhile, in February 1974, DEA Agent Anthony Triponi, a former Green Beret and member of Operation Twofold, was admitted to St. Luke’s Hospital in New York “suffering from hypertension.” DEA inspectors found Triponi in the psychiatric ward, distraught because he had broken his “cover” and now his “special code” would have to be changed.
Thinking he was insane, the DEA inspectors called former chief inspector Patrick Fuller in California, just to be sure. As it turned out, everything Triponi had said about Twofold was true! The incredulous DEA inspectors called the CIA and were stunned when they were told: “If you release the story, we will destroy you.”
By 1975, Congress and the Justice Department were investigating the DEA’s relations with the CIA. In the process they stumbled on, among other things, plots to assassinate Torrijos and Noriega in Panama, as well as Tripodi’s Medusa Program.
In a draft report, one DEA inspector described Medusa as follows:
Topics considered as options included psychological terror tactics, substitution of placebos to discredit traffickers, use of incendiaries to destroy conversion laboratories, and disinformation to cause internal warfare between drug trafficking organizations; other methods under consideration involved blackmail, use of psychopharmacological techniques, bribery and even terminal sanctions.
The Cover-Up
Despite the flurry of investigations, Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, reconfirmed the CIA’s narcotic intelligence collection arrangement with DEA, and the CIA continued to have its way. Much of its success is attributed to Seymour Bolten, whose staff handled “all requests for files from the Church Committee,” which concluded that allegations of drug smuggling by CIA assets and proprietaries “lacked substance.”
The Rockefeller Commission likewise gave the CIA a clean bill of health, falsely stating that the Twofold inspections project was terminated in 1973. The Commission completely covered-up the existence of the operation unit hidden within the inspections program.
Ford did task the Justice Department to investigate “allegations of fraud, irregularity, and misconduct” in the DEA. The so-called DeFeo investigation lasted through July 1975, and included allegations that DEA officials had discussed killing Omar Torrijos and Manuel Noriega. In March 1976, Deputy Attorney General Richard Thornburgh announced there were no findings to warrant criminal prosecutions.
In 1976, Congresswoman Bella Abzug submitted questions to new Director of Central Intelligence George H.W. Bush, about the CIA’s central role in international drug trafficking. Bush’s response was to cite that a 1954 agreement with the Justice Department gave the CIA the right to block prosecution or keep its crimes secret in the name of national security.
In its report, the Abzug Committee said: “It was ironic that the CIA should be given responsibility of narcotic intelligence, particularly since they are supporting the prime movers.”
The Mansfield Amendment of 1976 sought to curtail the DEA’s extra-legal activities abroad by prohibiting agents from kidnapping or conducting unilateral actions without the consent of the host government. The CIA, of course, was exempt and continued to sabotage DEA cases against its movers, while further tightening its stranglehold on the DEA’s enforcement and intelligence capabilities.
In 1977, the DEA’s Assistant Administrator for Enforcement sent a memo, co-signed by the six enforcement division chiefs, to DEA chief Peter Bensinger. As the memo stated, “All were unanimous in their belief that present CIA programs were likely to cause serious future problems for DEA, both foreign and domestic.”
They specifically cited controlled deliveries enabled by CIA electronic surveillance and the fact that the CIA “will not respond positively to any discovery motion.” They complained that “Many of the subjects who appear in these CIA- promoted or controlled surveillances regularly travel to the United States in furtherance of their trafficking activities.” The “de facto immunity” from prosecution enabled the CIA assets to “operate much more openly and effectively.”
But then DEA chief Peter Bensinger suffered the CIA at the expense of America’s citizens and the DEA’s integrity. Under Bensinger the DEA created its CENTAC program to target drug trafficking organizations worldwide through the early 1980s. But the CIA subverted the CENTAC: as its director Dennis Dayle famously said, “The major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.”
Murder and Mayhem
DEACON 1 inherited BUNCIN’s anti-Castro Cuban assets from Brigade 2506, which the CIA organized to invade Cuba in 1960. Controlled by Nixon’s secret political police, these CIA assets, operating under DEA cover, had parallel assignments involving “extremist groups and terrorism, and information of a political nature.”
Noriega and Moises Torrijos in Panama were targets, as was fugitive financier and Nixon campaign contributor Robert Vesco in Costa Rica, who was suspected of being a middle man in drug and money-laundering operations of value to the CIA.
DEACON 1’s problems began when overt agent Bill Logay charged that covert agent Bob Medell’s anti-Castro Cuban assets had penetrated the DEA on behalf of the Trafficante organization. DEACON 1 secretary Cecelia Plicet fanned the flames by claiming that Conein and Medell were using Principal Agent Tabraue to circumvent the DEA.
In what amounted to an endless succession of controlled deliveries, Tabraue was financing loads of cocaine and using DEACON 1’s Cuban assets to smuggle them into the U.S. Plicet said that Medell and Conein worked for “the other side” and wanted the DEA to fail. These accusations prompted an investigation, after which Logay was reassigned to inspections and Medell was reassigned and replaced by Gary Mattocks, an NIO member of the Dirty Dozen.
According to Mattocks, Shackley helped Colby set up DEASOG and brought in “his” people, including Tom Clines, whom Shackley placed in charge of the CIA’s Caribbean operations. Clines, like Shackley and Bolten, knew all the exile Cuban terrorists and traffickers on the DEASOG payroll. CIA officer Vernon Goertz worked for Clines in Caracas as part of the CIA’s parallel mechanism under DEASOG cover.
As cover for his DEACON 1 activities, Mattocks set up a front company designed to improve relations between Cuban and American businessmen. Meanwhile, through the CIA, he recruited members of the Artime organization including Watergate burglars Rolando Martinez and Bernard Barker, as well as Che Guevara’s murderer, Felix Rodriguez. These anti-Castro terrorists were allegedly part of an Operation 40 assassination squad that Shackley and Clines employed for private as well as professional purposes.
In late 1974, DEACON 1 crashed and burned when interrogator Robert Simon’s daughter was murdered in a drive-by shooting by crazed anti-Castro Cubans. Simon at the time was managing the CIA’s drug data base and had linked the exile Cuban drug traffickers with “a foreign terrorist organization.” As Mattocks explained, “It got bad after the Brigaders found out Simon was after them.”
None of the CIA’s terrorists, however, were ever arrested. Instead, Conein issued a directive prohibiting DEACON 1 assets from reporting on domestic political affairs or terrorist activities and the tragedy was swept under the carpet for reasons of national security.
DEACON 1 unceremoniously ended in 1975 after Agent Fred Dick was assigned to head the DEA’s Caribbean Basin Group. In that capacity Dick visited the DEACON 1 safe house and found, in his words, “a clandestine CIA unit using miscreants from Bay of Pigs, guys who were blowing up planes.” Dick hit the ceiling and in August 1975 DEACON I was terminated.
No new DEACONs were initiated and the others quietly ran their course. Undeterred, the CIA redeployed its anti-Castro Cuban miscreant assets, some of whom established the terror organization CORU in 1977. Others would go to work for Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North, a key National Security Council aide under President Ronald Reagan in the Iran-Contra drug and terror network.
Conein’s IGO was disbanded in 1976 after a grand jury sought DEACON I intelligence regarding several drug busts. But CIA acquired intelligence cannot be used in prosecutions, and the CIA refused to identify its assets in court, with the result that 27 prosecutions were dismissed on national security grounds.
Gary Mattocks was thereafter unwelcomed in the DEA. But his patron Ted Shackley had become DCI George Bush’s assistant deputy director for operations and Shackley kindly rehired Mattocks into the CIA and assigned him to the CIA’s narcotics unit in Peru.
At the time, Santiago Ocampo was purchasing cocaine in Peru and his partner Matta Ballesteros was flying it to the usual Cuban miscreants in Miami. One of the receivers, Francisco Chanes, an erstwhile DEACON asset, owned two seafood companies that would soon allegedly come to serve as fronts in Oliver North’s Contra supply network, receiving and distributing tons of Contra cocaine.
Mattocks himself soon joined the Contra support operation as Eden Pastrora’s case officer. In that capacity Mattocks was present in 1984 when CIA officers handed pilot Barry Seal a camera and told him to take photographs of Sandinista official Federico Vaughn loading bags of cocaine onto Seal’s plane. A DEA “special employee,” Seal was running drugs for Jorge Ochoa Vasquez and purportedly using Nicaragua as a transit point for his deliveries.
North asked DEA officials to instruct Seal, who was returning to Ochoa with $1.5 million, to deliver the cash to the Contras. When the DEA officials refused, North leaked a blurry photo, purportedly of Vaughn, to the right-wing Washington Times. For partisan political purposes, on behalf of the Reagan administration, Oliver North blew the DEA’s biggest case at the time, and the DEA did nothing about it, even though DEA Administrator Jack Lawn said in 1988, in testimony before the Subcommittee on Crime of the Committee on the Judiciary, that leaking the photo “severely jeopardized the lives” of agents.
The circle was squared in 1989 when the CIA instructed Gary Mattocks to testify as a defense witness at the trial of DEACON 1 Principal Agent Gabriel Tabraue. Although Tabraue had earned $75 million from drug trafficking, while working as a CIA and DEA asset, the judge declared a mistrial based on Mattocks’s testimony. Tabraue was released. Some people inferred that President George H.W. Bush had personally ordered Mattocks to dynamite the case.
The CIA’s use of the DEA to employ terrorists would continue apace. For example, in 1981, DEA Agent Dick Salmi recruited Roberto Cabrillo, a drug smuggling member of CORU, an organization of murderous Cuban exiles formed by drug smuggler Frank Castro and Luis Posada while George Bush was DCI.
The DEA arrested Castro in 1981, but the CIA engineered his release and hired him to establish a Contra training camp in the Florida Everglades. Posada reportedly managed resupply and drug shipments for the Contras in El Salvador, in cahoots with Felix Rodriguez. Charged in Venezuela with blowing up a Cuban airliner and killing 73 people in 1976, Posada was shielded from extradition by George W. Bush in the mid-2000s.
Having been politically castrated by the CIA, DEA officials merely warned its CORU assets to stop bombing people in the U.S. It could maim and kill people anywhere else, just not here in the sacred homeland. By then, Salmi noted, the Justice Department had a special “grey-mail section” to fix cases involving CIA terrorists and drug dealers.
The Hoax
DCI William Webster formed the CIA’s Counter-Narcotics Center in 1988. Staffed by over 100 agents, it ostensibly became the springboard for the covert penetration of, and paramilitary operations against, top traffickers protected by high-tech security firms, lawyers and well-armed private armies.
The CNC brought together, under CIA control, every federal agency involved in the drug wars. Former CIA officer and erstwhile Twofold member, Terry Burke, then serving as the DEA’s Deputy for Operations, was allowed to send one liaison officer to the CNC.
The CNC quickly showed its true colors. In the late 1990, Customs agents in Miami seized a ton of pure cocaine from Venezuela. To their surprise, a Venezuelan undercover agent said the CIA had approved the delivery. DEA Administrator Robert Bonner ordered an investigation and discovered that the CIA had, in fact, shipped the load from its warehouse in Venezuela.
The “controlled deliveries” were managed by CIA officer Mark McFarlin, a veteran of Reagan’s terror campaign in El Salvador. Bonner wanted to indict McFarlin, but was prevented from doing so because Venezuela was in the process of fighting off a rebellion led by leftist Hugo Chavez. This same scenario has been playing out in Afghanistan for the last 15 years, largely through the DEA’s Special Operations Division (SOD), which provides cover for CIA operations worldwide.
The ultimate and inevitable result of American imperialism, the SOD job is not simply to “create a crime,” as freewheeling FBN agents did in the old days, but to “recreate a crime” so it is prosecutable, despite whatever extra-legal methods were employed to obtain the evidence before it is passed along to law enforcement agencies so they can make arrests without revealing what prompted their suspicions.
Reuters reported in 2013:
The unit of the DEA that distributes the information is called the Special Operations Division, or SOD. Two dozen partner agencies comprise the unit, including the FBI, CIA, NSA, Internal Revenue Service and the Department of Homeland Security. It was created in 1994 to combat Latin American drug cartels and has grown from several dozen employees to several hundred.
The utilization of information from the SOD, which operates out of a secret location in Virginia, “cannot be revealed or discussed in any investigative function,” according to an internal document cited by Reuters, which added that agents are specifically directed “to omit the SOD’s involvement from investigative reports, affidavits, discussions with prosecutors and courtroom testimony.”
Agents are told to use “parallel construction” to build their cases without reference to SOD’s tips which may come from sensitive “intelligence intercepts, wiretaps, informants and a massive database of telephone records,” Reuters reported.
Citing a former federal agent, Reuters reported that SOD operators would tell law enforcement officials in the U.S. to be at a certain place at a certain time and to look for a certain vehicle which would then be stopped and searched on some pretext. “After an arrest was made, agents then pretended that their investigation began with the traffic stop, not with the SOD tip, the former agent said,” Reuters reported.
An anonymous senior DEA official told Reuters that this “parallel construction” approach is “decades old, a bedrock concept” for law enforcement. The SOD’s approach follows Twofold techniques and Bolten’s parallel mechanism from the early 1970s.
To put it simply, lying to frame defendants, which has always been unstated policy, is now official policy: no longer considered corruption, it is how your government manages the judicial system on behalf of the rich political elite.
As outlined in this article, the process tracks back to Nixon, the formation of the BNDD, and the creation of a secret political police force out of the White House. As Agent Bowman Taylor caustically observed, “I used to think we were fighting the drug business, but after they formed the BNDD, I realized we were feeding it.”
The corruption was first “collateral” – as a function of national security performed by the CIA in secret – but has now become “integral,’ the essence of empire run amok.
Douglas Valentine is the author of The Hotel Tacloban. He can be reached at: dougvalentine77@gmail.com.
September 20, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Deception, Timeless or most popular | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, DEA, Federal Bureau of Narcotics, Harry Anslinger, Heroin, Iran-Contra, Latin America, Manuel Noriega, Oliver North, Omar Torrijos, United States |
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Forgotten / Olvidados is one of the most important Bolivian films to emerge recently, marking a high point of technical achievement for the country’s film industry. The film serves as powerful indictment of the military personnel who were responsible for thousands of deaths and disappearances of political dissidents in Latin America during Operation Condor, estimated at 30,000 forced disappearances, 50,000 deaths, and 400,000 arrests. Beginning in 1975 the political campaign of repression spanned across Argentina, Chile, Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay—carried out by the right-wing military dictatorships and backed by the CIA. The ruthless campaign of suppression targeted opposition movements, including students, Marxists, Communists, and political parties that were deemed threats to the authoritarian governments.
Mexican actor, Damián Alcáraz plays General José Mendieta, a callous official tasked with the arrest, torture of dissidents under the guise of Operation Condor. General Mendieta shows some initial reluctance at carrying out the orders from his superiors. In his old age, the atrocities he committed in the past start to weigh on his psyche. The ruling class responsible for spearheading forced disappearances has rarely faced the justice system or been made to answer for their crimes. The perpetrators of such atrocities have grown old and frail, dying of old age, something denied to the many victims they executed.
After General Mendieta suffers a heart attack during a walk around the city, in which he encounters one of his former victims, he begins to craft a letter to his son Pablo (Bernardo Peña), now living in New York. In the letter he admits his involvement in the campaign of terror. In flashbacks we see how he was one of the masterminds of Operation Condor, where students, activists, and political opponents were followed, their meetings infiltrated by military personnel; when the order arrived, soldiers descended, forcibly taking their targets in broad daylight. The journalist Marco (Carlos Cotta) and his wife Luíca (Carla Ortiz) are among those taken by the military.
“Ramon Diaz. Thirty-nine. Monica Paz. Twenty-five. Luis Maldini. Sixty. Horacio Belette. Forty-two, Laura Gonzalez. Forty-three,” a jailed, dissident utters the names and age of those he shared his jail cell with the night before, but were taken away in the dark of the night by military forces. The repetition of their names serves as a mnemonic device to keep the identities alive, should any of the newly arrived prisoners manage to escape alive. While imprisoned the dissidents argue over their ideals that led to their imprisonment asking if their involvement in pursuit of social justice was it worth it.
The strength of the film lies in its painfully accurate portrayal of torture. The most powerful scenes occur in the jail cells, when the dissidents are subjected to torture and in the streets where protesters voice their opposition to the military dictatorship. The torture techniques used by the US officials in the Middle East against perceived terrorist threats were perfected decades earlier—in the CIA backed campaigns against political opponents in Latin America. When torture is still glorified by some political circles, the realistic portrayal of the toll of electrocution, water torture, rape, and isolation, dispels the fantasy that torture can be a useful method to extract information. The film makes evident, that anyone under duress will say what is needed to end the pain.
It is less successful in offering insight into the history of the region, offering but a glimpse of archival footage of US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger and a brief look at the training of soldiers at the infamous School of the Americas by US military personnel.
Forgotten was directed by Mexican Carlos Bolado, whose filmography has focused on social justice themes including Tlateloco: Verano del 68, the documentary about the 1968 student massacre in Mexico City, and Colosio: The Assassination, a film about the murder of Mexico’s presidential candidate Luis Donaldo Colosio. Filmed over 3 months in Bolivia, Chile and New York, the Chilean desert offers a lush backdrop—a jarring contrast against the brutality of the military repression.
The film was written and produced by actress Carla Ortiz who was born in Cochabamba, Bolivia. The film was years in the making, with Ortiz saying “that we urgently need to recuperate our historical memory, in order to not let history repeat itself” adding “it is important for the Americans to understand what their government keeps doing wrong or keeps on abusing its power for their benefit.” The disappearance of students, activists, and political dissidents, and the continued impunity and lack of prosecutions of the perpetrators of Operation Condor remains an injustice that plagues Latin America.
With the one-year anniversary of the disappearance of forty-three students from the Teachers College in Ayotzinapa, Mexico approaching, Forgotten reminds us that military repression has a long and painful history across the continent, the tactics employed by repressive military forces now, have been perfected through decades of forced disappearances of dissidents.
The film opens in theaters on September 18, in New York and October 2, in Los Angeles followed by a December release on HBO Latino.
September 18, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Film Review, Subjugation - Torture | Bolivia, Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Human rights, Latin America, United States |
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The neoconservatives arguably have damaged American national interests more than any group in modern history. They have done more harm than the marginal Communists pursued by Sen. Joe McCarthy in the 1950s, more than the Yippies of the 1960s, more than Richard Nixon’s Watergate burglars in the 1970s or the Iran-Contra conspirators in the 1980s.
The neocons have plunged the U.S. government into extraordinarily ill-considered wars wasting trillions of dollars, killing hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, and destabilizing large swaths of the planet including the Middle East, much of Africa and now Europe. Those costs include a swelling hatred against America and a deformed U.S. foreign policy elite that is no longer capable of formulating coherent strategies.
Yet, the neocons have remained immune from the consequences of their catastrophes. They still dominate Washington’s major think tanks as well as the op-ed pages of virtually all the leading newspapers, including The Washington Post, Wall Street Journal and New York Times. They hold down key positions in the State Department, and their “liberal interventionist” pals have the ear of President Barack Obama.
Clearly, the neocons are skilled operatives, knowing how to arrange a steady stream of funding for themselves, from military contractors donating to think tanks, from U.S. taxpayers footing the bill for organizations like the National Endowment for Democracy, and from ideological billionaires set on aligning U.S. foreign policy with hard-line Israeli desires.
The neocons are adept at writing op-ed articles that twist any set of facts into support for their ideological cause; they supply just the right quote that fits into the news cycle’s latest narrative; and they host policy conferences that attract powerful politicians and fawning media coverage.
But are the neocons a force that can coexist with the American Republic? Have they become an existential threat not only to the constitutional structure crafted in 1787 but to continued life on the planet? Are they locked on a course of action that could lead to a nuclear holocaust?
Clearly, the neocons’ commitment to Israeli interests violates a key principle established by the nation’s early presidents who all warned against “foreign entangling alliances” as a fundamental threat to a citizens’ republic that would transform America into a warrior state that would inevitably sap the nation’s liberties.
That loss of liberty has surely happened. Not only is there now bipartisan support for a surveillance state that can spy on the personal lives of American citizens, but the U.S. government has wedded itself to the concept of “strategic communications,” a catch-phrase that merges psychological operations, propaganda and P.R. into a seamless approach toward managing public perceptions at home and abroad.
When information is systematically pushed through a filter designed to ensure consent, the core democratic concept of an informed electorate has been turned on its head: The people no longer oversee the government; the government manipulates the people.
Neocon Tactics
All this has been part of the neocon approach dating back to the 1980s when key operatives, such as Robert Kagan and Elliott Abrams, were part of inter-agency task forces designed to whip the American people into line behind the government’s aggressive war policies. Guided by seasoned CIA propagandists, such as Walter Raymond Jr., the neocons learned their lessons well.
But the neocons are no longer just threatening the existence of the Republic; they are now endangering the continuation of life itself. They have decided to launch a new Cold War against Russia that will push the world toward the brink of thermo-nuclear war.
Of course, the neocons will frame their doomsday strategy as all Vladimir Putin’s fault. They will insist that they are just standing up to “Russian aggression” and that anyone who doesn’t join them is a “stooge of Moscow” or “weak.” They will dictate the shape of the debate just as they have in countless other situations, such as guiding Americans to war in Iraq over non-existent WMD stockpiles.
The neocon pundits will write seemingly authoritative op-eds about devious Kremlin strategies which will glue black hats on the Russians and white hats on whomever is on the other side, whether the neo-Nazis in Ukraine or the Islamic State/Al Qaeda terrorists in Syria. Americans will be whipped up into a frenzy that will demand a direct clash with the “Russ-kies” or “regime change” in Moscow.
There will be little or no concern about the risks. With the neocons, there never is. The assumption is that if “Amur-ika” is tough, the other side will back down. Then, with U.S.-led economic sanctions from the outside and U.S.-funded NGOs stirring up trouble from the inside, “regime change” becomes the cure-all.
Everyone who’s important in Official Washington – everyone on the talk shows and op-ed pages – knows that these disruptive situations always play out just the way they’re diagramed inside the top think tanks. A hand-picked “democratic reformer” who’s traveled the think-tank circuit and gotten the seal of approval – the likes of Iraq’s Ahmed Chalabi – will easily be installed and then the target country will do whatever the neocons dictate. After all, that approach worked so well in Iraq. The neocons always know best.
Raising the Stakes
Yet, with Russia, the stakes are even higher than with Iraq. Yes, it’s easy to find fault with Vladimir Putin. I myself have a personal rule that men over 40 should keep their shirts on when out in public (unless maybe they’re actors in a Bond film or going for a swim at the beach).
But Putin at least is a rational player in global affairs. Indeed, he has tried to cooperate with President Obama on a variety of key issues, including convincing Syria to surrender its chemical weapons and getting Iran to make concessions in the nuclear deal – two contributions to world peace that infuriated the neocons who favored bomb-bomb-bombing both Syria and Iran.
At a dinner party in Europe this summer, I was asked by a well-informed British woman what should be done with Putin. My answer was that Putin doesn’t frighten me; it’s the guy who comes after Putin who frightens me – because despite the neocons’ confidence that their “regime change” plans for Moscow will install a malleable moderate, the more likely result would be a much harder-line Russian nationalist than Putin.
The idea of the nuclear codes being handed to someone determined to defend the honor of Mother Russia is what scares me. Then, the clumsily aggressive neocons in Washington would have their reckless counterpart in Moscow, with neither side having the wisdom of a John F. Kennedy or a Nikita Khrushchev as displayed during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
Would American neocons or a Russian super-nationalist have the wisdom and courage to back down, to compromise, to make the concessions necessary to avoid plunging over the edge? Or would they assume that the other guy would blink first and that they would “win” the showdown?
I recall what William R. Polk, one of Kennedy’s mid-level aides during the Cuban Missile Crisis, wrote recently about what happens to the human mind under such stress.
“Since human beings make the decisions, we must be aware of decision makers’ vulnerabilities,” Polk wrote. “During the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was one of about 25 civilians fully engaged in the events. I was not at the center but in the second or third ‘echelon.’ So I did not feel the full strain, but by the Thursday of the Crisis, I was thoroughly exhausted. My judgment must have been impaired even though I was not aware of it.
“I do remember, however, a terrible episode – fortunately lasting only a few minutes – at which I thought to myself, ‘let’s just get it over with.’ When later I met with my Soviet counterparts, I got the impression, although they denied it, that my feelings were not unique. How the strain impacted on the inner group I can only guess.”
If someone as stable and serious as Bill Polk had such thoughts – “let’s just get it over with” – what might happen when American neocons or hyped-up Russian nationalists are inserted into the decision process? That is an existential question that I don’t want to even contemplate.
Endless Putin-Bashing
And, if you doubt that the neocons will engage in over-the-top Cold War-style Putin bashing, you should read the op-ed by The Washington Post’s neocon deputy editorial page editor Jackson Diehl on Monday, entitled “Putin shifts fronts: With a move into Syria, he continues his in-your-face maneuvers.”
Diehl delves into Putin’s psyche – a process that is so much easier than doing real reporting – and concludes that Putin’s decision to join the fight in Syria against the Islamic State and Al Qaeda is just another attempt to stick his finger in the eye of the righteous but clueless United States.
Diehl, of course, starts off with the neocon-approved narrative of the Ukraine crisis, ignoring the key role of neocon Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland (Robert Kagan’s wife) in midwifing the Feb. 22, 2014 coup that overthrew democratically elected President Viktor Yanukovych and installed an intensely anti-Russian regime on Russia’s border. Nuland even handpicked the new Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk, telling U.S. Ambassador Geoffrey Pyatt in a phone call several weeks before the coup that “Yats is the guy.”
The coup-makers then dispatched neo-Nazi militias (and Islamist militants) to wage a bloody “anti-terrorism operation” against ethnic Russian Ukrainians who resisted the “regime change.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ukraine Merges Nazis and Islamists.”]
But all that complexity is neatly boiled down by American neocons and the mainstream U.S. media as “Russian aggression.” Regarding the Syrian civil war, some neocons have even joined with senior Israeli officials in claiming that a victory by Al Qaeda is preferable to the continuation of Assad’s secular regime. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Syria’s Nightmarish Narrative.”]
Yet, however the story goes, the biggest bad guy is Putin, always with sinister motives and evil intent. So, in explaining the situation in Ukraine and Syria, Diehl writes:
“Throughout the summer, Russia’s forces in eastern Ukraine kept up a daily drumbeat of attacks on the Ukrainian army, inflicting significant casualties while avoiding a response by Western governments. On Sept. 1, following a new cease-fire, the guns suddenly fell silent. Optimists speculated that Vladimir Putin was backing down.
“Then came the reports from Syria: Russian warplanes were overflying the rebel-held province of Idlib. Barracks were under construction at a new base. Ships were unloading new armored vehicles. Putin, it turns out, wasn’t retreating, but shifting fronts — and executing another of the in-your-face maneuvers that have repeatedly caught the Obama administration flat-footed.”
The rest of the op-ed is similarly didactic and one-sided: Putin is the villain and Obama is the rube. In Diehl’s world, only he and other neocons have what it takes to take on Putin and put Russia down.
Any alternative explanation for Russia’s action in Syria is brushed aside, such as Putin deciding that a victory by either Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front – as favored by Israel – or the even more bloodthirsty Islamic State is unacceptable and thus Assad’s regime must be stabilized to avert a major geopolitical catastrophe.
Typically, the neocons breeze past the frightening logic of what the collapse of Assad’s military would mean for the Middle East, Europe and the world. After all, once Israeli leaders decided to throw in their lot with Al Qaeda in Syria, the die was cast as far as the neocons were concerned.
But the notion that the neocons can micromanage the outcome in Syria, with “moderate” Al Qaeda taking Damascus rather than the more “radical” Islamic State, reflects the arrogant know-nothing-ism of these U.S. opinion leaders. More likely, Al Qaeda’s Nusra Front would coordinate with their former allies in the Islamic State and share in the Sunni revenge against Syria’s Christian, Alawite, Shiite and other minorities.
So, while the Islamic State would busy itself chopping off heads of “heretics,” Al Qaeda could use its new headquarters in Damascus to plot the next round of terror attacks against the West. And, as destabilizing as the current refugee flow into Europe has been, it would multiply astronomically as the survivors of the Islamic State/Al Qaeda bloodletting flee Syria.
With Europe in chaos and the neocons still insisting that the real enemy is Russia, the possible consequences would be frightening to contemplate. Yet, this is the course that the neocons have set for the world – and nearly all the Republican candidates for president have signed on for the journey along with Democratic frontrunner Hillary Clinton.
In 2014, arch-neocon Robert Kagan, whom Secretary of State Clinton selected as one of her advisers while also promoting his wife, Victoria Nuland, told The New York Times that he could embrace a Clinton presidency: “If she pursues a policy which we think she will pursue … it’s something that might have been called neocon, but clearly her supporters are not going to call it that; they are going to call it something else.” [For more, see Consortiumnews.com’s “Is Hillary Clinton a Neocon-Lite?” and “Obama’s True Foreign Policy ‘Weakness.’“]
So far, virtually no one in the 2016 presidential race or in the mainstream U.S. news media is seriously addressing the reality of the neocons’ “regime change” chaos spreading across the Middle East and the prospect of a destabilized Europe. What limited discussion there is on the campaign trail mostly echoes Jackson Diehl’s Putin-bashing.
No one dares confront the existential question of whether the United States and the world can continue to tolerate and accommodate the neoconservatives.
~
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his latest book, America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon and barnesandnoble.com).
September 16, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Deception, Full Spectrum Dominance, Militarism | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Elliott Abrams, Human rights, Jackson Diehl, National Endowment for Democracy, New York Times, Robert Kagan, Russia, United States, Washington Post |
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“Airtec Inc. has been awarded a contract for intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) services in support of the U.S. Southern Command. The deal is expected to be completed in September 2018. The contractor will provide ISR services utilizing a Bombardier DHC-8/200.
According to José Vicente Rangel, a Venezuelan journalist, the aircraft will be equipped with cutting-edge equipment to effectively survey the border areas of Venezuela.”
The US special services have applied a lot of effort to incite tensions in the “conflict zone” on the border between the two states. There are forces in the ranks of Colombian political and military leadership that are ready to help Washington in its subversive operations against the “main regional adversary”. Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos, a henchman of tycoons’ families, has said many a time that he supports further progress in the “special relationship” with Washington, including military ties. Santos believes that the deployment of seven US military facilities on Colombian soil is a step on the way of engaging Colombian military in NATO activities. Bogota is an integral part of the US plan to restore its dominant position in the region.
Colombia is used to undermine the process of Latin American and Caribbean integration. Nicolas Maduro, the President of Venezuela, displays great tolerance against the backdrop of hostile actions undertaken by Colombia. American supervisors apply no special effort to conceal their involvement. The intention is evident – the opposition is trying to prove tha Maduro’s government is unable to get the national economy back on track and fill Venezuelan stores to meet the legitimate demands of consumers for essentials. Internal sabotage is assisted by the activities of smugglers operating in Colombian territory.
Joint efforts are required to fight smuggling but Colombian border guards do nothing to interrupt the criminal activities often headed by former paramilitares (paramilitaries), the militants of AUC (the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia). According to Venezuelan counterintelligence, their leaders collaborate with Colombian power structures.
AUC fighters have recently staged a provocation near the border area. They laid an ambush for a Venezuelan patrol in pursuit of smugglers. Shots were fired and three servicemen were seriously wounded. President Maduro immediately introduced the state of emergency in one of the areas near the Colombian border (the state of Táchira) and sealed the border for an uncertain period of time. Police and military reinforcements were sent out to find the attackers. Venezuela launched operations to pinpoint the paramilitares strongpoints – the bunkers serving as prisons for kidnapped people and stashes of smuggled goods. Thirty five militants have been arrested so far. The interrogations provided information on the scale of crimes perpetrated by paramilitares in Venezuela, including even existence of secret burial places. Maduro said the findings about the activities of criminals and armed formations reveal the horrible truth and he, as president, has an obligation to do away with this evil in Venezuela.
His tough stand is justified. The economic war against Venezuela has come to the point when essentials, foodstuffs, hygiene stuffs and medicals evaporate from the stores located in the vicinity of border areas. Everything is taken out of the country – clothes, shoes, car parts, tires and oil production equipment. Filling stations run out of fuel. Gasoline prices are extremely low in Venezuela. It takes only 2 USD to fill a tank. That’s why great quantities of Venezuelan fuel are transported to Colombia along the whole length of the countries’ border. According to official data, the small town of San Cristobal, Táchira’s capital, “has consumed” more gas than Caracas. It has gone far enough. The situation has reached the point when gas smuggling brings more profit to Colombian paramilitares than drug trafficking!
Smuggling thrives because there is a great difference in the prices of consumer goods (Venezuela allocates subsidies to bring the prices down). The rate of bolivar, the Venezuela’s currency, is used for large-scale scams. The Colombian city of Cúcuta has become the center of financial and economic subversive activities. It boasts around three thousand currency exchange shops. The general strategy is to devalue the bolivar. It results in impoverishment of people and increasing discontent in Venezuela.
Cúcuta has always played an important part in conspirators’ plans. The US Defense Intelligence Agency and the Central Intelligence agencies are active there. This is the place where radical cells of Venezuelan opposition get instructions. The leaders of three groups formed especially for anti-Venezuelan activities – El Centro de Pensamiento Primero Colombia» (the Center of Thought Foundation – Colombia First), FTI Consulting (Forensic Technologies International) and La Fundación Internacionalismo Democrático (the Democratic Internationalism Foundation) – hold their meetings there. The anti-Venezuelan conspiracy is led by former Colombian President Alvaro Uribe, who was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency in mid-80s. The Agency used damaging information. He was number 82 on the list of drug dealers prepared by the US Drug Enforcement Administration. During all eight years of his tenure President Uribe was involved in subversive activities against Hugo Chavez trying to isolate the “Bolivarian regime” in the Western Hemisphere. With good reason the Venezuelan intelligence agencies consider him to be the key figure in the US-led plot to overthrow the “Maduro regime”.
The Sanchez government of Colombia enjoys the support of Western media, especially by the New York Times and the Washington Post. Their editorials say essentially the same thing. They spread the idea that the “border problem” with Colombia has been “invented by Maduro” and this entire hullabaloo is raised with the purpose to ratchet up the Venezuelan President’s support before the parliamentary election. Not a word is said about five and half million Colombians residing in Venezuela, part of them as refugees who fled the civil war, the activities of paramiltares, drug traffickers and smugglers operating on Colombian soil. Venezuela’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has hit the nail right on the head when it disclosed the purpose of these publications. According to the Ministry, it’s all part of another plot staged by US media against Venezuela and its Bolivarian revolution.
Roy Chaderton, the Venezuelan Ambassador to the Organization of American States, said such Columbian media outlets as El Tiempo, RCN and Caracol radio stations and TV channels, as well as CNN Spanish language broadcasts, incite hatred towards Venezuela and its people. According to him, this hatred campaign could lead to a war. This scenario was avoided because Venezuelan leaders adopted quite different behavior patterns giving “positive signs” to Colombia. The Ambassador called on all the diplomats accredited with the Organization of American States not to trust Colombian media outlets waging a war of the fourth generation.
The US State Department made a statement regarding the closure of the border. It emphasized the humanitarian aspect of the problem and recommended to normalize the situation with the help of regional organizations. It said US diplomats were ready to contribute toward launching a dialogue. But there are different types of diplomats. For instance, according to Contrainjerencia, a respectable website, Kevin M. Whitaker, the US Ambassador to Colombia, served as the head of CIA station in Venezuela in 2006. It’s hard to believe that Whitaker and the like will really do anything positive. They have a quite different missions to carry out.
September 14, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Economics | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Colombia, Latin America, United States, Venezuela |
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When the U.S. Department of Defense published a new Law of War Manual (LOW) this past summer, editorialists at the New York Times sat up and took notice. Their concern was that the manual stated that journalists could be deemed “unprivileged belligerents.” The editorial explained that as a legal term “that applies to fighters that are afforded fewer protections than the declared combatants in a war.” In fact, it is far more insidious than that innocuous description.
Here is the manual’s definition: “‘Unlawful combatants’ or ‘unprivileged belligerents’ are persons who, by engaging in hostilities, have incurred one or more of the corresponding liabilities of combatant status (e.g., being made the object of attack and subject to detention), but who are not entitled to any of the distinct privileges of combatant status (e.g., combatant immunity and POW status).”
The key phrase here is “being made the object of attack.” For slow-witted New York Times editorialists, that means journalists can be killed as can any enemy soldier in wartime. “Subject to detention” means a journalist deemed an unprivileged belligerent will be put into military detention if captured. As with any enemy belligerent, however, if “capture is not feasible,” they would be killed if possible, by drone perhaps if in a foreign country.
Currently, most U.S. captives deemed “unprivileged belligerents” are imprisoned in Guantanamo although some may be held in Afghanistan. It must be noted that the United States deems as an “unprivileged belligerent” anyone they target for capture or choose to kill.
That the New York Times’ concern only arose with publication of the new LOW manual suggests they may have been in a deep sleep since 9/11 as the Department of Defense (DOD) has openly worked to impose limitations on information sharing and news gathering since that event gave them a pretext. It is now a well-established pattern of the U.S. government to suppress rights guaranteed by the First Amendment whenever they can get by with it, as was seen with the New York Times own James Risen.
But the New York Times colluded with the CIA in censoring Risen’s reporting. Furthermore, they seemed to have ignored the U.S. government’s momentous argument of the unlimited power of the President to target journalists and activists for “expressive activities,” as the Department of Justice stated in the case of Hedges v. Obama, as described below.
It has frequently been noted there’s been an ongoing “war” against journalists since 9/11. The new DOD Law of War manual makes that official and potentially takes it to the highest level of conflict. While expressing concern, the Times’ editorialist does not seem to realize or care how ominous it is that the DOD now openly declares that journalists may be deemed “unprivileged belligerents,” unlawful combatants, as the DOD manual provides, instead of hiding the fact in coded language as done since 2001. Inherent to those classifications is that they represent the “enemy” and can be killed by U.S. officials.
That will come as no surprise to those acquainted with the foreign journalists who have been targeted and killed by drones in places such as Pakistan. Nor will it surprise Sami al-Hajj, the Al Jazeera journalist who was held in Guantanamo for years. But now it is clear that the same fate could be in store for U.S. journalists.
That coded language is embedded in the claim by Military Commissions prosecutors and the Justice Department that there is a “U.S. domestic common law of war.” What they claim is entirely based upon martial law orders of the Civil War and the military’s orders to remove Japanese-Americans from the their homes on the West Coast in World War II. All the cases they rely on for a “domestic law of war” today were judicially condemned during or almost immediately after the wars in which they were a part of.
U.S. Domestic Common Law of War
U.S. Military Commissions Chief Prosecutor Brig. General Mark Martins and his staff invented what they call the “U.S. domestic common law of war” in filings to the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals. That invention consists only of the martial law precedents of the U.S. Civil War and the removal of the Japanese-Americans from the West Coast at the direction of General DeWitt. Both were later seen as examples of military despotism.
The American people have been inured by a deliberate effort of the U.S. military to accept invocation of the law of war as a talisman to permit any act by officials which would have been known as illegal before 9/11. But as the manual states: “Although the law of war is generally viewed as ‘prohibitive law,’ in some respects, especially in the context of domestic law, the law of war may be viewed as permissive or even as a source of authority. For example, the principle of military necessity in the customary law of war may be viewed as justifying or permitting certain acts.” (Emphasis added.)
“Military necessity” was the law of war basis for removal of the Japanese-Americans. Military necessity though indisputably a part of the law of war is a totalitarian precept when applied to a civilian population.
The LOW manual explains the object of war by quoting George H. Aldrich, Deputy Legal Adviser to the U.S. Department of State during the Vietnam War. He wrote of “a general acceptance of the view that modern war is aimed not merely at the enemy’s military forces but at the enemy’s willingness and ability to pursue its war aims. . . . In Viet-Nam political, rather than military, objectives were even more dominant. Both sides had as their goal not the destruction of the other’s military forces but the destruction of the will to continue the struggle.”
The “destruction of the will” of the adversary is always the object of war, according to Clausewitz and adopted by the U.S. military. But this has a totalitarian element to it; the adversary’s reciprocal object is to destroy our will. Consequently, “our” will must be protected by suppressing any dissent which could harm morale and the population’s willingness to “continue the struggle.”
That was the foundational belief underlying martial law during the Civil War. The Constitution was an obstacle again to suppressing dissent to a degree after the Civil War, but with the invention of a U.S. domestic common law of war and legalistic word play, this obstacle has once again been removed as the Justice Department argued in Hedges v. Obama.
The claim of being at war with internal and external enemies is always made by totalitarian states to justify their suppression of speech and a free press through repression. For a brief period in U.S. history, the Civil War, the U.S. military adopted military repression through martial law to suppress any dissent to its war practices.
Martial law was declared throughout the Union States, the North, on Aug. 8, 1862, by Secretary of War Edwin M. Stanton, at the request of President Abraham Lincoln. Orders were published to “arrest and imprison” any persons “discouraging volunteer enlistments” or “giving aid and comfort to the enemy” or for “any other disloyal practice.” A military commission would try the prisoners, and a second order “suspended” the writ of habeas corpus in their cases.
Martial law was more formally declared on Sept. 24, 1862, by President Lincoln himself in addition to suspending the writ of habeas corpus. Lieber’s Code was then prepared as the order giving effect to martial law. Contrary to how it is presented by the U.S. Army and credulous human rights commentators, Lieber’s Code was primarily a harsh martial law order with Prussian militarist law of war concepts introduced to the U.S. to criminalize any expressions of dissent as “war treason.”
Thus, Col. William Winthrop explained that among the greater number of individuals who were brought to trial before the military commissions during the Civil War, the offenses included “hostile or disloyal acts, or publications or declarations calculated to excite opposition to the federal government or sympathy with the enemy, etc.”
Whiting’s Guidance
Solicitor of the Department of War during the Civil War, William Whiting, gave legal guidance to the Union Commanders for enforcement of martial law. The “guidebook” was his own War Powers of the President. This book could have been used by any militaristic and totalitarian regime, which in fact it was as it was derived from authoritarian principles of martial law from Prussia. Those authoritarian principles remained in force under Prussia’s successor state, Germany, during two world wars, and were the legal basis of the infamous People’s Court which tried “war treason” cases; cases of “disloyal” expressive acts in most cases without more.
The guidance of Whiting was: “No person in loyal States can rightfully be captured or detained unless he has engaged, or there is reasonable cause to believe he intends to engage, in acts of hostility to the United States — that is to say, in acts which may tend to impede or embarrass the United States in such military proceedings as the commander-in-chief may see fit to institute.” This is the same argument that the U.S. government made in Hedges v. Obama.
What constituted an act of hostility? Whiting defines that to include a sentiment of hostility to the government “to undermine confidence in its capacity or its integrity, to diminish, demoralize . . . its armies, to break down confidence in those who are entrusted with its military operations in the field.”
An example of how martial law was to be carried out was in an order to a subordinate commander by the Army Department of the Pacific Commander in response to complaints from the Citizens of Solano County, California, of disloyal “utterances” they were hearing from fellow citizens.
The order read: “The department commander desires you to let the people understand generally that the order of the President suspending the writ of habeas corpus and directing the arrest of all persons guilty of disloyal practices will be rigidly enforced. . . . Practices injurious to the government or offensive to the loyal sentiment of the people will under no circumstances be permitted.”
Immediately after the Civil War, when it was freshest in their minds, the Supreme Court had this to say about martial law in Ex Parte Milligan: “What is ordinarily called martial law is no law at all. Wellington, in one of his despatches from Portugal, in 1810, in his speech on the Ceylon affair, so describes it. Let us call the thing by its right name; it is not martial law, but martial rule. And when we speak of it, let us speak of it as abolishing all law, and substituting the will of the military commander, and we shall give a true idea of the thing, and be able to reason about it with a clear sense of what we are doing.”
Martial law is a sub-part of the Law of War and since it is for application to a domestic population as with the Northern States during the Civil War by the Union Army, it is “moderated” ordinarily from the even harsher provisions of the Law of War which are now invoked in the Law of War manual. Yet precepts of both are being introduced domestically with Section 1021 of the 2012 National Defense Authorization Act and domestically and globally by the “U.S. domestic common law of war” precedents trumpeted by Chief Military Commissions Prosecutor, Brig. Gen. Mark Martins.
It must be noted that this is not to compare the Union unfavorably with the Confederacy. The Confederacy had the highest form of martial law: slavery. But the Defense Department only uses one legal precedent from the Confederacy today, which is “outlawry.”
Lieber’s Code addressed “outlawry” in Art. 148, which provided, in pertinent part: “The law of war does not allow proclaiming either an individual belonging to the hostile army, or a citizen, or a subject of the hostile government, an outlaw, who may be slain without trial by any captor, . . . on the contrary, it abhors such outrage.”
This was adopted in the Hague Regulations and as interpreted in earlier Army Law of Land Warfare manuals, prohibited assassinations as well as any declarations that an individual or group is outside the protection of the law of war, which is what designation as an unprivileged belligerent does. The prohibition of assassination has also been put aside with the routine practice of assassination with drones today by the U.S. military.
The Confederacy committed the offense of outlawry when its leaders declared all captured African-Americans fighting for the Union were outside the protection of the law of war (which did preexist Lieber’s Code) and would be placed into the indefinite detention of slavery. After 9/11, the U.S. government did the same with the invention of the unlawful combatant/unprivileged belligerent category and indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay and any other location U.S. officials chose to place “unprivileged belligerents.”
Treason of the Professors and the Media
Ironically, shortly after the New York Times expressed its concern for journalists in early August, the Guardian reported in an article written by William C. Bradford, a recently hired assistant professor in the law department at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. The article, entitled “Trahison des Professeurs: The Critical Law of Armed Conflict Academy as an Islamist Fifth Column,” was published in the National Security Law Journal of George Mason University Law School.
Bradford argued that the U.S. should be more aggressive in attacking Muslims to include attacks which are war crimes under the law of war. But it was his advocacy that the U.S. military attack other “lawful targets” in its war on terrorism, which include “law school facilities, scholars’ home offices and media outlets where they give interviews” that caught the most attention. These civilian areas were all places where a “causal connection between the content disseminated and Islamist crimes incited” exist, according to Bradford.
Furthermore, Bradford wrote, “Shocking and extreme as this option might seem, [dissenting] scholars, and the law schools that employ them, are – at least in theory – targetable so long as attacks are proportional, distinguish noncombatants from combatants, employ nonprohibited weapons, and contribute to the defeat of Islamism.” In other words, dissenting scholars are unprivileged belligerents and subject to attack, just as journalists are according to the Law of War manual.
Not to defend him but Bradford was articulating the underlying logic of the new Law of War manual’s position that dissenting journalists can be targeted as unprivileged belligerents. This, as stated above, is consistent with oppressive extra-constitutional martial law practices which Chief Prosecutor Mark Martins boasts of as “U.S. domestic common law of war.”
One has to ask: where are the supposed watchdogs of the press when military officers can so easily slide historical falsehoods past them in destroying freedom of the press? Further, Bradford argued that law professors who criticized the failure of the U.S. to abide by the Geneva Conventions and the Law of War represented a “treasonous” fifth column that could be attacked as enemy combatants.
If there is treason being committed in the United States, it must be seen in the acts of those reconstituting the extra-constitutional martial law cases of the Civil War period. That is, Brig. Gen. Mark Martins and associated government attorneys who, in effect, are engaged in an indirect coup d’etat of the U.S. Constitutional order. In fact, Bradford was alleged to have written in favor of a direct military coup d’etat as well.
As it turned out, Bradford had other ethical issues than just his incitement to commit war crimes and target law professors. A combination of factors led to his resigning his position at the Military Academy and this individual crisis would seem to have passed.
The home page of the National Security Law Journal in which his essay had been published carried a repudiation of it by the incoming editorial board. They summarized his article as follows: “Mr. Bradford’s contention that some scholars in legal academia could be considered as constituting a fifth column in the war against terror; his interpretation is that those scholars could be targeted as unlawful combatants.”
But substitute “journalists” for “scholars” and you have the position on journalists of the DOD’s new Law of War manual.
An insightful article in The Atlantic asks “how a scholar pushing these ideas seems not to have raised red flags any earlier.” That’s an excellent question. The article was entitled “The Unusual Opinions of William C. Bradford.” But here’s the point; these opinions are not unusual among some members of the military and right-wing law professors such as Adrian Vermeule of Harvard and Eric Posner of the University of Chicago.
Posner and Vermeule have carved out a niche in American legal discourse in advocating that the U.S. needs to turn to the legal “wisdom” of the German Nazi lawyer, Carl Schmitt. In Terror in the Balance, they suggest that the U.S. may need to adopt censorship for, among other reasons, “antigovernment speech may demoralize soldiers and civilians.” For precedent, they point out that “Martial law during the Civil War permitted the military to try and punish people who criticized the Lincoln administration’s conduct of the war.”
The Attack on ‘Lawfare’
Other prominent advocates of authoritarian legal practices present themselves as protecting against disloyal attorney who practice “lawfare,” which is defined as a form of “asymmetric warfare” that misuses domestic or international law to damage an opponent through legal actions in a courtroom. For instance, Ben Wittes of lawfareblog.com would seem to espouse this type of animosity toward public-interest lawyers who use the courts to defend First Amendment liberties.
A fallacious argument, made by Wittes in a paper which calls for “balancing” liberty and security, is his idiosyncratic belief that “in American constitutional law, for example, free speech does not exist as a general right of the public to communicate as much or as widely as it desires but as an individual right not to have government restrict one’s speech.”
This is contrary to the understanding of the Supreme Court which held in First Nat. Bank of Boston v. Bellotti, that: “[T]he First Amendment goes beyond protection of the press and the self-expression of individuals to prohibit government from limiting the stock of information from which members of the public may draw.” In other words, the First Amendment guarantees the public’s “right to know.”
Why does this matter? The Constitution’s Framers understood that an informed population was crucial for a Republic. As James Madison put it: “A popular Government, without popular information, or the means of acquiring it, is but a Prologue to a Farce or a Tragedy; or, perhaps both. Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: And a people who mean to be their own Governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”
This understanding of the criticality of the free flow of information for wise democratic decision-making is particularly important for national security where ignorance comes with the highest cost. This understanding formed Clausewitz’s belief in a broad-based civilian decision-making process in matters of national security strategic policy, and not one driven by military leaders with their one-dimensional thinking process.
The Vietnam War is Exhibit A as proof of this. If it had been left to the Generals to decide, the war would have continued “perpetually” even though wiser heads realized from the beginning that it was unwinnable by U.S. terms of maintaining an unpopular government in South Vietnam. The antiwar movement, whatever the motives of some, proved to be more strategically astute than General William Westmoreland who would have continued the war until the U.S. bankrupted itself in the manner that the Soviet Union would years later in Afghanistan. It was the American antiwar movement which gave effect to Clausewitz’s strategy that when a war’s costs exceed its “benefits,” a way must be found to end it.
Curiously, Wittes accurately notes in Law and the Long War that to claim “the President has all the powers of a normal war yet few of its restraints, that the whole world is his battlefield, and that this state of affairs goes on in perpetuity is really akin to claiming a kind of worldwide martial law.” In fact, that’s exactly what the Justice Department argued in Hedges v. Obama without the admission as to martial law.
Dissent as Treason
Since the Vietnam War, the belief that the media and other critics of government policies act as fifth columnists has become commonplace in military-oriented journals and with the American authoritarian-oriented political class, expressed in articles such as William Bradford’s attack on “treasonous professors.”
To the question “how a scholar pushing these ideas” did not raise a red flag, that might best be asked of the National Security Law Journal’s previous editorial board. It is worth noting however that the editors who chose to publish Bradford’s article are not neophytes in national security issues or strangers to the military or government.
As described on the NSLJ website, the Editor-in-Chief from 2014-2015 has broad experience in homeland and national security programs from work at both the Department of Justice and the Department of Homeland Security and currently serves (at the time of publication of Bradford’s article) as the Deputy Director for the Office of Preparedness Integration and Coordination at FEMA. A U.S. government official in other words.
The “Articles Selection Editor” is described as “a family physician with thirty years of experience in the foreign affairs and intelligence communities.” Websites online suggest his experience may have been acquired as a CIA employee. The executive editor appears to be a serving Marine Corps officer who attended law school as a military-funded student.
Significantly; Bradford was articulating precepts of the “U.S. common law of war” promoted by Chief Prosecutor Mark Martins because nothing Bradford advocated was inconsistent with William Whiting’s guidance to Union Generals. Except Whiting went even further and advised that judges in the Union states who “impeded” the military in any way by challenging their detentions were even greater “public enemies” than Confederate soldiers were.
This “U.S. common law of war” is a prosecution fabrication created by legal expediency in the absence of legitimate legal precedent for what the United States was doing with prisoners captured globally after 9/11. This legal invention came about when military commission prosecutors failed to prove that the offense of Material Support for Terrorism was an international law of war crime. So prosecutors dreamed up a “domestic common law of war.” This in fact is simply following the pattern of totalitarian states of the Twentieth Century.
Government-Media-Academic-Complex
The logic of Bradford’s argument is the same as that of the Defense Department in declaring that journalists may be deemed “unprivileged belligerents.” As quoted above, George H. Aldrich had observed that in Vietnam, both sides had as their goal “the destruction of the will to continue the struggle.”
Bradford argued that Islamists must overcome Americans’ support for the current war to prevail, and “it is the ‘informational dimension’ which is their main combat effort because it is U.S. political will which must be destroyed for them to win.” But he says Islamists lack skill “to navigate the information battlespace, employ PSYOPs, and beguile Americans into hostile judgments regarding the legitimacy of their cause.”
Therefore, according to Bradford, Islamists have identified “force multipliers with cultural knowledge of, social proximity to, and institutional capacity to attrit American political will. These critical nodes form an interconnected ‘government-media-academic complex’ (‘GMAC’) of public officials, media, and academics who mould mass opinion on legal and security issues . . . .”
Consequently, Bradford argues, within this triumvirate, “it is the wielders of combat power within these nodes — journalists, officials, and law professors — who possess the ideological power to defend or destroy American political will.”
While Bradford reserves special vituperation for his one-time fellow law professors, he states the “most transparent example of this power to shape popular opinion as to the legitimacy of U.S. participation in wars is the media.”
As proof, Bradford explained how this “disloyalty” of the media worked during the Vietnam War. He wrote: “During the Vietnam War, despite an unbroken series of U.S. battlefield victories, the media first surrendered itself over to a foreign enemy for use as a psychological weapon against Americans, not only expressing criticism of U.S. purpose and conduct but adopting an ‘antagonistic attitude toward everything America was and represented’ and ‘spinning’ U.S. military success to convince Americans that they were losing, and should quit, the war. Journalistic alchemists converted victory into defeat simply by pronouncing it.”
Space does not permit showing in how many ways this “stab in the back” myth is false. But this belief in the disloyalty of the media in Bradford’s view remains today. He wrote: “Defeatism, instinctive antipathy to war, and empathy for American adversaries persist within media.”
Targeting Journalists
The right-wing militarist Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), with mostly retired U.S. military officers serving as advisers, has advocated targeting journalists with military attacks. Writing in The Journal of International Security Affairs in 2009, retired U.S. Army Lt. Col. Ralph Peters wrote:
“Today, the United States and its allies will never face a lone enemy on the battlefield. There will always be a hostile third party in the fight, but one which we not only refrain from attacking but are hesitant to annoy: the media . . . . Future wars may require censorship, news blackouts and, ultimately, military attacks on the partisan media.” (Emphasis in original.)
The rationale for that deranged thinking was first propounded by Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp and other authoritarian-minded officers after the Vietnam War. Sharp explained, our “will” was eroded because “we were subjected to a skillfully waged subversive propaganda campaign, aided and abetted by the media’s bombardment of sensationalism, rumors and half-truths about the Vietnam affair — a campaign that destroyed our national unity.” William C. Bradford apparently adopted and internalized this belief, as have many other military officers.
That “stab in the back” myth was propagated by a number of U.S. military officers as well as President Richard Nixon (as explained here). It was more comfortable to believe that than that the military architects of the war did not understand what they were doing. So they shifted blame onto members of the media who were astute enough to recognize and report on the military’s failure and war crimes, such as My Lai.
But those “critical” journalists, along with critics at home, were only recognizing what smarter Generals such as General Frederick Weyand recognized from the beginning. That is, the war was unwinnable by the U.S. because it was maintaining in power its despotic corrupt ally, the South Vietnamese government, against its own people. Whether or not what came later was worse for the Vietnamese people was unforeseeable by the majority of the people. What was in front of their eyes was the military oppression of American and South Vietnamese forces and secret police.
Information Warfare Today
In 1999, the Rand Corporation published a collection of articles in Strategic Appraisal: The Changing Role of Information in Warfare. The volume was edited by Zalmay Khalilzad, the alleged author of the Defense Department’s 1992 Defense Planning Guidance, which was drafted when Dick Cheney was Defense Secretary and Paul Wolfowitz was Under Secretary of Defense – and promulgated a theory of permanent U.S. global dominance.
One chapter of Rand’s Strategic Appraisal was written by Jeremy Shapiro, now a special adviser at the U.S. State Department, according to Wikipedia. Shapiro wrote that the inability to control information flows was widely cited as playing an essential role in the downfall of the communist regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union.
He stated that perception management was “the vogue term for psychological operations or propaganda directed at the public.” As he expressed it, many observers worried that potential foes could use techniques of perception management with asymmetric strategies with their effect on public opinion to “destroy the will of the United States to wage war.”
Consequently, “Warfare in this new political environment consists largely of the battle to shape the political context of the war and the meaning of victory.”
Another chapter on Ethics and Information Warfare by John Arquilla makes clear that information warfare must be understood as “a true form of war.” The range of information warfare operations, according to Arquilla, extends “from the battlefield to the enemy home front.” Information warfare is designed “to strike directly at the will and logistical support of an opponent.”
This notion of information warfare, that it can be pursued without a need to defeat an adversary’s armed forces, is an area of particular interest, according to Arquilla. What he means is that it necessitates counter measures when it is seen as directed at the U.S. as now provided for in the new LOW Manual.
Important to note, according to Arquilla, is that there is an inherent blurriness with defining “combatants” and “acts of war.” Equating information warfare to guerrilla warfare in which civilians often engage in the fighting, Arquilla states “in information warfare, almost anyone can engage in the fighting.”
Consequently, the ability to engage in this form of conflict is now in the hands of small groups and individuals, offering up “the prospect of potentially quite large numbers of information warfare-capable combatants emerging, often pursuing their own, as opposed to some state’s policies,” Arquilla wrote.
Therefore, a “concern” for information warfare at the time of the Rand study in 1999 was the problem of maintaining “noncombatant immunity.” That’s because the “civilian-oriented target set is huge and likely to be more vulnerable than the related set of military infrastructures . . . . Since a significant aspect of information warfare is aimed at civilian and civilian-oriented targets, despite its negligible lethality, it nonetheless violates the principle of noncombatant immunity, given that civilian economic or other assets are deliberately targeted.”
What Arquillo is saying is that civilians who are alleged to engage in information warfare, such as professors and journalists, lose their “noncombatant immunity” and can be attacked. The “blurriness” of defining “combatants” and “acts of war” was removed after 9/11 with the invention of the “unlawful combatant” designation, later renamed “unprivileged belligerent” to mimic language in the Geneva Conventions.
Then it was just a matter of adding the similarly invented “U.S. domestic common law of war” with its martial law precedents and a framework has been built for seeing critical journalists and law professors as “unprivileged belligerents,” as Bradford indiscreetly wrote.
Arquilla claims that information warfare operations extend to the “home front” and are designed “to strike directly at the will and logistical support of an opponent.” That is to equate what is deemed information warfare to sabotage of the population’s psychological will to fight a war, and dissidents to saboteurs.
Perpetual War
But this is a perpetual war driven by U.S. operations, according to a chapter written by Stephen T. Hosmer on psychological effects of information warfare. Here, it is stated that “the expanding options for reaching audiences in countries and groups that could become future U.S. adversaries make it important that the United States begin its psychological conditioning in peacetime.” Thus, it is necessary “to begin to soften the fighting will of the potential adversary’s armed forces in the event conflict does occur.”
As information warfare is held to be “true war,” this means that the U.S. is perpetually committing acts of war against those deemed “potential” adversaries. Little wonder that Vladimir Putin sees Russia as under assault by the United States and attempts to counter U.S. information warfare.
This same logic is applied to counter-insurgency. The 2014 COIN Manual, FM 3-24, defines “Information Operations” as information-related capabilities “to influence, disrupt, corrupt, or usurp the decision-making of adversaries and potential adversaries while protecting our own.”
Those we “protect ourselves from” can logically be seen as the internal enemy, as William Bradford saw it, such as critical law professors and journalists, just as Augusto Pinochet did in Chile with dissidents.
With the totalitarian logic of information-warfare theorists, internalized now throughout much of the U.S. government counter-terrorism community, it should be apparent to all but the most obtuse why the DOD deems a journalist who writes critically of U.S. government war policy an “unprivileged belligerent,” an enemy, as in the Law of War manual. William C. Bradford obviously absorbed this doctrine but was indiscreet enough to articulate it fully.
It Has Happened Here!
That’s the only conclusion one can draw from reading the transcript of the Hedges v. Obama lawsuit. In that lawsuit, plaintiffs, including journalists and political activists, challenged the authority provided under Sec. 1021 of the 2012 National Defense Authorization for removal out from under the protection of the Constitution of those deemed unprivileged belligerents. That is, civilians suspected of lending any “support” to anyone whom the U.S. government might deem as having something to do with terrorism.
“Support” can be as William Whiting described it in 1862 and as what is seen as “information warfare” by the U.S. military today: a sentiment of hostility to the government “to undermine confidence in its capacity or its integrity, to diminish, demoralize . . . its armies, to break down confidence in those who are intrusted with its military operations in the field.”
Reminiscent of the Sinclair Lewis novel It Can’t Happen Here where those accused of crimes against the government are tried by military judges as in the U.S. Military Commissions, a Justice Department attorney arguing on behalf of the United States epitomized the legal reasoning that one would see in a totalitarian state in arguing why the draconian “Law of War” is a substitute for the Constitution.
The Court asked Assistant U.S. Attorney Benjamin Torrance if he would agree, “as a principled matter, that the President can’t, in the name of the national security of the United States, just decide to detain whomever he believes it is important to detain or necessary to detain to prevent a terrorist act within the United States?”
Rather than giving a straight affirmative answer to a fundamental principle of the U.S. Constitution, Torrance dissembled, only agreeing that that description would seem “quite broad,” especially if citizens. But he added disingenuously that it was the practice of the government “not to keep people apprehended in the U.S.”
Which is true, it is known that people detained by the U.S. military and CIA have been placed everywhere but in the U.S. so that Constitutional rights could not attach. Under Section 1021, that “inconvenience” to the government would not be necessary.
When asked by the Court if he, the Justice Department attorney, would agree that a different administration could change its mind with respect to whether or not Sec. 1021 would be applied in any way to American citizens, he dissembled again, answering: “Is that possible? Yes, but it is speculative and conjecture and that cannot be the basis for an injury in fact.”
So U.S. citizens or anyone else are left to understand that they have no rights remaining under the Constitution. If a supposed “right” is contingent upon who is President, it is not a right and the U.S. is no longer under the rule of law.
In discussing whether activist and journalist Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a citizen of Iceland, could be subject to U.S. military detention or trial by military commission, Assistant U.S. Attorney Torrance would only disingenuously answer that “her activities as she alleges them, do not implicate this.” Disingenuous because he knew based upon the answer he previously gave that the law of war is arbitrary and its interpretation contingent upon a military commander, whoever that may be, at present or in the future.
What could happen to Ms. Jónsdóttir would be completely out of her control should the U.S. government decide to deem her an “unprivileged belligerent,” regardless of whether her expressive activities changed positively or negatively, or remained the same. Her risk of detention per the Justice Department is entirely at the sufferance of whatever administration may be in place at any given moment.
Any doubt that the Authorization for the Use of Military Force, along with Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, is believed by the U.S. Executive Branch to give it the untrammeled power that Article 48 of the Weimar Germany constitution gave to the German President in 1933 was settled by the arguments made by the Justice Department attorney in Hedges v. Obama.
Setting First Amendment Aside
One does not need to speculate that the U.S. government no longer sees First Amendment activities as protected. Government arguments, which were made in the Hedges v. Obama lawsuit, revealed that the Justice Department, speaking for the Executive Branch, considers protection of the Bill of Rights subordinate to the claim of “war powers” by the Executive. One can only be willfully blind to fail to see this.
By the Justice Department’s court arguments and filings, the protections afforded by the U.S. Bill of Rights are no more secure today than they were to Japanese-Americans when Western District military commander General DeWitt decided to remove them from their homes on the West Coast and intern them in what were initially called, “concentration camps.”
The American Bar Association Journal reported in 2014 that Justice Antonin Scalia told students in Hawaii that “the Supreme Court’s Korematsu decision upholding the internment of Japanese Americans was wrong, but it could happen again in war time.” But contrary to Scalia stating that Korematsu had been repudiated, Korematsu has never been overruled.
The court could get a chance to do so, the ABA article stated, in the Hedges v. Obama case “involving the military detention without trial of people accused of aiding terrorism.” But that opportunity has passed.
A U.S. District Court issued a permanent injunction blocking the law’s indefinite detention powers but that ruling was overturned by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. A petition to the U.S. Supreme Court asked the justices to overturn Sec. 1021, the federal law authorizing such detentions and stated the justices should consider overruling Korematsu. But the Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2014, leaving the Appeals Court’s ruling intact.
The Supreme Court’s decision to not overturn Korematsu allows General DeWitt’s World War II decision to intern Japanese-Americans in concentration camps to stand as a shining example of what Brig. General Marks Martins proudly holds up to the world as the “U.S. domestic common law of war.”
Todd E. Pierce retired as a Major in the U.S. Army Judge Advocate General (JAG) Corps in November 2012. His most recent assignment was defense counsel in the Office of Chief Defense Counsel, Office of Military Commissions. In the course of that assignment, he researched and reviewed the complete records of military commissions held during the Civil War and stored at the National Archives in Washington, D.C.
September 13, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Civil Liberties, Full Spectrum Dominance, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, War Crimes | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Department of Defense, First Amendment, Human rights, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, JINSA, Law of War Manual, New York Times, United States, William Bradford |
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Reprieve | September 13, 2015
The UK Government has refused to confirm whether UK pilots have been involved in flying covert US drone strikes over Pakistan, withholding the information requested by legal charity Reprieve on grounds of ‘international relations.’
Reprieve had made Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to the Ministry of Defence asking two questions: whether the UK had flown drone missions over Pakistan; and whether British pilots ‘embedded’ in US units had done so. While the UK Government confirmed that it had not itself conducted such strikes in response to the first question, it said it would ‘neither confirm nor deny’ (NCND) whether British embedded pilots had done so.
This position is at odds with recent comments made by the UK Defence Secretary to the effect that the Government would answer questions about the activities of embedded personnel when asked. In the wake of revelations that British pilots had flown strikes in Syrian territory while embedded with the US Air Force, Michael Fallon said that “if we are asked to give details [on embeds] we of course do so.”
The new evidence of potential UK involvement in the US’ drone programme in Pakistan comes in the week of David Cameron’s announcement of a new UK ‘targeted killing’ policy which closely mirrors that carried out by the American Government. The US programme – which has been running for over a decade – has seen hundreds of strikes taken and hundreds of civilians killed. The latter is due in large part to faulty intelligence, which has seen strikes miss their intended target with the effect that individual alleged militants have often been reported ‘killed’ on multiple occasions.
The US programme – which is justified on the same basis as that of the UK, and carried out using the same technology – has also come in for heavy criticism from senior American defence and intelligence figures, who argue it has proved counter-productive. General Michael Flynn, former head of the US Defence Intelligence Agency, has described it as a “failed strategy,” while General Stanley McChrystal has warned it creates “ resentment” towards “American arrogance.”
The UK Government has consistently refused in the past to comment on drone strikes in Pakistan, saying that they are a matter for “the states involved.” For British personnel to have been involved in the strikes would go far beyond the picture of the drones programme that the Government has so far presented to the British public and Parliament.
Commenting, Jennifer Gibson, a lawyer at Reprieve, said: “This refusal suggests that we may be embroiled in the CIA’s secret wars in far greater ways than was thought. Given the CIA’s drone programme in Pakistan has killed hundreds of civilians while operating without public accountability, that is cause for serious concern. What more don’t we know?”
“Numerous senior military and intelligence figures have warned that secret drone programmes of this kind can actually make the situation worse, not better. Before heading down this path, we need a real debate, and real answers from the PM. We need to think very carefully about whether giving our government carte blanche to kill people anywhere in the world, without oversight, is really a good idea.”
September 13, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Militarism, Subjugation - Torture, War Crimes | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Pakistan, UK |
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“Wars are complex. They come out of nowhere and all of a sudden, people you’ve never heard of are killing each other on the evening news.”
So begins this rather patronising piece on Upworthy that attempts to explain in a digestible format what is happening in Syria. Entitled ‘Trying to follow what is going on in Syria and why? This comic will get you there in 5 minutes’, the article presents a neat, but ultimately misleading and reductive narrative, which argues that drought caused by climate change is primarily responsible for the war in Syria. Somewhat regrettably, it has been shared widely over the internet since it was published last week. Presumably it is being read (and shared) by people who are confused by events in Syria and want to find an easy framework with which to understand them.
Even for a piece that is explicitly intended for the layman, it is highly simplistic, misleadingly so. There is no doubt that the major drought witnessed in Syria between 2006 and 2011 had a catastrophic environmental and societal impact on the country, but it is not the over-arching cause of the war. The article is also littered with inaccuracies and has many glaring omissions, including the central role of foreign powers in the war, notably the US. For instance, there is no mention of the US’ long-standing effort (in co-ordination with Saudi Arabia) to encourage Islamic fundamentalism and sectarianism in Syria in order to weaken the Syrian Government at any cost (as revealed by WikiLeaks) and no mention of the CIA’s enormous Syria operation that has cost at least $1bn and trained and armed nearly 10,000 fighters sent to fight in Syria since the war began. But it is something else in the piece that – due to personal experience – I found especially problematic. The piece claims that in response to the drought crisis, “Bashar Al Assad’s Government offered little help” (the word Government is omitted in the article itself, this appears to be an editorial oversight).
In 2009, when the enormous scale of the drought in Syria was becoming clear, I was a research intern at the British Embassy in Damascus. In this role, one of my responsibilities was to attend briefings and events arranged by international organisations and other embassies and report my findings back to the UK Embassy. Therefore, when I read the phrase “offered little help”, I was immediately reminded of a UN briefing that I attended in Damascus in July 2009. As soon as I consulted my original notes from the briefing, the flagrant inaccuracy – if not outright dishonesty – of this wording struck me. At this briefing, the UN Drought Joint Needs Assessment Mission (or the JNA), chaired by Ismail Ould Cheikh Ahmed (now the Head of the United Nations Mission for Ebola Emergency Response), reported to international (primarily western) donors the findings of a field mission that the JNA had conducted in Eastern Syria in June 2009. In his presentation, Ahmed praised the response of the Syrian Government more than once but argued that given the enormous scale of the problem, further action from it was needed. He also summarised the measures that the government had already taken, these included the following:
*A food assistance programme that was supplementing the World Food Program’s efforts. 27,000-30,000 families were guaranteed support until December 2009.
* Livestock feed had been subsidised.
* Outstanding loans of farmers had been re-scheduled and micro-credit loans offered to them.
* New teachers had been hired for affected regions.
* Establishment of a government fund specifically for agricultural subsidies and support.
Representatives of the Syrian Government appeared alongside the UN at the meeting; The Director of Planning from the Syrian Ministry of Agriculture and the Deputy Head of the State Planning Commission. Both these Syrian officials stressed the severity and unprecedented scale of the drought and stated explicitly that the government was struggling to cope with its impact. They openly asked for financial assistance (both short- and long-term) from international donors and stated that the Syrian Government’s efforts alone would not be sufficient to cope. During the briefing a number of funding options were offered to international donors by the UN. These included food distribution for 300,000 people (priced at $29.9m) and water projects including reverse osmosis units and rehabilitation of wells (priced at $2.1m). An overall aid target of $50m was set; a figure that I remember many in the room thought was wholly unrealistic since only $4m had been donated by the same countries/groups the previous year.
In light of this context, the article’s premise that the government “offered little help” is, at best, an unfair and inaccurate simplification of how the Syrian Government actually responded to the drought. At worst, it is an intentional and dishonest attempt to obscure the government’s evident attempts to solve the crisis and mitigate its impact. The reality is that the Syrian Government was simply overwhelmed by the scale of the drought (and its subsequent effects); it did not possess the ability – financial, logistical and otherwise – to respond adequately to it and did not receive sufficient funding from international donors to help account for this deficiency. After that meeting, I remember my impression of the Syrian officials was of two overwhelmed and worried government employees who were acutely aware of the scale of the emergency and the dire need for international assistance but, given the numerous enemies Syria faced, were wary of appearing overly weak in front of an international audience.
Although to some this might seem a relatively unimportant clarification, it is reflective of a much broader trend in reporting on Syria; the constant reduction of the entire Syrian Government/State to simply ‘Assad’ (also the ‘Assad regime’ or ‘Assad’s Government’) and a small group of Alawite ‘thugs’, as if Syria lacked national institutions and infrastructures that although often dysfunctional, have existed and developed over decades, and are staffed by many thousands of government employees. Leader-focused framing such as this plays a central role in legitimising the West’s aggression against entire nation-states (think Gaddafi, Saddam, Milosevic et al) and inevitably, to observe such a fact often means being labelled “pro-Assad” or “pro-Qaddafi” etc. Such is the simplistic portrayal of the ‘Assad regime’ in much of the Western media, that I am sure many in the West would be surprised to learn that Syria even had a Deputy Head of the State Planning Commission or a Director of Planning at the Ministry of Agriculture.
The media’s constant use of ‘Assad’ and ‘regime’ obscures the reality that the government is not a homogenous entity, and that many ‘regime’ officials are simply bureaucrats, technical experts and civil servants, not murderous, sectarian thugs as is so often the impression. After all, Khaled al-Asaad, the former Head of Antiquities at Palmyra who was murdered by ISIS in August was a ‘regime’ official and had been so for forty years. While his murder was unanimously condemned and al-Asaad was – rightfully so – widely mourned by the Western press, the awkward fact that he was a government employee was conveniently downplayed. In the same way, the image of Syrian Government officials in the midst of a drought crisis, outlining the bureaucratic steps taken by the government to date, expressing real concern for the future and pleading for help from international donors does not fit the narrative of ‘Assad and his regime thugs’ and so was ignored.
Ultimately, any article that purports to explain an extremely complex topic in “five minutes” should be treated with extreme scepticism and the utmost caution, and this piece is no exception to that rule.
Louis Allday is a PhD candidate at SOAS based in London. Follow him on Twitter: @Louis_Allday
September 11, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Economics, Mainstream Media, Warmongering, Science and Pseudo-Science, Timeless or most popular | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Climate change, Syria |
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Federal agencies trying to determine if Israel’s nuclear program received uranium from the U.S. during the Cold War were kept in the dark by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Grant Smith, who runs the Institute for Research: Middle Eastern Policy, has long contended that Israel was able to develop nuclear weapons in part because it received 392 pounds of nuclear material that was lost by Nuclear Materials and Equipment Corp. (NUMEC) between 1957 and 1965, according to Courthouse News Service.
A Freedom of Information Act fight with the CIA for records pertaining to NUMEC resulted in Smith getting 130 pages of documents (pdf), one of which from March 9, 1972, dealt with the Atomic Energy Commission’s (AEC) survey of NUMEC’s loss.
The AEC found NUMEC lost 185 pounds of uranium due to inefficiencies in the refinement process, but the agency could not identify an error that led to the remaining loss, according to the memo.
Tim Ryan at Courthouse News Service wrote that other documents revealed a lack of cooperation among three agencies that investigated NUMEC.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) also looked into the missing uranium. But the FBI, like the AEC, closed its investigation after meeting with NUMEC director Zalman Shapiro but without consulting the CIA, “even though the agencies knew the CIA was interested in him,” Ryan wrote. He also reported that two CIA employees who worked during the height of the investigations have said diversion of uranium occurred.
“CIA has not furnished to the FBI sensitive agent reporting…since the decision was made by directors [Richard] Helms, [William] Colby and [George H.W.] Bush that this information would not further the investigation of NUMEC but would compromise sources and methods,” according to a 1977 report by CIA Associate Deputy Director for Operations Theodore Shackley.
No criminal charges were ever filed against officials at NUMEC.
To Learn More:
Discord Apparent in Nuclear ‘Diversion’ Probe (by Tim Ryan, Courthouse News Service )
CIA Releases Files about Illegal Weapons-Grade Uranium Diversions from U.S. to Israel (PR Newswire )
Grant F. Smith v. Central Intelligence Agency (U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia) (pdf)
Records Released by CIA to IRMEP via FOIA (Michael Lavergne, CIA) (pdf)
The Apollo Affair (Wikipedia)
September 10, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Ethnic Cleansing, Timeless or most popular | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, FBI, Israel, NUMEC, United States, Zionism |
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As the United States moves toward some kind of normal relations with Cuba, it faces a problem: normal is currently illegal. In 1996, Congress, with help from President Bill Clinton, created the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity (Helms-Burton) Act, which makes it illegal to normalize much of anything. What helped bring that about was a seemingly routine act of lawbreaking by a Miami exile group and the Clinton administration’s muddled response to it.
On February 24, 1996, three small surplus US Air Force Cessna Skymasters departed from Opa-locka airport in Miami-Dade County, Florida. The planes were gifts from President George H.W. Bush to Brothers to the Rescue (Hermanos al Rescate).
Brothers to the Rescue was a Miami-based anti-Castro organization run by José Basulto and William Schuss, organized in 1991 during a period of immigration chaos. Their first missions were to locate and lend assistance to balseros, Cuban migrants in the Florida Straits trying to reach the United States in makeshift craft.
Basulto and Schuss had received US military training and later belonged to Operation 40, organized by the CIA to prepare for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. Basulto later took part in sabotage actions against Cuba along with several well-known anti-Castro terrorists such as Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch. In 2005, he said on a Miami TV channel that in 1962, he had taken part in a raid against Cuba, firing a 22 mm canon from offshore at the Hotel Rosita Hornedo in Havana where Russians were thought to be staying. “So far, no one has come to question me,” he said.
Juan Pablo Roque, a Cuban agent who flew with the Brothers but returned to Cuba on the eve of the February 24 flight, told a Cuban interviewer that the organization was set up in the offices of the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), which was a creature of the Reagan administration. According to Roque,
Specifically, Martin Perez, with substantial economic support from the foundation, put forward the idea with some former CIA agents, José Basulto, Billy Shultz [Schuss], Arnaldo Iglesias. They advanced the idea to create an allegedly, quote, humanitarian organization, unquote, which would save the lives of the men who took to the sea to try to reach the coasts of Florida. [1]
Basulto filed a flight plan for February 24 that would take the three Cessnas to the Florida Straits where they were going to look for balseros. Instead of following the flight plan, they flew south and entered Cuba’s restricted military air space. [2]
The pilots were unaware of the intense scrutiny their flight was receiving from federal agencies. They had on many other occasions entered Cuban air space without arousing much federal interest. On previous flights, Basulto buzzed the Cuban capital and dropped leaflets and other anti-Castro debris over the city ignoring Cuban warnings. But this time, the State Department had alerted the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that it would be dangerous for the Brothers to attempt another flight over Cuba and asked for updates on their activities.
Consequently, an immense network of radar installations focused on Basulto’s tiny propeller planes traveling across the Gulf of Mexico at 150 mph. Even the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) center in Colorado, originally set up as an early-warning system against a Soviet missile attack, was enlisted. It coordinated radar installations around the country including March Air Reserve Base in Riverside, California, Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City, Florida and at Cudjoe Key in the Florida Keys, where an aerostat radar balloon was on alert. All of this for three small Cessnas.
The Riverside base had a narcotics interdiction center that usually hunted for flights coming from the south. When Jeffrey Houlihan, a senior detection-system specialist, reported for work there on February 24, the FAA told him to keep an eye on the Brothers, with whom he was familiar because of their frequent flights in the Florida Straits. According to Houlihan, the Southeast Air Defense
… made it very clear to me in briefings … that anything that pops up inside that area, they [the US military] will launch their interceptor aircraft immediately, their assumption being that anything that pops up in that area, heading towards the United States, is coming out of Cuba.
However, the elaborate monitoring of Basulto’s flight was not for his protection and it received none. National security seems not to have been a factor either since no US fighter jets were launched when Cuban MiGs, in pursuit of the Cessnas, headed toward the 24th parallel, the demarcation line between Cuban and US restricted zones.
Houlihan later testified at a federal hearing that a week prior to February 24, he was told to watch for the next Brothers’ flight because Basulto intended “to make a political statement against the Communist Government in Cuba, and we were requested, by the FAA, to watch for that.” [3]
Houlihan watched his monitors as fast-moving objects he took to be Cuban MiG fighter planes destroyed one of the Cessnas carrying two pilots. Six minutes later, a second air-to-air missile destroyed the second Cessna killing two more pilots. Basulto and three passengers in the third Cessna flew back to Opa-locka.
Clinton immediately declared a state of national emergency and set up a security zone in the waters around the Florida peninsula closing it to unauthorized sea and air traffic. He also demanded an investigation by the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) and a UN condemnation of Cuba. The state of national emergency declared in 1996 is still in effect, one of the long-term consequences of Basulto’s flight.
Amidst the uproar and condemnation of Cuba, Clinton signed Helms-Burton into law, which did more than any other piece of legislation to freeze Cuba policy into perpetual cycles of crisis and stagnation.
How did a miniature air force of three small civilian planes exert such influence on Cuba policy that a president felt compelled to give away most of his control over it to Congress? The shootdown occurred long after Cuba’s ties with the Soviet Union had died along with the Soviet Union itself. None of the old justifications for destroying the Cuban revolution cited in the 1960s seemed relevant in a world without the Soviet Bloc and with Cuba experiencing a serious economic setback after the loss of Soviet trade and aid.
Brothers to the rescue of Helms-Burton
When the number of balseros decreased after the 1994/ 1995 migration agreements, Basulto turned to direct action flying provocatively into Cuban air space. Whether through brilliant tactical calculation or reckless stupidity, the Brothers created counterrevolutionary martyrdom for themselves during the February 24 incursion, turned world opinion against Cuba and made Helms-Burton law.
According to journalist and historian Richard Gott, Helms-Burton had little to do with Cuban liberty and democratic solidarity:
Helms-Burton was aimed at investment and was originally drafted because of the success of the Cuban recovery and the concern that US business might take second place to European, Canadian and Japanese investors. Its underlying purpose was to scare off foreign investors at a time when Cuba’s economic survival depended on its ability to open up to the outside word — to seek markets, investors and managerial expertise in Europe, Canada, Japan and Latin America.[4]
By this time, there was growing interest in opening up trade with Cuba. Farm-state representatives, including conservatives like John Ashcroft (R-MO) pressured the White House for change. Cuba had survived the collapse of the Soviet Union and had begun to show economic growth without any help from US farm states. The Cuban economy grew by 2.5% in 1995, with 5% projected for 1996.
This was bad news for some exile groups because it appeared that the opportunity to finally dispose of the revolution through economic sanctions and sabotage was slipping away. Exile groups like Basulto’s were determined to provoke new tensions and force the Cuban government to overreact. [5]
It was also bad news that Clinton rejected Helms-Burton. He said in 1995, that he could not support the bill because “it would affect our capacity to promote the transition to democracy in Cuba.” [6]
If he was concerned about giving up some executive control over Cuba policy, he might have considered that his and previous administrations had already ceded much of it to private groups in Miami, some of them created and encouraged by Washington. No effective measures had been taken against private commando raiders, filibusterers and terrorists. It was also becoming apparent that agencies in the executive branch were, by inaction or tacit approval, relaxing federal control over the civil aviation adventures of José Basulto.
Crises and the art of learned helplessness
After months of warnings from Cuba that it would not tolerate continued provocations by Basulto, there was no effective US government action to prevent as opposed to simply monitoring the events of February 24. It is true that in October 1995, the US Interests Section in Havana had looked into the matter in languid bureaucratic fashion, asking Cuba for evidence the FAA could use against Basulto even though evidence was piling up in the Miami FAA offices of Basulto’s flagrant violations of FAA rules. The FAA was still going over Cuba’s evidence when the shootdown occurred four months later.
Of particular concern to Cuba, were flights into restricted military areas identified internationally as part of a nation’s Air Defense Identification Zone (ADIZ). Cuba’s ADIZ extends 26 miles toward the Florida Keys and is demarcated by latitude 24. These restricted military spaces extend beyond the traditional 12-nautical mile (22.2 km) maritime limit.
US agencies kept track of Basulto in the weeks before the shootdown, concerned about how Cuba might react to another overflight. After a January 20, 1996 overflight, FAA chief Cecilia Capestany wrote a letter to the Miami FAA office:
State is increasingly concerned about Cuban reactions to these flagrant violations. They are also asking from the FAA what is this agency doing to prevent/deter these actions. As a matter of fact, the Undersecretary of State called Secretary Pena last week to check on our case against Basulto. Worst case scenario is that one of these days the Cubans will shoot down one of these planes and the FAA better have all its ducks in a row.
But an unnamed official said that by the fall of 1995, the government had given up trying to control Basulto because he was “so agitated that we were more likely to provoke him than to quiet him down. He was going ballistic every time we talked about it.” [7]
The attitude was that, short of restricting airspace between Florida and Cuba, little could be done since the Brothers, whose leader was apparently treated as a rebellious teenager, would probably disobey any FAA orders.
Charles Smith, FAA administrator in Miami, had warned Basulto against making a July 13, 1995 flight over Cuba, but Basulto had said, “Chuck, you know I always play by the rules, but you must understand I have a mission in life to perform.” [8] When the FAA finally went after Basulto’s license, it was for flying too low over water.
Election: Running on Two Tracks
Meanwhile, Clinton was making regular incursions into Florida — looking for votes. It is difficult not to conclude that the shootdown was bound up with a risky electoral strategy by which Clinton advanced along two tracks.
On Track One, the White House would emit periodic signals to anti-Castro leaders in Miami that Clinton would stick doggedly to tough sanctions against Cuba and negotiate nothing with Castro. Track One led straight to the election and support from the Cuban American National Foundation.
Track Two was strewn with obstacles left over from building Track One. It required Clinton to listen privately to Cuban warnings about the incursions and privately to reassure Havana that something or other was being done about it. This track led nowhere because any action taken to shut down these exile operations might wreck the Clinton political express barreling down track number one.
When leaders of Movimiento Democracia planned to take a flotilla of small boats with air support from Basulto on a taunting mission to the Cuban coast, Clinton’s Cuba expert Richard Nuccio was sent to head off a train wreck. The exiles said they had the right, as Cubans, to engage in protests off Cuba’s coast, and the White House agreed. While the government could not do much for the flotilla and its air cover if they entered Cuban territory, the Coast Guard would set up a command post and escort them toward Cuba.
The State Department did not seem to take seriously the possibility that the flotilla might enter Cuban waters or that Basulto might fly too near Havana. This is where the two tracks – one publically belligerent toward Cuba and the other privately conciliatory – could intersect with dangerous results.
In Track Two fashion, the administration sent a discrete note to Cuba about perhaps investigating something. In stark contrast, Clinton’s Track One action was to issue a loud public announcement aligning Washington with Basulto and the flotilla.
Clinton was making moves in matching pairs. He threatened a veto of the Miami-backed Helms-Burton bill, simultaneously suggesting that he was going to crack down on Basulto through the FAA. Then, to head off an angry reaction from the hardliners for that, he relaxed travel rules for family visits to Cuba by Cuban-Americans, reversing restrictions he had ordered the previous year.
Conspiracy theories and excuses
After the shootdown, the administration and the media advanced a version of the shootdown that was carefully limited to the events of February 24 — as Dickens might have put it, to create a harvest that had never been sown.
Basulto also confined his telling of the shootdown to the day it happened. Despite the limited historical perspective, Basulto managed to raise questions about that day that have never been satisfactorily answered.
“No one, not one of the many agencies that were monitoring our flights that day, called to inform us we were being hunted down,” Basulto claimed. He even suggested that Clinton and Castro had conspired to bring the planes down and cover up unexplained discrepancies. This, said Basulto, was to insure Clinton’s reelection, which Castro presumably favored. [9]
At a congressional hearing, Basulto said that after the two Cessnas were shot down, his plane was chased by MiG fighters for 53 minutes as he raced back to Opa-locka. While the scene was being observed by the great radar network, no US fighter planes were scrambled even though, he claimed, evidence showed that the MiGs came within three nautical miles of Florida.
After Clinton’s re-election, which included a victory in Florida, Cuba policy seemed to drift with congressional currents. In January 1997, he sent Congress a report called “Support for a Democratic Transition in Cuba,” which discharged his obligation under Helms-Burton to tell Congress how the United States was to assist Cuba in its transition to democracy.
The report outlined a fanciful scenario in which the Cuban government would wondrously start dismantling its socialist economy and sack Fidel Castro. The reward for making this transition would be millions of dollars in aid, the possible return of the Guantánamo Bay territory, resumption of normal bilateral relations and a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to join the IMF and World Bank and thereby be eligible to take part in that destroyer of economies, the structural adjustment programs.
Rep. Robert Menendez (D-NJ), who played a role in requiring the report, said the intention was to create seeds of ferment in Cuba by showing that the United States was committed to the welfare of the Cuban people. [10] Two years earlier, CANF and Clinton acted together to sow seeds of ferment by convincing Cubans they would get no help from Clinton. Whatever the gestation properties of seeds in federal reports are, the “Support for a Democratic Transition” initiative was clearly not a serious step toward normalization.
They made me do it
In his second term and after he left office, Clinton portrayed Helms-Burton and the shootdown as things that happened in a space beyond his reach where other people were at fault. In a 2000 radio interview he said, “I believe if Castro hadn’t shot those planes down, and the Congress hadn’t passed a law which prohibits me from doing anything with the embargo, that we might have made some real progress there.”
At a 1997 gathering in Argentina, he said the Miami exiles were responsible for Helms-Burton because of pressure from them. He said that he was forced to sign the bill to prevent a stronger piece of legislation coming before Congress. [11]
In his memoirs, Clinton dropped the part about preventing a worse bill from coming to his desk. “Supporting the bill,” he wrote, “was good election-year politics in Florida… but it did undermine whatever chance I might have had, if I won a second term to lift the embargo in return for positive changes in Cuba.” [12]
Perhaps the simplest explanation for why Basulto was able to fly that day in spite of all the radar surveillance, the FAA handwringing and the State Department warnings was this from Clinton’s memoirs: “My main target was the election.” [13]
After all, he had worked hard throughout his first term to win the Florida vote. He did favors for Florida: he held the Summit of the Americas in Miami; he relocated the Southern Command there from Panama; and he made “inroads” in the Cuban-American community. He might have added that Basulto was free to fly.
The handling of the Brothers little war against Cuba and the shootdown had driven the administration into an election-based myopia. By signing the Helms-Burton Act, Clinton was reduced to sending reports mandated by Congress. Cuba policy was to be decided primarily by congressional committees responding to concessions or lack of them from Cuba. By hitching policy to fictional scenarios of a Cuban surrender of its sovereignty, Congress and Clinton, with considerable help from Brothers to the Rescue, ensured that little would change far into the future.
Notes.
1 Roque interview, Tele Rebelde, BBC Summary of World Broadcasts, 02/27/9.
2 Miami Herald, 02/16/97.
3.Ibid.
4 Richard Gott, Cuba: A New History, New Haven: Yale Nota Bene, 2005, p.278.
5 Agencia EFE, 11/21/95.
6 Agencia EFE, 03/29/95.
7 Miami Herald, 02/16/97.
8 Miami Herald, 03/01/01.
9 El Nuevo Herald (Miami), 12/24/98.
10 Miami Herald, 01/28/97.
11 Miami Herald, 10/17/97.
12 Bill Clinton, My Life, New York: Knopf, 2004, p. 700.
13 Ibid. p.727
Robert Sandels writes on Cuba and Mexico. Nelson P. Valdés is Emeritus Professor of Sociology, University of New Mexico.
September 8, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Economics, Timeless or most popular | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, Cuba, Latin America, United States |
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This happened some 63 years ago, but as the U.S. government has never stopped lying about it, and it’s generally known only outside the United States, I’m going to treat it as news.
Here in our little U.S. bubble we’ve heard of a couple versions of a film called The Manchurian Candidate. We’ve heard of the general concept of “brainwashing” and may even associate it with something evil that the Chinese supposedly did to U.S. prisoners during the Korean War. And I’d be willing to bet that the majority of people who’ve heard of these things have at least a vague sense that they’re bullshit.
If you didn’t know, I’ll break it to you right now: people cannot actually be programed like the Manchurian candidate, which was a work of fiction. There was never the slightest evidence that China or North Korea had done any such thing. And the CIA spent decades trying to do such a thing, and finally gave up.
I’d also be willing to bet that very few people know what it was that the U.S. government promoted the myth of “brainwashing” to cover up. During the Korean War, the United States bombed virtually all of North Korea and a good bit of the South, killing millions of people. It dropped massive quantities of Napalm. It bombed dams, bridges, villages, houses. This was all-out mass-slaughter. But there was something the U.S. government didn’t want known, something deemed unethical in this genocidal madness.
It is well documented that the United States dropped on China and North Korea insects and feathers carrying anthrax, cholera, encephalitis, and bubonic plague. This was supposed to be a secret at the time, and the Chinese response of mass vaccinations and insect eradication probably contributed to the project’s general failure (hundreds were killed, but not millions). But members of the U.S. military taken prisoner by the Chinese confessed to what they had been a part of, and confessed publicly when they got back to the United States.
Some of them had felt guilty to begin with. Some had been shocked at China’s decent treatment of prisoners after U.S. depictions of the Chinese as savages. For whatever reasons, they confessed, and their confessions were highly credible, were borne out by independent scientific reviews, and have stood the test of time.
How to counter reports of the confessions? The answer for the CIA and the U.S. military and their allies in the corporate media was “brainwashing,” which conveniently explained away whatever former prisoners said as false narratives implanted in their brains by brainwashers.
And 300 million of so Americans more or less sort of believe that craziest-ever dog-ate-my-homework concoction to this day!
The propaganda struggle was intense. The support of the Guatemalan government for the reports of U.S. germ warfare in China were part of the U.S. motivation for overthrowing the Guatemalan government; and the same cover-up was likely part of the motivation for the CIA’s murder of Frank Olson.
There isn’t any debate that the United States had been working on bio-weapons for years, at Fort Detrick — then Camp Detrick — and numerous other locations. Nor is there any question that the United States employed the top bio-weapons killers from among both the Japanese and the Nazis from the end of World War II onward. Nor is there any question that the U.S. tested such weapons on the city of San Francisco and numerous other locations around the United States, and on U.S. soldiers. There’s a museum in Havana featuring evidence of years of U.S. bio-warfare against Cuba. We know that Plum Island, off the tip of Long Island, was used to test the weaponization of insects, including the ticks that created the ongoing outbreak of Lyme Disease.
Dave Chaddock’s book This Must Be the Place, which I found via Jeff Kaye’s review, collects the evidence that the United States indeed tried to wipe out millions of Chinese and North Koreans with deadly diseases.
“What does it matter now?” I can imagine people from only one corner of the earth asking.
I reply that it matters that we know the evils of war and try to stop the new ones. U.S. cluster bombs in Yemen, U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan, U.S. guns in Syria, U.S. white phosphorus and Napalm and depleted uranium used in recent years, U.S. torture in prison camps, U.S. nuclear arsenals being expanded, U.S. coups empowering monsters in Ukraine and Honduras, U.S. lies about Iranian nukes, and indeed U.S. antagonization of North Korea as part of that never-yet-ended war — all of these things can be best confronted by people aware of a centuries-long pattern of lying.
And I reply, also, that it is not yet too late to apologize.
September 6, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Timeless or most popular, War Crimes | China, CIA, North Korea, United States |
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One of the most depressing things about watching — even from a distance — the quadrennial race for the White House is seeing what passes for debate on the one area where the president does have some Constitutional authority: foreign policy.
Candidates who have spent little or no time studying or traveling to the rest of the world, and, in the fashion of many Americans in the age of Empire, see the rest of the world as just a series of US colonial outposts, apparently consider foreign policy unworthy of serious consideration.
So little do Republican candidates care about foreign policy that most of them have “outsourced” their foreign policy to a single neocon-dominated foreign policy shop called the “John Hay Initiative.” If you wonder why most Republican candidates sound exactly the same on foreign policy, it’s because they are nearly all getting their advice from the same people.
When nearly all candidates look to someone like Eliot Cohen, a founding member of the Project for a New American Century (PNAC), to provide an off-the-shelf foreign policy, it should be no surprise that the “debate” in the Republican party is only over which country to attack first.
Any candidate who thinks so little about something so important as America’s place in the world should be automatically disqualified.
But the neocons love it! The “experts” who brought us the 2003 Iraq war and the Libya “liberation” are still in the driver’s seat when it comes to foreign policy.
“Jeb!” has John Hay Initiative members Michael Chertoff and Michael Hayden (remember those crooks?) on board as his advisors.
Marco Rubio reportedly draws from Hay Project member Roger Zakheim, the son of GW Bush administration “vulcan,” Dov Zakheim. Zakheim père, we remember, joined with his fellow neocons to lie the US into war with Iraq, enriching the military-industrial complex, before absconding to the “private sector” to make his millions from the same military-industrial complex. Zakheim quickly and quietly left his position as the Pentagon’s chief financial officer after a trillion dollars went missing and the Government Accountability Office was critical of his handling of matters.
Scott Walker, a soporific candidate who nevertheless still gives neocons like Bill Kristol the vapors, also shops the neocon Walmart of foreign policy, the John Hay Initiative. It should be no surprise, then, that at his big foreign policy coming out speech at the Citadel military college Friday, he unveiled an “aggressive” foreign policy — crying out “America will not be intimidated. And neither will I” — as he promised more war and vowed that “the retreat is over!”
Is this the retreat he is talking about?
Walker reportedly taps into the McCain Institute’s David Kramer, a John Hay member, for his foreign policy wisdom. Kramer is another PNAC alumni, also putting in time at the CIA-affiliated Freedom House and as director of the Bush State Department’s Office of Policy Planning. This must explain Walker’s obsession with taking out Iran. He vowed to “roll back the theocrats in Tehran,” but in fact unlike the US, Tehran has not invaded another country in hundreds of years. What’s to “roll back?”
If Walker actually paid any attention to the quality of advice he gets from his PNAC/John Hay gang he might call for his money back. Walker’s speech was peppered with macho language about “defeat[ing] the barbarians of ISIS,” while also vowing to destroy the two forces actually fighting ISIS — Syria and Iran! In fact, his vow to use the US military to overthrow the Syrian government would without question result in the greatest ISIS victory to date — control of Syria. One need not sympathize with Assad to recognize that he is literally the only thing keeping the whole of Syria out of the hands of ISIS.
John Hay Initiative “experts” also wrote the foreign policy speeches of candidates Carly Fiorina and Chris Christie. No doubt they were behind Fiorina’s astonishingly ignorant vow to make her first call as president to Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to “to reassure him that we stand with the state of Israel” and to make her second call to Iran to “to tell him that whatever the deal is that he signed with Obama, there’s a new deal and the new deal is this: Until you submit every facility [where] you have nuclear uranium enrichment to a full set of inspections, we’re going to make it as hard as possible for you to move money around the global financial system.”
Pure PNAC.
These neocons should be in jail, not still deeply ensconced in the Beltway foreign policy halls of power, dining in sumptuous splendor while the rest of America is impoverished by the destructive wars they push. Their lies have cost millions of innocent lives overseas as well. They are a cancer on the country. Any candidate who cares so little about the issues as to accept a “virtual staff” of foreign policy “experts” from those who have gotten every single major foreign policy issue of our time totally and catastrophically wrong has no business holding any elected office.
John Hay? I’d rather shop for a foreign policy expert at Walmart.
September 4, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Corruption, Ethnic Cleansing, Racism, Zionism, Full Spectrum Dominance, Militarism, Timeless or most popular, Wars for Israel | Carly Fiorina, Chris Christie, CIA, John Hay Initiative, Marco Rubio, Michael Chertoff, Michael Hayden, Roger Zakheim, Scott Walker, United States |
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The executive summary of the Senate torture report, released last December, exposed a system of abuse that was far more brutal than the CIA ever admitted to the White House, Congress, the courts, or the American public. But for all its revelatory, gruesome details, it also revealed more about what we don’t know.
The 525-page summary released by the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence references documents detailing secret legal defenses for torture, attempts at covering up illegality, indications of dissent from within the CIA, and more. To fill in the blanks, we filed a Freedom of Information Act request today for 77 documents, most of which are referenced in the report.
The ACLU has previously acquired and made public redacted versions of some of those documents (see, for example, the OLC memos that were released to us in April 2009). Others have been totally hidden from Americans and deserve to see the light. We’re submitting this new request because we think the public is entitled to a full account of what happened in the CIA’s black sites, and why.
Some details about the still-withheld documents are provided in the Senate’s report and give us a partial understanding as to what the documents contain. In one email referenced by the Senate report, Director of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center Jose Rodriguez instructed CIA personnel to suppress their doubts about the legality of the so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” used on detainee Abu Zubaydah. Personnel involved in Abu Zubaydah’s torture wrote headquarters that they believed his interrogations were “approach[ing] the legal limit.”
Rodriguez responded:
[I] strongly urge that any speculative language as to the legality of given activities or, more precisely, judgment calls as to their legality vis-à-vis operational guidelines for this activity agreed upon and vetted at the most senior levels of the agency, be refrained from in written traffic. Such language is not helpful.
Another classified email, written by CIA torture contractor James Mitchell, provides a glimpse of President Bush’s “discomfort” with an “image of a detainee, chained to the ceiling, clothed in a diaper, and forced to go to the bathroom on himself.”
According to the Senate report, the still-withheld documents also tell another story: one about those within the government who objected to torture even when it tarnished their reputations or derailed their careers. One email referenced in the Senate report was written by the CIA’s chief of interrogations after he received the interrogation plan for Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, a former CIA detainee currently being held at Guantánamo Bay. The CIA chief wrote that he would “no longer be associated in any way with the interrogation program due to serious reservation[s]” and that he would be “retiring shortly.” Among other things, the report quotes him as writing, “[t]his is a train wreck [sic] waiting to happen and I intend to get the hell off the train before it happens.”
The ACLU has worked to expose the details of the torture program for more than a decade. As a result of our previous FOIA requests and ensuing litigation, the government has released more than 100,000 pages of torture-related documents. But while the ACLU has received a great deal of information on the Department of Defense’s torture of detainees, some of the critical documents relating to the CIA’s torture program have remained partially or fully hidden. Our fight for transparency continues with this request, along with our ongoing battles for the release of the SSCI’s full 6,900-page report and photographic evidence of torture in two separate cases pending before federal appeals courts.
The release of the executive summary should be a turning point — not the endpoint — for transparency.
August 15, 2015
Posted by aletho |
Deception, Subjugation - Torture | Central Intelligence Agency, CIA, United States |
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