The U.S. Terrorists
by Conn Hallinan

The Smell of Smoke
by Margo Pepper

excerpted from the book

September 11 and the U.S. War

Beyond the Curtain of Smoke

Edited by Roger Burbach and Ben Clarke

City Lights Books, 2002

p59

The U.S. Terrorists
by Conn Hallinan

There is a law in politics almost as old as the business itself. When one lays claim to the moral high ground, goes the saying, one should be "as Caesar's wife: above reproach." The Bush Administration's inattention to that piece of wisdom is likely to cause it no end of trouble as it tries to cobble together an international coalition against terrorism.

When the United States' new United Nations Ambassador John Negroponte rose to praise that body's Sept. 28 resolution on terrorism, reminding delegates that the action "obligates all member states to deny financing, support, and safe haven for terrorists," his remarks were greeted with studied silence by Latin American delegates. It is hard to cheer when you're gritting your teeth.

Twenty years ago, Negroponte was financing and supporting terrorist death squads in Honduras and providing "safe haven" for the Contras, who used sabotage and murder in their efforts to overthrow the Sandinista regime in Nicaragua.

When Negroponte took over as U.S. Ambassador to Honduras in 1981, the outgoing Carter Administration appointee, Jack Binns, warned him that human rights abuses were on the rise. Negroponte not only ignored him, he oversaw a jump in U.S. military aid from $3.9 million in 1981 to S77.4 million in 1984. At the time, Honduras had no internal or external enemies, but was serving as the major launch pad for the U.S.-backed Contra attacks. Locals dubbed the country the "USS Honduras."

At the time Negroponte was denying human rights violations in Honduras, the military's notorious Battalion 3-16, a secret unit trained by the CIA, and headed by Gen. Gustavo Alverez Martinez, a graduate of the U.S.'s School of the Americas, was kidnapping and murdering opponents of the government. Some 184 murders have been documented by human rights organizations, including American Jesuit priest Joseph Carney. According to a 1995 series in the Baltimore Sun exposing the U.S. role in training the Battalion, the unit used electric shock and suffocation as its favored interrogation technique, murdering prisoners afterwards.

Honduran Congressman Efrain Diaz Aarrivillaga told the Sun he took up the issue of Battalion 3-16 with Negroponte, but said the Ambassador's attitude was one of "tolerance and silence." Diaz told the Sun, "They needed Honduras to loan its territory more than they were concerned about innocent people being killed."

Jose Miguel Vivanco, the director of Human Rights Watch/America, calls Negroponte the "ostrich ambassador," who "never saw anything wrong. He never heard about any serious rights violations. It was like he was living in another country."

The Senate Foreign Relations Committee had these reports before it when it approved Negroponte's nomination on Sept.14, but in the stampede to stand with the President, it chose not to pursue them. It is a decision the Senate may come to regret. When the new U.N. Ambassador thunders about the damages inflicted on Americans by the New York and Washington attacks, the Nicaraguans and Salvadorans may remind him that the International Court of Justice in the Hague found the U.S. liable for $17 billion of damage inflicted on both countries during the Reagan Administration's jihad in Central America. When Negroponte points to the 3,000-plus deaths caused by the Sept. 11 terrorism, Central Americans may sit quietly, but it is doubtful they will forget the 200,000 lives lost during their U.S.-sponsored civil wars, or the two million refugees those conflicts engendered.

If Negroponte is a potential headache for the White House, Elliot Abrams, the newly appointed senior director for the National Security Council's office for Democracy, Human Rights, and International Operations is a major migraine. Abrams was a key actor in the Iran-Contra business and was convicted of lying about it to Congress in 1986. What he was never charged with was covering up mass murder, murder most foul.

In December 1981, the U.S. trained Atlacatl Battalion rounded up the 900 residents of El Mazote in El Salvador and systematically murdered all but a few who escaped. They shot them with American M-16s, cut their throats, burned them alive, and machine gunned and macheted scores of children. The massacre was exposed by Ray Bonner of the New York Times and Alma Guillermoprieto of the Washington Post.

But their reports never received widespread circulation because Elliot Abrams covered up the atrocity. He lied, he spun, he whispered that Bonner and Guillermoprieto were rebel sympathizers, and tossed out just enough smoke and intimidation that a timid press backed off the story. In the end it all came out when the U.N. Truth Commission carried out a painstaking reconstruction of the massacre in 1993.

Abrams' response to the Commission's findings on El Mazote and the fact that 85 percent of the 22,000 extra-legal murders in El Salvador were carried out by U.S.-sponsored death squads in alliance with the Salvadoran military? "The (Reagan) Administration's record on El Salvador is one of fabulous achievement." And this is the man whom the world should listen to on democracy and human rights?

There are other terrorists whom the Bush Administration has unearthed and brought back into the fold as well. Keep an eye out for Otto Reich, the nominee for Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. As the former head of the State Department's Latin America Office, he helped plant stories and opinion pieces praising the Contras in U.S. newspapers. It wasn't just the stories that were phony, so were the authors. Reich's office wrote them all. He also helped spring terrorist Orlando Bosch from a Venezuelan prison in 1987. Bosch was jailed for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban commercial airplane that killed 73 people.

This is the caliber of people making speeches about fighting terrorism these days. It's enough to make the angels weep.

Conn Hallinan is a Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

*****

p78

The Smell of Smoke
by Margo Pepper

... According to [Noam] Chomsky, George Kennan, the Head of the State Department Planning Staff in the late 1940s, acknowledged that the United States had amassed half the world's wealth and that such unbridled greed bred resentment elsewhere on the planet. The primary purpose of U.S. foreign policy claimed Kennan, was to "maintain that disparity" at the expense of "vague" and "idealistic" notions such as "human rights, the raising of the living standards and democratization." At the time, the sole threat to U.S. security were ICBMs and thermonuclear weapons, yet there is no evidence that any efforts to prevent this threat were ever made. Chomsky concludes that this historical record teaches us that questions of security have never been relevant to the arms race; and they still are not significant.

Today, fundamentalist terrorists worldwide from the Taliban to Falwell-followers and neo-Nazi militia all pose real and disturbing threats to our well-being. However, judging from top defense contracts and airline and insurance company bailouts-with only token pennies for displaced and laid-off workers-it is plausible that our planners are more concerned -with funneling our tax dollars to CEOs, than protecting us. Ever since the Second World War helped lift us out of the Great Depression of the 1930s Chomsky reminds us, the lesson of "Keynesian" economics taught both U.S. planners and Fascist powers that if a government subsidizes production in the advanced sectors of industry, a capitalist economy can pull itself out of economic straits. The most tempting way for governments to do this is through military spending; the state creates a guaranteed market for high-priced technological production. And the most efficient way to goad tax-payers into footing the bill is to scare the wits out of them. Chomsky elaborates: "You can always frighten them because the 'monolithic and ruthless conspiracy' is out there ready to take over the world."

Furthermore, as long as people are terrified and blindly obedient-regardless of the legitimacy of the sources of these initial emotions-a state of national security acts as a smoke screen to veil unjustified and illegal attacks on civil liberties at home, as well as to obfuscate aggressive policies abroad which, ironically, will only provoke more incidents like the crimes against humanity that claimed more than 3,000 lives in New York. Fear has pushed the Patriot Act through, indefinitely restricting our First and Fourth amendment rights, and on October 2, 343 billion of the dollars that were nowhere to be found for healthcare, homeless shelters, schools or social security, were funneled straight into the pockets of Boeing, General Electric, Lockheed and others. If we are not vigilant, fear will shut down our system of checks and balances, extend the WTO and approve union-busting Fast Track, putting thousands more out of work here at home, at the very least.

Unfortunately, fear is just one of several motivators to adopting positions which the public might have previously found objectionable. Stalin, McCarthy and Hitler all demonstrated the efficacy of massive propaganda campaigns which not only exacerbated fear, but elicited subservience from subjects. Philip G. Zimbardo from Stanford University, Ebbe B. Ebbesen at the University of California, San Diego and Christina Maslach at the University of California, Berkeley list some variables involved in such coercive persuasion, commonly known as brainwashing:

Isolation from Old Social Support.
The usual sources of support are severed. In the initial weeks of the 911 tragedy, media offered no respite from the news, ball games were cancelled, restaurants and movie theaters were empty.

Information Control.
The only ideas presented are those contained in the philosophy of the coercive persuasion agent. There is no opportunity to independently assess the validity or seek informative counter-arguments. Any opposition, teach-ins, attempt to criticize factual U.S. foreign policy, past or present, has been termed traitorous and unpatriotic. The only view acceptable is Bush's party line. "You're with us, or you're with the terrorists." After ten days of bombing Afghanistan, the United States bought up rights to the commercial satellite which has pictures of the area, so no one can publish them. Clear Channel banned all songs which advocate peace. Pacifica radio, the only corporate-free radio network in the U.S., is under constant attack. Instead of the footage of hundreds of civilian casualties and the burning of U.S. pop-tart food rations by civilian Afghanis, our media gives us only interviews with missile-envying U.S. generals and insipid speeches and sound bites for T.V.-stunted minds. "Effective propaganda must be brought out in the form of slogans. . . If this principle is sacrificed to the desire to be many-sided, it will dissipate the effectual working of the propaganda, for the people will be unable to digest or retain the material offered them."-Adolf Hitler

Cohesive Peer Group.
Approval becomes a powerful source of social reward, status and recognition. Skewed poll questions and population samples manufacture consent for Bush's war policies. The New York and Bay Area protests on October 6 that swelled to over ten thousand protesters each were not covered by corporate media. While both major cities may have substantial opposition to the war, most individuals outside them who favor justice instead of vengeance are being led to believe that they're lone voices.

Illusion of Free Choice. Once the target behavior is self-generated, the new behavior will be maintained in the absence of surveillance or pressure-because it's one's own.

Should most readers feel immune to such persuasion, they may recall the infamous study by Stanley Milgram on blind obedience to authority in which the overwhelming majority of subjects continued to deliver, on demand, potentially lethal shocks to an innocent "victim." According to co-author of Human Information Processing (1977, Academic Press, Inc.) Donald A. Norman at the University of California, San Diego, the results of the Milgram experiment "raise the possibility that human nature, or- more specifically-the kind of character produced in American democratic society, cannot be counted on to insulate its citizens from brutality and inhumane treatment at the direction of malevolent authority.... If in this study an anonymous experimenter could successfully command adults to subdue a fifty-year-old man and force on him painful electric shocks against his protests, one can only wonder what government, with its vastly greater authority and prestige, can command of its subjects." (Milgram, 1965)

As we witness the brutal killings and beatings of innocent Arab-American shop-keepers and gas-station attendants and the relentless bombing of a country in which over seven million face starvation, one need not wonder for long.

During McCarthyism, the State justified the repression by scapegoating "communists"; today it's "terrorists," a fluid term presently extending to many groups, including Arab-Americans, Muslims and activists. One might wonder why the definition of "terrorist" doesn't extend to neo-Nazi and other perpetrators at home, whose crimes include brutally dragging an African American to his death by chaining him to a truck, murdering an abortion doctor, threatening anthrax repeatedly at Planned Parenthood facilities and blowing up the Oklahoma Federal Building. In this Orwellian political scenario in which old enemies like Russia become allies and old Taliban business partners become targets, double-think logic means that white U.S. citizens cannot be named as terrorists (unless they protest or try to shed light on U.S. war crimes or injustices, in which case they are "traitors"). It is for these so-called "traitors" and "terrorists" that Dalton Trumbo's suppressed statement submitted to the House On Un-American Activities Committee in 1947 must ring true:

"Already the gentlemen of this committee and others of like disposition have produced in this capital city a political atmosphere which is acrid with fear and repression; a community in which anti-Semitism finds safe refuge behind secret tests of loyalty; a city in which no union leader can trust his telephone; a city in which old friends hesitate to recognize one another in public places; a city in which men and women who dissent even slightly from the orthodoxy you seek to impose, speak with confidence only in moving cars and in the open air. You have produced a capital city on the eve of its Reichstag fire. For those who remember German history in the autumn of 1932 there is the smell of smoke in this very room."

p81
Fascism, by definition of Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary in 1983, does not have to be as extreme as Hitler's Nazism. Rather, it is:
"a system of government characterized by rigid one-party dictatorship, forcible suppression of the opposition (unions, other, especially leftist, parties, minority groups, etc.), the retention of private ownership of the means of production under centralized governmental control, belligerent nationalism and racism, glorification of war, etc. First instituted in Italy in 1922."

p83
The FBI has always done more than chase criminals; like the CIA it has long considered itself the protector of U.S. ideology. Those who opposed government policies-whether civil rights workers, anti-Vietnam war protesters, opponents of the covert Reagan-era wars or cultural dissidents- have repeatedly been surveilled and their activities disrupted by the FBI.

p87
Wartime Lies: A Consumer's Guide to the Bombing
by Paul Bass

CBS News anchor Dan Rather, after the Sept. 11 attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center

"George Bush is the president, he makes the decisions, and, you know, as just one American, he wants me to line up, just tell me where."

*****

p89

Media War Without End
by Norman Solomon

News media of the United States have been sliding down a long-term slippery slope. Television networks in particular are running scared-accelerating their already appreciable zeal to serve the propaganda agendas of top officials in Washington.

p89
Walter Karp, Harper's magazine, 1990
"The first fact of American journalism is its overwhelming dependence on sources, mostly official, usually powerful.

p89
Behind the scenes, the tacit deals amount to quid pro quos. Officials dispense leaks to reporters with track records of proven willingness to stay within bounds. "It is a bitter irony of source journalism," Karp observed, ~

p89
Walter Karp, Harper's magazine, 1990
"The most esteemed journalists are precisely the most servile. For it is by making themselves useful to the powerful that they gain access to the 'best' sources".

p90
... mainstream media outlets provide big megaphones for those who already have plenty of clout. That suits wealthy owners, large advertisers and government officials. But what about democracy?

p90

... the overwhelming bulk of news organizations [are] accustomed to serving as amplification systems for Washington's warriors in times of crisis ...

p92
Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, November 1988, speaking to senior CIA officials at the agency headquarters in Langley, Virginia

"There are some things the general public does not need to know and shouldn't. I believe democracy flourishes when the government can take legitimate steps to keep its secrets and when the press can decide whether to print what it knows."

p99
Coming to a Mall Near You: Just War
by David Potorti

War, to the increasing exclusion of everything else, is the only thing that America collectively cares about anymore.

We don't manufacture much of anything; just war. We don't concern ourselves with education; just war. We don't attend to the 40 million Americans without health coverage; just war. We don't focus on the 30 million American children living in poverty; just war. We don't support the arts; just war. Even though a multitude of human needs were in existence prior to September 11, and have only increased since then, we continue to direct our attention and our resources into what we do best: war. Just war.

September 11 and U.S. War

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