A System of Injustice
from the book
Toward an American Revolution
by Jerry Fresia
South End Press
... A battle was waged by the Framers to maintain between
themselves as property owners and common people as non-property
owners a political separation which could not be bridged. We call
this relationship democracy and it is this vision of the world
that is dangerously inaccurate.
... those of us who are really outraged by what our government
is doing in our name spend quite a bit of time asking the question,
"But what can we do?" This is hardly the refrain of
an empowered people who believe that they govern themselves.
... far from being a government of "the people, ours
is a government which rests on the assumption that "the people,"
especially when they become politically excited, interested, and
alive, are thought of as subversive. Any serious student of political
surveillance and repression in this country knows this to be true.
But we seem to prefer to protect our moral high-mindedness by
permitting elites, virtually at every chance they get, to persist
in the lie that it is "we the people," and not "we
the largest property owners," who govern this country. In
so doing we risk weakening our understanding of the ways in which
our lives are systematically made subordinate to the interests
of the rich and politically powerful. And in so doing, we invite
our own destruction.
***
The Bill of Rights
Following the colonial experience, both the Framers and the
common people shared a fear of tyranny or oppressive government
and the tyranny of an imperial power which exploited the productive
and trade opportunities of its colonies. It is upon this fear
that the Bill of Rights rests. The Bill of Rights guarantees individuals
protection from the government but it is the kind of protection
that individual entrepreneurs, merchants, creditors, property
owners, and speculators sought after having escaped the grip of
British capitalists. As Staughton Lynd reminds us, "The First
Amendment was not intended to protect the rights of wage workers
... Rather the amendment sought to safeguard the rights of property-owning
middle-class citizens to read, speak, meet and publish, prior
to the formation of public policy."
... Proposals which attempted to make private power accountable,
even in limited ways, however, were rejected. Consequently, while
we have protection as individuals from the government (in principle
but not in practice), the Bill of Rights does not protect us from
corporations or from our employers. The point here is that the
Bill of Rights is quite consistent with the enhancement of private
power intended by the Constitution. Corporations, themselves considered
individuals (given a 1943 ruling by the Supreme Court), are often
shielded by the Bill of Rights from public demands. The recent
effort by the tobacco industry to prevent the government from
prohibiting their advertisements in magazines by pointing to the
Bill of Rights is a case in point.
While few would disagree that the Bill of Rights affords certain
individuals important protection from the government and therefore
ought to be celebrated and carefully guarded, one could also argue
chat there is more to citizenship than protection. The Bill of
Rights says not a word about guaranteeing participation. This
is especially true width regard to investment decisions, the use
of national resources, and workplace practices (there is no right
to strike, for example). It is also true with regard to simple
political participation. Despite all the talk about our "right
to vote," voting is not a right guaranteed by the Constitution.
It is a privilege granted by the state for which we must qualify,
and much of U.S. political history has been the struggle of the
under-classes to do just that. As Sheldon Wolin points out, the
Bill of Rights is "couched in such a language that was less
suggestive of what a citizen might actively do than what government
was prohibited from doing. ('Congress shall make no law...abridging
the freedom of speech...' 'No person shall...be deprived of life,
liberty, or property, without due process of law...')" Indeed,
the protection afforded by the Bill of Rights is quite conditional
...
... A political-economic document, the Constitution was supposedly
designed to "preserve the spirit and form of popular government"
(Madison) even as the substance of popular government was taken
away and the participatory politics flourishing at the local level
was weakened. This was done out of fear and distrust of the political
tendencies of common people or what Madison called an "unjust
and interested majority." Having established the political
supremacy of property owners, the Constitution was then able to
authorize the state to encourage economic expansion through the
regulation of commerce, the protection of industry, trade, and
private property the guarantee of contracts, and the development
of a capital market. In other words the state was placed at the
service of private elites and made an instrument of private power.
The token usage of such egalitarian phrases as "we the people,"
as Wolin correctly points out, was "a formula to give the
Constitution a legitimate basis, not to encourage an active citizenry."
The vitality of the state would come not from a politically astute
and engaged citizenry but from a highly productive and efficient
economy. "Getting the economy moving again," not "liberation,"
would become the slogan of candidates running for political office.
And here we come to the heart of the crisis which infects our
political order. The concept of a reflective, politically active
and community oriented citizen ... must be displaced by the concept
of the responsible citizen ... one who gives "a due obedience
to its [the federal government's] authority" (Hamilton) and
who appreciates and longs for the imperial reward for obedience:
material wealth and protection.
What does this mean? It means that long as we value the accumulation
and protection of property, and a judiciary to protect us from
the government more than we value playing a meaningful role in
the decisions that affect our lives, we obey. We don't ask questions.
We learn to care more about how much we earn than about what we
do and even less about the impact that our work has on others.
In fact, obedience implicitly means that when we go to work we
leave our conscience at home. It also means that we agree not
to care so much about the details of politics as long as the form
of popular government and the appearance of democracy is maintained.
We agree when we consider political issues to think primarily
in terms of self-interest and consumer sovereignty. The Middle-East?
That means the price of oil. Central America? There is the potential
for more Spanish-speaking refugees to pour across our border.
Social programs? Unless I am a recipient, they have a bad effect
on my taxes and interest rates. We learn to admit that we are
selfish and materialistic, as though it could not be otherwise,
and then take pride for being honest in this admission. But notice:
it is in the context of this obedience that I may claim my rights
as a responsible citizen and expect the government to deliver
to me as a responsible citizen the real opportunity to acquire
affluence and comfort. It is in this context of obedience that
my freedom of speech is protected. For if I don't obey, if I persist
in valuing real democracy and community higher than the opportunity
to obtain private power and affluence, then I am a subversive
and my freedom of speech can
*
Political repression in the United States ... has been constant
and widespread. And the depth and persistence of political repression
in the United States, in light of our nation's self-understanding
as a free and innocent people, is, in a word, shocking.
*
... because we are supposed to be a government of the people,
much of the work of our government's "secret police"
is concerned with making sure that people do, in fact, support
what the government is doing.
*
... the rush to defend the Constitution on the part of many
progressives ... stems from the desire to protect the liberal
ideal which the Framers ( of the Constitution) used to cloak their
defense of private power and their quest for private empire ...
... It emerges, ultimately, from a desire to protect the myth
of innocence: we are a self-governed nation of the people, where
individual freedom is extended to all, where no one is above the
law, and where the right to dissent is guaranteed by the Bill
of Rights. But in order to preserve the innocence of the liberal
ideal, we must ignore the fact that the Constitution is more than
a design for a political system; we must ignore that it is a design
for a political economic system... the political system which
the Constitution created was intended to support private power
("freedom") in a private economy ("free" enterprise)
and that today its purpose is to support and protect a capitalist
empire...
... the use of military force by the state in the service
of private power has been a constant feature of the expansion
of our economy. According to a 1969 study, the United States has
been engaged in warlike activity during three-fourths of its history
(in 1,782 out of 2,340 months). To put this dynamic in a constitutional
context, persistent acts of war have been sponsored by the federal
government because in order to validate the state debt, protect
private property, provide military and diplomatic representation
abroad, suppress insurrections and do the other things that the
Constitution requires the state to do to help property owners
control productive activity and markets on a global scale, the
state repeatedly has had to take the side of the few who seek
control against the many who resist it.
... The United States is nearly always at war because the
United States is nearly always using violence to support the few
who are rich against the many who are poor. It is the few who
are rich (those who own vast amounts of wealth producing property),
then, who have real power in our society because it is their private
interests (the "national interest") that need to be
served if economic expansion is to take place. Working through
their own private organizations such as the Council on Foreign
Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Ford and Rockefeller
Foundations, the Committee for Economic Development, and such
"think tanks" as the American Enterprise Institute,
these elites become an unaccountable governing force that can
become a secret government if and when they acquire positions
within the government which enable them to link military and intelligence
capability with specific corporate needs.
*
Fletcher Prouty, a former officer within the Defense Intelligence
Agency, describes those who run the secret government ... "security-cleared
individuals in and out of government who receive secret intelligence
data gathered by the CIA and the National Security Agency..."
whose power derives from the "vast intra-governmental undercover
infrastructure and its direct relationship with great private
industries, mutual funds and investment houses, universities,
and the news media, including foreign and domestic publishing
houses." During the post-World War II era, states Prouty
"more and more control over military and diplomatic operations
at home and abroad (has been) assumed by elites "whose activities
are secret, whose budget is secret, whose very identities as often
as not are secret."
The fundamental issue which underlies secret government ((and
the secret teams which they field to carry out "special"
covert operations))is injustice. The American people must not
know that their government acts violently and unjustly on a regular
basis.(But there is an additional twist). The injustice in question
is purposeful. It is a feature of economic expansion, privilege,
and private empire. It is in the interest of private elites...
*
After more than a century and a half of varied social movements,
Congress in 1947 felt compelled to create a new level of government
that better insulated private elites from the public pressures
of policy making. The National Security Act of 1947, which gave
birth to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National
Security Council (NSC) among other agencies and departments,
enabled corporate elites to more directly and more secretly
control war making policies essential for global economic expansion
and stability. It was the stronger centralization, the more severe
set of checks and balances against public power that many of the
more conservative members of the Constitutional Convention such
as Hamilton had argued for in 1787. Moreover, the act created
a new kind of transnational army within the CIA suitable for suppressing
insurrections and overthrowing governments ( "such other
functions and duties") on a global scale just as the Framers
had created a national army in 1787 to suppress insurrections
on a state or regional scale.
*
The military collaboration between the Allies and the Fourth
Reich Nazis was extensive. As early as December 1941 key top generals
had become disillusioned with Hitler's handling of the war and
began to plan ways of rebuilding the German military after the
anticipated German defeat. Perhaps the major figure in the post-war
collaborative efforts was Hitler's chief of Soviet intelligence,
Reinhard Gehlen. As the Russians closed in on Berlin in April
1945, Gehlen, with his staff and crates of intelligence, fled
to a hideout in the Bavarian mountains. From there he worked out
a deal with the Americans where he would continue to supply intelligence
on the Soviet Union and its satellites to the United States provided
that he would be permitted to maintain an autonomous organization
under his control. The deal was made and Gehlen, accompanied by
Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner and others, was brought to the United
States three months after VE (Victory in Europe) Day in the uniform
of a four-star U.S. Army general. Gehlen's entire intelligence
organization was grafted from the Third Reich onto the U.S. government
and became the nucleus of the CIA. Gehlen's organization was later
sent back to West Germany and became West Germany's intelligence
system and largely the intelligence of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) as well. It should be pointed out that by
April 1961, Adolph Heusinger, the last Deputy Chief of the German
General Staff (or number two military man in the Wehrmacht) had
become Chairman of the Permanent Military Committee of NATO, the
highest ranking U.S. military office in NATO.
Gehlen was just one of 5,000 SS and Gestapo Nazis who, with
the assistance of key U.S. government officials like Dulles, were
able to find safe refuge outside of Germany. Many of the most
sadistic killers such as Joseph Mengele were protected by the
United States in their effort to escape justice. Many would develop
links with neo-fascist elements in the military or interior ministries
of Latin American countries (particularly in Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay,
Argentina, and Peru) and collaborate with the CIA in repressive
operations against the Left. And many found their way into the
U.S. intelligence system, including, for a time, Adolf Eichmann
and Klaus Barbie. Peter Dale Scott concludes that one legacy of
the U.S.-Nazi collaboration "is the system of Death Squads
now operative in Central America. Another has been the involvement
of men like Barbie and their political clients in the highly organized
Latin American drug traffic."
Although Gehlen is not well known, he left an important legacy
as well. For example, he initiated the idea of erecting an anti-communist
propaganda transmitter called Radio Free Europe. The idea was
implemented with the assistance of Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner
and private contributions from such groups as the CFR. More important
for our purposes was his creation before the war was over of Nazi
special forces, called the Werewolves, which were intended to
act as a partisan underground army inside Germany during the occupation.
Their battle cry was "better dead clan red." What is
interesting is that Gehlen's expertise with regard to guerrilla
tactics was called upon during the early 1950s to create a mercenary
army to penetrate eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The units
were called the Green Berets.
... between 1950 and 1975, the U.S. provided training or aid
to the police of twenty-two nations that practiced torture. The
U.S. also trained military personnel of four additional nations
that practiced torture during the same period. We know also that(United
State) the documentation of torture instruction by U.S. special
forces in Vietnam, Central America, and other places by such groups
as Amnesty International is extensive. Members of the CIA have
been present, according to some victims, during torture sessions.
The following is a brief excerpt from an interview with a Salvadoran
soldier who claims to have been in attendance at one of the torture
classes:
"The officers said we are going to teach you how to mutilate
and how to teach a lesson to these guerrillas. The officers who
were teaching us this were the American Green Berets. . .then
they began to torture this young fellow. The took out their knives
and stuck them under his fingernails. After they took his fingernails
off then they broke his elbows. Afterwards they gouged out his
eyes. They took their bayonets and made all sorts of slices in
his skin...They then took his hair off and the skin of his scalp.
When they saw there was nothing left to do with him they threw
gasoline on him and burned him...the next day they started the
same thing with a 13 year old girl...
The idea of the "death squad," which is central
to the torture network, was suggested in 1962 by U.S. General
William Yarborough, head of the Special Warfare Center at Fort
Bragg. He urged security forces to "select civilian and military
personnel for clandestine training" that would "execute
paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known
Communist proponents." Used in Vietnam in the Phoenix Program
which was responsible for the assassination of more than 20,000
Viet Cong (these are CIA figures, other estimates are as high
as 100,000), Yarborough's death squad concept often operates out
of the U.S. Office(s) of Public Safety, a division of the Agency
for International Development. It is interesting to note that
the term public safety has been used throughout U.S. history to
cover instances of repression. And the term has its roots in the
Constitution. The one instance where the Constitution (Article
I Section 9) authorizes the state to take people off the street
without a writ of habeas corpus or due process "when in cases
of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."
John Stockwell, a former CIA agent, has stated that a woman
who had been tortured in Brazil for two years testified, before
international tribunals, that "the most horrible thing beyond
the pain and degradation was the fact that the people doing the
torturing were not raving psychopaths. She said had they been
she might have been better able to break mental contact with them.
She said they were normal, everyday, decent people doing these
things to her." According to Stockwell, the woman reported
that during a torture session conducted by six men in which she
was strapped naked to a table, there was an interruption: "The
American is called to a telephone in the next room. The rest take
a smoke break. And she listens to the conversation as he says,
"Oh hi honey. Yes, I can wrap it up here in another hour
or two and pick up the kids and meet you at the ambassador's on
the way home."
It has often been said that the CIA is the president's private
army. But the role of the CIA and other military forces that are
shrouded in mystery such as those associated with the Defense
Intelligence Agency appear to be less at the command of the president
than at the command of those whom the president serves, namely
international corporate elites. It appears, then, that the CIA
is a special force, trained as professionals to carry out impersonal
and anonymous punishment, for international corporate elites.
These elites, because of their hidden power and influence within
the Executive branch of government, constitute, at any given time,
a secret government. And that secret government is capable of
fielding secret teams whose job it is to remove political opposition
to the expansion of our private economy by any means necessary.
***
The Constitution and Secret Government
... The federal government continues to assassinate political
opponents despite declarations and statutes to the contrary, collaborates
with transnational criminal organizations in drug dealing for
the purpose of covert financing, and systematically promulgates
disinformation about its political opponents and its own policies.
*
... the rush to defend the Constitution on the part of many
progressives ... stems from the desire to protect the liberal
ideal which the Framers used to cloak their defense of private
power and their quest for private empire... It emerges ... from
a desire to protect the myth of innocence: we are a self-governed
nation of the people, where individual freedom is extended to
all, where no one is above the law, and where the right to dissent
is guaranteed by the Bill of Rights. But in order to preserve
the innocence of the liberal ideal, we must ignore the fact that
the Constitution is more than a design for a political system;
we must ignore that it is a design for a political economic system...
the political system which the Constitution created was intended
to support private power ("freedom") in a private economy
("free" enterprise) and that today its purpose is to
support and protect a capitalist empire...
... the use of military force by the state in the service
of private power has been a constant feature of the expansion
of our economy. According to a 1969 study, the United States has
been engaged in warlike activity during three-fourths of its history
(in 1,782 out of 2,340 months). To put this dynamic in a constitutional
context, persistent acts of war have been sponsored by the federal
government because in order to validate the state debt, protect
private property, provide military and diplomatic representation
abroad, suppress insurrections and do the other things that the
Constitution requires the state to do to help property owners
control productive activity and markets on a global scale, the
state repeatedly has had to take the side of the few who seek
control against the many who resist it.
... The United States is nearly always at war because the
United States is nearly always using violence to support the few
who are rich against the many who are poor. It is the few who
are rich (those who own vast amounts of wealth producing property),
then, who have real power in our society because it is their private
interests (the "national interest") that need to be
served if economic expansion is to take place. Working through
their own private organizations such as the Council on Foreign
Relations, the Trilateral Commission, the Ford and Rockefeller
Foundations, the Committee for Economic Development, and such
"think tanks" as the American Enterprise Institute,
these elites become an unaccountable governing force that can
become a secret government if and when they acquire positions
within the government which enable them to link military and intelligence
capability with specific corporate needs.
Fletcher Prouty, a former officer within the Defense Intelligence
Agency, describes those who run the secret government this way:
they are "security-cleared individuals in and out of government
who receive secret intelligence data gathered by the CIA and the
National Security Agency..." whose power derives from the
"vast intra-governmental undercover infrastructure and its
direct relationship with great private industries, mutual funds
and investment houses, universities, and the news media, including
foreign and domestic publishing houses." During the post-World
War II era, states Prouty, more and more control over military
and diplomatic operations at home and abroad" [has been]
assumed by elites "whose activities are secret, whose budget
is secret, whose very identities as often as not are secret..."
The fundamental issue which underlies secret government ((and
the secret teams which they field to carry out "special"
covert operations is injustice.. The American people must not
know that their government acts violently and unjustly on a regular
basis. But there is an additional twist. The injustice in question
is purposeful. It is a feature of economic expansion, privilege,
and private empire. It is in the interest of private elites. All
of this is quite consistent with the values of the Framers, the
way they understood and explained inequality, and the purposes
to which the Constitution was committed. To be sure, the Framers
had no way of knowing the dimension of the political problem that
would confront their descendants following 1945 when the empire
was fully realized. They had no way of knowing that the checks
and balances outlined within the Constitution might not be sufficient
to protect private power against the rapid upward swell of political
activism following World War II and on into the 1960s and 1970s.
They had no way of knowing that the suppression of insurrections,
shifted to a global scale, would take the form of virulent anticommunism,
Nazi collaboration, and state sponsored terrorism. This set of
sins was not especially more wicked than the acts of human enslavement
and genocide committed by the Framers. But against the standards
of decency that had emerged by the mid-twentieth century, the
blustering and impersonal violence of capitalist expansion could
not be legitimated as easily. Instead, new methods of insulating
the policymaking of private elites from interested majorities
had to be invented. Thus, the real issue today is not whether
the dirty work of the secret team violates the Constitution, it
is whether the work of the Framers is sufficient to protect corporate
power from the people in the wake of yet another "crisis
of democracy," whether called feminism, Black Power, student
protest, environmentalism, peace, the New Age or simply the "Vietnam
syndrome."
*
After more than a century and a half of varied social movements,
Congress in 1947 felt compelled to create a new level of government
that better insulated private elites from the public pressures
of policy making. The National Security Act of 1947, which gave
birth to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the National
Security Council (NSC) among other agencies and departments, enabled
corporate elites to more directly and more secretly control war
making policies essential for global economic expansion and stability.
It was the stronger centralization, the more severe set of checks
and balances against public power that many of the more conservative
members of the Constitutional Convention such as Hamilton had
argued for in 1787. Moreover, the act created a new kind of transnational
army within the ClA suitable for suppressing insurrections and
overthrowing governments ... on a global scale just as the Framers
had created a national army in 178,7 to suppress insurrections
on a state or regional scale.
*
The Secret Government and the Rise of Nazi Germany
*
... the U.S. government leaders together with private elites
have often felt compelled to organize counter-revolutionary armies
to protect property and market relations or what they prefer to
call "freedom."
*
The Secret Government Following World War II
*
... The military collaboration between the Allies and the
Fourth Reich Nazis was extensive. As early as December 1941 key
top generals had become disillusioned with Hitler's handling of
the war and began to plan ways of rebuilding the German military
after the anticipated German defeat. Perhaps the major figure
in the post-war collaborative efforts was Hitler's chief of Soviet
intelligence, Reinhard Gehlen. As the Russians closed in on Berlin
in April 1945, Gehlen, with his staff and crates of intelligence,
fled to a hideout in the Bavarian mountains. From there he worked
out a deal with the Americans where he would continue to supply
intelligence on the Soviet Union and its satellites to the United
States provided that he would be permitted to maintain an autonomous
organization under his control. The deal was made and Gehlen,
accompanied by Allen Dulles, Frank Wisner and others, was brought
to the United States three months after VE (Victory in Europe)
Day in the uniform of a four-star U.S. Army general. Gehlen's
entire intelligence organization was grafted from the Third Reich
onto the U.S. government and became the nucleus of the CIA. Gehlen's
organization was later sent back to West Germany and became West
Germany's intelligence system and largely the intelligence of
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as well. It should
be pointed out that by April 1961, Adolph Heusinger, the last
Deputy Chief of the German General Staff (or number two military
man in the Wehrmacht) had become Chairman of the Permanent Military
Committee of NATO, the highest ranking U.S. military office in
NATO.
Gehlen was just one of 5,000 SS and Gestapo Nazis who, with
the assistance of key U.S. government officials like Dulles, were
able to find safe refuge outside of Germany. Many of the most
sadistic killers such as Joseph Mengele were protected by the
United States in their effort to escape justice. Many would develop
links with neo-fascist elements in the military or interior ministries
of Latin American countries (particularly in Chile, Bolivia, Paraguay,
Argentina, and Peru) and collaborate with the ClA in repressive
operations against the Left. And many found their way into the
U.S. intelligence system, including, for a time, Adolf Eichmann
and Klaus Barbie. Peter Dale Scott concludes that one legacy of
the U.S.-Nazi collaboration "is the system of Death Squads
now operative in Central America. Another has been the involvement
of men like Barbie and their political clients in the highly organized
Latin American drug traffic. "
Although Gehlen is not well known, he left an important legacy
as well. For example, he initiated the idea of erecting an anti-communist
propaganda transmitter called Radio Free Europe. The idea was
implemented with the assistance of Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner
and private contributions from such groups as the CFR. More important
for our purposes was his creation before the war was over of Nazi
special forces, called the Werewolves, which were intended to
act as a partisan underground army inside Germany during the occupation.
Their battle cry was "better dead than red." What is
interesting is that Gehlen's expertise with regard to guerrilla
tactics was called upon during the early 1950s to create a mercenary
army to penetrate eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. The units
were called the Green Berets.
*
... between 1950 and 1975, the U.S. provided training or aid
to the police of twenty-two nations that practiced torture. The
U.S. also trained military personnel of four additional nations
that practiced torture during the same period. We know also that(United
State] the documentation of torture instruction by U.S. special
forces in Vietnam, Central America, and other places by such groups
as Amnesty International is extensive. Members of the ClA have
been present, according to some victims, during torture sessions.33
The following is a brief excerpt from an interview with a Salvadoran
soldier who claims to have been in attendance at one of the torture
classes:
" The officers said we are going to teach you how to
mutilate and how to teach a lesson to these guerrillas. The officers
who were teaching us this were the American Green Berets. . .then
they began to torture this young fellow. The took out their knives
and stuck them under his fngernails. After they took his fingernails
off then they broke his elbows. Afterwards they gouged out his
eyes. They took their bayonets and made all sorts of slices in
his skin...They then took his hair off and the skin of his scalp.
When they saw there was nothing left to do with him they threw
gasoline on him and burned him...the next day they started the
same thing with a 13 year old girl... "
The idea of the "death squad," which is central
to the torture network, was suggested in 1962 by U.S. General
William Yarborough, head of the Special Warfare Center at Fort
Bragg. He urged security forces to "select civilian and military
personnel for clandestine training" that would "execute
paramilitary, sabotage and/or terrorist activities against known
Communist proponents." Used in Vietnam in the Phoenix Program
which was responsible for the assassination of more than 20,000
Viet Cong (these are CIA figures, other estimates are as high
as 100,000), Yarborough's death squad concept often operates out
of the U.S. Office(s) of Public Safety, a division of the Agency
for International Development. It is interesting to note that
the term public safety has been used throughout U.S. history to
cover instances of repression. And the term has its roots in the
Constitution. The one instance where the Constitution (Article
I Section 9) authorizes the state to take people off the street
without a writ of habeas corpus or due process "when in cases
of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it."
John Stockwell, a former CIA agent, has stated that a woman
who had been tortured in Brazil for two years testified, before
international tribunals, that "the most horrible thing beyond
the pain and degradation was the fact that the people doing the
torturing were not raving psychopaths. She said had they been
she might have been better able to break mental contact with them.
She said they were normal, everyday, decent people doing these
things to her." According to Stockwell, the woman reported
that during a torture session conducted by six men in which she
was strapped naked to a table, there was an interruption: "The
American is called to a telephone in the next room The rest take
a smoke break. And she listens to the conversation as he says.
" Oh hi honey. Yes, I can wrap it up here in another hour
or two and pick up the kids and meet you at the ambassador's on
the way home."
It has often been said that the CIA is the president's private
army. But the role of the CIA and other military forces that are
shrouded in mystery such as those associated with the Defense
Intelligence Agency appear to be less at the command of the president
than at the command of those whom the president serves, namely
international corporate elites. It appears, then, that the CIA
is a special force, trained as professionals to carry out impersonal
and anonymous punishment, for international corporate elites.
These elites, because of their hidden power and influence within
the Executive branch of government, constitute, at any given time,
a secret government. And that secret government is capable of
fielding secret teams whose job it is to remove political opposition
to the expansion of our private economy by any means necessary.
***
The Secret Government and the Secret Team of Today
The chief political officer of the NSC's Special Group which
planned the Bay of Pigs invasion in 1959 was then Vice-President
Richard Nixon. Following the precedent set by the Gehlen-Dulles-Wisner
secret armies that penetrated the Soviet Union, Nixon and Dulles
also established secret military training bases for counter-revolutionary
Cubans whose assignment would be to infiltrate back into Cuba,
establish centers of guerrilla military resistance (much like
Gehlen's Werewolves) and wage terrorist military attacks against
the economic infra-structure of Cuba. The code-name for this operation
was Operation 40. In addition, Robert Mahue, a key figure in the
empire of billionaire Howard Hughes, and Santo Trafficante, a
Mafia casino, hotel, and prostitution operator who had been kicked
out of Cuba by Fidel Castro, were brought into Operation 40. Their
job was to carry out a "private" sub-operation, the
assassination of Castro, his brother Raul Castro, Che Guevara
and five other revolutionary Cuban government leaders.
The training of these political assassins by Trafficante and
his associates, called the Shooter Team, took place in Mexico
at a secret Triangular-Fire Training Base. The Shooter Team attempted
several assassinations of Castro between 1960 and 1963. Operation
40 (after the Bay of Pigs it was called Operation Mongoose; it
is also referred to as JM/Wave, the name of a Miami CIA station),
involving up to 6,000 (Cuban) counter-revolutionaries or "freedom
fighters," had the support of members within the Kennedy
administration. In 1963, members of Operation Mongoose were caught
smuggling narcotics to the U.S. from Cuba. For reasons that are
unclear, President Kennedy ordered the CIA to halt the raids in
1963. According to the House Select Committee on Assassinations,
it was "likely" that Santo Trafficante participated
in the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963.
Operation Mongoose continued into 1965 when it was shut down.
Theodore Shackley, a young CIA agent who had been brought in directly
from Berlin where he had worked with Gehlen, to head Operation
Mongoose along with his deputy, Thomas Clines, were then transferred
to Laos where Shackley was made Deputy Chief of Station for the
CIA in Laos. While in Laos, Shackley and Clines arranged air support
for one Vang Pao in a three-sided war in which yang Pao was fighting
to gain control of the Laotian opium trade. yang Pao, in turn,
helped Shackley and Clines, by financing the training of indigenous
Hmong tribesmen in guerrilla war tactics for use in "unconventional
warfare" activities which included the art of political assassination.
A Special Operations Group, supervised by Shackley and Clines,
was created which was a multi-service or Joins Task Force for
unconventional warfare. General John K. Singlaub supervised the
political assassination program in Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand.
One of his deputies was Oliver North, a major in the Marines at
the time. The Deputy Air Wing commander for the Special Operations
Group was Air Force General Richard Secord. Between 1966 and 1971,
this operation, using the secret Hmong tribesmen unit funded by
yang Pao's opium trade, assassinated over 100,000 suspected communists
(Upon-combatant village mayors, book-keepers, clerks and other
civilian bureaucrats") in Laos, Cambodia, and Thailand. In
1969, yang Pao's opium trade increased substantially as did the
money flowing from it to the Special Operations Group as Santo
Trafficante, from the initial Operation 40 team, worked with yang
Pao to become the number one importer and distributor of China
White heroin in the United States.
In 1971, Shackley was brought back to the U.S. and made the
chief of the CIA's Western Hemisphere operations. Clines was made
his deputy. And from this post they directed the political assassination
of Chilean socialist President Salvador Allende and his Chief
of Staff in Chile as well as the military overthrow of the Chilean
democratically elected government in 1973. It was during this
time that Henry Kissinger declared, "I don't see why we need
to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility
of its own people."
In 1973, Shackley and Clines were sent to Vietnam where they
directed the Phoenix Project which carried out the assassination
of members of the economic and political bureaucracy so that once
the U.S. withdrew from Vietnam, its ability to function successfully
and validate a communist alternative would be crippled. Within
the Phoenix Project, the ClA, through Shackley, Clines, and others,
carried out the assassination of some "60,000 village mayors,
treasurers, school teachers and other non-Viet Cong administrators."
Vang Pao opium money was also used in the Phoenix Project. In
charge of this drug money in Vietnam was Richard Armitage, a member
of the Saigon's U.S. office of Naval Operations from 1973 to 1975.
"However, because Theodore Shackley, Thomas Clines and
Richard Armitage knew that their secret and-communist extermination
program was going to be shut down in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia,
and Thailand in the very near future, they, in 1973 began a highly
secret non-ClA authorized program setting up their own private
anti-communist assassination and unconventional warfare program,
to operate after the end of the Vietnam campaign." Shackley
and Clines, therefore, began taking tons of U.S. weapons, ammunition,
and explosives (stored in Thailand) and they began funneling drug
money into a secret Australian bank account.
Following the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Vietnam in 1975,
Armitage was sent to Iran by Shackley and Clines in order to arrange
for a secret "financial conduit" to be set up in Iran
that could receive yang Pao's drug money. These funds were intended
to establish a non-CIA authorized secret team that would "seek
out, identify, and assassinate socialist and communist sympathizers,
who were viewed by Shackley and his 'secret team' members to be
'potential terrorists' against the Shah of Iran's government in
Iran." We find, then, a privately organized secret team,
run by government officials, emerging out of a government organized
secret team that was privately funded. The point simply is that
the linkages between private and government covert operations,
by the late 1970s were growing more complex. The purpose of assassinating
"communists" remained the same. And the assassination
of "communists" represented an efficient way of removing
obstacles in the path of market expansion. It was a rational solution.
In 1976, Richard Secord was sent to Tehran, Iran as the Deputy
Assistant Secretary of Defense in Iran. He was in charge of military
sales of U.S. aircraft, weapons and military equipment to "friendly"
nations in the Middle East. But Secord used a middle-man, Albert
Hakim. He did this so that he could purchase military equipment
from the U.S. government at a low "manufacturer's cost,"
turn around and sell the equipment to client states, through Hakim,
at a higher "replacement cost." The difference was secretly
transferred into Shackley's private secret team and into various
secret bank accounts. Secord and Hakim in other words, had joined
Shackley, Clines, and Armitage in their anticommunist assassination
project.
Just prior to the triumph of the Sandinistas over U.S. created
dictator Anatasio Somoza in Nicaragua, representatives of the
Shackley's secret team offered to assassinate the top leadership
of the Sandinista movement for $650,000. It is worth noting that
veterans of the 1960 Nixon-Trafficante Shooter Team that was brought
together for Operation 40 were still being used by Shackley. Meanwhile,
as Somoza was negotiating a lower price, it became clear that
the military situation of Somoza had deteriorated significantly.
The Carter administration, in the final days of Somoza's reign,
had cut off the supply of military equipment by the United States.
Therefore, the Shackley team arranged to fill the gap and provide
Somoza with military supplies. Neither President Carter nor director
of the ClA, Stansfield Turner, knew of the operations of Shackley's
secret team. In fact, Turner ordered that Shackley and Clines
resign from the ClA when he discovered that Shackley and Clines
were linked to an illegal weapons delivery to Libya.
When the Sandinistas kicked Somoza and his supporters out
of Nicaragua, Shackley, now acting privately, sent his representatives
to meet with Somoza (in exile in the Bahamas). They entered into
a contract to supply aircraft, weapons, ammunition, and military
explosives to Somoza and his National Guard or state police which
had fled Nicaragua so that they could execute a war against the
Sandinista government. The remnants of the National Guard, now
known as the Contras, were "virtually identical to the one(s)
which Theodore Shackley and Thomas Clines had supervised against
the socialist revolutionary government of Cuba from 1961 to 1965."
In 1981, with the election of President Reagan, the ClA officially
took over Shackley's operation of funding Somoza's National Guard
or Contras. And when Congress cut off funding for the Contras
in 1983, Lt. Colonel Oliver North, working with the NSC, turned
to Shackley, Clines, Hakim, and Secord and had the secret team
reactivate its military supply of the Contras. And when President
Reagan, Attorney General Meese, ClA Director William Casey, and
NSC members Robert McFarlane, John Poindexter and Oliver North
decided in 1985 to secretly send weapons to "friendly"
factions in Iran, they turned once again to the secret team.
After 200 years, the political system which was rooted in
the desire to serve and insulate private power has been forced
to circumvent, entirely, the political process. Jonathan Marshall,
Peter Dale Scott, and Jane Hunter write that given general public
hostility to "rolling back" socialist states in the
Third World, overt pursuit of the "Reagan Doctrine"
became "difficult or impossible. Even the ClA was a problematic
tool of policy owing to legal requirements that it report covert
operations to Congress." The reliance on private citizens
to carry out foreign policy was effective because a private citizen,
noted a "covert missions planner", "has no obligation
to tell anyone." And the Policy Development Group within
the NSC "could plan secret operations free from the obligation
to report to the intelligence committees of Congress." The
use of drug money as a means of covert financing also helps to
avoid the messiness of prolonged debate and uncertainty.
***
The Secret Government and Capitalism
*
The Constitution ... was designed to hold in check those people
without property, a majority at the time. It was also designed
to permit property owners the freedom to own unlimited amounts
of property and to have the freedom from government to do with
that property as they pleased, to invest anywhere, and to have
access to raw materials anywhere.
*
Such are the rights and freedom granted by the Constitution;
they rest upon the belief that government is the source of tyranny
and unchecked private power is the source of freedom. The Constitution
not only was intended to create a political system that would
serve private power (freedom), it was intended to guarantee that
private power would remain unaccountable. When we understand that
it was the western European powers, primarily, that created and
controlled markets around the globe, set up client states, inhibited
the development of popular organizations such as labor unions,
we understand that with freedom for property owners came institutionalized
racism and militarism. Further, the Constitutional imperative
to protect private power and correspondingly the need to check
the political impulse of non-elites (primarily people of color)
has never been relaxed. Even during the immediate postwar period
when the security and wealth of the United States was unparalleled,
elites were quite alarmed that the "have nots" might
threaten their power and privilege. Note George Kennan's (head
of the State Department Planning Staff) icy assessment of the
security threat posed to the United States in 1948:
"... we have about 50% of the world's wealth, but only
6.3% of its population....ln this situation, we cannot fail to
be the object of resentment. Our real task in the coming period
is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to
maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment
to our national security. To do so, we will have to dispense with
all the sentimentality and day-dreaming; and our attention will
have to be concentrated everywhere on our immediate national objectives.
We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury
of altruism and world-benefaction...We should cease to talk about
vague and...unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising
of the living standards, and democratization. The day is not far
off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.
The less we are then hampered by idealistic slogans, the better."
The perceived threat to U.S. security has grown in proportion
to the degree that the private economy of the United States has
become dependent upon the international economy.
*
Toward
an American Revolution