Wanted: A Sharon Of The Left

There is not much time left. The leftist public, and some rightists too, are waking up from the torpor of despair and are ready to follow whoever calls them to the colors. The state needs a change before disaster strikes. If the Left misses this opportunity, history will not forgive it.
© 2003 Uri Avnery Gush Shalom

Mr. pResident, You're No Moses

Unfortunately, because of George W. Bush, it is just that. Democracy cannot exist without truth and genuine self-determination. A liar cannot be a liberator if the flowering of democracy is truly the endgame.
© 2003 Robert Scheer

War, Social Justice, Media And Democracy
By Norman Solomon

Prepared text of speech at the Brazilian Social Forum
November 8, 2003
Belo Horizonte, Brazil

I am very glad to be here to participate in the Brazilian Social Forum.

For me and the grassroots activists who I work with every day in the United States, many events have caused us to feel discouraged during the last few years. But I have often remembered words that I heard in early 2001 at the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre. Speaking there, Eduardo Galeano mentioned a statement that he saw written on a wall on a street in a South American city. The statement said: "Let’s save pessimism for better times."

To people on this planet who are striving to overcome the destructive priorities of neoliberalism, the transition that has occurred in Brazil this year offers hope. We see in the present day that the struggles of millions of people, for years and decades, can bring uplifting changes that once seemed very unlikely or even impossible.

But in the United States — and for the people elsewhere in the world who have been in the main line of fire of U.S. policies — the times have gotten worse in recent years.

I live in California, a state where a bad actor can become governor. And I live in a country where the presidents are bad actors.

In Washington, the job description for presidents is to act like humanitarians while functioning as world-class exploiters and thugs.

Ten months ago, I visited Baghdad while accompanying Denis Halliday, the former United Nations assistant secretary general who had been director of the UN’s "oil for food" program in Iraq. I felt in January that I was at the scene of a crime against humanity — a crime that had not yet occurred, but that was being proudly proclaimed on the agenda of the leaders of the U.S. and British governments.

Before the launching of cruise missiles and two-thousand pound bombs against Baghdad and other heavily populated urban areas, before the "cluster munitions" that would be scattered across cities and towns in Iraq, before the depleted uranium shells that would be fired with the subsidies of U.S. taxpayers — before the all-out unleashing of the Pentagon’s lucrative firepower — there were the weapons of mass deception.

In the cross-hairs of these weapons of mass deception were any people who could perhaps be persuaded to be gullible. The propaganda armaments were endless phony claims about seeking diplomatic solutions. The propaganda armaments were speeches at the United Nations where President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Colin Powell fervently presented false claims about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and links to Al Qaeda. But most of all, the arsenals of propaganda — enabling the war on Iraq to proceed — were the news media.

And in many ways, the most powerful technique of deception continues to be silence about truth.

In the United States, very few prominent journalists are willing to mention that President Bush has the blood of many Iraqi children on his hands after launching an aggressive war in violation of the U.N. Charter and the Nuremberg principles established more than half a century ago.

Anti-democratic news media are hostile to history. And so, the same propaganda machinery says little about the suffering that results from the class war constantly waged by the wealthy — and avoids telling much about the human consequences of militarism.

The writer Mark Twain once said that "None but the dead are permitted to speak truth." And often that seems literally to be the case.

In the United States, certain vital statements by Twain — who’s often considered to be the nation’s greatest writer — are excluded from corporatized media culture.

* A hundred years ago, he wrote: "Who are the oppressors? The few: the king, the capitalist and a handful of other overseers and superintendents. Who are the oppressed? The many: the nations of the earth; the valuable personages; the workers; they that make the bread that the soft-handed and idle eat."

* He wrote: "Why is it right that there is not a fairer division of the spoil all around? Because laws and constitutions have ordered otherwise. Then it follows that laws and constitutions should change around and say there shall be a more nearly equal division."

* And he wrote: "I am an anti-imperialist. I am opposed to having the eagle put its talons on any other land."

In current times, for the government that is pleased to proclaim itself "the world’s only superpower," the media bias that prepares the path for war must avoid certain inconvenient realities of history. One of those realities, for the U.S. media, has been the profound verdict rendered 58 years ago at trials in the German city of Nuremberg.

Despite such deafening media silences this year, the fact remains that judgments at Nuremberg and precepts of international law forbid launching an aggressive war — an apt description of what the U.S. government inflicted on Iraqi people in the spring of 2003.

"We must make clear to the Germans that the wrong for which their fallen leaders are on trial is not that they lost the war, but that they started it," said Supreme Court Justice Robert L. Jackson, a U.S. representative to Nuremberg at the International Conference on Military Trials at the close of World War II. He added that "no grievances or policies will justify resort to aggressive war. It is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy."

When a country — particularly "a democracy" — goes to war, the passive consent of the governed lubricates the machinery of slaughter. Silence is a key form of cooperation, but the war-making system does not insist on quietude or agreement. Mere passivity or self-restraint will suffice to keep the missiles flying, the bombs exploding and the faraway people dying.

We now face an emboldened regime in Washington which sees military actions as reliable solutions.

To devote billions more dollars to weaponry while so many people are hungry and dying from preventable diseases is a sin and a crime.

No part of the world is spared the impacts. The excellent news agency Inter Press Service reported in late September that "levels of U.S. military aid to Latin America have more than tripled over the last five years." The news agency added: "At a time when the region’s economies are stagnating or even shrinking, throwing millions more people into poverty, total U.S. military aid to Latin America now almost equals the amount of money Washington is devoting to social or economic development there."

The backing for the U.S. war on Iraq and the occupation of that country cannot be understood apart from the economic imperial designs known as "neoliberalism" and "globalization" — the eagerness to create optimum conditions for investment and maximally profitable trade arrangements.

Today — despite all that has been revealed and all the splits that have developed among U.S. elites about the occupation of Iraq — the media supporters of it include the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman. We should consider what the esteemed journalist Friedman had to say in his 1999 book titled "The Lexus and the Olive Tree." He wrote: "The hidden hand of the market will never work without a hidden fist. McDonald’s cannot flourish without McDonnell Douglas, the designer of the U.S. Air Force F-15. And the hidden fist that keeps the world safe for Silicon Valley’s technologies to flourish is called the U.S. Army, Air Force, Navy and Marine Corps."

That declaration was written in a spirit of enthusiastic approval. The visions of hegemony — with their geopolitical, economic, cultural and media components — are driven by the specter of a kind of "united corporate states of the world" ... a world in which the preeminent sovereignty belongs to the likes of American Express and Citicorp and McDonalds and Burger King and Monsanto. And Disney and CNN.

Seriously distorted reporting tells us that the leaders in Washington are eager to achieve peace. But this is true only in the context of subjugation.

The U.S. government wants peace — on its own terms.

The man with a boot on another person’s neck may speak loudly of desiring peace. So does the Israeli government as it maintains a brutal and flagrantly illegal occupation of Palestinian territory, now in its 37th year.

As the Prussian general Karl von Clausewitz remarked two centuries ago: "A conqueror is always a lover of peace."

Last weekend, the shooting down of a helicopter in Iraq resulted in the deaths of 16 members of the U.S. armed forces.

On Monday [November 3] the organization that I’m part of, the Institute for Public Accuracy based in the United States, released a statement from a California resident, Fernando Suarez del Solar, whose son Jesus Alberto Suarez del Solar Navarro died in Iraq on March 27, a week after the start of the war. The bereaved father said: "These attacks are the tragic result of the illegal occupation of Iraq by the U.S. military. Our young people are exposed to death every day. They are wounded in faraway lands for the whims and lies of President Bush.... The military does all kinds of things to recruit Hispanics, African Americans and poor Anglos. How many children of congressmen or CEOs are in Iraq?"

But the U.S. news media cannot accept very much of such candor. The debates about policies are tactical, not fundamental. Certain perspectives — prevalent in elite circles and promoted by most government officials — are heard again and again. Other outlooks, questioning not only the strategic wisdom but also the moral basis of government policies, are heard only once in a while.

In the mass media, the power to include and exclude is the power to shape and manipulate public opinion. As dominant media corporations grow larger in size and fewer in number, the major means of mass communication are engaged in a "corporatization of consciousness."

And in times of war, there is often a parallel militarization of consciousness. In a country with democratic forms of government, this is what makes possible the manipulated consent of the governed for war based on lies.

Now, the occupation of Iraq is imposing new economic models of privatization for the benefit of U.S. corporate interests. This is neoliberalism at gunpoint.

Iraq has an estimated 112 billion barrels of oil under the sand. The news media of the United States like to pretend that the oil there has little or nothing to do with the war and the occupation. But can anyone seriously believe that the U.S. government would have 130,000 troops in Iraq today if that country did not have a single drop of oil reserves?

Thirty-six years ago, the civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. identified the U.S. government as "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." That statement was accurate in 1967. And it is accurate in 2003.

So, too, we are still living with the truth that Dr. King expressed as he said: "When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered."

The struggle over media and the flow of information — whether in the United States or Brazil or anywhere else — is inseparable from the battle for democracy. It is impossible for democratic participation to breathe freely while the heavy weight of capital sits on the windpipe of open expression and wide-ranging debate.

It is necessary but it is not enough to ensure freedom of speech. All people must also have the freedom to be heard. Otherwise, "free speech" can be — and often is — the freedom to speak to the walls.

The major news outlets are like walls with cracks. Every day the confining structures of big media loom large.

Yet we have countless opportunities to find, utilize and widen the cracks in the corporate media’s barriers to democratic communication. Meanwhile, we need to grow non-corporate media institutions capable of effectively promoting social change.

Steadily worsening concentrations of ownership and the hefty clout of advertising combine to severely limit the range of information and debate in news media. Ongoing pressures — economic, ideological and governmental — constrain the work of mainline journalists, whose efforts routinely suffer from skewed priorities and self-censorship.

Self-censorship is a huge problem in our societies with freedom of the press. As George Orwell observed: "Circus dogs jump when the trainer cracks his whip, but the really well-trained dog is the one that turns his somersault when there is no whip."

The profit-driven ideology of the "free market" is in sync with the agendas of top management and advertisers. The tilt against truly independent media and wide-ranging discourse is extreme when corporations are the owners who hire the managers who hire the journalists and producers.

While no individual or single organization can take on more than a fraction of the necessary endeavors, the overall work to create a democratic media environment must run a wide gamut. Popular movements now face the imperative of struggling for democratic media.

Sustained efforts to challenge the corporate media and support independent media outlets can reinforce each other with continuous synergy — to establish, sustain and expand progressive movements’ media organizations; to spread deft criticism of rancid mass media; to push for better reporting and much wider debate in mainstream media; to fight for structural reform of government agencies so that the airwaves can be reclaimed by the public; to lambast, debunk and satirize the insidious junk that so often passes for journalism and cultural uplift.

In the long run, no campaign for basic media reform can succeed apart from broader social-justice movements — and vice versa. The degradation of journalism and mass entertainment is entwined with pervasive corporate power that severely damages virtually every facet of political and social life.

Media criticism becomes profoundly useful in combination with media activism. Too often we’ve held onto theories about what is and is not possible. But analysis and action become much more powerful when they constantly inform each other — when assessments shift due to on-the-ground experiences that benefit not only from the results of trial and error but also from insightful up-to-date analysis.

We’ve discovered that it’s not nearly enough to put out a powerful expose or release a cogent analysis in a few print outlets or on some web pages or on a few radio stations — or to briefly surface in a large national media venue. Such achievements, while important, are insufficient. They need to draw strength from each other — while simultaneously finding ways to reach broader audiences, including via mass media, where there are cracks in the corporate walls.

Some journalism students are taught the noble theory that journalists should "afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted." But under corporate control, news media outlets are routinely engaged in comforting the already comfortable and afflicting the already afflicted.

On an ongoing basis, major news outlets participate in class warfare, from the top down. And they often condemn those who engage in class warfare from the bottom up.

In many countries, the routine is for the mass media — the daily newspapers, the biggest magazines, the radio and TV networks, the cable stations — to side with those who "have" against those who "have not."

In the United States, every daily newspaper has a Business section. Not one has a Labor section. Apparently the dominant media assumption is that wealth creates all labor, instead of the other way around.

Popular movements urgently need to boost the resources and improve the coordination of their media work. It should be possible to attain the creative advantages of sharp analysis, institutional growth, coordinated planning and agile cooperation while encouraging a decentralized, democratic, grassroots approach to social action.

Right now the cracks in the media walls are much too thin and much too scarce. The long haul of our struggle involves bringing down the institutional barriers that, in effect, "soundproof" much of the media world and suppress the voices of those without privilege.

Any campaign for media democratization will encounter massive opposition from those who own the big newspapers and large magazines and the radio and television networks. And they’re determined to also dominate the Internet as much as possible.

The corporate media are committed not only to their exorbitant profits but also to propagandizing the society to accept an economic order based on fundamental injustice.

We can have corporate domination of media or we can have genuine democracy — but we cannot have both.

Under the ownership of enormous corporations, heavily influenced by the main sources of advertising revenue, often functioning in tandem with state power — the major media outlets cast a massive shadow over our lives, wherever we live.

Every day, when the voices of the rich and powerful dominate what is loudly broadcast and widely publish, the media managers are doing what they’re paid to do.

But it is possible to create democratic media. Possible — and absolutely necessary.
© 2003 Norman Solomon is co-author of "Target Iraq: What the News Media Didn’t Tell You." For an excerpt and other information, go to: Context Books

A Model Of Corporate Greed

In addition to being genetically disposed to greed, do CEO's of big corporations also carry the stupid gene?

Take the case of Dick Davidson, CEO of Union Pacific railroad. It's now our nation's largest rail corporation, having swallowed up such other companies as Southern Pacific, the M-K-T, Chicago & North Western, and several others. Apparently, though, Dick is not content merely to control the big trains, for he's also making a grab for the miniature ones – as in model trains.

How stupid. Like a bear being chased by thousands of angry bees, Dick has incurred the wrath of everyone from model-train makers to the hobbyists and kids who buy the models.

What's up is that Union Pacific has suddenly demanded that model-train makers pay it a royalty on all sales of trains that bear not only its logo, but also the logos of any of the former railroads that it has absorbed. As the outraged editor of Mainline Modeler magazine put it: "The Union Pacific has interposed itself into the model railroad industry, demanding a percentage of revenues . . . without any investment whatsoever. It's simply a method of skimming a profit without providing a service. It is an outstanding example of greed."

Over the years, railroad corporations, including Union Pacific, have been delighted to be the subjects of model trains, seeing it as a form of flattery, free promotion, and goodwill. For it now to threaten and demand loot from these small modeling companies is an act of PR suicide.

Sure enough, train buffs are fighting back against what they now call "the great yellow goliath." Among other actions, they're organizing UP stockholders and buying stock themselves so they can go to next spring's shareholder meeting en masse to rail against Dick's railroad job.

Dick stupidly is buying a trainload of ill will by trying to collect this pittance in royalties. To tell Dick to wise up, call him: 402-271-5000.
© 2003 Jim Hightower's latest book, "If The Gods Had Meant Us To Vote They Would Have Given Us Candidates," is available in a fully revised and updated paperback edition.

Iraq: Quicksand & Blood
By Robert Parry

George W. Bush and his top advisers learned little from the Vietnam debacle of the 1960s, since most avoided service in the war. But many top Bush aides played key roles in the repression of leftist peasant uprisings in Central America in the 1980s, a set of lessons the Bush administration is now trying to apply to the violent resistance in Iraq.

The key counterinsurgency lesson from Central America was that the U.S. government can defeat guerrilla movements if it is willing to back a local power structure, no matter how repulsive, and if Washington is ready to tolerate gross human rights abuses. In Central America in the 1980s, those tactics included genocide against hundreds of Mayan villages in Guatemala’s highlands and the torture, rape and murder of thousands of young political activists throughout the region. [More on this below]

The body dumps that have been unearthed across Central America are thus little different from the mass graves blamed on Saddam Hussein in Iraq, except in Central America they represented the dark side of U.S. foreign policy and received far less U.S. press scrutiny. Another lesson learned from the 1980s was the importance of shielding the American people from the ugly realities of a U.S.-backed "dirty war" by using P.R. techniques, which became known inside the Reagan administration as "perception management."

The temptation to recycle these counterinsurgency strategies from Central America to Iraq is explained by the number of Reagan-era officials now back in prominent roles in George W. Bush's administration.

They include Elliot Abrams, who served as assistant secretary of state for Latin America in the 1980s and is a National Security Council adviser to Bush on the Middle East; John Negroponte, U.S. ambassador to Honduras in the 1980s and now Bush’s U.N. Ambassador; Paul Bremer a counter-terrorism specialist in the 1980s and Iraq’s civilian administrator today; Bush’s Secretary of State Colin Powell, who was the senior military adviser to Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger in the 1980s; and Vice President Dick Cheney, who was a Republican foreign-policy stalwart in Congress two decades ago.

Proxy Army

One important difference between Iraq and Central America, however, is that to date, the Bush administration has had trouble finding, arming and unleashing an Iraqi proxy force that compares to the paramilitary killers who butchered suspected leftists in Central America. In El Salvador, Guatemala and Honduras, well-established "security forces" already existed. Plus, in Nicaragua, Ronald Reagan could turn to the remnants of ousted dictator Anastasio Somoza’s National Guard to fashion a contra rebel force.

In Iraq, however, U.S. policymakers chose to disband – rather than redirect – Saddam Hussein’s army and intelligence services, leaving the burden of counterinsurgency heavily on U.S. occupying troops who are unfamiliar with Iraq’s language, history and terrain.

Now, with U.S. casualties mounting, the Bush administration is scrambling to build an Iraqi paramilitary force to serve under the U.S.-appointed Iraqi Governing Council’s interior minister. The core of this force would be drawn from the security and intelligence wings of five political organizations, including Ahmad Chalabi’s formerly exile-based Iraqi National Congress.

Bush’s national security adviser Condoleezza Rice said on Nov. 10 that the administration’s No. 1 strategy in Iraq is to build an Iraqi security force, which she claims already numbers about 118,000 people, roughly the size of the U.S. military contingent in Iraq. Many of these Iraqis have received speeded-up training with the goal of using them to pacify the so-called Sunni Triangle north of Baghdad.

Earlier, some U.S. officials, including civilian administrator Bremer, balked at a paramilitary force out of fear it would become a tool of repression. "The unit that the Governing Council wants to create would be the most powerful domestic security force in Iraq, fueling concern among some U.S. officials that it could be used for undemocratic purposes, such as stifling political dissent, as such forces do in other Arab nations," the Washington Post wrote.

But faced with the rising U.S. death toll, Bremer no longer has "any objection in principle" to this concept, a senior U.S. official told the Post. [Washington Post, Nov. 5, 2003] With all the missteps that have plagued the U.S. occupation, Bremer appears to understand that the Iraqi security situation needs to be bolstered – and quickly.

In much of the Sunni Triangle, U.S. control now is intermittent at best, existing only during heavily armed U.S. forays into resistance strongholds. "American troops patrol less frequently, townspeople openly threaten Iraqi security personnel who cooperate with U.S. forces, and the night belongs to the guerrillas," the Washington Post reported from Thuluiya about 60 miles north of Baghdad. [Nov. 8, 2003]

One U.S. senator who has visited the region told me that the struggle for Iraq may take 30 years before a new generation accepts the American presence. But even taking the long view does not guarantee success. Israel has been battling to break the back of Palestinian resistance for more than three decades with no sign that younger Palestinians are less hostile to the Israeli occupation. The Iraqi insurgency already has spread too far and penetrated too deeply to be easily uprooted, military experts say.

Central American Lessons

Having lurched into this Iraqi quicksand, the Bush administration is now searching for lessons that can be gleaned from the most recent U.S. counterinsurgency experience, the region-wide wars in Central America that began as uprisings against ruling oligarchies and their military henchmen but came to be viewed by the Reagan administration as an all-too-close front in the Cold War.

Though U.S.-backed armies and paramilitary forces eventually quelled the leftist peasant rebellions, the cost in blood was staggering. The death toll in El Salvador was estimated at about 70,000 people. In Guatemala, the number of dead reached about 200,000, including what a truth commission concluded was a genocide against the Mayan populations in Guatemala’s highlands.

The muted press coverage that the U.S. news media has given these atrocities as they have come to light over the years also showed the residual strength of the "perception management" employed by the Reagan administration. For instance, even when the atrocities of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt are mentioned, as they were in the context of his defeat in Guatemala’s Nov. 9 presidential elections, the history of Reagan’s warm support for Rios Montt is rarely, if ever, noted by the U.S. press.

While the slaughter of the Mayans was underway in the 1980s, Reagan portrayed Gen. Rios Montt and the Guatemalan army as victims of disinformation spread by human rights groups and journalists. Reagan huffily discounted reports that Rios Montt’s army was eradicating hundreds of Mayan villages.

On Dec. 4, 1982, after meeting with Rios Montt, Reagan hailed the general as "totally dedicated to democracy" and declared that Rios Montt's government had been "getting a bum rap." Reagan also reversed President Jimmy Carter’s policy of embargoing military equipment to Guatemala over its human rights abuses. Carter’s human rights embargoes represented one of the few times during the Cold War when Washington objected to the repression that pervaded Central American society.

Death Squad Origins

Though many U.S.-backed regimes in Latin America practiced the dark arts of "disappearances" and "death squads," the history of Guatemala’s security operations is perhaps the best documented because the Clinton administration declassified scores of the secret U.S. documents in the late 1990s to assist a Guatemalan truth commission. The Guatemala experience also may be the most instructive today in illuminating a possible course of the counterinsurgency in Iraq.

The original Guatemalan death squads took shape in the mid-1960s under anti-terrorist training provided by a U.S. public safety adviser named John Longon, the declassified documents show. In January 1966, Longon reported to his superiors about both overt and covert components of his anti-terrorist strategies.

On the covert side, Longon pressed for "a safe house [to] be immediately set up" for coordination of security intelligence. "A room was immediately prepared in the [Presidential] Palace for this purpose and … Guatemalans were immediately designated to put this operation into effect," according to Longon’s report. Longon’s operation within the presidential compound became the starting point for the infamous "Archivos" intelligence unit that evolved into a clearinghouse for Guatemala’s most notorious political assassinations.

Just two months after Longon's report, a secret CIA cable noted the clandestine execution of several Guatemalan "communists and terrorists" on the night of March 6, 1966. By the end of the year, the Guatemalan government was bold enough to request U.S. help in establishing special kidnapping squads, according to a cable from the U.S. Southern Command that was forwarded to Washington on Dec. 3, 1966.

By 1967, the Guatemalan counterinsurgency terror had gained a fierce momentum. On Oct. 23, 1967, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research noted the "accumulating evidence that the [Guatemalan] counterinsurgency machine is out of control." The report noted that Guatemalan "counter-terror" units were carrying out abductions, bombings, torture and summary executions "of real and alleged communists."

The mounting death toll in Guatemala disturbed some American officials assigned to the country. The embassy's deputy chief of mission, Viron Vaky, expressed his concerns in a remarkably candid report that he submitted on March 29, 1968, after returning to Washington. Vaky framed his arguments in pragmatic terms, but his moral anguish broke through.

"The official squads are guilty of atrocities. Interrogations are brutal, torture is used and bodies are mutilated," Vaky wrote. "In the minds of many in Latin America, and, tragically, especially in the sensitive, articulate youth, we are believed to have condoned these tactics, if not actually encouraged them. Therefore our image is being tarnished and the credibility of our claims to want a better and more just world are increasingly placed in doubt."

Vaky also noted the deceptions within the U.S. government that resulted from its complicity in state-sponsored terror. "This leads to an aspect I personally find the most disturbing of all -- that we have not been honest with ourselves," Vaky said. "We have condoned counter-terror; we may even in effect have encouraged or blessed it. We have been so obsessed with the fear of insurgency that we have rationalized away our qualms and uneasiness.

"This is not only because we have concluded we cannot do anything about it, for we never really tried. Rather we suspected that maybe it is a good tactic, and that as long as Communists are being killed it is alright. Murder, torture and mutilation are alright if our side is doing it and the victims are Communists. After all hasn't man been a savage from the beginning of time so let us not be too queasy about terror. I have literally heard these arguments from our people."

Though kept secret from the American public for three decades, the Vaky memo obliterated any claim that Washington simply didn't know the reality in Guatemala. Still, with Vaky's memo squirreled away in State Department files, the killing went on. The repression was noted almost routinely in reports from the field.

On Jan. 12, 1971, the Defense Intelligence Agency reported that Guatemalan forces had "quietly eliminated" hundreds of "terrorists and bandits" in the countryside. On Feb. 4, 1974, a State Department cable reported resumption of "death squad" activities.

On Dec. 17, 1974, a DIA biography of one U.S.-trained Guatemalan officer gave an insight into how U.S. counterinsurgency doctrine had imbued the Guatemalan strategies. According to the biography, Lt. Col. Elias Osmundo Ramirez Cervantes, chief of security section for Guatemala's president, had trained at the U.S. Army School of Intelligence at Fort Holabird in Maryland. Back in Guatemala, Ramirez Cervantes was put in charge of plotting raids on suspected subversives as well as their interrogations.

The Reagan Bloodbath

As brutal as the Guatemalan security forces were in the 1960s and 1970s, the worst was yet to come. In the 1980s, the Guatemalan army escalated its slaughter of political dissidents and their suspected supporters to unprecedented levels.

Ronald Reagan's election in November 1980 set off celebrations in the well-to-do communities of Central America. After four years of Jimmy Carter's human rights nagging, the region's hard-liners were thrilled that they had someone in the White House who understood their problems.

The oligarchs and the generals had good reason for optimism. For years, Reagan had been a staunch defender of right-wing regimes that engaged in bloody counterinsurgency against leftist enemies. In the late 1970s, when Carter's human rights coordinator, Pat Derian, criticized the Argentine military for its "dirty war" -- tens of thousands of "disappearances," tortures and murders -- then-political commentator Reagan joshed that she should "walk a mile in the moccasins" of the Argentine generals before criticizing them. [For details, see Martin Edwin Andersen's Dossier Secreto.]

After his election in 1980, Reagan pushed to overturn an arms embargo imposed on Guatemala by Carter. Yet as Reagan was moving to loosen up the military aid ban, the CIA and other U.S. intelligence agencies were confirming new Guatemalan government massacres.

In April 1981, a secret CIA cable described a massacre at Cocob, near Nebaj in the Ixil Indian territory. On April 17, 1981, government troops attacked the area believed to support leftist guerrillas, the cable said. According to a CIA source, "the social population appeared to fully support the guerrillas" and "the soldiers were forced to fire at anything that moved." The CIA cable added that "the Guatemalan authorities admitted that 'many civilians' were killed in Cocob, many of whom undoubtedly were non-combatants."

Despite the CIA account and other similar reports, Reagan permitted Guatemala's army to buy $3.2 million in military trucks and jeeps in June 1981. To permit the sale, Reagan removed the vehicles from a list of military equipment that was covered by the human rights embargo.

No Regrets

Apparently confident of Reagan’s sympathies, the Guatemalan government continued its political repression without apology.

According to a State Department cable on Oct. 5, 1981, Guatemalan leaders met with Reagan's roving ambassador, retired Gen. Vernon Walters, and left no doubt about their plans. Guatemala's military leader, Gen. Fernando Romeo Lucas Garcia, "made clear that his government will continue as before -- that the repression will continue."

Human rights groups saw the same picture. The Inter-American Human Rights Commission released a report on Oct. 15, 1981, blaming the Guatemalan government for "thousands of illegal executions." [Washington Post, Oct. 16, 1981]

But the Reagan administration was set on whitewashing the ugly scene. A State Department "white paper," released in December 1981, blamed the violence on leftist "extremist groups" and their "terrorist methods," inspired and supported by Cuba’s Fidel Castro. Yet, even as these rationalizations were pitched to the American people, U.S. ntelligence agencies in Guatemala continued to learn of government-sponsored massacres.

One CIA report in February 1982 described an army sweep through the so-called Ixil Triangle in central El Quiche province. "The commanding officers of the units involved have been instructed to destroy all towns and villages which are cooperating with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor [known as the EGP] and eliminate all sources of resistance," the report stated. "Since the operation began, several villages have been burned to the ground, and a large number of guerrillas and collaborators have been killed."

The CIA report explained the army's modus operandi: "When an army patrol meets resistance and takes fire from a town or village, it is assumed that the entire town is hostile and it is subsequently destroyed." When the army encountered an empty village, it was "assumed to have been supporting the EGP, and it is destroyed. There are hundreds, possibly thousands of refugees in the hills with no homes to return to. … The well-documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil Indian population is pro-EGP has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike."

Rios Montt

In March 1982, Gen. Rios Montt seized power in a coup d’etat. An avowed fundamentalist Christian, he immediately impressed official Washington, where Reagan hailed Rios Montt as "a man of great personal integrity."

By July 1982, however, Rios Montt had begun a new scorched-earth campaign called his "rifles and beans" policy. The slogan meant that pacified Indians would get "beans," while all others could expect to be the target of army "rifles." In October, he secretly gave carte blanche to the feared "Archivos" intelligence unit to expand "death squad" operations.

The U.S. embassy was soon hearing more accounts of the army conducting Indian massacres. On Oct, 21, 1982, one cable described how three embassy officers tried to check out some of these reports but ran into bad weather and canceled the inspection. Still, the cable put a positive spin on the situation. Though unable to check out the massacre reports, the embassy officials did "reach the conclusion that the army is completely up front about allowing us to check alleged massacre sites and to speak with whomever we wish."

The next day, the embassy fired off an analysis that the Guatemalan government was the victim of a communist-inspired "disinformation campaign," a claim embraced by Reagan with his "bum rap" comment after he met with Rios Montt in December 1982.

On Jan. 7, 1983, Reagan lifted the ban on military aid to Guatemala and authorized the sale of $6 million in military hardware. Approval covered spare parts for UH-1H helicopters and A-37 aircraft used in counterinsurgency operations. State Department spokesman John Hughes said political violence in the cities had "declined dramatically" and that rural conditions had improved too.

In February 1983, however, a secret CIA cable noted a rise in "suspect right-wing violence" with kidnappings of students and teachers. Bodies of victims were appearing in ditches and gullies. CIA sources traced these political murders to Rios Montt's order to the "Archivos" in October to "apprehend, hold, interrogate and dispose of suspected guerrillas as they saw fit."

Sugarcoating

Despite these grisly facts on the ground, the annual State Department human rights survey sugarcoated the facts for the American public and praised the supposedly improved human rights situation in Guatemala. "The overall conduct of the armed forces had improved by late in the year" 1982, the report stated.

A different picture -- far closer to the secret information held by the U.S. government -- was coming from independent human rights investigators. On March 17, 1983, Americas Watch representatives condemned the Guatemalan army for human rights atrocities against the Indian population.

New York attorney Stephen L. Kass said these findings included proof that the government carried out "virtually indiscriminate murder of men, women and children of any farm regarded by the army as possibly supportive of guerrilla insurgents."

Rural women suspected of guerrilla sympathies were raped before execution, Kass said. Children were "thrown into burning homes. They are thrown in the air and speared with bayonets. We heard many, many stories of children being picked up by the ankles and swung against poles so their heads are destroyed." [AP, March 17, 1983]

Publicly, however, senior Reagan officials continued to put on a happy face. On June 12, 1983, special envoy Richard B. Stone praised "positive changes" in Rios Montt's government. But Rios Montt’s vengeful Christian fundamentalism was hurtling out of control, even by Guatemalan standards. In August 1983, Gen. Oscar Mejia Victores seized power in another coup.

Despite the power shift, Guatemalan security forces continued to kill those who were deemed subversives or terrorists. When three Guatemalans working for the U.S. Agency for International Development were slain in November 1983, U.S. Ambassador Frederic Chapin suspected that "Archivos" hit squads were sending a message to the United States to back off even the mild pressure for human rights improvements.

In late November, in a brief show of displeasure, the administration postponed the sale of $2 million in helicopter spare parts. The next month, however, Reagan sent the spare parts. In 1984, Reagan succeeded, too, in pressuring Congress to approve $300,000 in military training for the Guatemalan army.

By mid-1984, Chapin, who had grown bitter about the army’s stubborn brutality, was gone, replaced by a far-right political appointee named Alberto Piedra, who was all for increased military assistance to Guatemala.

In January 1985, Americas Watch issued a report observing that Reagan's State Department "is apparently more concerned with improving Guatemala's image than in improving its human rights."

Death Camp

Other examples of Guatemala’s "death squad" strategy came to light later. For example, a U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency cable in 1994 reported that the Guatemalan military had used an air base in Retalhuleu during the mid-1980s as a center for coordinating the counterinsurgency campaign in southwest Guatemala – and for torturing and burying prisoners.

At the base, pits were filled with water to hold captured suspects. "Reportedly there were cages over the pits and the water level was such that the individuals held within them were forced to hold on to the bars in order to keep their heads above water and avoid drowning," the DIA report stated.

The Guatemalan military used the Pacific Ocean as another dumping spot for political victims, according to the DIA report. Bodies of insurgents tortured to death and live prisoners marked for "disappearance" were loaded onto planes that flew out over the ocean where the soldiers would shove the victims into the water to drown, a tactic that had been a favorite disposal technique of the Argentine military in the 1970s.

The history of the Retalhuleu death camp was uncovered by accident in the early 1990s when a Guatemalan officer wanted to let soldiers cultivate their own vegetables on a corner of the base. But the officer was taken aside and told to drop the request "because the locations he had wanted to cultivate were burial sites that had been used by the D-2 [military intelligence] during the mid-eighties," the DIA report said. [To see the Guatemalan documents, go to the National Security Archive's Web site.]

Guatemala, of course, was not the only Central American country where Reagan and his administration supported brutal counterinsurgency operations -- and then sought to cover up the bloody facts. Deception of the American public – a strategy that the administration internally called "perception management" – was as much a part of the Central American story as the Bush administration’s lies and distortions about weapons of mass destruction were to the lead-up to the war in Iraq.

Reagan's falsification of the historical record became a hallmark of the conflicts in El Salvador and Nicaragua as well as Guatemala. In one case, Reagan personally lashed out at a human rights investigator named Reed Brody, a New York lawyer who had collected affidavits from more than 100 witnesses to atrocities carried out by the U.S.-supported contras in Nicaragua.

Angered by the revelations about his contra "freedom-fighters," Reagan denounced Brody in a speech on April 15, 1985, calling him "one of dictator [Daniel] Ortega's supporters, a sympathizer who has openly embraced Sandinismo."

Privately, Reagan had a far more accurate understanding of the true nature of the contras. At one point in the contra war, Reagan turned to CIA official Duane Clarridge and demanded that the contras be used to destroy some Soviet-supplied helicopters that had arrived in Nicaragua. In his memoirs, Clarridge recalled that "President Reagan pulled me aside and asked, 'Dewey, can't you get those vandals of yours to do this job.'" [See Clarridge's A Spy for All Seasons.]

`Perception Management'

To manage U.S. perceptions of the wars in Central America, Reagan also authorized a systematic program of distorting information and intimidating American journalists. Called "public diplomacy," the project was run by a CIA propaganda veteran, Walter Raymond Jr., who was assigned to the National Security Council staff. The project's key operatives developed propaganda "themes," selected "hot buttons" to excite the American people, cultivated pliable journalists who would cooperate and bullied reporters who wouldn't go along.

The best-known attacks were directed against New York Times correspondent Raymond Bonner for disclosing Salvadoran army massacres of civilians, including the slaughter of some 800 men, women and children in El Mozote in December 1981. But Bonner was not alone. Reagan's operatives pressured scores of reporters and their editors in an ultimately successful campaign to minimize information about these human rights crimes reaching the American people. [For details, see Robert Parry's Lost History.]

The tamed reporters, in turn, gave the administration a far freer hand to pursue counterinsurgency operations in Central America. Despite the tens of thousands of civilian deaths and now-corroborated accounts of massacres and genocide, not a single senior military officer in Central America was held accountable for the bloodshed.

The U.S. officials who sponsored and encouraged these war crimes not only escaped legal judgment, but remain highly respected figures in Washington. Some have returned to senior government posts under George W. Bush. Meanwhile, Reagan has been honored as few recent presidents have with major public facilities named after him, including National Airport in Washington.

On Feb. 25, 1999, a Guatemalan truth commission issued a report on the staggering human rights crimes that Reagan and his administration had aided, abetted and concealed.

The Historical Clarification Commission, an independent human rights body, estimated that the Guatemalan conflict claimed the lives of some 200,000 people with the most savage bloodletting occurring in the 1980s. Based on a review of about 20 percent of the dead, the panel blamed the army for 93 percent of the killings and leftist guerrillas for three percent. Four percent were listed as unresolved.

The report documented that in the 1980s, the army committed 626 massacres against Mayan villages. "The massacres that eliminated entire Mayan villages … are neither perfidious allegations nor figments of the imagination, but an authentic chapter in Guatemala's history," the commission concluded.

The army "completely exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their livestock and crops," the report said. In the northern highlands, the report termed the slaughter a "genocide." Besides carrying out murder and "disappearances," the army routinely engaged in torture and rape. "The rape of women, during torture or before being murdered, was a common practice" by the military and paramilitary forces, the report found.

The report added that the "government of the United States, through various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for some [of these] state operations." The report concluded that the U.S. government also gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed "acts of genocide" against the Mayans.

"Believing that the ends justified everything, the military and the state security forces blindly pursued the anticommunist struggle, without respect for any legal principles or the most elemental ethical and religious values, and in this way, completely lost any semblance of human morals," said the commission chairman, Christian Tomuschat, a German jurist.

"Within the framework of the counterinsurgency operations carried out between 1981 and 1983, in certain regions of the country agents of the Guatemalan state committed acts of genocide against groups of the Mayan people," Tomuschat said. [For more details on the commission's report, see the Washington Post or New York Times, Feb. 26, 1999]

During a visit to Central America, on March 10, 1999, President Clinton apologized for the past U.S. support of right-wing regimes in Guatemala. "For the United States, it is important that I state clearly that support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that mistake," Clinton said.

Iraqi War

Less than five years later, however, the U.S. government is teetering on the edge of another brutal counterinsurgency war in Iraq.

Some supporters of Bush’s invasion of Iraq in March are now advocating an iron fist to quell the growing Iraqi resistance. In a debate in Berkeley, Calif., for instance, ardent Bush supporter Christopher Hitchens declared that the U.S. intervention in Iraq needed to be "more thoroughgoing, more thought-out and more, if necessary, ruthless." [See Salon.com, Nov. 11, 2003]

Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the U.S. commander in Iraq, told a news conference in Baghdad on Nov. 11 that U.S. forces would follow a new get-tough strategy against the Iraqi resistance. "We are taking the fight into the safe havens of the enemy, in the heartland of the country," Sanchez said.

But U.S. military commanders in Iraq and Bush enthusiasts at home are not alone in encouraging a fierce counterinsurgency campaign to throttle the Iraqi resistance. Though many war critics say the likelihood of a difficult occupation should have been anticipated before the invasion, some now agree that the U.S. government must fight and win in Iraq or the United States will suffer a crippling loss of credibility in the Middle East and throughout the world.

Wishing for a result, however, can be far different from achieving a result. Wanting the U.S. forces to prevail and asserting that they must prevail does not mean that they will prevail. American troops could find themselves trapped in a long painful conflict against a determined enemy fighting on its home terrain.

As the United States wades deeper into this Iraqi quicksand, the lessons of the bloody counterinsurgency wars in Central America will be tempting to the veterans of the Reagan administration. Those lessons certainly are the most immediate antecedents to many of the architects of the Iraq counterinsurgency.

But the Central American lessons may have limited applicability to Iraq. For one, the Bush administration can't turn to well-entrenched power centers with ideologically committed security forces as the Reagan administration could in Guatemala and other Central American countries. Also, the cultural divide and the physical distance between Iraq and the United States are far greater than those between Central America and the United States.

So even if the Bush administration can hastily set up an Iraqi security apparatus, it may not be as committed to a joint cause with the Americans as the Central American paramilitary forces were with the Reagan administration. Without a reliable proxy force, the responsibility for conducting a scorched-earth campaign in Iraq likely would fall to American soldiers who themselves might question the wisdom and the morality of such an undertaking.

Perhaps one of the lessons of the current dilemma is that George W. Bush may have dug such a deep hole for U.S. policy in Iraq that even Guatemalan-style brutality applied to the Sunni Triangle would only deepen the well of anti-Americanism that already exists in many parts of Iraq and across much of the Islamic world.
© 2003 While at the Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s, Robert Parry broke many of the stories now known as the Iran-Contra Affair. Visit Robert at: Consortium News His latest book on the manipulation of intelligence is entitled "Lost History."

Why We Fight

To victory!
© 2003 Ted Rall is the author of the graphic travelogue "To Afghanistan and Back," an award-winning recounting of his experiences covering the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. It is now available in a revised and updated paperback edition containing new material. Ordering information is available at amazon.com.)

Struggle Continues For Human Rights

"Even someone as unsympathetic to human rights as President Ronald Reagan at the height of the Cold War understood the need for a positive vision. He understood that the United States could not only be against communism. It had to stand for democracy, even if at times his support was no more than rhetorical. Similarly, it will not work for the Bush administration today to be only against terrorism. It will have to stand for the values that explain what’s wrong with attacking civilians—the values of human rights."
© 2003 You may reach Joe via email at: Joe Conason

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