Let me begin with some background not covered in the film. Dirty War derives from La Sale Guerre, the term the French applied to their counter-terror campaign in Algeria, circa 1954-1961. Algeria wanted independence, and France resisted.

Like subject people everywhere, the Algerians were badly outgunned and resorted to guerrilla tactics including “selective terrorism,” a hallmark of the Viet Minh, who fought the French until 1954, when America claimed Vietnam as its rightful property. Viet Minh tactics were derived largely from Mao’s precepts for fighting a People’s War.

Selective terrorism meant the murder of low-ranking officials – collaborators – who worked closely with the people; policemen, mailmen, teachers, etc. The murders were gruesome – a bullet in the belly or a grenade lobbed into a café – designed to achieve maximum publicity and demonstrate to the people the power of the nationalists to strike crippling blows against their oppressors.

Whether the Great White Fathers are French or American or English, they agree that putting down a People’s War means torturing and slaughtering the people – despite the fact that most people are not engaged in terrorism or guerrilla action and have no blood on their hands.

As John Stockwell taught us years ago, Dirty War means destabilizing a targeted nation through covert methods, the type the CIA has practiced around the world for 66 years. Destabilizing means “hiring agents to tear apart the social and economic fabric of the country.

“What we’re talking about is going in and deliberately creating conditions where the farmer can’t get his produce to market; where children can’t go to school; where women are terrified inside their homes as well as outside; where government administered programs grind to a complete halt; where the hospitals are treating wounded people instead of sick people; where international capital is scared away and the country goes bankrupt.”

Economic warfare – strangling nations like Cuba, Iraq and Iran in Medieval fashion – is a type of Dirty Warfare beloved by the Great White Fathers who control the world’s finances. Though no less deadly than atomic bombs, or firebombing Dresden, it is easier to sell to the bourgeoisie.

You’ll hear no mention of this in Scahill’s film, nor will you hear any references to Phil Agee, or the countless others who have explained Dirty War to each generation of Americans since World War Two.

You will not hear about psychological warfare, the essence of Dirty War.

America’s first was terror guru was Ed Lansdale, the advertising executive who made Levi’s blue jeans a national craze in the 1930’s. He applied his sales skills to propaganda in the OSS and after WW II, concocted a new generation of psywar tactics as an agent of the Office of Policy Coordination assigned to the Philippines under military cover. Lansdale’s bottomless black bag of dirty tricks included a “skull squadron” death squad that roamed the countryside, torturing and murdering Communist terrorists.

One of Lansdale’s counter-terror “psywar” tactics was to string a captured Communist guerrilla upside down from a tree, stab him in the neck with a stiletto, and drain his blood. The terrorized Commies fled the area and the terrified villagers, who believed in vampires, begged the government for protection.

Lansdale referred to his sadism as “low humor,” an excuse borrowed liberally by American officialdom during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.

Lansdale formalized “black propaganda” practices to vilify the Communists: one of his Filipino commando units would dress as rebels and commit atrocities, and then another unit would arrive with cameras to record the staged scenes and chase the “terrorists” away.

Lansdale brought his black propaganda and passion for atrocity to Saigon in 1954, along with a goon squad of Filipinos mercenaries packaged as “Freedom Company.”

Under Lansdale’s guidance, Freedom Company sent Vietnamese commandoes into North Vietnam, under cover as relief workers, to activate stay-behind agent nets and conduct all manner of sabotage and subversion. Disinformation was a Lansdale specialty, and his agents spread lurid tales of Vietminh soldiers’ disemboweling pregnant Catholic women, castrating priests, and sticking bamboo slivers in the ears of children so they could not hear the Word of God.

In the South, with the help of the American media, Lansdale re-branded the heroic Vietminh as the beastly Viet Cong.

Lansdale’s greatest innovation, still used today, was to conduct all manner of espionage and terror under cover of “civic action.” As a way of attacking Viet Minh agents in the South, Lansdale launched “Operation Brotherhood,” a Filipino paramedical team patterned on the typical Special Forces A team. With CIA money, Operation Brotherhood built medical dispensaries that the CIA used as cover for terror operations, as depicted in the book and movie The Quiet American.

Levis never went out of fashion, nor did Lansdale’s dirty tricks. Think Saddam Hussein killing babies in their incubators. Such disinformation invariably works on an American public looking for any excuse to rationalize its urge for racist genocide.

Think Argo and Zero Dark Thirty and every Rambo and Bruce Willis film.

Only Americans were fooled by the propaganda, and the Vietnamese quickly caught on. So the CIA in 1956 launched the Denunciation of Communists campaign, which compelled the Vietnamese people to inform on Commies or get tortured and murdered. The campaign was managed by CIA agents who could arrest, confiscate land from, and execute Communists and their sympathizers on the CIA’s master list. In determining who was a Communist, the CIA used a three-part classification system: A for dangerous party members, B for less dangerous party members, and C for loyal citizens.

As happened later in the Phoenix program, the threat of an A or B classification was used to extort innocent civilians, while category A and B offenders were put to work building houses and offices for CIA officers and their lackeys. And, of course, the puppet Vietnamese President used his CIA created, funded and trained security forces to eliminate his political rivals.

As Lansdale confessed, “it became a repressive tool to liquidate any opponent.”

“This development was political,” Lansdale observes. “My first inkling came when several families appeared at my house one morning to tell me about the arrest at midnight of their men-folk, all of whom were political figures. The arrests had a strange aspect to them, having come when the city was asleep and being made by heavily armed men who were identified as `special police.””‘

Lansdale complained, but he was told that a “U.S. policy decision had been made. We Americans were to give what assistance we could to the building of a strong nationalistic party that would support Diem. Since Diem was now the elected president, he needed to have his own party. ”

How We Got to Scahill’s Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield

By 1962, as the US expanded its Dirty Wars in the Far East and South America, the military replaced its Office of Special Operations with an up-dated Special Assistant for Counter-insurgency and Special Activities (SACSA). SACSA assigned unconventional warfare forces to the CIA and regular army commanders, who initially resisted.

The development of psychological warfare and special operations is explained in Michael McClintock’ Secret Warriors(1988).

JSOC’s mission, conducted on the Phoenix model with the CIA, is identifying and destroying terrorists and terror cells worldwide. Paramilitary personnel are often exchanged between JSOC and CIA.

By the early 1980s, CIA and military veterans of the Phoenix program were running counter-insurgency and counter-terror ops worldwide.

General Paul Gorman, who commanded U.S. forces in Central America in the mid-1980?s, defined this advanced form of Dirty War as “a form of warfare repugnant to Americans, a conflict which involves innocents, in which non-combatant casualties may be an explicit object.” (Toledo Blade 1 Jan 1987)

All of which brings me to my review.

Dirty Wars

Dirty Wars is a post-modern film by Jeremy Scahill, about himself, starring himself in many poses.

The film owes more to Sergio Leone and Kathryn Bigelow than Constantinos Gavras. Scahill certainly is no Leslie Cockburn: there is no Tony Poe telling how the CIA facilitates heroin shipments; no Richard Secord suing him for unraveling the financial intrigues of the CIA’s secret operators. The CIA is rarely mentioned.

There is no reference to the Guerra Sucia in Argentina.

Scahill is no Franz Fanon documenting the devastating psychological effects of racism on society. There are no cameos by Jean-Paul Sartre advocating violent retribution on Hollywood, no mingling with the Taliban in their caves as they conspire against their Yankee oppressors at the Sundance Film Festival.

Read the rest of the article

The Best of Doug Valentine

Recently by Douglas Valentine: War on Terror: GreatestCovertOp

Listen to the podcast

ROCKWELL: Good morning. This is the Lew Rockwell Show. And how great to have as our guest this morning, Mr. Doug Valentine. Doug is a poet. He also is an expert on the CIA, on the DEA, on various other evil government agencies (laughing). And it’s great to have him come on to talk about what I always think of, in some sense, as the secret government of the U.S. He’s the author of The Strength of the Pack: The Personalities, Politics, and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA; The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America’s War on Drugs; The Phoenix Program; and two novels, too, TDY and The Hotel Tacloban.

So, Doug, those of us who were interested in the Church hearings, which we don’t hear much more about, learned about Operation Mockingbird, the CIA’s program to take control of the U.S. media. Has Operation Mockingbird continued? And, in fact, has it put Operation Mockingbird of the old days in the shadows? Is the American mainstream media just pretty much a P.R. operation for the CIA?

VALENTINE: It goes beyond the CIA, of course. The United States has a couple of agencies that are interested in propagandizing not only the American people but the world, including the State Department, which is the biggest federal agency involved in propaganda, and the military, which is probably a close second. The military is one of the biggest advertisers. And, of course, the media depends on its revenue, not on — especially the television — not on listeners or viewers, but on its advertisers. So there is relationships — a much larger relationship between the U.S. media, the military, the State Department, than there is with the CIA.

The question one has to ask, given that all this propaganda from the various agencies is coming at the American people is, what makes CIA propaganda different than State Department propaganda or military propaganda or even just plain — the propaganda that corporations and advertisers are throwing at the American people every second of every day. Everywhere you look there’s signs, advertising signs, and that’s all propaganda as well, too. So the question you have to ask is, what differentiates CIA propaganda from all this other propaganda.

ROCKWELL: And you also make an interesting point about the advertising. Doesn’t the DEA do a huge amount of advertising, too?

VALENTINE: Well, sure. And they’re always the biggest — just as an example, you know, the biggest message that the DEA is trying to get across through its propaganda is that America, the United States is a victim of the War on Drugs; that other people, foreign countries are pushing drugs on us. And —

ROCKWELL: Yes.

(Laughter)

VALENTINE: — we’re just innocent victims of all these drug pushers and, therefore, the DEA has to have a $50 billion-a-year industry that goes around the world to try to stop these people. And even though that never happens and the war just goes on and on, the propaganda is convincing, and Americans feel good that it’s not their own addictions or demands for drugs that’s fueling this thing. But, you know, it’s the fault of a couple of cartels in Mexico that all of this is going wrong.

But, yes, the DEA and the FBI — the FBI is a huge propaganda machine. J. Edgar Hoover’s strong suit was that he really understood how to create a P.R. machine that would promote FBI agents around the world as crime stoppers and, in America, as the people who got John Dillinger. And he knew how to manipulate statistics, to go after the correct criminals to promote the interests of his particular fiefdom within the United States government, which is composed of, you know, huge bureaucracies, which are all competing for federal dollars which come from taxpayers. And so they each have their P.R. machine, their own propaganda, which is just for bureaucratic reasons, so that they can get a bigger part of the congressional pie.

So there’s all sorts of reasons for propaganda. There’s all types of propaganda. And the CIA is one of those agencies that’s trying to promote itself and get more money for itself. And all those things contribute to whether the CIA decides what kind of propaganda to promote in its decision making. There’s those bureaucratic reasons as well as anything about spreading freedom and democracy.

ROCKWELL: As you asked earlier, what is it that differentiates CIA propaganda from all the rest of these agencies?

VALENTINE: We could go back to the ancient history of the Cold War and Mockingbird. In those days, it was a little bit easier to distinguish what the interests were of the CIA. And the CIA had an interest in promoting the unstated goals and policies of the United States, as opposed to the State Department, whose propaganda was in promoting the stated objectives of the United States, which were, of course, wrapped in the same kinds of deceptions and circumlocutions and euphemisms that the CIA uses, that the military uses. The language is pretty much the same for anybody who’s propagandizing, which adds to the confusion of where it’s coming from.

But the State Department was promoting the stated objectives, which is to promote democracy and free enterprise and the institutions that people identify with America. The CIA propaganda is to disguise the fact that there’s an agency, a very powerful agency of the United States government that’s promoting anti-democratic policies, policies that are designed to support tyrants overseas, for example, or terrorism overseas or sabotage overseas or subversion overseas of friendly government, even the promotion of political parties in foreign countries that are actually advancing anti-democratic ideals, all these sorts of things that would be, if the public was to find out that the United States government is doing these things, would cause the president and the government embarrassment.

So the CIA is given the charge of doing these things that are essentially illegal and anti-democratic. And it’s propaganda, which is generally referred to as black propaganda, as opposed to State Department propaganda, which is generically called white propaganda. The CIA has its black propaganda, which is to utterly and completely disguise its operations and blame them on our enemies.

ROCKWELL: You know, Doug, the CIA has always specialized in assassinations.

VALENTINE: Yes.

ROCKWELL: The military, too. Of course, now we have the president openly assassinating people and claiming he has the right to. In the earliest days, the CIA was allegedly prevented from operating within the U.S. I think that was always a myth. Now, the CIA is just openly and massively involved within the United States. Do you think it’s committing assassinations here as well?

VALENTINE: Well, the thing with the CIA, it’s always hard to prove anything. When you start dealing with the CIA and somebody says, well, show me a document that says the president ordered the CIA to kill, let’s say, just as an example — and I’m not saying this is true — Senator Paul Wellstone, or some critic of government policies, and he dies in a suspicious plane crash, well, you’re never going to find a document. You’re never going to find any proof that can be used in a court of law which would show that the CIA conducted that kind of a political assassination within the United States, because the CIA doesn’t conduct its operations unless they’re deniable. And they won’t go ahead and conduct that kind of an operation unless it’s not connected — it can’t be connected to them.

So there’s always, when talking about whether — making an accusation about the CIA, because it’s impossible to back it up with proof, it becomes an area that’s difficult to tread upon. My inclination, based on everything I know as an expert of the CIA, is that, yes, they do. But can I prove it? I can’t prove it because of the reasons I’ve just stated.

ROCKWELL: What’s your opinion of Philip Agee’s book? He’s, of course, a former CIA agent who defected and wrote about just how many people were on the payroll and how many people were controlled by the agency. Do you think that’s a — is that a persuasive book?

VALENTINE: Absolutely, it is. And I think that much of the modern history of the CIA begins with Agee and his revelations as a person who was on the inside. Nothing he has ever said has been disproved. Nothing that he ever — none of the hundreds of CIA offices that he outted, none of the methods that he ascribed to the CIA, none of that has ever been — the CIA has not been able to say we don’t do that or we didn’t do that. Everything Agee said was true. Agee’s problem was that he was considered a traitor for revealing these things. And so he was discredited on that basis and that basis alone. And any appeal that’s made to people to disbelieve anything that Phil Agee said is made strictly on the basis of him having revealed secrets that he wasn’t supposed to reveal, but not on the actual factual evidence. Everything he said was true.

He opened up to the public, and through his publishers, a lot of the inner workings of the CIA. And with that, it’s not coincidental that the Church hearings follow pretty much on the heels of his revelations. At the time, there was a lot of things coming out, but he was the first and, as far as I know, the only CIA officer to ever reveal the inner workings of the CIA in that detail.

ROCKWELL: You know, we’re finding out just now a lot more information about the Paris Review, a very influential literary publication, being, in effect, a CIA front. I’ve always been interested in National Review, one of my least-favorite publications, which was founded by Bill Buckley, a former CIA agent — maybe I should put “former” in quotes. Whether these people ever really are “former” or not, I guess, is a question — and a number of other former CIA people involved. And this is a magazine that set out as its goal to destroy any anti-war feelings on the so-called right, which it did help succeed in almost entirely doing. Do you think that perhaps the National Review was set up — we’ve never known where the money came from. It didn’t come from the Buckley family.

VALENTINE: Well, that’s an interesting point. And I’m glad that you asked me that particular question, because there are agents of the CIA who work for a case officer and are on the payroll, and then, like in any spy business or propaganda people, there’s people who do it for love, who will inform, or help a spy agency or a particular cause purely for ideological reasons. Somebody like Buckley is a perfect example of this. There’s a lot of people who, even though they’re, or by their inclination, they’re predilections, might appear to be a CIA officer, they’re simply in ideological sync with the CIA and they would be doing these things anyway. But I don’t think that it’s, in his case, necessary to try to distinguish whether or not he was an agent of the CIA or just somebody who was doing it out of, like I say, love.

What you need to — where you need to focus is not on people whose ideology is the same as the CIA, but on, for example, the left. And now I’ll raise — just as an example, The Nation is a very popular leftist magazine. The question you have to ask is, would The Nation be promoting a CIA line in a particular instance? Would it be infiltrated? Would it — because that’s where the CIA would be directing its efforts. It would be directing its efforts at what Cord Meyer called — and Cord Meyer was the CIA agent who was most commonly associated with Mockingbird — what Cord Meyer called courting the compatible left. This is the area that the CIA would be involved in, not William Buckley and the National Review, because the CIA doesn’t have to tell them what to say. They know what to say. They say the same thing as the CIA anyway. It’s the newspapers and magazines that are promoting themselves as, let’s say, fair and balanced or objective or non-partisan or even leftist. That’s where the CIA would be concentrating its efforts. The further to the left a magazine or a media outlet is, that’s where the CIA would be found.

ROCKWELL: For example, the Congress for Cultural Freedom in the early years, too.

VALENTINE: Yes. This, again, is — so what you have to understand about the CIA, they don’t have to tell J. Edgar Hoover what to say. These people know what to say. They’re on the same wavelength, you know? They have all the same interests, the same — if not the same patrons in private industry, they certainly have patrons who work on the same economic class or the same political class, you know, and so they have all the same interests.

What the CIA is going to do is it’s going to try to infiltrate the Vietnamese Lao Dong Communists and bring them closer. It’s going to try to go into France and infiltrate the Socialist parties and try to bring them further over to — you know, even if it’s just marginally — towards, you know, free enterprise or whatever its drift is. They’re going to concentrate in areas that are thought to be enemies of the United States. They’re going to infiltrate those groups.

That would apply also domestically. They’re going to try to move the Black Panthers to, you know, the mainstream. They’re going to focus on areas that are needed; what the government sees to be needed in that sense.

ROCKWELL: You know, Doug, if somebody wanted to learn about the CIA, what would be the books that you would tell them to read?

VALENTINE: Well, I would start in the beginning with Agee, and Marchetti with The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence. I think that another one from days gone by would be Fletcher Prouty, The Secret Team. I would stay away from books that are written by establishment figures, reporters for The New York Times. You know, Evan Thomas, do not read his books. I’d also stay away from academic books.

So those early books are important, but somebody would have to read something more recent because the CIA has undergone a lot of organizational changes in the last 10 years. The whole clandestine services have been reorganized and they’re under new names. So these older books refer to the CIA organizationally in ways that are outdated, although the policies and operations haven’t really changed. And so it would be important for people even to just read whatever information the CIA — (laughing) — puts out itself about its own organizational structure. It’s a bureaucracy and it has to be understood as an organization, and how that organization is structured, what its different branches and divisions are, and what they do, simply in that kind of a straight-forward way. You can’t understand the CIA without understanding how it’s structured. And so, you know, looking at an organizational chart is, for me, always the first step. And then to understand that, as with any organization, the true channels of power happen off the — (laughing) — organizational chart. An organization like the CIA has built-in back channels and ways of doing things that defy any kind of structural analysis, too.

It’s really difficult to understand, as is algebra or the petro-chemical industry. These are things that take serious study and a lot of effort. You have to read a lot of books and you have to stay up to date.

If I could, could I just mention something about how complicated things have become now a days? And —

(Crosstalk)

ROCKWELL: Yes, please.

VALENTINE: 20 years ago, in 1989, actually 23 years ago, there was an article in Marine Corps Gazette, and it was talking about modern warfare at that time, 23 years ago. And if I just read something that was said 23 years ago, I think it will help people to understand just how things have evolved.

In this article from October 1989, in Marine Corps Gazette, they said, “The new type of warfare will be widely dispersed and largely undefined. Distinction between war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point. There will be no definable battlefields or fronts. And the distinction between civilian and military will disappear. Success will depend heavily on effectiveness and joint operations” — the kind that, I would add, 10 years ago, became standard through Homeland Security. Anyway — “as the lines between responsibility and mission become blurred.” And then the kicker was they said that, “This war, new type of warfare will depend on psychological operations manifested in the form of media information intervention.” Again, that’s the military itself intervening into media information. “One must be adept at manipulating the media to alter domestic and world opinion. On this new psychological battlefield, television news may become a more powerful operational weapon then armored divisions.”

23 years ago, before the Internet was even here, already the military was talking about how, as the world becomes a global village, state boundary lines disappear and the United States became the hegemonic world power with influence everywhere around the world. These types of psychological operations, which is propaganda, would become the defining factor in whether or not the United States would continue to dominate the world and its affairs, its political affairs.

And, like I said, this is before the Internet, before Facebook allowed people to get on in the morning and talk to somebody in Brazil and somebody in the Philippines and somebody in Russia and China, individual, and to have access to information from all over the world at our fingertips as individuals, and to be able to put on BBC or to read Russia Times, to get information from everywhere all the time. The military and the State Department and the CIA all understood that this was evolving and this was happening.

So to be called a person, an individual who can look at all this information and to understand that the instruments of American statecraft are trying to manipulate them, to make you think and feel a particular way, becomes a breathtakingly complex thing to do, to try to figure out where a particular piece of information is coming from. Is it coming from the State Department or the military or the CIA? And this article said these boundaries are breaking down. You can’t even distinguish any more where a particular piece of propaganda is coming from. You can’t — the information is so rapid and overwhelming and mixed in with corporate messages, other kinds of messages that are coming at us. It’s just like the person said, who wrote that article, it’s a blur.

So how does an individual adapt themselves, adjust themselves to be able to discern in all this what’s happening and where messages are coming from? You know, that’s an incredible challenge. And people tend not to think that it’s something they can even begin to deal with or recognize, let alone reading a book here or there, if you see what I’m trying to say (laughing).

ROCKWELL: But it still is possible, isn’t it? It’s just as you say —

VALENTINE: Oh, absolutely.

ROCKWELL: — a matter of a lot of work?

VALENTINE: Yes, it’s possible. It certainly is, because all the information is there.

ROCKWELL: Doug, I want to ask you one last question. This is a huge question, so you may just want to sort of skip over it lightly. But since you're an expert on the DEA as well as the CIA, what about the story of the CIA and drug running? Is it really true that, in the late 1940s, they were — they began to get involved in the Golden Triangle and so forth, and maybe until recently, used drugs for political and maybe financial purposes?

VALENTINE: Oh, absolutely. The CIA and drugs, or the DEA and drugs?

ROCKWELL: Well, the — well, — (laughing) — you can tell me about both, I guess. But I mean the CIA.

VALENTINE: Yes, yes. You know, the CIA made a point of infiltrating the DEA under the Nixon administration. But prior to that, you didn’t have to tell the people who ran the DEA or its predecessor organizations that the drug wars were essentially political.

In the 1940s, the United States — starting in 1949, it was official U.S. policy to blame China, Communist China for America’s drug problem. It was not true. You know, that was the propaganda. And you didn’t need the CIA to tell the old Bureau of Narcotics to do that. In fact, the guy who was the commissioner of the Bureau of Narcotics, a guy named Harry Anslinger, was one of the great propagandists — (laughing) — of all time. He associated pot smoking with Negros trying to corrupt white women; you know, drug addicts with black musicians. You know, this guy, he taught the CIA how to propagandize, and that’s true. When the OSS was formed, Harry Anslinger helped form the OSS. And his agents from the Bureau of Narcotics — one of his senior agents went over to England in 1942. His name, the narcotic agent’s name was Garland Williams. He went over there with a man named Millard Preston Goodfellow, who was a Hearst executive and on the Brooklyn Eagle; a newspaper man. And they came back with the British SOE training manuals and set up the OSS. So the guys who created the CIA included a narcotics agent who taught CIA agents how to avoid the security forces of foreign nations, which is what the narcotics people had been doing for decades.

All this stuff is old standard operating procedure. It really doesn’t matter whether it’s the DEA or the CIA or the FBI or the military. These people all know what to do. It’s just, they do it for their own different bureaucratic reasons.

ROCKWELL: Well, Doug Valentine, thank you for what you do. This is not the sort of career that leads to power and pelf, which you’ve chosen. You’ve chosen the path of truth and of teaching truth, and we’re all very much in your debt.

So, of course, we’ll list all your books on the podcast page, your own web site.

Please come back on the show again. This has been terrific.

VALENTINE: You’re very welcome. I would love to.

If I may just gratuitously thank my wife?

ROCKWELL: Please.

VALENTINE: People in my — who follow this path, tend not to make a lot of money, and I’ve benefited from having a spouse who backed me 100%.

ROCKWELL: Great, Doug. Thank you very much.

VALENTINE: You’re welcome.

ROCKWELL: Bye-bye.

Well, thanks so much for listening to the Lew Rockwell Show today. Take a look at all the podcasts. There have been hundreds of them. There’s a link on the upper right-hand corner of the LRC front page. Thank you.

Podcast date, June 26, 2012

Douglas Valentine [send him mail] is the author of four previously published books: The Hotel Tacloban (Lawrence Hill, 1984), The Phoenix Program, (William Morrow, 1990), TDY (iUniverse.com, 2000), and The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs (Verso, 2004). His latest book is The Strength of the Pack (TrineDay, 2009). For more information about the author and his works, please visit his websites at www.douglasvalentine.com and http://members.authorsguild.net/valentine.

The Best of Doug Valentine

The following commentary is drawn from a speech delivered by Douglas Valentine at a peace conference:

The politics of terror are the greatest covert operation ever.

In explaining why, I’ll begin by defining some terms, because, when discussing the covert op called “the politics of terror,” words and their management are all important.

How are politics and terror actually defined: how are these meanings manipulated; for what purposes, and by whom?

Terrorism is defined as "violence against civilians intended to obtain a political purpose."

This is an ambiguous phrase, which begs the questions: what are politics and violence?

Politics is defined as “the process by which groups of people make collective decisions.” And violence in this context is the use of force to compel a person or group to do or think something against their will. That includes the violence of words – of threatening to hurt – and of social structures, as well as the violence of deeds.

So, by definition, terrorism is political violence – hurting people, or threatening to hurt them, in order to make them govern themselves (or acquiesce to an external force) against their will.

In America, terrorism is always condemned by the government, and, accordingly, America is never a perpetrator of terrorism, but always the victims of it.

The U.S. war on terror is the ultimate expression of this principle: it is a military response to terrorism; violence in self-defense, not (ostensibly) violence for a political purpose.

That’s the official story – the assumption. But I’m going to show that America does engage in terrorism – violence against civilians for political purposes. This “state” terrorism, however, is covert, in so far as it is equated with national security, and thanks to that built-in ambiguity, it has both stated and unstated purpose.

The State and Unstated Policy in America

Politics is a process by which groups of people make collective decisions. But who really makes the overarching political decisions in America? Who governs us?

The two political parties represent the people and they compete for control of the government. Historically, Republicans have generally favored business and Democrats have favored labor. The political division is, generally, class based.

Now, the government can be controlled by either political party; but the state endures – “the state” being the nation’s indispensable industries and infrastructure (banking, auto industry, insurance, Microsoft), and the institutions which defend the nation’s enduring interests: the military, law enforcement, the intelligence and security services.

In Europe they often, cynically, refer to the state as “industry” or Big Business. In America we tend to call “the state” the Establishment – an ambiguous word that needs to be defined.

The dictionary defines Establishment as, “An exclusive group of powerful people who rule a government or society by means of private agreements and decisions.”

I would venture to say that the interests of the state and the Establishment are the same, and that the definition of Establishment with a capital E is the pivotal phrase in discussing “state” terrorism. . Consider this: there is the politics of the two parties vying for control of the government, and there is the Establishment, the state, making the covert (ostensibly non-political) decisions that effectively govern America.

Many of those covert decisions concern national security: they are unstated policy.

Moreover, these covert policy decisions about national security are made by people who control the military, law enforcement, and intelligence and security services. These guardians of “the state” are collectively called the National Security Establishment.

Like the Establishment that secretly rules the “state,” the National Security Establishment is an exclusive group that is not accountable to the political whims of the people.

These professional guardians of the state – the Establishment – are assumed to be above partisan politics. Their loyalty is assumed to be to the law or national security. And that assumption is the Big Lie upon which state terrorism is based.

Yes, it is true that the National Security Establishment is not accountable to the people: and, in fact, it has built a series of ever-larger, concentric moats around itself called the National Security State, precisely to keep the people out of its business.

The National Security Establishment rules the National Security State, with an iron fist, but it is pure propaganda that the National Security Establishment and State are not political.

In order to get inside the National Security Establishment, and rise to a position of authority within it, one must be born there (like Bush or make billions like Bill Gates), or submit to years of right-wing political indoctrination calibrated to a series of increasingly restrictive security clearances.

Political indoctrination – adopting the correct right-wing ideology – and security clearances represent the drawbridge across the moats.

The National Security State is the covert social structure of the Establishment, and it has as its job not just defending the Establishment from foreign enemies, but also expanding the Establishment’s economic and military influence abroad, while preserving its class prerogatives at home.

By “class prerogatives,” I mean the National Security State is designed to keep the lower class from exerting any political control over the state; especially, redistributing the Establishment’s private wealth.

To these unstated ends – imperialism abroad and repression at home – the National Security State engages in terrorism – i.e. political violence – on behalf of the Establishment.

Indeed, the National Security State is political violence, terrorism, in its purest form.

The Establishment and its National Security State as Terrorism

The lower classes in America have little voice in making government or state policy. Some members of the lower classes have given up hope, others are content: but in either case, voter turnout is a mere 54 percent.

Whether hopeless or content, they know they cannot fight conventional thinking. For example, when the Establishment exerts its influence, it is not considered politics; it is simply the status quo. The rich create jobs and must be accommodated with trillion-dollar bailouts, paid for by workers taking furloughs.

That’s just the way it is. Politicians in the service of the Establishment, for over-arching reasons of national security, have to keep the capitalist financial system afloat.

It is the same thing with the National Security Establishment: America invaded Iraq, and there was nothing the people could do about it. The decision was made for them. Peace activists, least of all, had no voice in the decision, because they are assumed to have no stake in national security.

You will not find peace activists in the National Security Establishment; and that political repression is part of covert state terrorism.

Likewise, if labor seeks to exercise influence, its efforts are described as exploiting the state for more than it deserves, because it does not have an enduring stake in the state.

It is a fact: only Establishment wealth – ownership – is equated with national security.

Consider the immortal words of Leona Helmsley: “Only the little people pay taxes.”

That injustice in the tax code is political repression and, in so far as it makes the people fearful, it is state terrorism. The Establishment fears losing its loopholes, while workers and the poor fear losing their homes: two types of fear, one for each class, one stated, one unstated.

The Establishment engages imperialism and political repression through propaganda (word management violence) and social structures. This state terrorism also is unstated, covert.

Only when the people rebel and challenge the Establishment is the word terrorism applied.

Likewise, the military, police or intelligence actions that provoke rebellion, or the responses to rebellion, are never called terrorism: they are national security.

And that’s how the management of words helps to repress the lower classes.

Read the rest of the article

Douglas Valentine [send him mail] is the author of four previously published books: The Hotel Tacloban (Lawrence Hill, 1984), The Phoenix Program, (William Morrow, 1990), TDY (iUniverse.com, 2000), and The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs (Verso, 2004). His latest book is The Strength of the Pack (TrineDay, 2009). For more information about the author and his works, please visit his websites at www.douglasvalentine.com and http://members.authorsguild.net/valentine.

The Best of Doug Valentine

The Washington
Post has
published a splashy expos about the mammoth “homeland security”
intelligence empire that now burdens the United States, financially
and ideologically.

As usual, however,
there is no real historical context. And that lack of context is
part of the story — not just the current dimensions of the empire.

I wrote the
following article for Penthouse in the summer of 2003. It
was reprinted by CounterPunch later that summer.

At the time
I said: “This homeland security boondoggle is the biggest reorganization
of the U.S. government in 50 years. It might even bankrupt the country
and, perhaps intentionally, throw it into a Depression. That remains
to be seen. What is certain is that at a cost of $50 billion in
taxpayer’s money, the homeland security infrastructure will provide
Bush with 170,000 political cadres, and the internal security he
needs to assure the continuity of his political power indefinitely.
Except for providing Bush with political internal security, there
is no need for the Department of Homeland Security; it is a Trojan
Horse through which Bush will unleash his ideological storm troopers
and exploit his ill-gotten power to achieve permanent political
dominance.”

I put the blame
on “Bush” at the time (and the numbers have varied) but it’s really
the national security state that’s to blame for the near Depression
the homeland security state (financially and ideologically) has
caused. And of course the Washington Post is part of the national
security state — that secret group of people who control America
through secret deals — the type of secret deals that enable Washington
Post reporters’ access to anonymous CIA officers.

Don’t forget
— there is always a quid pro quo for that type of access, even in
today’s expos.

And it is that
national security state in its entirety that provides “their” empire
with built-in security. Political Internal Security.

As pundits
rush to comment on this “revelation,” don’t forget that it was utterly
predictable.

And you know
what that means….

Homeland
Security for Whom?
Are
Bush, Ashcroft, and Wolfowitz Protecting America or Their Own Regime?

by Douglas Valentine

Adapted
from the July 2003 issue of Penthouse Magazine

“The implication
or latent threat of terror was sufficient to insure that the people
would comply.”

~ William Colby,
creator of the CIA’s
Phoenix Program, which targeted Vietnamese leaders for assassination
during the Vietnam War

For those of
you believe the war on terror and the violent occupation of Iraq
will ensure world peace, you’ve got another thing coming; and that
thing is the illegitimate Bush Regime’s homeland security infrastructure.

Let me state
the point of this article up front: The war on terror, and its “homeland
security” counterpart, are flip sides of the same coin. They are
the same ideology applied to foreign and domestic policy. But like
CIA agent Alden Pyle in The
Quiet American, their evil intention is wrapped in a complex
matrix of transparent lies. Pointedly, that evil intention is to
provide the Bush Regime with political internal security at home,
thus enabling it to plunder the world with impunity.

The foreign
policy aspect of this synthesis was promulgated on September 20,
2002 in the “The National Security Strategy of the United States”
(a.k.a. the Bush Manifesto) in which the Bush Regime confers upon
itself the divine right to devastate any nation it dislikes, or
has vast oil fields or other natural resources that it covets. This
first-degree-murder strategy makes about 70 percent of Americans
feel good about Bush. But Bush has an insidious ulterior motive,
and if these feel-good Americans were to read the fine print of
his Manifesto, they would realize that by generating more human
misery around the world, the eternal war on terror will create more
dissenters at home, and thus provide Bush with the mandate he needs
to impose a de facto military dictatorship, as prescribed in his
domestic policy statements: the Homeland Security, Patriot, and
Domestic Security Enhancement Acts.

Just as waging
war around the world is popular, so too will be suppressing domestic
dissent. For example, Fox News Channel’s Bill O’Reilly recently
had to defend himself when he said war protesters were “un-American.”
His producers made him do some fast backpedaling, but the Big Mouth
was expressing the true feelings of most of his listeners. The airwaves
and editorial columns bombard the public with the Bill O’Reilly
message, and that is how peace activists go from being bad Americans
to being enemies of the state. And that is how the war on terror
translates into a homeland security infrastructure that suppresses
dissent.

The Shell
Game

Homeland Security
is a euphemism for internal security, but that phrase has the nasty
ring of McCarthyism to it, and the anti-Communist witch-hunts of
the 1950s, led by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and racist Senator
James Eastland’s Internal Security Subcommittee. Before the neo-cons
got hooked on terror, America’s hawks were obsessed with Godless
Communism. Hoover devoted his life to destroying every Communist
in America, while the Dulles brothers (CIA Director Allen and Secretary
of State John) harnessed the mania and used it as a convenient pretext
for Cold War foreign intervention, and laid the foundation stones
for the American empire after World War II. In the same way, Bush’s
anal obsession with terror is the new contrived pretext for solidifying
world domination. But as Hoover, Eastland, and the Dulles’ knew,
without political internal security, Bush cannot wage war abroad,
with all the economic benefits that entails.

So Bush, with
the help of Joe Lieberman, the Senator from Israel, created the
Department of Homeland Security to pacify (a euphemism for terrorize)
the American people into submission through a number of ploys. This
homeland security boondoggle is the biggest reorganization of the
U.S. government in 50 years. It might even bankrupt the country
and, perhaps intentionally, throw it into a Depression. That remains
to be seen. What is certain is that at a cost of $50 billion in
taxpayer’s money, the homeland security infrastructure will provide
Bush with 170,000 political cadres, and the internal security he
needs to assure the continuity of his political power indefinitely.
Except for providing Bush with political internal security, there
is no need for the Department of Homeland Security; it is a Trojan
Horse through which Bush will unleash his ideological storm troopers
and exploit his ill-gotten power to achieve permanent political
dominance.

And he is creating
this police state through terror. As the Homeland Security web site
assures us, the threat of terrorism “is a permanent condition” that
“requires our country to design a new homeland security structure.”

Terror as
an Organizing Principle of Society

The underlying
principle of homeland security (and the war on terror) is that terror
is an organizing principle of society. This includes every type
of terror, from the shock and awe bombs that liberated Baghdad,
to the collective punishments Israel used to crush the Palestinian
soul. It’s armed propaganda in the form of National Guardsmen eye-balling
us at airports, and it’s the greatest psywar campaign ever waged,
in the form of red white and blue color-coded warnings of terror
attacks that never occur, and unsubstantiated reports brought to
you by government stenographers at network news.

Terror is the
underlying concept. In “Metaphoric Entrapment In Time,” researcher
Anthony Judge tells how the new homeland security infrastructure
is actually an act of “structural violence.”

“Personal violence
is for the amateur in dominance,” Judge notes, quoting two-time
Nobel Prize winner Johan Galtung, but “structural violence is the
tool of the professional. The amateur who wants to dominate uses
guns; the professional uses social structure. The legal criminality
of the social system and its institutions, of government, and of
individuals at the interpersonal level is tacit violence. Structural
violence is a structure of exploitation and social injustice.”

Now that the
Department of Homeland Security has been voted into law, Bush has
laid the groundwork for America’s new legally criminal social structure,
which exploits on both personal and professional levels. This confluence
blesses Bush with omnipotence. He is all-powerful. As he said before
sacrificing the Iraqis on the altar of his apotheosis: “We have
concluded that tomorrow is a moment of truth for the world.”

Delusions of
grandeur? A messiah syndrome? Penis envy? What gives?

Justice
as Terror

Administrative
detention is the extralegal nail upon which the forthcoming legally
criminal homeland security structure hangs. It is a neat way of
avoiding the Bill of Rights and the Geneva Conventions by creating
“crimes of status.”

Administrative
detention was first used by the CIA in the Vietnam War through the
notorious Phoenix “assassination” Program, and was applied against
Communists, Nationalists, and anyone else opposing the puppet US
puppet regime, just as CIA death squads are operating now in Afghanistan
and Iraq. Sympathizing with the Communists was a crime of status,
as was advocating peace.

Administrative
detention is structural violence for the professionals. At the personal
level, the terror as an organizing principle of society relies on
selective terror, which means destroying one’s political opposition
through acts of terror directed at individuals. It derives from
the Eye of God technique, which plays on primitive fears of an all-seeing
cosmic Eye of God that sees into your mind. It was used in World
War One by morale officers who sent pilots in small aircraft to
fly over enemy camps to call out the names of individual soldiers.
CIA psywar expert Ed Lansdale, Graham Greene’s model for Alden Pyle
in The Quiet American, used this technique in the Philippines
in the early 1950s. At night a psywar team would creep into town
and paint an eye (like the one that appears atop the pyramid in
the Great Seal of the United States) on the wall of a house facing
a suspected Communist or Communist sympathizer.

In South Vietnam
the Eye of God trick took a ghastly twist. CIA officer Pat McGarvey
recalled to Seymour Hersh that “some psychological warfare [psywar]
guy in Washington thought of a way to scare the hell out of villagers.
When we killed the VC there, they wanted us to spread eagle the
guy, put out his eye, cut a hole in the back [of his head] and put
his eye in there. The idea was that fear was a good weapon.” Likewise,
ears were cut off corpses and nailed to houses to let the people
know that big brother was listening as well. When Viet Cong leaders
were found, Phoenix teams murdered and mutilated them along with
their families and neighbors as a means of terrorizing the neighboring
population into a state of submission. Such horrendous acts were,
for propaganda purposes, often made to look as if they had been
committed by the enemy. To spread the word that everyone was a potential
victim, CIA psywar posters pictured a Phoenix with a blacklist trailing
from its beak and a snake (i.e. a Communist) grasped in one of its
talons. The message was that the omnipotent CIA selectively snatches
its prey, in the most hideous way.

The Bush Regime
is locked into this method of selective terror. They want you to
think they know everything about you: if you’ve been bad or good,
so to speak. Just remember what happened to Uday Hussein and his
brother Qusay, and all the other Iraqis featured on the CIA’s popular
death cards, which are advertised on the Internet.

The modern
manifestation of selective terror is the computerized blacklist
— the greatest blackmail scheme ever invented: if you don’t do what
Bush and his clique want, your name pops up and you’re suppressed.
Be forewarned, the Bush Regime’s blacklists include the INS/State
Department’s TIPOFF; CAPPS II, which uses credit information and
secret databases to assess a person’s security risk level each time
he or she flies; the “No-Fly” blacklist of peace activists, distributed
to airlines by the FBI and the Transportation Security Administration;
and local blacklists like the one kept by the Denver police department.
You know about these lists. You just don’t know about the secret
ones, the Bush Regime’s enemies list of its most powerful domestic
political opponents.

Administrative
detention and selective terror work in tandem and depend on informant
and surveillance programs that identify, in homeland jargon, “terrorist
surrogates” at the grassroots level of society. (Attorney General
John Ashcroft’s Terrorism Information and Prevention System, a.k.a
TIPS, was the short-lived prototype.) This is how it happens: on
the basis of a false accusation made by an anonymous homeland informant,
counter-terror teams will arrest a terrorist surrogate, detain the
person indefinitely under administrative detention laws in an interrogation
center until he or she dies or defects, or is sent to a military
tribunal for disposition. Disposition means permanent detention
in some perverse torture chambers like the ones in Guantanamo Bay,
Cuba. Ultimately, the Domestic Security Enhancement Act will allow
Ashcroft to secretly incarcerate and deport U.S. citizens without
any thought of ensuring them due process of law.

Check out what
happened to Jos Padilla.

To summarize
so far: Blanket surveillance, blacklists, arrests on the word of
anonymous informants, the absence of due process through extralegal
administrative detention procedures, military tribunals, incarceration,
and deportation are the instruments of the homeland security infrastructure,
which will coordinate all existing U.S. intelligence, police, and
military units in the attack on terrorists and their surrogates.

Ensuring
Political Security

Bush is about
to devour his domestic enemies at both the tactical (personal) and
strategic (professional) levels. Upper echelon enemies will be dealt
with by the Homeland Security Council, which Bush chairs, and which
does not appear on any organizational chart. It sets policy for
a secret political warfare program. It is the greatest danger facing
America today. Like the anthrax letters mailed to Democratic senators,
it takes only a few “black propaganda” operations to suppress the
leaders of the political opposition. Private contactors may carry
out executive actions (what the Israelis fondly refer to as “targeted
kills”) issued by this all-powerful Board of Directors, as they
are not accountable to Congress. Or Bush will employ political action
squads from the Terrorist Threat Integration Center, which consists
of the FBI and CIA’s terror experts, and reports only to Bush.

Tactically
Bush will neutralize opponents through the Department of Homeland
Security, which consists of four directorates: Information Analysis
and Infrastructure Protection, Science and Technology, Border and
Transportation Security, and Emergency Preparedness and Response.
The all-important Office of Intelligence, consisting of about 1000
analysts from dozens of agencies, is cloistered within the Directorate
of Information Analysis and Infrastructure Protection. This Office,
insofar as it will coordinate the other directorates in terror operations,
is the nerve center of the DHS political internal security infrastructure.

The Office
of Intelligence will manage the CIA’s domestic action squads, interrogation,
and informant programs, and will wag the homeland security dog by
coordinating all in-coming intelligence, and then sending out warnings
to state, local and private sector officials. Employees from the
CIA’s Counter-Terror Center will fill the most important positions
within the Office of Intelligence, and will plan daily operations
in conjunction with fellow CT Center officers posted within 93 Justice
Department terrorism task forces run around the country. With the
latest electronic surveillance gadgets available to them, they will
reach into every corner of society, including our homes, workplaces,
public facilities and computers, to sniff out terrorist surrogates
and launch preemptive attacks to neutralize them before they activate.

If you don’t
believe that the blossoming homeland security infrastructure is
already providing political internal security, consider that hundreds
of businesses and institutions across the country have already been
placed on the CIA’s Watch List. According to Bob Woodward of the
Washington Post, one Bush official said that merely being on the
list “could destroy the livelihood of all those organizations…without
a bomb being thrown or a spore of anthrax being released.”

Elizabeth Becker
of the New York Times reported several months ago that “the
leaders of many federal departments and agencies have been scrambling
to figure out… how they can influence the outcome [of the impending
Department of Homeland Security] without appearing disloyal.”

And James Bamford
noted that “pressure has been building on the intelligence agencies
to deliberately slant estimates to fit a political agenda,” and
“a growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals
and diplomats …charge that the administration squelches dissenting
views.”

This is the
maximum danger of homeland security, and what it boils down to mandatory
self-censorship. Already we passively permit hooded paramilitary
policemen with automatic rifles to search our cars, without probable
cause, for Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein. These policemen are
helping us, right? They would never turn their guns on us, right?

As stated in
a CIA terrorist training manual that came to light almost 20 years
ago, “Implicit terror always accompanies weapons, since the people
are internally “aware” that they can be used against them.”

This is what
William Colby was talking about when he was quoted in the prologue
to this article as saying, “The implication or latent threat of
terror was sufficient to insure that the people would comply.”

Creating
the Political Cadres

Neo-con Michael
Ledeen, a certified homelander, rationalized the use of terror as
an organizing principle of society when he said, “New times require
new people with new standards.” According to Ledeen, these new people
have the will power to “stamp out” the “corrupt habits of mind”
manifest in the thoughts or actions of anyone who opposes Bush Regime
aggression. Says Ledeen, “The entire political world will understand
it and applaud it. And it will give [Homeland Security] a chance
to succeed, and us to prevail.”

On the international
scene, these “new people” illegally invaded Iraq, formed a puppet
regime of supplitiefs, stole the nation’s oil and are putting the
profits in their own pockets, and are now assassinating and otherwise
terrorizing, through an updated Phoenix Program, any political opposition,
in what amounts to mass murder.

Information
management is key in creating the “new people” who will organize
the new criminal homeland social structure, and make it appear legal,
moral and most importantly, popular. The first step in manufacturing
these robots is through motivational indoctrination, which is based
on the principle that people will do anything you ask of them if
you make them feel special. In return for adopting the right attitude,
a successful career is offered. Several alumni from the CIA’s Phoenix
Program already enjoy important top homeland security posts, like
Major General Bruce Lawlor, Chief of Staff of the Department of
Homeland Security, and Roger Mackin, the CIA officer in charge of
the Department’s counter-narcotics center. From mid-1967 until mid-1968,
Mackin ran the Phoenix Program in Da Nang City, and managed its
Intelligence and Operations Coordination Center — the organizational
model for the Department of Homeland Security. Mackin is also touted
as the CIA officer who nailed Colombian drug smuggler Pablo Escobar
in a typical Phoenix assassination operation in December 1993.

CIA psywar
experts like Lawlor and Mackin will motivationally indoctrinate
the 170,000 some odd homeland security personnel to wage political
warfare. A training manual on the subject was reprinted in the early
1980s by a former Phoenix officer who got caught up in the Reagan
Regime’s illegal Contra War. Titled Psychological Operations in
Guerrilla Warfare, it states that “the human being should be considered
the priority objective in a political war. And conceived as the
military target of guerrilla war, the human being has his most critical
point in his mind. Once his mind has been reached, the ‘political
animal’ has been defeated, without necessarily receiving bullets.”

Having been
politically and motivationally indoctrinated, Critical Infrastructure
and other homeland personnel will spy on colleagues who may inadvertently
or maliciously serve as terrorist surrogates by publicly or privately
revealing information about homeland infrastructure vulnerabilities,
such as power grids or computer systems. These cadre will covertly
identify and watch terrorist surrogates until it becomes necessary
to expose the surrogates in the media. No one will want to be identified,
even falsely, as an inadvertent or malicious terrorist surrogate,
knowing that they are subject to being “stamped out,” as Michael
Ledeen suggests. In this way the Bush Regime is organizing its political
cadre — Ledeen’s “new people” who have been psychologically defeated
by the implicit terror around them and, having reverted to the same
infantile state of mind occupied by President George W. Bush, have
embraced the Fascist principles they’ve been subliminally indoctrinated
with for years through the corporate propaganda machine.

These “new
people” are fast joining front organizations like the Freedom Corps,
the Citizen Corps, Community Emergency Response Teams (which will
train kids at school to prepare for the disasters the Bush Regime
will surely visit upon America); the Neighborhood Watch Program
that will allow the Bush Regime to detain its drunk and disorderly
political opponents as terrorist surrogates; and the Medical Reserve
Corps (MRC), through which enfranchised doctors will monitor patients
within the faltering health care system.

Within these
front groups are cadres trained “in techniques of persuasion over
control of target groups” to support the Bush Regime. In the forthcoming
national emergency, these cadres will be mobilized, will attend
mass meetings, carry placards, shout slogans as part of a Popular
Information Program, appeal to our cultural beliefs through Michael
Savage-style radio shows, teach classes on correct thinking, organize
subtle but massive screening operations designed to generate defectors,
who will in turn to denounce former comrades who spoke ill of the
Bush Regime. They will intervene with “problem individuals,” and
everywhere encourage their neighbors to report the activities of
terrorist surrogates by dropping a note addressed to the police
in local mailboxes. It’s not hard to imagine a few of the most highly
motivated cadres getting carried away, grabbing ropes, and forming
lynch mobs.

Only five percent
of the people need to be organized in this fashion for Bush to wield
control over the indifferent ninety percent, and defeat the five
percent that form the political resistance. This is why psychological
operations are the Bush Regime’s No. 1 priority. Case in point:
when Bush publicly announced the Department of Homeland Security
on 6 June 2002, he stated that the organization’s primary mission
was to “mobilize and focus… the American people “to accomplish
the mission of attacking the enemy where he hides and plans.” By
which he means his political opponents.

Psywar experts
prize “compromise and discreditation” operations like the one the
FBI used against Martin Luther King before he was assassinated.
Information about his extramarital affairs was leaked, and he was
sent a message with the suggestion that he should commit suicide.
“There is only one way out for you,” the forged document read. “You
better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is
bared to the nation.” Forged documents like the one used against
King are an important facet of political blackmail, and are also
used to justify false arrests or conceal illegal operations. We
have already seen Network News broadcast “edited” videotapes of
Osama bin Laden and, in the Afghanistan war, captured (perhaps forged)
documents were routinely used as a form of black propaganda to justify
military actions that resulted in “collateral” damage.

The greatest
example, of course, is Bush’s criminal and impeachable use of forged
documents to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq. This was an act
of treason by the President of the United States, and yet within
the new legally criminal homeland security structure, it is business
as usual.

We can expect
a slew of false rumors from low-level homeland cadre, designed to
ruin the reputations of politically incorrect families in their
villages and towns, especially environmentalists who pose a threat
to Critical Infrastructure corporations. The paranoia that currently
infects the Arab-American community will spread until no one is
sure who is a spy for the Thought Police. When the national emergency
arrives, most likely the forthcoming depression, and the homeland
security infrastructure goes on Red Alert, midnight arrests and
disappearances into administrative detention centers will become
commonplace. Amid the confusion, the CIA will form special units
within the 93 terrorism task forces around the country, and other
unilateral Phoenix Program-style hit teams will operate under cover
of the security forces at their disposal.

The clincher
is when the definition of a terrorist surrogate is expanded to include
people deemed dangerous to the Public Order, at which point any
person can be arrested on criminal charges for political offenses.
No specific charge is required; a homelander like Ledeen or Bill
O’Reilly will simply accuse someone of disturbing the peace or being
un-American The definitions of sedition and treason will grow to
include disseminating information about government corruption, or
undermining the will of the State by challenging its authority.
Calling for civil disobedience will be a really scary threat to
the homeland. Cadre in the Office of Cyberspace Security will expose
you as a terrorist surrogate for sending sarcastic or satirical
emails. How can you prove you were only joking when you blamed Bush
for the terror attacks on the World Trade Center, and said Cheney’s
refusal to investigate proves that Bush did it?

Ultimately,
every town will form a Homeland Committee, chaired by a Bush Regime
operative who will process confidential reports from concerned citizens
about the activities of peaceniks, or people they don’t like for
personal reasons, such as business competitors. These reports will
pass through an ideological filter as they work their way up to
the Office of Intelligence and the Terrorist Threat Integration
Center, where motivated CIA officers will gleefully pull the plug
on environmentalists, people espousing national health care, and
anyone challenging to the Bush Regime and the internal security
forces that are firmly in its grip.

Beware. Ashcroft
has vowed to “employ new tools that ease administrative burdens.”
However benign he might think he means this, these new tools can
allow the government to wage political warfare through implicit
and explicit terror. And the government can do it! The Geneva Conventions
guarantee protection to civilians in time of war, but do not prohibit
a state from interning civilians or subjecting them to emergency
detention when such measures are necessary for the security or safety
of the state. In this way indefinite detention, torture and summary
execution, all carried out without previous judgment pronounced
by a regularly constituted court, are perfectly legal, because they
are the result of “administrative procedures” and do not involve
a “criminal sentence.”

This is what
Israel is done to the Palestinians, and this is what the Bush Regime
has in store for America through its eternal war on terror: that
sad obsession with dominance, itself a sad projection of Bush’s
feelings of inadequacy, most likely brought upon by his domineering
mother Barbara.

Douglas
Valentine [send him mail]
is
the author of four previously published books: The Hotel Tacloban
(Lawrence Hill, 1984), The
Phoenix Program, (William Morrow, 1990), TDY
(iUniverse.com, 2000), and The
Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs
(Verso, 2004). His latest book is The
Strength of the Pack (TrineDay, 2009). For more information
about the author and his works, please visit his websites at www.douglasvalentine.com
and http://members.authorsguild.net/valentine.

On the morning
of Dec. 30, 2009, I listened in disbelief as an NPR "terrorism"
expert disingenuously explained how the suicide bombing that killed
seven CIA employees in Afghanistan was especially hideous, because
the CIA victims were spreading economic development and democracy
through a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT).

CIA Director
Lou Panetta issued a statement saying, "Those who fell yesterday
were far from home and close to the enemy, doing the hard work that
must be done to protect our country from terrorism.” President Obama
likewise glorified the CIA officers, calling them “part of a long
line of patriots who have made great sacrifices for their fellow
citizens, and for our way of life.”

On New Year's
Day, Washington Post staff writers Joby Warrick and Pamela
Constable began to fill in some of the blanks that the initial propaganda
had ignored. Warrick and Constable reported that the seven CIA officers
were "at the heart of a covert program overseeing strikes by
the agency’s remote-controlled aircraft along the Afghanistan-Pakistan
border."

In the past
year, those strikes have killed more than 300 people (perhaps as
many as 700) who are invariably described by the U.S. news media
as suspected insurgents, or militants, or terrorists, or jihadists
— or as collateral damage, people killed by accident. There is never
any distinction made between Afghan nationalists fighting the U.S.
occupation of their country and real terrorists who have inflicted
intentional violence against civilians to achieve a political objective
(the classic definition of terrorism).

Likewise, the
U.S. news media describes the Dec. 30 attack on the CIA officers
as "terrorism," although it doesn't fit the definition
since the CIA officers were engaged in military operations and thus
represented a legitimate target under the law of war, certainly
as much so as Taliban commanders far from the front lines.

One such commander,
Jalaluddin Haggani, was said to have ordered the suicide attack
from his base in North Waziristan in retaliation for drone strikes
on his forces. Haggani, a former CIA ally during the Soviet occupation
of Afghanistan, also has close ties to Pakistani intelligence. Curiously,
the bomb used in the suicide attack has been linked to the Pakistani
intelligence service. It is unclear, however, if Haggani arranged
for the bomb to be delivered to suicide bomber Humam Khalil Abu-Mulal
al-Balawi, the Jordanian agent whom the CIA summoned in the belief
that he had information as to the whereabouts of a top Al Qaeda
official.

What is clear
is that Al-Balawi sacrificed his life to help to drive Americans
from Islamic nations like Afghanistan, where they cause so much
death and misery. The mainstream media describes people like Al-Balawi
as irrational "jihadists" with no appreciation for the
fact that Americans are merely "defending" their "interests"
in the region.

In the broadest
sense, Al-Balawi's suicide attack was retaliation for the murder
of thousands of innocent Muslims in Iraq and Afghanistan, including
ten civilians in Ghazi Khan Village in Narang district of the
eastern Afghan province of Kunar. The ten civilians were executed
during a midnight raid on Dec 27 by what NATO called "non-military"
(meaning CIA) American commandos.

CIA commandos,
often Green Berets and Navy SEALs hired into the CIA's Special Activities
Division, do not wear uniforms in violation of international rules
of land warfare. Instead they grow long beards and wear traditional
Afghan garb and appear to be civilians. During the post-9/11 "global
war on terror," these teams have engaged in widespread kidnappings
and executions.

CIA commandos
are America's Einsatzgruppen, the notorious Nazi death squads that
hunted and terrorized partisans in the Russian countryside in World
War Two. Other CIA commandos function like the Gestapo, terrorizing
the resistance cells in urban areas. In both cases, their mission
is to terrorize the civilian population into submission.

CIA
Terrorism

NATO spokesmen
initially labeled the ten victims in Ghazi Khan as "insurgents"
belonging to a "terrorist" cell that manufactured improvised
explosive devices used to kill occupation troops and civilians.
But later reports from Afghan government investigators and townspeople
identified the dead as civilians, including eight students, aged
11 to 17, enrolled in local schools. All but one of the dead came
from the same family.

According to
a
Dec. 31 article published by the Times of London, the
CIA death squad flew by helicopter from Kabul, landing about two
kilometers from the village. The commandos snuck up to the residence,
taking the inhabitants by surprise as they slept. The commandos
entered the first room and shot two of their victims — a guest and
a student — then entered the second room and handcuffed seven other
students, whom they executed in cold blood. When the farmer with
whom the students were staying heard the shooting and came outside,
the commandos killed him too.

Protests over
the killings erupted throughout Kunar Province, where the deaths
occurred, as well as in Kabul. Hundreds of protesters demanded that
American occupation forces leave the country, and that the murderers
be brought to justice.

A NATO spokesman
claimed there was "no direct evidence to substantiate"
the claims of premeditated murder. And yet, the record of American
forces engaging the first degree murder of unarmed people in Afghanistan
and Iraq is a long one, with testimony about premeditated executions
even emerging in U.S. military disciplinary hearings.

These types
of "unilateral" (done without informing any Afghan nationals)
CIA "covert actions" are increasing in frequency with
Obama's surge of 30,000 additional U.S. troops into Afghanistan.
Of course, this ratcheting up of the cycle of violence will only
incite more and more revenge killings. Indeed, the CIA immediately
vowed to avenge the murder of its colleagues. Typically, a public
statement of revenge such as this is an invocation of the notorious
100-to-one rule employed by the Nazis: anytime the partisans killed
a member of the Gestapo or Einsatzgruppen, the Nazis killed 100
innocent civilians as punishment.

In the meantime,
the surviving CIA personnel at Forward Operating Base Chapman have
barricaded themselves inside their compound and are grilling the
Afghan employees who were on duty at the time of the Dec. 30 bomb
attack. Afghans who worked with the CIA on the outside are locked
out.

Given their
elevated status and class prerogatives, CIA officers do not perform
menial tasks, and every chauffeur, maid, and vendor will now be
seen as a potential "double agent." This apprehension
will spread (as the suicide bomber and his masters intended) from
the bottom to the top: Afghan officials in the US-backed government
knew little about unilateral CIA operations at FOW Chapman to begin
with, but now, as mutual mistrust reaches unprecedented levels,
they will have less input and the war will enter a bloodier phase
reminiscent of the pacification of Iraq.

The Face
of Terrorism — Provincial Reconstruction Teams

The events
of the past week are instructive in explaining how CIA covert operations
are conducted in concert with the U.S. news media.

Few Americans
were aware that FOB Chapman was a CIA base camp. The local Afghans,
however, were well aware of this fact. They also knew that the CIA
used the Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) based at Chapman as
a means of gathering — from informants, secret agents, and field
interrogations — intelligence upon which to coordinate super-sophisticated
drone attacks and crude paramilitary operations.

Composed of
Afghan and US forces, the PRTs have been a foundation stone of the
CIA's secret government in Afghanistan since they were instituted
in 2002 under the imprimatur of Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzadin. As
with all the entities the CIA has created in Afghanistan, the PRTs
are entirely funded by the CIA, and staffed with collaborators under
CIA control.

Naturally,
the suicide bombing has cast doubt on the integrity of the intelligence
the PRTs produce for the CIA. Agents of the resistance have infiltrated
the program and the PRTs are certainly going through an internal
review. But they will not be abandoned, and so it is instructive
to know how they are organized and how they operate.

The PRTs provide
CIA agents — usually Afghans working in the PRTs — with a covert
way to recruit and meet sub-agents (informants) in the field. CIA
"officers" run "agents" in the field and these
Afghan agents in turn run "sub-agents" — people in villages
like Ghazi who spy on other people in the villages.

The CIA managers
of the PRTs also rely on interpreters, as well as Afghan "counter-parts"
in the secret police and military to determine if the intelligence
given about "suspects" in a particular village is reliable.
This leap of faith carries considerable risk. If a sub-agent in
a village or an agent in the PRT is a double, a CIA death squad
can easily be misdirected against innocent civilians. Likewise,
a drone strike could be directed against an enemy of Jalaluddin
Haggani's within the resistance.

The PRT "counter-terror"
mission is to identify members of the resistance. The sub-agent
tells the PRT agent where the suspect lives in the village, how
many people are in his house, where they sleep, and when they enter
and leave the house. He also provides a picture, if possible. Other
times a PRT agent will attempt to blackmail the suspect into becoming
an informant, if there is reason to believe that is possible.

The PRT also
has a "foreign intelligence" mission, which involves collecting
intelligence on Taliban leaders and their Al Qaeda contacts in foreign
nations, like Pakistan.

Obviously,
al Qaeda and the Afghan resistance are aware of the CIA's activities,
and this fact casts suspicion on the CIA's interpreters and counter-parts
in the Afghan police and military. All of this puts increasing pressure
on the CIA to separate itself entirely from the untrustworthy, ungrateful
Afghans it has come to liberate.

The CIA's Provincial
Reconstruction Teams are at the center of this dilemma. Although
it bills the PRTs as a means of spreading economic development and
democracy, the CIA is not a social welfare program: its job is gathering
intelligence and using it to capture, kill or turn the enemy into
agents. The PRTs are a means to achieve these goals — but only as
long as the CIA can plausibly deny that it does so. Thus, the two
main purposes of PRTs are 1) maintaining the fiction that the US
is a force for positive change and 2) providing the CIA with cover
for its dirty business.

As the CIA
tightens its security measures, and as the Obama administration
moves to reactivate some of the most brutal and corrupt warlords
who fought the Soviets in the 1980s, the PRTs and their "community
defense forces" will become increasingly reliant on criminals
and sociopaths — agents who have no compunctions about pursuing
unilateral CIA policies and goals that are antithetical to Afghanistan's
national interests. And that spells trouble for the CIA.

The Origins
of PRTs in Vietnam

Much of this
bloody strategy was tested during the Vietnam War. In the early
1960s in South Vietnam, the CIA's Covert Action Branch developed
the programs that would, in 1965, be grouped within its Revolutionary
Development Cadre program. The standard Revolutionary Development
Team was composed of North Vietnamese defectors and South Vietnamese
collaborators advised by U.S. military and civilian personnel under
the management of the CIA.

The original
model, known as a Political Action Team, was developed by CIA officer
Frank Scotton. The original PAT consisted of 40 men: as Scotton
told me, "That’s three teams of twelve men each, strictly armed.
The control element was four men: a commander and his deputy, a
morale officer, and a radioman."

"These
are commando teams,” Scotton stressed, “displacement teams. The
idea was to go into contested areas and spend a few nights. But
it was a local responsibility so they had to do it on their own.”

“Two functions
split out of this,” Scotton added. First was pacification. Second
was counter-terror. As Scotton noted, "The PRU thing directly
evolves from this.”

The PRU, for
Provincial Reconnaissance Unit, was the name given in 1966 to the
CIA's "counter-terror" teams, which had generated a ton
of negative publicity in 1965 when Ohio Sen. Stephen Young charged
that they disguised themselves as Vietcong and discredited the Communists
by committing atrocities, including murder, rape and mutilation.

Notably, propagandists
like Mark Moyar, a professor of national security affairs at the
Marine Corps University, advocate for the expansion of PRU-style
counter-terror teams in Afghanistan. [See Consortiumnews.com's "A
Bad Vietnam Lesson for Afghanistan."]

Staffing is
a crucial element of this "political action" strategy,
and to this end Scotton developed a "motivational indoctrination"
program, which is certainly used today in some form in Afghanistan
and Iraq. Scotton's motivational indoctrination program was modeled
on Communist techniques, and the process began on a confessional
basis.

"On the
first day,” according to Scotton, “everyone would fill out a form
and write an essay on why they had joined.” The team's morale officer
“would study their answers and explain the next day why they were
involved in a special unit. The instructors would lead
them to stand up and talk about themselves.” The morale officer’s
job, he said, “was to keep people honest and have them admit mistakes.”

Not only did
Scotton co-opt Communist motivational techniques, but he also relied
on Communist defectors as his cadre. “They could communicate doctrine,
and they were people who would shoot,” he explained, adding, “It
wasn’t necessary for everyone in the unit to be ex-Vietminh, just
the leadership.”

Indeed, the
Vietnamese officer in charge of Scotton’s PAT program, Major Nguyen
Be, had been party secretary for the Ninth Vietcong Battalion before
switching sides.

In 1965, Scotton
was transferred to another job, and Major Be, with his new CIA advisor,
Harry "The Hat" Monk, combined CIA “mobile” Census Grievance
cadre, PATs, and Counter-Terror Teams into the standard 59-man Revolutionary
Development (RD) team.

Census Grievance
Teams were the primary way RD agents contacted sub-agents in the
villages — by setting up a portable shack in which civilians could
privately complain about the government. The PRTs very likely have
this Census Grievance element in their intelligence unit.

Major Be’s
59-man Revolutionary Development teams were called Purple People
Eaters by American soldiers, in reference to their clothes and terror
tactics. To the rural Vietnamese, the RD teams were simply “idiot
birds.”

In mid-1965
the RD Cadre Program was officially launched and teams were sent
across South Vietnam. With standardization and expansion came the
need for more advisers, so Thomas Donohue, the CIA officer in charge
of Covert Action in South Vietnam, began recruiting military men.
Most came from US Special Forces, though the regular army, navy
and marines also provide support personnel as "detailees"
to the CIA.

“We got to
the point,” Donohue told me, “where the CIA was running a political
program in a sovereign country where they didn’t know what the hell
we were teaching. But what kind of program could it be that had
only one sponsor, the CIA, that says it was doing good? It had to
be sinister. Any red-blooded American could understand that. What
the hell is the CIA doing running a program on political action?

“So I went
out to try to get some cosponsors for the record. They weren’t easy
to come by. I went to [USIS chief] Barry Zorthian. I said, `Barry,
how about giving us someone?’ I talked to MACV about getting an
officer assigned. I had AID give me a guy.”

But all of
it, Donohue said, “was window dressing. We [the CIA] had the funds;
we had the logistics; we had the transportation.”

The same can
undoubtedly be said for the PRTs in Afghanistan and Iraq.

PRTs in
Iraq

The CIA's RD
Cadre program in Vietnam has been cloned into the Provincial Reconstruction
Teams in Afghanistan and Iraq. The PRT program started in Afghanistan
in 2002 and migrated to Iraq in 2004.

PRTs consist
of anywhere between 50 and 100 civilian and military specialists.
The standard PRT has a military police unit, a psychological operations
unit, an explosive ordinance-demining unit, an intelligence team,
medics, a force protection unit, and administrative and support
personnel.

Like Scotton's
teams in South Vietnam, they conduct terror, political, and psychological
operations, under cover of fostering economic development and democracy.
Long ago the American people grew weary of the heavily censored
but universally bad news they got about Iraq, and are now quiet
happy to believe that PRTs have put Iraq back on its feet. Americans
are quite happy to forget about the devastation they wrought.

But few Iraqis
are fooled by the "war as economic development" shell
game, or by the deceitful standards the US government uses to measure
the success of its PRT program.

In his correspondence
with reporter Dahr Jamail, one Iraqi political analyst from Fallujah
(a neighborhood that was destroyed in order to save it) put
it succinctly when he said: "In a country that used to
feed much of Arab world, starvation is the norm."

According to
another of Jamail's correspondents, Iraqis "are largely mute
witnesses. Americans may argue among themselves about just how much
“success” or “progress” there really is in post-surge Iraq, but
it is almost invariably an argument in which Iraqis are but stick
figures — or dead bodies."

In a publication
titled "Hard Lessons: The Iraq Reconstruction Experience,"
the Special Inspector General for Iraq Reconstruction describes
its mission as the largest overseas rebuilding effort in U.S. history.

In some places
in Iraq unemployment is at 40–60 percent. Repairing war damage was
the policy goal, but little connection was made between how the
rebuilding would – or even could – bring about a democratic
transition. As in Iraq, the PRTs in Afghanistan are a gimmick to
make Americans feel good about the oppressive occupations conducted
for their benefit. The supposed successes of the PRTs are cloaked
in double-speak and meaningless statistics.

After all,
achieving statistical progress is not hard in nations whose infrastructures
were destroyed by invasion and occupation, and where entire neighborhoods
have been leveled in the name of security. The hard truth is that
the U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq always have been less about
combating Islamic "terrorism" and "protecting the
homeland" than about projecting the dark side of the American
collective psyche.

Protecting
the People from the Knowledge of CIA Terrorism

Protecting
Americans from any knowledge of the horror their government inflicts,
is the job of the mainstream media. Its propagandists will not tell
you that the CIA has a policy of targeting civilians for recruitment
as agents and informants, or that it intentionally detains, without
charge, and interrogates civilians as a means of coercing information
from them about the Islamic resistance to American aggression. Civilians
are knowingly killed and maimed in drone attacks, as well as raids
by CIA commandos, as a means of terrorizing the people from associating
in any way with the resistance.

It is the job
of mainstream propagandists to disguise this policy and characterize
these civilians as either members of the enemy infrastructure, or
jihadists, and thus legitimate military targets.

Another thing
you will not read about is the accommodation that normally exists
between the opposing elites in any war. This accommodation exists
in the twilight zone between reality and imagination, in the fog
of war. It is why officers are separated from enlisted men in POW
camps and given better treatment. It is why officers of opposing
armies have more in common with one another than they have with
their own enlisted men.

Officers are
trained to think of the lower ranks as canon fodder. Officers know
when they send a unit up a hill, some men will be killed. That is
why they do not fraternize with the lower ranks. This class distinction
exists across the world, and is the basis of the accommodation.
It is why the Bush family flew the bin Laden family, and other Saudi
Royals, out of the United States in the days after 9-11. If anyone
was a case officer to the 9-11 bombers, or had knowledge about the
bombers or any follow-up plots, it was these "protected"
people.

CIA officers
too are among the Protected Few. Blessed with false identities and
bodyguards, they fly in private planes, live in villas, eat fancy
food and enjoy state-of-the-art technology. CIA officers tell army
generals what to do. They direct Congressional committees. They
assassinate heads of state and innocent children with equal impunity
and indifference.

In Afghanistan
they manage the drug trade from their hammocks in the shade. They
know the Taliban tax the farmers growing the opium, and they know
that Karzai's warlords convert the opium into heroin and fly it
to the Russian mob. They are amused by the antics of earnest DEA
agents, who, in their patriotic bliss, cannot believe such an accommodation
exists.

CIA officers
are trained to exist in this moral netherworld, for the simple reason
that the CIA in every conflict has a paramount need to keep secure
communication channels open to the enemy. The CIA, as part of its
mandate, is authorized to negotiate with the enemy, but it can only
do so as long as the channel is secure and deniable. The mainstream
media makes sure that no proof will ever exist, so the American
public can be deceived.

But every once
in a while, something disrupts the accommodation. Take Iran Contra,
when President Reagan publicly vowed never to negotiate with terrorists,
then secretly sent a team of spies to Tehran to sell missiles to
the Iranians and use the money to buy guns for the drug dealing
Contras.

There are stated
and unstated policies, and the CIA exists to pursue the government's
unstated policy. And without an accommodation in Afghanistan, the
CIA would not have a secure channel to the resistance to negotiate
on simple matters like prisoner exchanges.

The exchange
of British journalist Peter Moore for an Iraqi in CIA custody is
an example of how the accommodation works in Iraq. Moore was held
by a Shia group allegedly allied to Iran, and his freedom depended
entirely on the CIA communicating secretly and in good faith with
America's enemies in the Iraq resistance. The details of such prisoner
exchanges are never revealed by complicit assets in thee media,
but the same channels of communication are used to discuss issues
of strategic importance vital to any eventual reconciliation.

The Afghanis
want reconciliation. Apart from US policy, Karzai and his clique
at every level have filial relations with the resistance. And no
matter how powerful the CIA and its doppelgangers in al Qaeda are,
they cannot overcome that.

Ed Brady, an
Army officer detailed to the CIA in Saigon in 1967 and 1968, explains
how the accommodation worked in Vietnam.

While Brady
and his Vietnamese counterpart Colonel Tan were lunching at a restaurant
in Dalat, Tan pointed at a woman eating noodle soup and drinking
Vietnamese coffee at the table next to them. He told Brady that
she was the Viet Cong province chief's wife. Brady, of course, wanted
to grab her and use her for bait.

Coolly, Colonel
Tan said to him: "You don't understand. You don't live the
way we live. You don't have any family here. You're going to go
home when this operation is over. You don't think like you're going
to live here forever. But I have a home and a family and kids that
go to school. I have a wife that has to go to market…. And you want
me to go kill his wife? You want me to set a trap for him and kill
him when he comes in to see his wife? If we do that, what are they
going to do to our wives?"

"The VC
didn't run targeted operations against them either," Brady
explains. "There were set rules that you played by. If you
went out and conducted a military operation and you chased them
down fair and square in the jungle and you had a fight, that was
okay. If they ambushed you on the way back from a military operation,
that was fair. But to conduct these clandestine police operations
and really get at the heart of things, that was kind of immoral
to them. That was not cricket. And the Vietnamese were very, very
leery of upsetting that."

The CIA relies
on such clandestine operations in Afghanistan, but only among working
and middle class families, in an effort to rip apart the fabric
of Afghan society, until the Afghan people accept American domination,
through its ruling class. And that, ultimately, is why CIA officers
were targeted. It has played a double game, violating the accommodation
on the one hand, and exploiting it on the other.

The CIA is
utterly predictable. As programmed, it will go on a killing spree
until its vengeance is satisfied. But at the end of the day, the
Afghan people will only hate the Americans more. And that spells
defeat for the CIA and America.

Douglas
Valentine [send him mail]
is
the author of four previously published books: The Hotel Tacloban
(Lawrence Hill, 1984), The
Phoenix Program, (William Morrow, 1990), TDY
(iUniverse.com, 2000), and The
Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs
(Verso, 2004). His latest book is The
Strength of the Pack (TrineDay, 2009). For more information
about the author and his works, please visit his websites at www.douglasvalentine.com
and http://members.authorsguild.net/valentine.

Douglas
Valentine worked as a researcher for the King family and testified
at the trial about suspicions that Dr. King might have been under
U.S. government surveillance at the time of the assassination.

On Dec. 8,
a jury in Memphis, Tenn., deliberated for only three hours before
deciding that the long-held official version of Martin Luther King
Jr.’s assassination was wrong.

The jury’s verdict implicated a retired Memphis businessman and
government agencies in a conspiracy to kill the civil rights giant.

Though the
trial testimony had received little press attention outside of the
Memphis area, the startling outcome drew an immediate rebuttal from
defenders of the official finding: that James Earl Ray acted alone
or possibly as part of a low-level conspiracy of a few white racists.

Leading newspapers
across the country disparaged the December verdict as the product
of a flawed conspiracy theory given a one-sided presentation.
The Washington Post even lumped the conspiracy proponents in
with those who insist Adolf Hitler was unfairly accused of genocide.

“The deceit
of history, whether it occurs in the context of Holocaust denial
or in an effort to rewrite the story of Dr. King’s death, is a dangerous
impulse for which those committed to reasoned debate and truth cannot
sit still,” a Post editorial read. “The more quickly and
completely this jury’s discredited verdict is forgotten the better.”
[WP, Dec. 12, 1999]

For its part,
the King family cited the verdict as a way of dealing with its personal
grief. “We hope to put this behind us and move on with our lives,”
said Dexter King, speaking on behalf of the family. “This is a time
for reconciliation, healing and closure.”

But should
closure – or forgetfulness – follow a verdict that finds the
federal government complicit in a conspiracy to assassinate one
of this nation’s most historic figures? Are there indeed legitimate
reasons to doubt the official story? And how should Americans evaluate
this unorthodox trial, its evidence and the verdict?

Without doubt,
the trial in Memphis lacked the neat wrap-up of a Perry Mason drama.
The testimony was sometimes imprecise, dredging up disputed memories
more than three decades old.

Some testimony
was hearsay; long depositions by deceased or absent figures were
read into the record; and some witnesses had changed their stories
over time amid accusations of profiteering.

There was a
messiness that often accompanies complex cases of great notoriety.
The plaintiff’s case also did not encounter a rigorous challenge
from Lewis K. Garrison, the attorney for defendant Loyd Jowers.

Garrison shares
the doubts about the official version, and his client, Jowers, has
implicated himself in the conspiracy, although insisting his role
was tangential. Some critics compared the trial to a professional
wrestling match with the defense putting up only token resistance. 

Yet, despite
the shortcomings, the trial was the first time that evidence from
the King assassination was presented to a jury in a court of law.
The verdict demonstrated that 12 citizens – six blacks and
six whites – did not find the notion of a wide-ranging conspiracy
to kill King as ludicrous as many commentators did.

The trial suggested,
too, that the government erred by neglecting the larger issue of
public interest in the mystery of who killed Martin Luther King
Jr. Instead the government simply affirmed and reaffirmed James
Earl Ray’s guilty plea for three decades. Insisting that the evidence
pointed clearly toward Ray as the assassin, the government never
agreed to vacate Ray’s guilty plea and allow for a full-scale trial,
a possibility that ended when Ray died from liver disease in 1998.

At that point,
the King family judged that a wrongful death suit against Jowers
was the last chance for King’s murder to be considered by a jury.
From the start, the family encountered harsh criticism from many
editorial writers who judged the conspiracy allegations nutty.

The King family’s
suspicions, however, derived from one fact that was beyond dispute:
that powerful elements of the federal government indeed were out
to get Martin Luther King Jr. in the years before his murder.

In particular,
FBI director J. Edgar Hoover despised King as a dangerous radical
who threatened the national security and needed to be neutralized
by almost any means necessary.

After King’s
“I have a dream speech” in 1963, FBI assistant director William
Sullivan called King “the most dangerous and effective Negro leader
in the country.” Hoover reacted to King’s Nobel Peace Prize in 1964
with the comment that King was “the most notorious liar in the country.”

The documented
record is clear that the FBI and other federal agencies aggressively
investigated King as an enemy of the state. His movements were monitored;
his phones were tapped; his rooms were bugged; derogatory information
about his personal life was leaked to discredit him; he was blackmailed
about extramarital affairs; he was sent a message suggesting that
he commit suicide.

“There is only
one way out for you,” the message read. “You better take it before
your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bared to the nation.”

These FBI operations
escalated as black uprisings burned down parts of American cities
and as the nation’s campuses erupted in protests against the Vietnam
War. To many young Americans, black and white, King was a man of
unparalleled stature and extraordinary courage. He was the leader
who could merge the civil rights and anti-war movements.

Increasingly,
King saw the two issues as intertwined, as President Lyndon Johnson
siphoned off anti-poverty funds to prosecute the costly war in Vietnam.

On April 15,
1967, less than a year before his murder, King concluded a speech
to an anti-war rally with a call on the Johnson administration to
“stop the bombing.” King also began planning a Poor People’s March
on Washington that would put a tent city on the Mall and press the
government for a broad redistribution of the nation’s wealth.

Covert government
operations worked to disrupt both the anti-war and civil rights
movements by infiltrating them with spies and agents provocateurs.
The FBI's COINTELPRO sought to neutralize what were called “black
nationalist hate groups,” counting among its targets King’s Southern
Christian Leadership Conference.

One FBI memo
fretted about the possible emergence of a black “Messiah” who could
“unify and electrify” the various black militant groups. The memo
listed King as “a real contender” for this leadership role.

With this backdrop
came the chaotic events in Memphis in early 1968 as King lent his
support to a sanitation workers’ strike marred by violence.

The government’s
surveillance of King in Memphis – by both federal agents and
city police – would rest at the heart of the case more than
three decades later.

On April 4,
1968, at 6 p.m., King emerged from his room on the second floor
of the Lorraine Motel. As he leaned over the balcony, King was struck
by a single bullet and died.

As word of
his death spread, riots exploded in cities across the country. Fiery
smoke billowed from behind the Capitol dome. Government officials
struggled to restore order and police searched for King’s assassin.

One of those
questioned was restaurant owner Loyd Jowers whose Jim’s Grill was
below the rooming house where James Earl Ray had stayed and from
where authorities contend the fatal shot was fired.

Jowers told
the police he knew nothing about the shooting, but had heard a noise
that “sounded like something that fell in the kitchen.” [The
Commercial Appeal, Dec. 9, 1999]

The international
manhunt ended at London’s Heathrow Airport on June 8, 1968, when
Scotland Yard detained Ray for carrying an illegal firearm. Ray
was extradited back to the United States to stand trial as King’s
lone assassin.

The FBI insisted
that it could find no solid evidence indicating that Ray was part
of any conspiracy. But the authorities contended they had a strong
case against Ray, including a recovered rifle with Ray’s fingerprints.
The rifle fired bullets of the same caliber as the one that killed
King.

While Ray sat
in jail, Jowers’s name popped up again in the case. On Feb. 10,
1969, Betty Spates, a waitress at Jim’s Grill, implicated Jowers
in the assassination. She said Jowers found a gun behind the caf
and may actually have shot King. Two days later, however, Spates
recanted. [The Commercial Appeal, Dec. 9, 1999]

On March 10,
1969, Ray accepted the advice of his attorney and pleaded guilty.
He was sentenced to 99 years in prison.

Three days
later, however, he wrote a letter to the judge asking that his guilty
plea be set aside. He claimed that he was innocent and that his
lawyer had misled him into making the plea.

Ray began telling
a complex tale in which he was duped by an operative he knew only
as “Raul.” Ray claimed that Raul arranged the assassination and
set Ray up to take the fall.

Government
investigators rejected Raul’s existence and insisted that Ray was
simply spinning a story to escape a long prison term. The courts
rejected Ray’s request for a trial. As far as the legal system of
Memphis was concerned, the case was closed.

But there did
appear to be weaknesses in the prosecution case that might have
shown up at trial.

For instance,
Charles Stephens, a key witness placing Ray at the scene of the
crime, appeared to have been drunk at the time and had offered contradictory
accounts of the assailant’s description, according to a reporter
who encountered him after the shooting. [For details, see William
F. Pepper's Orders
to Kill.]

Outside the
government, other skeptical investigators began to pick at the loose
ends of the case.

In 1971, investigative
writer Harold Weisberg published the first dissenting account of
the official King case in his book, Frame
Up. Weisberg noted problems with the physical evidence,
including the FBI’s failure to match the death slug to the alleged
murder weapon.

Questions about
the case mounted when the federal government declassified records
revealing the intensity of FBI hatred for King. The combination
of factual discrepancies and a possible government motive led some
of King’s friends to suspect a conspiracy.

In 1977, civil
rights leader Ralph Abernathy encouraged lawyer William F. Pepper
to meet with Ray and hear out the convict’s tale. Pepper said he
took on the assignment in part because he had encouraged King to
join in publicly criticizing the Vietnam War and felt a sense of
responsibility for King’s fate.

Responding
to growing public doubts about the official accounts of the three
major assassinations that rocked the nation in the 1960s, Congress
also agreed to re-examine the murders of President John F. Kennedy,
Sen. Robert F. Kennedy and King.

In congressional
testimony, however, Ray came off poorly. Rep. Louis Stokes, D-Ohio,
the chairman of the investigating committee, said Ray’s performance
convinced him that Ray indeed was the assassin and that there was
no government role in the murder.

The panel did
leave open the possibility that other individuals were involved,
but limited the scope of any conspiracy to maybe Ray’s brothers,
Jerry and John, or two St. Louis racists who allegedly put a bounty
on King’s life. But others on the panel, such as Rep. Walter Fauntroy,
D-D.C., continued to harbor doubts about the congressional findings.

After a decade
of on-and-off work on the case, Pepper decided to press ahead. He
agreed to represent Ray and filed a habeas corpus suit on his behalf.

Also, in 1993,
a mock television trial presented the evidence against Ray to a
“jury,” which returned the convict’s “acquittal.” Pepper asserted
that the government’s case was so weak that Ray would win a regular
trial, too.

Jowers reentered
the controversy as well, reversing his initial statement to police
in which he denied knowledge of the assassination. On Dec. 16, 1993,
in a nationally televised ABC-TV interview, Jowers claimed that
a Mafia-connected Memphis produce dealer, Frank C. Liberto, had
paid him $100,000 to arrange King’s murder.

But Liberto
was then dead and the man named by Jowers as the paid hit-man denied
any role in the murder. [The Commercial Appeal, Dec. 9, 1999]

In 1995, Pepper
published an account of his investigation in Orders to Kill.
The book contended that the conspirators behind the assassination
included elements of the Mafia, the FBI and U.S. Army intelligence.

Pepper located
witnesses with new evidence. John McFerren, a black grocery owner,
was quoted as saying that an hour before the assassination, he overheard
Liberto order someone over the phone to “shoot the son of a bitch
when he comes on the balcony.”

But Pepper’s
credibility suffered when he cited anonymous sources in identifying
William Eidson as a deceased member of a U.S. Army assassination
squad that was present in Memphis on the day King died. ABC-TV researchers
found Eidson to be alive and furious at Pepper’s insinuations about
his alleged role in the King assassination.

Still, the
King family – especially King’s children – grew increasingly
interested in the controversy. On March 27, 1997, King’s younger
son, Dexter, sat down with Ray in prison, listened to Ray’s story
and announced his belief that Ray was telling the truth.

In a separate
meeting with the King family, Jowers claimed that a police officer
shot King from behind Jim’s Grill. The officer then handed the smoking
rifle to Jowers, the former restaurant owner said.

The authorities
in Tennessee, however, continued to rebuff Ray’s appeals for a trial.
Prosecutors concluded that Jowers’s story lacked credibility and
may have been motivated by greed. Ray’s pleas for his day in court
finally ended with his death from liver disease.

On Oct. 2,
1998, the King family filed a wrongful death suit against Jowers.
The trial opened in November 1999, attracting scant attention from
the national press.

Jowers, 73,
attended only part of the trial and did not testify. His admissions
of complicity were recounted by others who had spoken with him.

Former United
Nations ambassador Andrew Young testified that he found Jowers sincere
during a four-hour conversation about the assassination. “I got
the impression this was a man who was very sick [and who] wanted
to go to confession to get his soul right,” Young said.

According to
Young, Jowers said he had served Memphis police officers and federal
agents when they met in Jowers’s restaurant before the assassination.
Jowers also recounted his story of Mafia money going to a man who
delivered a rifle to Jowers’s caf.

After the assassination,
the man, a Memphis police officer, handed the rifle to Jowers through
a back door, according to Jowers’s account. [Scripps Howard News
Service, Nov. 18, 1999]

A former state
judge, Joe Brown, took the stand to challenge the government’s confidence
that Ray’s rifle was the murder weapon. During one of Ray’s earlier
court hearings, Brown had ordered new ballistic tests on the gun
and the bullet that killed King.

The results
had been inconclusive, with the forensics experts unable to rule
whether the gun was the murder weapon or wasn’t. In his testimony,
however, Brown asserted that the sight on the rifle was so poor
that it couldn’t have killed King.

“This weapon
literally could not hit the broadside of a barn,” Brown said. But
he acknowledged that he had no formal training as a weapons expert.

The jury also
heard testimony that federal authorities were monitoring the area
around the Lorraine Motel. Carthel Weeden, a former captain with
the Memphis Fire Department, said that on the afternoon of April
4, 1968, two men appeared at the fire station across from the motel
and showed the credentials of U.S. Army officers.

The men then
carried briefcases, which they said held photographic equipment,
up to the roof of the station. Weeden said the men positioned themselves
behind a parapet approximately 18 inches high, a position that gave
them a clear view of the Lorraine Motel and the rooming house window
from which Ray allegedly fired the shot that killed King.

They also would
have had a view of the area behind Jim’s Grill. But what happened
to any possible photographs remains a mystery. Weeden added that
he was never questioned by local or federal authorities.

Former Rep.
Fauntroy also testified at the Kings-Jowers trial. Fauntroy complained
that the 1978 congressional inquiry was not as thorough as the public
might have thought. The committee dropped the investigation when
funding dried up and left some promising leads unexplored, he told
the jury.

“Had we had
[another] six months, we may well have gotten to the bottom of everything,”
Fauntroy testified on Nov. 29. “We didn’t have the time to investigate
leads we had established but could not follow. … We asked the Justice
Department to follow up … and to see if there was more than just
a low-level conspiracy.” 

Other witnesses
described a strange withdrawal of police protection from around
the motel about an hour before King’s death. A group of black homicide
detectives, who had served as King’s bodyguards on previous visits
to Memphis, were kept from performing those duties in April 1968.

In his summation,
trying to minimize his client’s alleged role in the conspiracy,
Garrison asked the jury, “would the owner of a greasy spoon restaurant,
and a lone assassin, could they pull away officers from the scene
of an assassination? Could they put someone up on the top of the
fire station?”

The cumulative
evidence apparently convinced the jury. After the trial, juror Robert
Tucker told a reporter that the 12 jurors agreed that the assassination
was too complex for one person to handle. He noted the testimony
about the police guards being removed and Army agents observing
King from the firehouse. “All of these things added up,” Tucker
said. [AP, Dec. 9, 1999]

Even before the trial ended, the media controversy about the case
had begun. Many reporters viewed the conspiracy allegations as half-baked
and the defense as offering few challenges to the breathtaking assertions.

The jury, for
instance, heard little about the gradual evolution of Jowers’s story,
which began with a flat denial and grew over time with the addition
of sometimes-conflicting details.

In a commentary
on the case, history writer John McMillian reaffirmed his confidence
in Ray’s guilt and his certainty that the wrongful death suit was
“misguided.” But McMillian noted that the King family’s suspicions
about the government’s actions were grounded in the reality of the
FBI’s campaign to ruin King’s reputation.

“While King
was alive, he and his family suffered needlessly from slimy government
subterfuge,” McMillian wrote. Though believing Ray was “justly punished
for being King’s assassin,u201D McMillian wrote, u201Cthe FBI has never
been held accountable for a much more lengthy, expensive and organized
campaign to destroy King.” [The Commercial Appeal, Nov. 26,
1999]

Other critics
focused on Pepper. Court TV analyst Harriet Ryan noted that the
King family’s motivations appeared sincere, but “the same cannot
be said for Pepper [who] stands to gain from sales of his book.”

Gerald Posner,
author of the conspiracy-debunking book, Killing
the Dream, argued that the trial “bordered on the absurd”
due to a “lethargic” defense and a passive judge who allowed “most
everything to come into the record.”

Posner also
cited money as the motive behind the case. He accused Pepper of
misleading the King family for personal gain and suggested that
the King family went along as part of a scheme to sell the movie
rights to film producer Oliver Stone.

Pepper responded
that a film project that the King family had discussed with Warner
Bros. had fallen through before the civil case was brought. He noted,
too, that the family sought and received only a token jury award
of $100. [WP, Dec. 18, 1999]

But the back-and-forth quickly muddied whatever new understanding
the public might have gained from the trial.

Part of the
confusion could be traced to the effectiveness of Posner and other
critics in making their case in a wide array of newspapers and on
television talk shows. Some of the blame, however, must fall on
Pepper and his flawed investigation that did include some erroneous
assertions. 

The larger
tragedy may be that the serious questions about King’s assassination
have receded even deeper into the historical mist.

As Court TV
analyst Ryan noted, “Whatever theories Garrison and Pepper get into
the record … it is not likely they will change the general belief
that Ray was responsible.”

Though Ryan
may be right, another perspective came in 1996 when two admirers
of Dr. King – the Rev. James M. Lawson Jr. and actor Mike Farrell
– wrote a fund-raising letter seeking support for a fuller
investigation of the assassination.

They argued
that the full story of Martin Luther King Jr.'s assassination was
too important to the country to leave any stone unturned. They stated:

“There are
buried truths in our history which continue to insist themselves
back into the light, perhaps because they hold within them the nearly
dead embers of what we were once intended to be as a nation.”

Douglas
Valentine [send him mail]
is
the author of four previously published books: The Hotel Tacloban
(Lawrence Hill, 1984), The
Phoenix Program, (William Morrow, 1990), TDY
(iUniverse.com, 2000), and The
Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs
(Verso, 2004). His latest book is The
Strength of the Pack (TrineDay, 2009). For more information
about the author and his works, please visit his websites at www.douglasvalentine.com
and http://members.authorsguild.net/valentine.

After the Battle
of Hastings in 1066, William the Conqueror's army buried its fallen
comrades, but left the corpses of the English defenders to rot in
the fields where they lay.

Such is the
brutal nature of war: the victor inflicts all manner of suffering
and humiliation on the vanquished.

What the United
States is doing in Iraq and Afghanistan is only marginally different.

William the
Conqueror made no pretense about his brutal subjugation of the English.
They hated him and resisted his occupation for twenty years, during
which time he took all their property and gave it to the Norman
upper class. Over 300,000 English people were murdered and starved
(one fifth of the population) and some 300,000 French and Normans
were planted in England in positions of authority.

An English
nobleman was likely blinded, castrated, and thrown in a dungeon
in one of the hundreds of prison William built across the countryside
to terrorize the population into submission.

England ceased
being England, and William repented his sins on his deathbed.

While the U.S.
subjugation of Iraq and Afghanistan is following much the same pattern,
it is different in one respect. Unlike William, whose oppression
was done in the light of day, the U.S. conceals its crimes to preserve
the pretense of moral superiority that defines American "exceptionalism."

Covert operations,
cover-ups, and deception are essential because, without the belief
in its inherent moral superiority, the American public might not
support its government's plundering of foreign nations on behalf
of America's ruling class.

The U.S. policy
of not identifying or accurately counting foreigners killed in recent
American conquests is a good example of why this Big Lie is employed.

The
U.S. has an official policy of not counting the number of people
it has killed and crippled, rendered homeless, starved, condemned
to sickness, disease and insanity. Thus it is impossible to quantitatively
measure the amount of misery America has visited upon Iraq, which
of course makes it easier for the U.S. Government to pretend that
all this death and suffering was for Iraqi benefit.

There
are reports of five million orphans in Iraq. That's three times
the number of Englishmen William conquered.

In
the face of such immense numbers, it is easy to forget that each
person matters, as much as you matter. Someone knows who these people
are.

More
to the point, in many if not most cases the U.S. Government — the
hired killers in the military and the CIA — know perfectly well
the names and identities of each and every person they murder, maim,
or render an orphan.

They
don't tell you, but they know.

In
Afghanistan, for example, the CIA and military have been conducting,
through Provincial Reconstruction Teams, other "civic action"
programs, and a secret army of informants, a census of every village,
town and city in the country — much like William's Doomsday Book.

As
commander of the U.S. occupation army, General Stanley McChrystal
wants to know every Afghan by name, so he can decide who is Taliban
and who is not. McChrystal wants to know where each man lives, how
many people are in his family, who his wife and children and relatives
are, where he works and where his house is.

In
places like Marjah, McChrystal is at a bit of a loss, but he still
wants to know, and tries to know, largely through spies and all
manner of electronic surveillance, including satellites.

All
this biographical information on Afghans is entered into a computer
in McChrystal's office. The CIA carefully monitors that computer,
and with its military special operations counterparts, keeps a separate
folder for the Taliban alone.

Within
that Taliban folder, every man is identified by the same biographical
criteria as every other Afghan. In addition, each Taliban is categorized
by his rank and position within the organization. Low-level fighters
are left to the Marines. High-Value Targets have their own folder,
and belong to the CIA and military special operations.

High-Value Targets are given the same special attention that William
the Conqueror afforded to English noblemen. High-Value Targets have
the property (intellectual as well as, say, opium fields) that McChrystal
wants, and thus more biographical information is gathered about
them. Their movements are tracked 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
Through spies and sophisticated electronic surveillance, McChrystal
even has a very good idea when they are leaving one safe house and
traveling to another.

The
jets are fueled, and the drones are in the sky, waiting.

And
this is how and why 27 Afghan civilians were summarily murdered
on 21 February 2010 while traveling between remote provinces in
a caravan of minibuses. The CIA and military special operations
forces were alerted that such and such a High-Value Target was traveling
with his family, and McChrystal seized the opportunity to kill them
all.

In
a dirty war like the one in Afghanistan, killing High-Value Targets
almost always involves killing them while they are home or traveling
with their families; otherwise they are underground and inaccessible.

Because
this psychological warfare tactic of killing important enemy leaders
along with their entire families is policy (albeit secret policy),
it is called "black propaganda."

It
is psychological warfare because it has a sobering effect on low-level
Taliban who wish to rise in the ranks. It is propaganda because
every Afghan citizen is aware of this policy. And it is black because
Americans can't believe it is true.

They
can't believe it is true for two reasons. First, because General
McChrystal looks like an American nobleman and, like William, he
expresses remorse.

And
they believe because the mainstream media goes along with the Big
Lie.

And yet, despite
the PR work of correspondents at Newsweek, General McChrystal is
no less savage than William the Conqueror. His job is fighting battles,
killing enemies, and dismembering their bodies. Every man, woman,
and child.

The only difference
is that William did his killing personally, up close, with a battle
axe and a sword for everyone to see, while McChrystal stands far
away from the carnage, without witnesses, and allows other to do
his dirty work for him, with 2000-pound bombs, missiles fired from
drones, shotguns, and censorship.

Most of all
it works because no one ever knows the names and biographies of
the innocent victims.

Douglas
Valentine [send him mail]
is
the author of four previously published books: The Hotel Tacloban
(Lawrence Hill, 1984), The
Phoenix Program, (William Morrow, 1990), TDY
(iUniverse.com, 2000), and The
Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs
(Verso, 2004). His latest book is The
Strength of the Pack (TrineDay, 2009). For more information
about the author and his works, please visit his websites at www.douglasvalentine.com
and http://members.authorsguild.net/valentine.

The
Strength of the Pack
(TrineDay, 2009) documents the secret history of federal drug law
enforcement from the formation of the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous
Drugs in 1968, through the creation of the Drug Enforcement Administration
in 1973, until the present time.

Many books
to date have focused on individual aspects of federal drug law enforcement,
but no book to date has plumbed as deeply or taken as comprehensive
a view as this one.

The Strength
of the Pack builds on the characters, themes, and action introduced
in The
Strength of the Wolf (New York, Verso, 2004), and develops
the theory that federal drug law enforcement is essentially a function
of "national security" in its broadest sense: not just
defending America from foreign enemies, but preserving traditional
values of race, class and gender at home, while expanding American
economic and military influence abroad.

The book documents
the unfolding of this unstated policy, and analyzes its impact not
only on federal drug law enforcement, but on American society as
well.

The Strength
of the Pack is based largely on interviews with former federal
narcotics agents, as well as the influential politicians and government
bureaucrats they worked with. Many of these sources have never spoken
publicly before. The information and insights these people provide
is set within the context of existing literary sources on the subject.
The author has refined the book by focusing only on the most important
people and events. Taken together, Strength of the Wolf and
Strength of the Pack represent a new chapter in American
history; they introduce a host of fabulous characters, and an abundance
of new and historically significant information.

Written in
an accessible style, The Strength of the Pack tells how and
why the Nixon Administration expanded federal drug law enforcement
operations at home and abroad. Major successes and failures are
examined. One failing was the self-destructive competitiveness among
agencies. There was also a failure to properly address corruption
and racism within the ranks. Most important was the inability to
prevent the Central Intelligence Agency from commandeering federal
drug law enforcement’s internal security and intelligence functions,
and using them for national security purposes.

Strength
of the Pack tells how, amid the Watergate scandal, the Nixon
Administration created the Drug Enforcement Administration as a
super-agency that would combine all existing anti-narcotic organizations
in a concerted effort to solve America's burgeoning drug problem.
The Strength of the Pack reveals the personality conflicts,
management problems and corruption that rendered the DEA ineffective
in its early years. By 1975, the press, the Senate, the Justice
Department, the FBI, and the DEA’s besieged Internal Security Division
were investigating the DEA. The author, notably, has spoken at length
with the key players in this drama, which represents the turning
point in the history of federal drug law enforcement, and is presented
in its entirety for the first time in the book.

The DEA was
paralyzed, a mere two years after its creation, at the height of
America's drug problem. The Strength of the Pack carefully
describes how the government attempted, through a number of reorganizations
— including the replacement of the DEA’s executive staff by FBI
agents in 1980 — to correct its mistakes and more successfully prosecute
the war on drugs. The book follows this drama, with all its recurring
themes, through the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton Administrations, and
it describes how each successive administration undercut it own
attempts at reform by using the DEA for selfish political purposes.
Most importantly, it tells how the CIA's influence steadily grew,
along with that of the military's, until federal drug law enforcement
entered its final and current stage of "narco-terrorism."

The Strength
of the Pack achieves its goal of telling new history
in a manner that is both academically sound and compelling. It weaves
together the most important characters and cases, with the political,
bureaucratic, and espionage-related issues that shaped the destiny
of federal drug law enforcement. The book follows the DEA as it
spread around the world, but it never strays from the personal dramas
that unfolded within the organization. The revelations in the book
are profound, including evidence that U.S. government protects and
supports, as unstated policy through its clandestine intelligence
agency, the CIA, some of the world's most powerful drug cartels.

The book is
a major breakthrough in this era of government secrecy, and corporate
media self-censorship. Its purpose is to acquaint the American public
with an important segment of its history that has hitherto been
buried; and by revealing this history, to restore to the American
people a portion of their rightful heritage — the substance of self-knowledge.

Many of the
people interviewed for the book have provided vintage photographs.
The Strength of the Pack is fertile ground for documentary
or theatrical film.

Douglas
Valentine [send him mail]
is
the author of four previously published books: The Hotel Tacloban
(Lawrence Hill, 1984), The
Phoenix Program, (William Morrow, 1990), TDY
(iUniverse.com, 2000), and The
Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs
(Verso, 2004). His latest book is The
Strength of the Pack (TrineDay, 2009). For more information
about the author and his works, please visit his websites at www.douglasvalentine.com
and http://members.authorsguild.net/valentine.

Respected journalist Jeremy
Scahill wrote an article on 4 February for The Nation titled
"The
Expanding US War in Pakistan." In his article he presented
as fact several assertions about the CIA and US military special
operations forces.

In
this article I will challenge those assertions.

Why?

Because
many readers of The Nation, and other public sources of information
where the article appeared, accept without question the veracity
of these assertions.

Therein
lays my motive for writing this article. It is not a personal attack.

Indeed,
the lack of critical analysis of national security matters is an
institutional problem the antiwar movement needs to correct. Antiwar
spokespeople talk endlessly about the effects of national
security policy. But they rarely discuss how it works from within.

This
is not entirely their fault. The National Security State is the
province of the pro-war right. To get inside and rise to a position
of expertise, one must usually submit to years of political indoctrination
calibrated to a series of increasingly restrictive security clearances.

The
National Security State — the National Security Council, the military,
the CIA, the FBI, the DEA, etc. — is designed to keep antiwar activists
out.

As
we saw during the Bush Administration, antiwar activists are even,
in some cases, considered terrorist sympathizers and equated with
"the enemy" within.

This
is the daunting challenge facing authoritative voices like Scahill
or Amy Goodman or Glenn Greenwald. It's tough, but at a minimum
they need to check their facts.

In this particular
case, Scahill reports that three people killed in
Pakistan last Wednesday were "special
forces soldiers" training a paramilitary force run by Pakistan’s
Interior Ministry. By his account, this confirms "that the
US military is more deeply engaged on the ground in Pakistan than
previously acknowledged by the White House and Pentagon."

But
how does this assertion confirm that the military is more deeply
involved in Pakistan than previously acknowledged (which certainly
may be true) without first proving that the three people killed
were, in fact, working for the military and not the CIA?

Indeed,
Special Forces soldiers detailed to the CIA have deniability, and
there are several reasons to believe the three people killed were
deniable assets working for the CIA, not the military.

To
begin with, correspondent Eric Schmitt at the New York Times
told me in July 2009 that Joint Special Operations Command
(JSOC) forces "have operated closely with CIA paramilitary
teams in both Afghanistan and Pakistan.   The typical covert
arrangement is that in Afghanistan, the team leaders are military;
in Pakistan, the CIA takes the lead."

Schmitt's assertion is supported by the fact that,
historically, the CIA goes where the military cannot legally go.
If Pakistan has not officially invited US military forces onto its
sovereign territory, the CIA would likely get the job. If the legal
arrangements have changed, that needs to be demonstrated, not asserted.

Next,
in describing the appearance of the three soldiers, Scahill cites
an unidentified Pakistani journalist as saying that "some"
of them were dressed in civilian clothes and were pretending to
be journalists. He also cites sources as saying the three people
were in Pakistan at the invitation of a private company (giving
the government deniability), as civil affairs trainers, and were
not involved in combat missions for the JSOC.

Granted,
military special operations forces may disguise themselves as civilians
and pretend to be journalists while training paramilitary forces.
They are also known to work under cover of civil affairs. But given
the fact that the paramilitary force (the Frontier Scouts) that
was being trained is part of the Interior Ministry, not the Defense
Ministry, it is also more likely that people killed were working
for the CIA.

In
expanding on the assertion that the soldiers were military personnel
with the JSOC, Scahill, in the style of Seymour Hersh, turns to
an anonymous source he identifies as "a member of CENTCOM and
US Special Forces with extensive experience in the Afghanistan-Pakistan
theatre."

“Any
firefights in Pakistan would be between JSOC forces versus whoever
they were chasing,” Scahill cites his source as saying. “I would
bet my life on that.”

But
is the source's life at stake? And while citing an anonymous source
does not lend any credibility to anyone's assertions (even a national
security "beat" reporter like Hersh or Schmitt), such
melodramatic statements serve only to undermine the source's credibility
— and the thesis Scahill bases on his source's assertions.

The
thesis Scahill advances, as informed by his anonymous source, is
that General Stanley McChrystal, who commands some 200 military
personnel in Pakistan, has "unprecedented influence on overall
US military operations, opening the door for an expansion of secretive,
black operations done with little to no oversight."

According
to Scahill's anonymous source, this turning of the CIA's traditional
prerogatives over to the military indicates "battlefield preparation"
for US military combat operations in Pakistan.

This
is a "paradigm shift," the anonymous source asserts. “Everything
is one echelon removed from before: where CIA was the darkest of
the dark, now it is JSOC. Therefore, military forces have more leeway
to do anything in support of future military objectives. The CIA
used to have the ultimate freedom u2014 now that freedom is in JSOC’s
hands, and the other elements of the military have been ordered
to adapt.”

In
advancing this "battlefield preparation" thesis, Scahill's
anonymous source asserts that the CIA is "legally required
to brief" Congressional intelligence committees on covert operations,
but the JSOC is not. This allows the JSOC "freedom to expand
or absorb traditionally CIA missions.”

According
to Scahill's anonymous source, President Obama and his Defense Secretary
Robert Gates think this new arrangement, in which the JSOC pre-empts
the CIA, is fine, despite "deep resentment” it has generated
among those who have been excluded.

Refuting this
thesis is national security expert John Prados. As Prados explains,
"This is [Seymour Hersh's] thesis. But so far as I know, Sy
has not been able thus far to document that charge, in spite of
a trip he made to Pakistan last year.

"Part
of this is true. That is, back during the Bush years, when
Rummy was concentrating power in DOD, he got unprecedented authorities
for [military intelligence] to “operate” (with JSOC an action agency)
for the ostensible purpose of “intelligence preparation of the battlefield,”
and that he then refused intel oversight on the grounds these were
military ops, creating a loophole for JSOC intel activity. And McChrystal
was in charge.

"But Gates
went into DOD declaring he was going to tune back Pentagon intel
ops, fired the asst sec for these activities (Cambone), and had
DOD negotiate a new agreement with CIA. I believe Gates did not
go as far as necessary, but I also think he clipped the wings of
some of this activity. That it has not ended is indicated by scattered
mentions of [JSOC] ops worldwide — eg Somalia — but is yet
to be demonstrated for Pakistan.

"Given
his proclivities," Prados says, "I’d not be surprised
if McChrystal pushed for a “parallel operation” now in the field,
but we don’t know anything concrete."

Prados adds
that the CIA is at a minimum represented at JSOC, if not, as Eric
Schmitt asserts, actually in command in Pakistan. Thus, if "battlefield
preparation" conniving is going on behind the CIA's back, "it
involves," Prados says, "some element of internal deception,
probably rationalized as stove-piping."

Internal
deception in Washington is divisive at best; in the field it is
a matter of life and death. For example, Scahill cites an anonymous
"military intelligence source" as saying that JSOC "conducts
targeted assassinations of suspected Taliban and Al Qaeda operatives."

If
the military element of JSOC targets an individual for assassination,
how do they know that particular individual is not a CIA informant
or double agent, unless they check with the CIA station in Pakistan? 

There are several
others good reasons to believe the JSOC is subordinate to the CIA
in Pakistan.

1) Gathering
political intelligence is the bailiwick of the CIA.
And while General McChrystal and his JSOC chief Vice Admiral William
McRaven are certainly briefed on political developments, it is unlikely
they have the power to secretly, apart from the CIA or State Department,
forge the political agreements that are needed for US paramilitaries
to assassinate people and recruit agents in Pakistan.

2) The CIA
is concerned with strategic intelligence, while special military
units like JSOC are concerned with tactical intelligence. And yet
low-level intelligence — the type gathered by paramilitaries advising
Frontier Scouts — often reflects a high-level directive, which is
why the CIA station in Pakistan would need to know about captured
documents and intelligence reports generated by JSOC. That "need
to know" implies oversight.

3) Special
activity military organizations like the JSOC want to win a battle.
The CIA has broader responsibilities in this area of operations,
including spying on the Pakistani intelligence agencies, and monitoring
their involvement with the Taliban, Al Qaeda, drug smuggling, and
opposition political parties.

4)
The military, historically, is obligated to provide personnel slots
to the CIA, so CIA officers can operate under cover. CIA officers
have even been known to masquerade as generals. Why not Stanley
McChrystal? Most CIA officers in the military are in the various
special forces.

5)
As Ron Paul says, "There’s been a coup, have you heard?
It’s the CIA coup. The CIA runs everything, they run the military."

And
yet, perhaps, as Jeremy Scahill asserts, all this has changed. Perhaps
JSOC is now more secret than the CIA, and is absorbing traditional
CIA missions. Perhaps President Obama is fine with all this, as
well as with the resentment McChrystal's power grab is causing.

But
shouldn't Scahill, at a minimum, check with his White House, Congressional
and CIA sources to see if they agree? Isn't some corroboration required
before advancing such a thesis?

And
perhaps, as Scahill concludes, the killing of the three soldiers
is an indication that the US military is becoming increasingly entrenched
in Pakistan, and that, as the "US military presence in the
country expands, it will become increasingly difficult for the Obama
administration to downplay or deny the reality that a US war in
Pakistan is already underway."

But
shouldn't he be more careful with how he presents the assertions
that support this thesis? Presentation matters. Scahill wrote the
article in the Seymour Hersh style, mixing anonymous sources with
dramatic statements and phrases like "The Nation has
learned" this or that, suggesting that his evidence is authoritative.

But
is it authoritative, when compared to what Schmitt and Prados say?

There
is not much difference between disinformation and misinformation,
and often the difference is subtle and stylistic. One intends to
deceive; the other does so without trying. Writing in an authoritative
style when one is not an authority is an attempt to deceive, and
that's why the question arises, "Is this article an example
of deliberate disinformation?

Was
it stylistic disinformation, for example, to omit the fact that
the three dead soldiers were killed while attending the opening
of a girls' school in Pakistan?

I
doubt it. But it does need to be emphasized that the CIA places
its paramilitary political action cadre in "civic action"
programs designed to foster democracy (a girls' school) while forming
self-defense forces (the Frontier Scouts) as a means of "protecting
the people from terrorism." Often these people are special
forces personnel.

The
CIA performs these civic action and self-defense functions to cover
its actual purpose, which is to recruit agents to identify enemy
cadre, and capture or kill them.

Apart
from what Schmitt and Prados say, the fact that the three dead Americans
were in that situation is reason enough to think they were the CIA
employees, and not jump to the conclusion that they were JSOC "soldiers."

In
both reporting, and covert actions, omission indicates an intention
to deceive. I think the intention in this case is to deceive the
reader into thinking the writer is an authority, not to cover for
the CIA. But the effect is the same: people are deceived about the
CIA.

Antiwar
spokespeople like Jeremy Scahill, Amy Goodman, and Glenn Greenwald
are driven to speak and write authoritatively everyday, like the
Glenn Becks of the world. They need to stop for a month, study in
depth the issues they talk about, and consult with identifiable
authorities, even if those authorities are not antiwar.

Douglas
Valentine [send him mail]
is author of The
Phoenix Program,
The
Strength of the Wolf,
and the new book Strength
of the Pack.
Visit his website.

Last week the U.S. Government began floating the idea of welcoming
low and mid-level Taliban defectors into its war on terror against
Al Qaeda. After waging an eight-year "dirty war" against
the Taliban, U.S. military commanders and politicians are publicly
acknowledging their "insurgent" enemy is actually part of
the "fabric" of Afghan society.

U.S. and NATO
officials are also offering bribes from a billion-dollar "Peace
and Reintegration Trust Fund" to Taliban fighters to defect.

Taliban leaders
have condemned the buyout strategy as a "trick" to divide
and conquer its forces, and said that offers of reconciliation were
futile without a withdrawal of foreign troops.

This billion
dollar buyout may, indeed, seem a bizarre reversal of fortunes,
but only if one believes the U.S. genuinely wants reconciliation
with the Taliban. In reality, defectors programs like the one proposed
for Afghanistan are an essential part of the traditional U.S. pacification
policy. For example, the so-called Chieu Hoi "Open Arms"
program is touted by military historians as having produced positive
results throughout the Vietnam War by offering "clemency to
insurgents."

Make no mistake
about it: this too is propaganda. Defector "amnesty" or
"clemency" or "open arms" programs are aggressive
CIA intelligence operations and have nothing to do with reconciliation.

As former DCI
William Colby told me, CIA political action teams in Vietnam (like
Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan) employed defectors
whose job was to "go around the countryside and indicate to
the people that they used to be Vietcong and that the government
has received them and taken them in, and that the Chieu Hoi program
does exist as a way of VC currently on the other side to rally.
[Defectors] contact people like the families of known VC,"
Colby said, "and provide them with transportation to defector
and refugee centers."

Master spy
Colby would certainly agree that information management — language
— is the essence of political warfare in general and defector programs
in particular. The first step in either case is concocting a slogan
that appeals to the sensibilities of the targeted audience, which
is why defectors programs are given names like "amnesty"
or "clemency" or "open arms."

Such cleverly
crafted slogans need have no basis in reality. Instead, by appealing
to American (not Vietnamese or Afghan) sensibilities (or lack thereof),
these slogans serve as the first step in creating deniability for
the CIA's roll in organizing repression.

During Senate
hearings into CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders, deniability
was defined by the CIA’s deputy director of operations Richard Bissell
as "the use of circumlocution and euphemism in discussions
where precise definitions would expose covert actions and bring
them to an end."

Apart from
using circumlocution and euphemism, and Madison Avenue style slogans,
the CIA creates deniability, and thus garners public approval, by
composing and planting distorted articles in foreign and domestic
newspapers. It also composes “official” communiqués which
appear to have originated within, for example, the Karzai government
in Afghanistan.

To ensure the
deniability necessary for public support of its repressive policies,
the CIA conducts covert action under cover of Civic Action programs
that are advertised as fostering freedom, patriotism, brotherhood,
and democracy.

Likewise, the
Taliban defector buyout program is said to foster reconciliation.

In CIA jargon
this manipulation of language is called "black propaganda"
and is the job of political and psychological (PP) warfare officers
in the covert action branch. "PP" officers played a major
role in packaging the Phoenix Program for sale to the American public
as a program designed “to protect the people from terrorism.”"

CIA disinformation
campaigns persuade predisposed Americans to offer their tax dollars
to pay for the massive military and aid programs that support the
CIA’s covert action programs. The proposed billion-dollar Taliban
defector program is just such a case.

Intelligence
Potential

After arranging
for deniability, the CIA will launch a covert action program like
the Taliban defector program only if it has "intelligence
potential." Such a program must be able to produce information
on an enemy’s political, military, and economic infrastructure or
it will not be undertaken. The CIA after all, is not a "reconciliation"
agency.

And defectors
have superlative "intelligence potential."

Not only are
defectors valued for their ability to sap the enemy’s fighting strength
and morale, but having worked on the inside, they are an accurate
and timely source of intelligence on enemy unit strength and location.
They also serve as guides and trackers, and after defecting, many
are immediately returned to their area of operations with a reaction
force to locate hidden enemy arms or food caches.

Others defectors,
after being screened and interrogated by security officers, are
turned into double agents. Defectors who return to their former
positions inside enemy military units or political organizations
are, as Colby explained, provided with a “secure” means of contacting
their CIA case officer, to whom they feed information leading to
the arrest or ambush of enemy cadres, soldiers, and secret agents.

Defector programs
also provide CIA "talent scouts" with cover for recruiting
criminals into counter-terrorist and political action programs.
Burglars, arsonists, forgers, and smugglers have unique skills and
no compunctions about preparing wanted posters or conducting interrogations.

In Vietnam,
the entire Fifty-second Ranger Battalion was recruited from Saigon
prisons.

With Obama's
surge and additional NATO forces providing cover for more expansive
CIA covert actions, CIA political and psychological warfare experts
are moving to the forefront of the occupation; and of course, their
Provincial Reconstruction Teams are, as noted in a previous article,
at the forefront of this "intelligence" surge. That is
why the Taliban defector buyout program is being launched now.

Let me repeat:
what makes such an intelligence operation "covert" is
not any false impression on the part of the Taliban, but rather
the CIA’s ability to deny its involvement in the defector buyout
program to the American public.

A Case Study

Under cover
of Civic Action, the CIA is waging a plausibly deniable dirty war
against the Taliban using black propaganda, defectors, criminals,
selective terror, indefinite detention and a slew of other devious
tactics disguised as bringing freedom and democracy, but in fact
designed to provide internal security for the puppet Karzai regime.

The CIA perfected
this practice in Vietnam, where it waged clandestine political and
psychological warfare with the U.S. Information Service (USIS).

Ostensibly
the overseas branch of the U.S. Information Agency (which performed
the same propaganda and censorship functions inside America), the
USIS had as its raison d’être promotion of the “American way.”
In its crusade to convert the world into one big happy Chamber of
Commerce, the USIS employed all manner of "media," from
TVs, radios, and satellites to armed propaganda teams, wanted posters,
and terrorism.

Frank Scotton,
a CIA officer masquerading as an USIS officer, played a large role
in political and psychological operations (psyops) in Vietnam. A
graduate of American University’s College of International Relations,
Scotton received a government graduate assistantship to the East-West
Center at the University of Hawaii.

According to
legendary CIA officer Lucien Conein, it was there that Scotton was
recruited into the CIA.

About the
CIA-sponsored East-West Center, Scotton said, “It was a cover for
a training program in which Southeast Asians were brought to Hawaii
and trained to go back to Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos to create
agent nets.” After passing the Foreign Service exam, Scotton was
persuaded to join the USIS, which “dealt with people,” unlike the
State Department, which “observed from a distance.

After arriving
in Vietnam in 1961, and initiating his vast agent net, Scotton turned
his attention to "energizing” the Vietnamese through political
action that advanced American policies.

In looking
for individuals to mold into unilateral political cadres, Scotton
turned to the CIA’s defector program, which in April 1963 was placed
under cover of the Agency for International Development and named
the Chieu Hoi (Open Arms) amnesty program.

There Scotton
found the raw material he needed to prove the viability of CIA political
action and psywar programs. Scotton worked with Vietnamese Special
Forces Captain Nguyen Tuy (a graduate of Fort Bragg’s Special Warfare
Center who commanded the Fourth Special Operations Detachment) and
Tuy’s case officer, U.S. Special Forces Captain Howard Walters in
Pleiku Province.

As part of
a pilot program designed to induce defectors, Scotton, Walters,
and Tuy set up an ambush deep in Vietcong territory and waited till
dark. When they spotted a VC unit, Scotton yelled in Vietnamese
through a bullhorn, “You are being misled! You are being lied to!
We promise you an education!” Then, full of purpose and allegory,
he shot a flare into the night sky and hollered, “Walk toward the
light!”

To his surprise,
two defectors did walk in, convincing him and his CIA bosses that
“a determined GVN unit could contest the VC in terms of combat and
propaganda.”

Back in camp,
Scotton told the VC defectors that they had to divest themselves
of untruths. "We said that certainly the U.S. perpetrated war
crimes, but so did the VC [substitute Taliban]. We acknowledged
that theirs was the stronger force, but that didn’t mean that everything
they did was honorable and good and just.” In this manner, Scotton
indoctrinated cadres for his political action teams.

The chief of
CIA covert action programs, Tom Donohue, recognized the value of
intelligence obtained through defectors, and authorized the establishment
of Chieu Hoi programs in each of South Vietnam's provinces. In typical
CIA style, there was nothing in writing, and nothing went through
the central government.

The CIA's security
officer would oversee the Chieu Hoi Program in any particular province
and select different defectors for different jobs, working with
agents at the district level and into the villages.

If a defector
had potential, the province security officer put him on an airplane
and sent him to the central CIA re-indoctrination center, where
he was plied with special attention and wowed with CIA gadgetry.
The food was spectacular, full of protein, and the bullets weren't
flying. The training was vigorous, but the defector was treated
for infections and put on weight. Other defectors then explained
the beauty of the American Way, and other applicable lessons of
the day.

This type brainwashing
is “precisely” what political warfare is all about: Having been
selected into a “special” program and given “special” treatment,
defectors are taught the corporate sales pitch, cross-trained as
interchangeable parts for efficiency, then given one last motivational
booster shot of schmaltz.

Scotton called
his program "motivational indoctrination."

This
is deadly serious business, and conducted secretly at high-security
CIA bases in Afghanistan. All defector-debriefing reports are certainly
sent to the CIA station in Kabul for analysis and collation. Translations
are, typically, never considered accurate unless read and confirmed
in the original language by the same person, but that rarely happens.
Likewise, interrogations conducted through defectors are rarely
considered reliable, for significant information is generally lost
or misrepresented. And thus, the defector program will likely be
exploited by Taliban secret agents, just as the Chieu Hoi program
was penetrated in Vietnam.

According to
Douglas McCollum, who monitored the Chieu Hoi program in three provinces
in Vietnam, "It was the biggest hole in the net. They’d come
in; we’d hold them, feed them, clothe them, get them a mat. Then
we’d release them, and they’d wander around the city for a while,
and then disappear."

What McCollom
is referring to, "the revolving door syndrome," is another
reason the CIA is turning to the Taliban buyout program at this
particular time, when Obama's surge will produce thousands of more
detainees and prisoners.

The CIA was
plagued in Vietnam, as it is in Afghanistan, by overcrowding in
prisons, and defector, interrogation, and detention centers. In
Vietnam by 1966 there was little space available in the prison system
for actual “Communist offenders.” And as more and more people were
captured and placed in pens, a large percentage was necessarily
squeezed out. Hence the revolving door.

Defectors
and the Phoenix Program

In June 1967,
the CIA's Chieu Hoi defector program was incorporated within its
newly established Phoenix Program, as it was organized by CIA officer
Nelson Brickham, who appreciated Chieu Hoi as “one of the few areas
where police and paramilitary advisers cooperated.”

The Phoenix
program was designed to coordinate all intelligence programs in
South Vietnam so the CIA could more effectively identify and neutralize
Viet Cong political cadre. As Brickham said, "My motto was
to recruit them; if you can’t recruit them, defect them (that’s
Chieu Hoi); if you can’t defect them, capture them; if you can’t
capture them, kill them.”

Brickham also
emphasized that Chieu Hoi was a means for the CIA to develop "unilateral
penetrations unknown to the [South Vietnamese] police.”

In other words,
the Taliban defector buyout program will be conducted unilaterally
by the CIA, apart from the Karzai government.

From 1967 onwards,
all “rallied” VC cadre were included in Phoenix neutralization statistics,
and by 1969 more than a hundred thousand defectors had been
processed through 51 Chieu Hoi centers. The Chieu Hoi program was
managed from 1966 until March 1969 by Ogden Williams, and then by
Eugene P. Bable, a career CIA officer who had served in the Flying
Tigers.

The Phoenix
Program sought to resolve the "revolving door syndrome"
by arranging through the SIDE (Screening, Interrogation and Detention
of the Enemy) Program the construction of permanent detention facilities;
a registration system coordinated with Chieu Hoi programs; and judicial
reform aimed at the rapid disposal of pending cases, as devised
by Robert Harper, a lawyer on contract to the CIA.

Through Phoenix,
the CIA also began a policy of offering Chieu Hoi status to informers.

From the language
of the Phoenix reports, one could easily think that the Chieu Hoi
program was a great success. But many Chieu Hoi defectors simply
regurgitated the American line in order to win amnesty, make a quick
visit to their families, enjoy a few home-cooked meals, and then
return to the war for independence, fat and rested.

Legitimate
Chieu Hoi defectors were pariahs who were not accepted back in their
villages.

Jim Ward, the
senior CIA officer in charge of Phoenix in the Delta (1967–1969)
described Chieu Hoi as "a great program. Well done.”

Ward explained
that most Chieu Hoi advisers were from the U.S. Information Service,
although some were State Department or military officers.

Ward
describes the defection process as follows: Upon arriving at the
Chieu Hoi center, the defector was “interviewed” and, if he had
information on the VCI, was sent to the CIA's Province Interrogation
Center; if he had tactical military information, he was sent to
military interrogators.

Next
came political indoctrination, lasting from 40–60 days, depending
on the individual. “They had a formal course,” said Ward. “They
were shown movies and given lectures on democracy.” Upon graduation
each was given an ID card, a meal, some money, and a chance to repent.
Political indoctrination was handled by defectors who said they
had been well treated by the Americans and had decided it was better
to live for a free Vietnam than to die for the totalitarian
North Vietnamese.

“Chieu
Hoi had lots of guys who had been with the enemy before,” Ward continued,
“who knew how to talk to these people and would persuade them to
join the Territorial Forces or the PRU.” Others joined armed propaganda
teams, which went back into VC territory to contact Vietcong families
and recruit more Vietcong defectors.

“The great
thing about the Chieu Hoi program,” Ward noted, “is that we didn’t
have to put people in jails or process them through the judicial
system, which was already overcrowded."

Political
and Psychological Warfare

Despite his
praise for the Chieu Hoi program, Ward said that “Americans should
have been targeted only against the North Vietnamese and left the
South Vietnamese forces to handle the insurgency,” even though such
a strategy would have precluded Phoenix.

The same lesson
applies in Afghanistan. The U.S. has no legitimate reason to be
there, and thus it must rely on psychological ploys, rather than
any appeal to nationalism, to win the Afghanis over to the American
Way of doing things.

That
is how High Value Reward and bounty programs become business as
usual. That is why the U.S. is instituting a defector program,
with a publicity campaign managed in the field by psyops teams replete
with radios, leaflets, posters, banners, TV shows, movies, comic
books falling from planes, and loudspeakers mounted on trucks to
spread the word.

On
January 22, 1970, thirty-eight thousand of these leaflets were dropped
over three villages in Go Vap District. Addressed to specific VCI
members, they read: “Since you have joined the NLF, what have you
done for your family or your village and hamlet? Or have you just
broken up the happiness of many families and destroyed houses and
land? Some people among you have been awakened recently, they have
deserted the Communist ranks and were received by the GVN and the
people with open arms and family affection. You should be ready
for the end if you remain in the Communist ranks. You will be dealing
with difficulties bigger from day to day and will suffer serious
failure when the ARVN expand strongly. You had better return to
your family where you will be guaranteed safety and helped to establish
a new life. “

This
is how defectors will be created in Afghanistan as well. Psyops
leaflets aimed at creating defectors will portray the Taliban as
a socially disruptive force that can only be stopped by America.

But Americans
can only reach the Afghan “people” through “media” like leaflets
and loudspeakers — an indication of just how far removed the CIA
is from the reality of life in Afghanistan's rural villages.

And while the
CIA relies on cartoons to sell itself, the Taliban go from person
to person, proving that technology is no substitute for human contact.
Ultimately the U.S. was defeated in Vietnam for just this reason.

The Taliban
defector buyout program heralds just such a development in Afghanistan
— defeat — and nothing more.

Douglas
Valentine [send him mail]
is author of The
Phoenix Program,
The
Strength of the Wolf,
and the new book Strength
of the Pack.
Visit his website.

On Dec. 31, I listened in dismay as an NPR “terrorism” expert
condemned the suicide bombing that killed seven CIA employees in Afghanistan
as especially hideous because the CIA victims were spreading economic
development and democracy in the area as members of a Provincial Reconstruction
Team (PRT).

Less surprising
but no less disingenuous were the comments of CIA Director Leon
Penetta who said the dead CIA officers were “doing the hard
work that must be done to protect our country from terrorism."
And President Barack Obama’s depiction of the CIA officers
as "part of a long line of patriots who have made great sacrifices
for their fellow citizens, and for our way of life."

On New Year’s
Day, Washington Post staff writers Joby Warrick and Pamela
Constable began to fill in some of the blanks that the initial propaganda
had ignored. Warrick and Constable reported that the CIA officers
were “at the heart of a covert program overseeing strikes by
the agency’s remote-controlled aircraft along the Afghanistan-Pakistan
border.”

In the past
year, those strikes have killed more than 300 people (perhaps as
many as 700) who are invariably described by the U.S. news media
as suspected “militants,” “terrorists” or “jihadists"
– or as collateral damage, people killed by accident.

There is never
any distinction made between Afghan nationalists fighting the U.S.-led
occupation of their country and real terrorists who have inflicted
intentional violence against civilians to achieve a political objective
(the classic definition of terrorism).

Indeed, despite
the U.S. news media’s frequent description of the Dec. 30 attack
on the CIA officers as “terrorism,” it doesn’t fit
the definition since the CIA officers were engaged in military operations
and thus represented a legitimate target under the law of war, certainly
as much so as Taliban commanders far from the front lines.

Many U.S. press
accounts also have suggested that the suicide attack was in retaliation
for drone strikes on Taliban forces. But there is now some speculation
that the suicide bomb attack on the CIA personnel may have been
payback for the Dec. 27 killing of 10 people in Ghazi Khan village
in Narang district of the eastern Afghan province of Kunar.

The 10 Afghanis
were shot to death during a raid by American commandos, apparently
a Special Forces unit.

The commandos,
often Green Berets or Navy SEALs detailed to the CIA’s Special
Activities Division, operate outside traditional legal restrictions
on warfare. During the post-9/11 “global war on terror,”
these teams have engaged in kidnappings, killings and executions
of suspected “terrorists,” “insurgents” and
“militants.”

NATO spokesmen
initially labeled the 10 victims in Ghazi Khan as “insurgents”
or at least relatives of an individual suspected of belonging to
a “terrorist” cell that manufactured improvised explosive
devices used to kill U.S. and NATO troops and civilians.

But later reports
from Afghan government investigators and townspeople identified
the dead as civilians, including eight students, aged 11 to 17,
enrolled in local schools. All but one of the dead came from the
same family.

Allegations
of Handcuffed Victims

According to
a
Dec. 31 article published by the Times of London, the
American-led raid faces accusations “of dragging innocent children
from their beds and shooting them. … Locals said that some
victims were handcuffed before being killed.”

An official
statement posted on Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s Web site
said government investigators who were dispatched to the scene concluded
that the raiding party “took ten people from three homes, eight
of them school students in grades six, nine and ten, one of them
a guest, the rest from the same family, and shot them dead.”

Assadullah
Wafa, who led the investigation, told The (UK) Times that
the U.S. unit flew by helicopter from Kabul, landing about two kilometers
from the village.

“The troops
walked from the helicopters to the houses and, according to my investigation,
they gathered all the students from two rooms, into one room, and
opened fire,” said Wafa, a former governor of Helmand province.
“It’s impossible they [the victims] were al-Qaeda. They
were children, they were civilians, they were innocent.”

The Times also
quoted the school’s headmaster as saying the victims were asleep
in three rooms when the raiding party arrived. “Seven students
were in one room,” said Rahman Jan Ehsas. “A student and
one guest were in another room, a guest room, and a farmer was asleep
with his wife in a third building.

“First
the foreign troops entered the guest room and shot two of them.
Then they entered another room and handcuffed the seven students.
Then they killed them. Abdul Khaliq [the farmer] heard shooting
and came outside. When they saw him, they shot him as well. He was
outside. That’s why his wife wasn’t killed.”

The guest was
a shepherd boy, 12, called Samar Gul, the headmaster said, adding
that six of the students were in high school and two were in primary
school. He said that all the students were his nephews.

A local elder,
Jan Mohammed, said that three boys were killed in one room and five
were handcuffed before they were shot. “I saw their school
books covered in blood,” he said, according to The Times.

The Afghan
National Security Directorate, which usually is a compliant outlet
for CIA communiqués, said "international forces from
an unknown address came to the area and without facing any armed
resistance, put ten youth in two rooms and killed them.”

Protests over
the killings erupted throughout Kunar Province, where the deaths
occurred, as well as in Kabul. Hundreds of protesters demanded that
American occupation forces leave the country, and that the murderers
be brought to justice.

A NATO spokesman
claimed there was “no direct evidence to substantiate”
the claims of premeditated murder. He asserted that the assault
force had come under fire from several buildings in the village.

Yet, the record
of American forces engaging in indiscriminate and intentional killings
of unarmed people in Afghanistan and Iraq is now a long one, with
testimony about premeditated executions even emerging in U.S. military
disciplinary hearings. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Bush’s
Global Dirty War.”]

The United
Nations also has warned against nighttime raids of private homes
because the attacks often cause civilian deaths. In the case of
Ghazi Khan, however, the Afghan government account indicates that
most of the killings were cold-blooded murder, not nighttime accidents.

It appears,
too, that these types of brutal operations may be increasing in
frequency with Obama’s plan to “surge” 30,000 additional
U.S. troops into Afghanistan, bringing the total to about 100,000.
Yet, this ratcheting up of the cycle of violence only seems likely
to incite more and more revenge killings.

Already, Afghans
have vowed to avenge the killings of the school children by the
U.S. commandos, and the CIA is now vowing to avenge the killing
of its officers, who included the base chief, a mother of three
young children.

In the meantime,
the surviving CIA personnel at Forward Operating Base Chapman barricaded
themselves inside as they questioned all Afghan employees who were
on duty at the time of the Dec. 30 bomb attack. Afghans who worked
with the CIA on the outside were locked out.

Provincial
Reconstruction Teams

The recent
events are instructive in explaining how CIA covert operations,
including their own psywar and terror operations, are conducted
and whitewashed by the mainstream American news media.

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the rest of the article

Douglas
Valentine is author of The
Phoenix Program,
The
Strength of the Wolf,
and the new book Strength
of the Pack.
Visit his website.

When they hear
the words "the French Connection," most people think of
the 1971 Gene Hackman movie, in which a rough and tumble New York
City detective corralled a group of Mafia heroin traffickers in
January 1962, but failed to capture the suave, insouciant Frenchman
who was their source of supply. Indeed, most people think of "the
French Connection" as an action-adventure story – not
as an example of political warfare. But, in fact, the French Connection
is a keyhole through which to view the CIA’s use of the underworld
in its larger strategy of political and psychological warfare.

Simply stated,
this secret war is a function of American capital’s use of organized
criminals in the employ of its private police force, the CIA, to
smash Communism everywhere; to suppress labor and undesirable minorities
at home; and to expand its influence worldwide, at the expense of
unfriendly and friendly foreign nations alike.

Documentary
Evidence

Indeed, based
on four newly discovered documents, generated by the defunct Federal
Bureau of Narcotics (1930–1968), it is now evident that the
U.S. government, through the CIA, has historically employed drug
smugglers to effect its unstated domestic agenda. The French Connection
is a prime example, and a principal player in that sordid episode
was labor leader Irving Joseph Brown, the American Federation of
Labor’s chief overseas representative from 1945 until 1962.

Brown had
a long history of involvement with the CIA, gangsters, and drug
smugglers; but it was not until April 1962 that he first came to
the attention of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN). The circumstances
are both bizarre and revealing, and center on Etienne Tarditi, a
short, potbellied, Corsican drug smuggler, who first implicated
Brown in drug smuggling activities.

Tarditi’s job
in the 1950s was twofold: on behalf of his underworld sponsors,
he purchased morphine base in Lebanon and smuggled it to France,
where it was converted into heroin; then he "recruited"
diplomats to smuggle the heroin to Mafiosi in America.

Tarditi’s
operation began to unravel, however, in mid-1960, when a rival drug
smuggler told the FBN Agent in Beirut that a diplomat named "Maurice"
was carrying heroin to America. The ensuing investigation revealed
that the diplomat, whose luggage was passed through U.S. Customs
without being checked, was Maurice Rosal Bron, Guatemala’s Ambassador
to the Netherlands. Rosal, it was discovered, had an unrestrained
sexual desire for young boys – fatal flaw which Tarditi used
to blackmail the dapper diplomat into carrying heroin to America.
Further investigation revealed that Rosal made frequent trips to
America, often with Tarditi, and that he always left with less baggage
weight than when he arrived. The investigation itself climaxed in
October 1960 in New York City, when FBN agents busted Rosal, Tarditi,
TWA purser Charles Bourbonnais, and Nick Calamaris of the Gambino
Mafia family.

The bust netted
100 kilograms of pure heroin, and the intelligence take provided
the FBN with enough leads to keep it busy for the next five years.
Most of the information, notably, came from Tarditi, who identified
his sources in France, and claimed that he "was involved in
intelligence work beneficial to American interests." Tarditi
would also, after 18 months of steady interrogation, implicate labor
leader Irving Brown in drug-smuggling activities.

Meanwhile,
two related cases unfolded. One was the famous French Connection
case of January 1962, in which FBN Agents and NYPD detectives busted
Mafioso Patsy Fuca, along with his father Joe, French heroin smuggler
Francois Scaglia (co-leader of the Trois Canards Gang in Paris),
and Scaglia’s unsuspecting courier, Jacques Angelvin, the host of
a popular French television show. Eluding authorities in the case
were Jean Jehan, the debonair mastermind of the plot, and mystery
man Jacques Mouren, who was never identified.

Another occurred
in March 1961 (right after French President Charles de Gaulle decided
to negotiate with nationalist rebels in Algeria), when Air France
stewardess Simone Christman was arrested by U.S. Customs agents
for smuggling heroin in her brassiere. Christman said the powder,
which she thought was perfume base, had been given to her by a Mr.
Mueller in Paris.

In March 1962,
Christman was sentenced to four years in prison – but at the
intervention of an unknown outside force, she was quietly and quickly
released.

According to
an FBN agent on the scene at the time, Christman was, in fact, a
spy for the Secret Army Organization (OAS), a group of French soldiers
who, with the support of the CIA, were fighting the forces of President
de Gaulle in Algeria. The OAS was known to be financing its operations
through the drug trade, and, being "a good soldier," Christman
"took a small fall to protect her bosses" – who in
return continued to receive CIA support.

In addition
to Christman’s quiet and quick release, the FBN agent stationed
in Paris was told not to investigate the mysterious "Mr. Mueller."
The agent was told that U.S. Customs was handling the case; but
he knew that the CIA had, in fact, blocked the investigation in
order to conceal its involvement with the protected OAS drug-smuggling
ring.

Likewise, it
is conceded by FBN agents that they were not allowed to follow up
leads relating to Jean Jehan and Jacques Mouren in the French Connection
case, for the very same, intelligence-related reasons.

"Mr.
Mueller" Unmasked

The unexpected
does happen, however, and just as Customs agents had inadvertently
uncovered a protected CIA drug route when they busted Simone Christman,
"Mr. Mueller’s" identity was revealed in April 1962, when
Etienne Tarditi, seeking leniency in his case, named Irving Brown
in connection with the busts of Ambassador Rosal in October 1960,
and of Simone Christman in March 1961.

Like most
professional crooks, Tarditi’s allegations about Brown (as well
as his own work for U.S. intelligence) normally would not have been
believed. But all of the information he had provided about the drug-smuggling
milieu had proven accurate, so in May 1962, FBN agent Andrew Tartaglino
launched an investigation of Irving Brown. And through a routine
background check, Tartaglino learned that Brown (who was then the
International Confederation of Free Trade Unions’ representative
to the United Nations) frequented a restaurant owned by George Bayon
in Paris. Tartaglino subsequently learned that Irving Brown was
Bayon’s friend; that Bayon used the alias "Mueller"; and
that Bayon’s restaurant was used by drug smugglers to "recruit"
diplomats, like the hapless Ambassador Rosal, as couriers in their
drug-smuggling ventures.

These facts
fueled the agent’s curiosity, and his investigation of Brown was
widened; and after checking with other government agencies, Tartaglino
learned that Brown had been granted port privileges in New York
(meaning that his baggage was never checked by Customs); that his
wife, Lilly, was a secretary for Carmel Offie, a CIA agent who owned
an import-export business in Manhattan; and that there was "a
possibility" that Brown himself was "connected in some
manner with the CIA."

The implications
were unmistakable, and at this point in June 1962, Tartaglino was
told to drop his investigation; that another Agency was handling
it. Which begs two questions: 1) who were Irving Brown and Carmel
Offie, and 2) were they smuggling drugs for the CIA?

The Angleton
Connection

In regard to
the second question, leads to the CIA’s notorious chief of counter-intelligence,
James Jesus Angleton, had emanated from the Rosal case. Specifically,
inside Ambassador Rosal’s pocket at the time of his arrest was the
address of Stig Wennerstrom, a former Swedish military attaché
to the United States, and a close friend of Philippe de Vosjoli.
De Vosjoli at the time was the French intelligence service’s liaison
to Angleton. But more importantly, de Vosjoli was also a double-agent
working for Angleton against his own country.

By de Vosjoli’s
account, Wennerstrom was "an associate" of several French
intelligence officers stationed in Washington. De Vosjoli’s charge
led Angleton to believe that the Soviet intelligence service, the
KGB, had penetrated the French intelligence service, SDECE. In Angleton’s
mind, this belief was confirmed in December 1961 by the famous KGB
defector, Anatoly Golitsyn. And for this reason, Angleton, who had
long been associated with Irving Brown, apparently decided to penetrate
the French drug-smuggling milieu, as a way of uncovering further
evidence that SDECE, which had long been involved in smuggling narcotics
out of Indochina, was penetrated by the KGB. And Angleton’s use
of drug smugglers as counter-intelligence agents brings us back
to the first question: who were Irving Brown and Carmel Offie?

Briefly, Irving
Brown was a disciple of Jay Lovestone, who in the 1920s was the
leader of America’s Communist Party. But after a dispute with Stalin
in 1929, Lovestone defected, and with Brown’s help, began rooting
Communists out of American labor unions. In return for his counter-espionage
work, Brown was assigned as the AFL’s representative to the War
Production Board during World War II, and afterwards began to work
for the CIA under AFL cover in Europe and Africa.

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the rest of the article

January
8, 2010

Disrupting
the Accommodation:

Why?

“Why?”
The grieving family members ask. “Why did the terrorists kill
our loved ones?”
The hardnosed colleagues of the four fallen CIA officers comfort
the wives and children (and one husband). They shake off their sorrow,
huddle together by the graves, and vow vengeance. They bathe themselves
in their seething anger like it was the blood of the lamb.

“Why?
The American public and its officials ask. Why? The media repeats,
adding in shock and awe, “Don’t the terrorists know that
you can’t kill CIA officers?”

Why, everyone
wonders, did a Jordanian suicide bomber target the CIA, knowing
that the wrath of the biggest, baddest, bloodthirstiest Gang on
Planet Earth is going to start dropping bombs and slitting throats
until its lust for death and suffering is satisfied?

Over the course
of its sixty year reign of terror, in which it has overthrown countless
governments, started countless wars costing countless lives, and
otherwise subverted and sabotaged friends and foes alike, the CIA
has lost less than 100 officers.

On a good day,
one CIA drone, and one CIA hit team, kills 100 innocent women and
children, and nobody bats an eye.

Why would the
terrorists suddenly deviate from the norm – the sacred accommodation
– and throw the whole game into chaos?
Why?

OK, I’ll
Tell You Why

There is a
phenomenon called “The Universal Brotherhood of Officers.”
It exists in the twilight zone between imagination and in reality,
in the fog of war. It is why officers are separated from enlisted
men in POW camps and given better treatment. It is why officers
of opposing armies have more in common with one another than they
have with their own enlisted men.

Officers are
trained to think of their subordinate ranks as canon fodder. Their
troops are expendable. They know when they send a unit up a hill,
some will be killed. That is why they do not fraternize with thee
lower ranks. This class distinction exists across the world, and
is the basis of the sacred accommodation. No slobs need apply.

It is why the
Bush Family flew the Bin Laden Family, and other Saudi Royals, out
of the United States in the days after 9-11. If anyone was a case
officer to the 9-11 bombers, or had knowledge about the bombers
or any follow-up plots, it was these “protected” people.

CIA officers
are at the pinnacle of the Universal Brotherhood. They are the Protected
Few, blessed with false identities and bodyguards, flying in jet
planes, living in villas, eating fancy food and enjoying state of
the art technology. CIA officers tell army generals what to do.They
direct Congressional committees. They assassinate heads of state
and innocent children equally, with impunity, with indifference.

In Afghanistan
they manage the drug trade from their hammocks in the shade.They
know the Taliban tax the farmers growing the opium, and they know
that Karzai’s warlords convert the opium into heroin and fly
it to the Russian mob. They are amused by the antics of earnest
DEA agents, who, in their ignorant patriotic bliss, cannot believe
such an accommodation exists.

CIA officers
are trained to exist in this moral netherworld of protected drug
dealers, for the simple reasons that the CIA in every conflict has
a paramount need to keep secure communication channels open to the
enemy. This is CIA 101. The CIA, as part of its mandate, is authorized
to negotiate with the enemy, but it can only do so as long as the
channel is secure and deniable.

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the rest of the article

January
6, 2010