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Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower
by William Blum
INTRODUCTION
This book could be entitled: Serial chain-saw baby killers
and the women who love them.
The women don't really believe that their beloved would do
such a thing, even if they're shown a severed limb or a headless
torso. Or if they believe it, they know down to their bone
marrow that lover-boy really had the best of intentions; it must
have been some kind of very unfortunate accident, a well-meaning
blunder; in fact, even more likely, it was a humanitarian act.
For 70 years, the United States convinced much of the world that
there was an international conspiracy out there. An
International Communist Conspiracy; seeking no less than control
over the entire planet, for purposes which had no socially
redeeming values. And the world was made to believe that it
somehow needed the United States to save it from communist
darkness. "Just buy our weapons," said Washington, "let our
military and our corporations roam freely across your land, and
give us veto power over who your leaders will be, and we'll
protect you."
It was the cleverest protection racket since men convinced
women that they needed men to protect them -- If all the men
vanished overnight, how many women would be afraid to walk the
streets?
And if the people of any foreign land were benighted enough
to not realize that they needed to be saved, if they failed to
appreciate the underlying nobility of American motives, they were
warned that they would burn in Communist Hell. Or a CIA
facsimile thereof. And they would be saved nonetheless.
A decade after the fall of the Berlin Wall, America is still
saving countries and peoples from one danger or another. The
scorecard reads as follows: From 1945 to the end of the century,
the United States attempted to overthrow more than 40 foreign
governments, and to crush more than 30 populist-nationalist
movements struggling against intolerable regimes. In the
process, the US caused the end of life for several million
people, and condemned many millions more to a life of agony and
despair.
As I write this in Washington, D.C., in April 1999, the
United States is busy saving Yugoslavia. Bombing a modern,
sophisticated society back to a pre-industrial age. And The
Great American Public, in its infinite wisdom, is convinced that
its government is motivated by "humanitarian" impulses.
Washington is awash with foreign dignitaries here to
celebrate the 50th anniversary of the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization; three days of unprecedented pomp and circumstance.
The prime-ministers, presidents and foreign ministers, despite
their rank, are delighted to be included amongst the schoolyard
bully's close friends. Private corporations are funding the
opulent weekend; a dozen of them paying $250,000 apiece to have
one of their executives serve as a director on the NATO Summit's
host committee. Many of the same firms lobbied hard to expand
NATO by adding the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland, each of
which will be purchasing plentiful quantities of military
hardware from these companies.
This marriage of NATO and the transnationals is the
foundation of the New World Order, the name George Bush gave to
the American Empire. The credibility of the New World Order
depends upon the world believing that the new world will be a
better one for the multitude of humanity, not just for those for
whom too much is not enough; and believing that the leader of the
New World Order, the United States, means well.
Let's have a short look at some modern American history,
which may be instructive. A congressional report of 1994
informed us that:
Approximately 60,000 military personnel were used as
human subjects in the 1940s to test two chemical
agents, mustard gas and lewisite [blister gas]. Most
of these subjects were not informed of the nature of
the experiments and never received medical followup
after their participation in the research.
Additionally, some of these human subjects were
threatened with imprisonment at Fort Leavenworth if
they discussed these experiments with anyone,
including their wives, parents, and family doctors.
For decades, the Pentagon denied that the research had
taken place, resulting in decades of suffering for many
veterans who became ill after the secret testing.{1}
Now let's skip ahead to the 1990s. Many thousands of
American soldiers came home from the Gulf War with unusual,
debilitating ailments. Exposure to harmful chemical or
biological agents was suspected, but the Pentagon denied that
this had occurred. Years went by while the GIs suffered
terribly: neurological problems, chronic fatigue, skin
problems, scarred lungs, memory loss, muscle and joint pain,
severe headaches, personality changes, passing out, and much
more. Eventually, the Pentagon, inch by inch, was forced to
move away from its denials and admit that, yes, chemical
weapon depots had been bombed; then, yes, there probably were
releases of the deadly poisons; then, yes, American soldiers
were indeed in the vicinity of these poisonous releases, 400
soldiers; then, it might have been 5,000; then, "a very large
number", probably more than 15,000; then, finally, a precise
number -- 20,867; then, "The Pentagon announced that a
long-awaited computer model estimates that nearly 100,000 U.S.
soldiers could have been exposed to trace amounts of sarin
gas." ...{2}
Soldiers were also forced to take vaccines against
anthrax and nerve gas not approved by the FDA as safe and
effective, and punished, sometimes treated like criminals, if
they refused. (During World War II, US soldiers were forced
to take a yellow fever vaccine, with the result that some
330,000 of them were infected with the hepatitis B virus.){3}
Finally, in late 1999, almost nine years after the Gulf War's
end, the Defense Department announced that a drug given to
soldiers to protect them against a particular nerve gas,
"cannot be ruled out" as a cause of lingering illnesses in
some veterans.{4}
The Pentagon brass, moreover, did not warn American
soldiers of the grave danger of being in close proximity to
expended depleted uranium weapons on the battlefield.
If the Pentagon had been much more forthcoming from the
outset about what it knew all along about these various
substances and weapons, the soldiers might have had a proper
diagnosis early on and received appropriate care sooner. The
cost in terms of human suffering was incalculable. One gauge
of that cost may lie in the estimate that one-third of the
homeless in America are military veterans.
And in the decades between the 1940s and 1990s, what do
we find? A remarkable variety of government programs, either
formally, or in effect, using soldiers as guinea pigs --
marched to nuclear explosion sites, with pilots then sent
through the mushroom clouds; subjected to chemical and
biological weapons experiments; radiation experiments;
behavior modification experiments that washed their brains
with LSD; exposure to the dioxin of Agent Orange in Korea and
Vietnam ... the list goes on ... literally millions of
experimental subjects, seldom given a choice or adequate
information, often with disastrous effects to their physical
and/or mental health, rarely with proper medical care or even
monitoring.{5}
The moral of this little slice of history is simple: If
the United States government does not care about the health
and welfare of its own soldiers, if our leaders are not moved
by the prolonged pain and suffering of the wretched warriors
enlisted to fight the empire's wars, how can it be argued,
how can it be believed, that they care about foreign peoples?
At all.
When the Dalai Lama was asked by a CIA officer in 1995:
"Did we do a good or bad thing in providing this support [to
the Tibetans]?", the Tibetan spiritual leader replied that
though it helped the morale of those resisting the Chinese,
"thousands of lives were lost in the resistance" and that
"the U.S. Government had involved itself in his country's
affairs not to help Tibet but only as a Cold War tactic to
challenge the Chinese."{6}
"Let me tell you about the very rich," wrote F. Scott
Fitzgerald. "They are different from you and me."
So are our leaders.
Consider Zbigniew Brzezinski, national security advisor
to Jimmy Carter. In a 1998 interview he admitted that the
official story that the US gave military aid to the
Afghanistan opposition only after the Soviet invasion in 1979
was a lie. The truth was, he said, that the US began aiding
the Islamic fundamentalist Moujahedeen six months before the
Russians made their move, even though he believed -- and told
this to Carter -- that "this aid was going to induce a Soviet
military intervention".
Brzezinski was asked whether he regretted this decision.
Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent
idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into
the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day
that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote
to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of
giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost
10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by
the government, a conflict that brought about the
demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet
empire.{7}
Besides the fact that there is no demonstrable
connection between the Afghanistan war and the breakup of the
Soviet empire, we are faced with the consequences of that
war: the defeat of a government committed to bringing the
extraordinarily backward nation into the 20th century; the
breathtaking carnage; Moujahedeen torture that even US
government officials called "indescribable horror"{8}; half
the population either dead, disabled or refugees; the
spawning of thousands of Islamic fundamentalist terrorists
who have unleashed atrocities in numerous countries; and the
unbelievable repression of women in Afghanistan, instituted
by America's wartime allies.
And for playing a key role in causing all this, Zbigniew
Brzezinski has no regrets. Regrets? The man is downright
proud of it! The kindest thing one can say about such a
person -- as about a sociopath -- is that he's amoral. At
least in his public incarnation, which is all we're concerned
with here. In medieval times he would have been called
Zbigniew the Terrible.
And what does this tell us about Jimmy Carter, whom many
people think of as perhaps the only halfway decent person to
occupy the White House since Roosevelt? Or is it Lincoln?
In 1977, when pressed by journalists about whether the
US had a moral obligation to help rebuild Vietnam, President
Carter responded: "Well, the destruction was mutual."{9}
(Perhaps when he observed the devastation of the South Bronx
later that year, he was under the impression that it had been
caused by Vietnamese bombing.)
In the now-famous exchange on TV between Madeleine
Albright and reporter Lesley Stahl, the latter was speaking
of US sanctions against Iraq, and asked the then-US
ambassador to the UN: "We have heard that a half million
children have died. I mean, that's more children than died
in Hiroshima. And -- and you know, is the price worth it?"
Replied Albright: "I think this is a very hard choice,
but the price -- we think the price is worth it."{10}
One can give Albright the absolute full benefit of any
doubt and say that she had no choice but to defend
administration policy. But what kind of person is it that
takes a job appointment knowing full well that she will be an
integral part of such ongoing policies and will be expected
to defend them without apology? Not long afterwards,
Albright was appointed Secretary of State.
Lawrence Summers is another case in point. In December
1991, while chief economist for the World Bank, he wrote an
internal memo saying that the Bank should encourage migration
of "the dirty industries" to the less-developed countries
because, amongst other reasons, health-impairing and
death-causing pollution costs would be lower. Inasmuch as these
costs are based on the lost earnings of the affected workers,
in a country of very low wages the computed costs would be
much lower. "I think," he wrote, "the economic logic behind
dumping a load of toxic waste in the lowest-wage country is
impeccable and we should face up to that."{11} Despite this
memo receiving wide distribution and condemnation, Summers,
in 1999, was appointed Secretary of the Treasury by President
Clinton. This was a promotion from being Undersecretary of
the Treasury -- for international affairs.
We also have Clinton himself, who on day 33 of the
aerial devastation of Yugoslavia -- 33 days and nights of
destroying villages, schools, hospitals, apartment buildings,
the ecology, separating people from their limbs, from their
eyesight, spilling their intestines, traumatizing children
for the rest of their days ... destroying a life the Serbians
will never know again -- on day 33 William Jefferson Clinton,
cautioning against judging the bombing policy prematurely,
saw fit to declare: "This may seem like a long time. [But] I
don't think that this air campaign has been going on a
particularly long time."{12} And then the man continued it
another 45 days.
Clinton's vice president, Albert Gore, appears eminently
suitable to succeed him to the throne. In 1998, he put great
pressure on South Africa, threatening trade sanctions if the
government didn't cancel plans to use much cheaper generic
AIDS drugs, which would cut into US companies' sales.{13}
South Africa, it should be noted, has about three million
HIV-positive persons among its largely impoverished
population. When Gore, who at the time had significant ties
to the drug industry{14}, was heckled for what he had done
during a speech in New York, he declined to respond in
substance, but instead called out: "I love this country. I
love the First Amendment."{15}
It's interesting to note that when Madeleine Albright
was heckled in Columbus, Ohio in February 1998, while
defending the administration's Iraq policy, she yelled: "We
are the greatest country in the world!"
Patriotism is indeed the last refuge of a scoundrel,
though Gore's and Albright's words don't quite have the ring
of "Deutschland über alles" or "Rule Britannia".
In 1985, Ronald Reagan, demonstrating the preeminent
intellect for which he was esteemed, tried to show how
totalitarian the Soviet Union was by declaring: "I'm no
linguist, but I've been told that in the Russian language
there isn't even a word for freedom."{16} In light of the
above cast of characters and their declarations, can we ask
if there's a word in American English for "embarrassment"?
No, it is not simply that power corrupts and dehumanizes.
Neither is it that US foreign policy is cruel because
American leaders are cruel.
It's that our leaders are cruel because only those
willing and able to be inordinately cruel and remorseless can
hold positions of leadership in the foreign policy
establishment; it might as well be written into the job
description. People capable of expressing a full human
measure of compassion and empathy toward faraway powerless
strangers -- let alone American soldiers -- do not become
president of the United States, or vice president, or
secretary of state, or national security advisor, or
secretary of the treasury. Nor do they want to.
There's a sort of Peter Principle at work here.
Laurence Peter wrote that in a hierarchy every employee tends
to rise to his level of incompetence. Perhaps we can
postulate that in a foreign policy establishment committed to
imperialist domination by any means necessary, employees tend
to rise to the level of cruelty they can live with.
A few days after the bombing of Yugoslavia had ended, the New
York Times published as its lead article in the Sunday Week
in Review, a piece by Michael Wines, which declared that
"Human rights had been elevated to a military priority and a
pre-eminent Western value. ... The war only underscored the
deep ideological divide between an idealistic New World bent
on ending inhumanity and an Old World equally fatalistic
about unending conflict. ... there is also a yawning gap
between the West and much of the world on the value of a
single life."
And so on. A paean to the innate goodness of the West,
an ethos unfortunately not shared by much of the rest of the
world, who, Wines lamented, "just don't buy into Western
notions of rights and responsibilities."{17} The Times fed
us this morality tale after "the West" had just completed the
most ferocious sustained bombing of a nation in the history
of the planet, a small portion of whose dreadful consequences
are referred to above.
During the American bombing of Iraq in 1991, the
previous record for sustained ferociousness, a civilian air
raid shelter was destroyed by a depleted-uranium projectile,
incinerating to charred blackness many hundreds of people, a
great number of them women and children. White House
spokesman Marlin Fitzwater, reiterating US military
statements that the shelter had been a command-and-control
center, said: "We don't know why civilians were at that
location, but we do know that Saddam Hussein does not share
our value for the sanctity of human life."{18}
Similarly, during the Vietnam War, President Johnson and
other government officials assured us that Asians don't have
the same high regard for human life as Americans do. We were
told this, of course, as American bombs, napalm, Agent
Orange, and helicopter gunships were disintegrating the
Vietnamese and their highly regarded lives.
And at the same time, on a day in February 1966, David
Lawrence, the editor of US News & World Report, was moved to
put the following words to paper: "What the United States is
doing in Vietnam is the most significant example of
philanthropy extended by one people to another that we have
witnessed in our times."
I sent Mr. Lawrence a copy of a well-done pamphlet
entitled American Atrocities in Vietnam, which gave graphic
detail of its subject. To this I attached a note which first
repeated Lawrence's quotation with his name below it, then
added: "One of us is crazy.", followed by my name.
Lawrence responded with a full page letter, at the heart
of which was: "I think a careful reading of it [the pamphlet]
will prove the point I was trying to make -- namely that
primitive peoples with savagery in their hearts have to be
helped to understand the true basis of a civilized
existence."
The American mind -- as exemplified by that of Michael
Wines and David Lawrence -- is, politically, so deeply formed
that to liberate it would involve uncommon, and as yet
perhaps undiscovered, philosophical and surgical skill. The
great majority of Americans, even the most cynical -- who
need no convincing that the words that come out of a
politician's mouth are a blend of mis-, dis- and non-information,
and should always carry a veracity health
warning -- appear to lose their critical faculties when
confronted by "our boys who are risking their lives". If
love is blind, patriotism has lost all five senses.
To the extent that the cynicism of these Americans is
directed toward their government's habitual foreign
adventures, it's to question whether the administration's
stated interpretation of a situation is valid, whether the
stated goals are worthwhile, and whether the stated goals can
be achieved -- but not to question the government's
motivation. It is assumed a priori that our leaders mean
well by the foreign people involved -- no matter how much
death, destruction and suffering their policies objectively
result in.
Congressman Otis Pike (R.-NY) headed a committee in 1975
which uncovered a number of dark covert actions of US foreign
policy, many of which were leaked to the public, while others
remained secret. In an interview he stated that any member
of Congress could see the entire report if he agreed not to
reveal anything that was in it. "But not many want to read
it," he added.
"Why?" asked his interviewer.
"Oh, they think it is better not to know," Pike replied.
"There are too many things that embarrass Americans in that
report. You see, this country went through an awful trauma
with Watergate. But even then, all they were asked to
believe was that their president had been a bad person. In
this new situation they are asked much more; they are asked
to believe that their country has been evil. And nobody
wants to believe that."{19}
This has been compared to going to a counselor because
your child is behaving strangely, and being told, "You have a
problem of incest in your family." People can't hear that.
They go to a different counselor. They grab at any other
explanation. It's too painful.{20}
In The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides, speaking
of the practice of plundering villages, the main source of a
warrior's livelihood, tells us that "no disgrace was yet
attached to such an achievement, but rather credit".
Almost all of us grew up in an environment in which we
learned that thou shalt not murder, rape, rob, probably not
pay off a public official or cheat on your taxes -- but not
that there was anything wrong with toppling foreign
governments, quashing revolutions, or dropping powerful bombs
on foreign people, if it somehow served America's "national
security".
Let us look at our teachers. During the bombing of
Yugoslavia, CBS Evening News Anchor, Dan Rather, declared:
"I'm an American, and I'm an American reporter. And yes,
when there's combat involving Americans, you can criticize me
if you must, damn me if you must, but I'm always pulling for
us to win."{21} (In the past, US journalists were quick to
criticize their Soviet counterparts for speaking in behalf of
the State.)
What does this mean? That he's going to support any war
effort by the United States no matter the legal or moral
justification? No matter the effect on democracy, freedom or
self-determination? No matter the degree of horror produced?
No matter anything? Many other American journalists have
similarly paraded themselves as cheerleaders in modern times
in the midst of one of the Pentagon's frequent marches down
the warpath, serving a function "more akin to stenography
than journalism".{22} During the Gulf War, much of the
media, led by CNN, appeared to have a serious missile fetish,
enough so to suggest a need for counseling.
The CEO of National Public Radio, Kevin Klose, is the
former head of all the major, worldwide US government
broadcast propaganda outlets, including Voice of America,
Radio Free Europe, Radio Liberty, and the anti-Castro Radio
Marti, which broadcasts into Cuba from Florida. NPR, which
can be thought of as the home service of the Voice of
America, has never met an American war it didn't like. It
was inspired to describe the war against Yugoslavia as
Clinton's "most significant foreign policy success."{23}
And the head of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting,
Robert Coonrod, has a résumé remarkably similar to that of Klose,
from Voice of America to Radio Marti.
Is it any wonder that countless Americans -- bearing psyches
no less malleable than those of other members of the species --
are only dimly conscious of the fact that they even have the
right to be unequivocally opposed to a war effort and to question
the government's real intentions for carrying it out, without
thinking of themselves as (horror of horrors) "unpatriotic"?
Propaganda is to a democracy what violence is to a dictatorship.
During the 1991 Gulf War, the Bush administration conducted
three briefings a day with such telegenic figures as generals
Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf. Marlin Fitzwater later
recalled that when ABC-TV interviewed a group of Kansans around a
kitchen table, "every answer at that table reflected one of the
reasons we had given for going in."{24}
In Spain, in the 16th century, the best minds were busy at
work devising rationalizations for the cruelty its conquistadors
were inflicting on the Indians of the New World. It was decided,
and commonly accepted, that the Indians were "natural slaves",
created by God to serve the conquistadors.
Twentieth-century America took this a step further. The
best and the brightest have assured us that United States
interventions -- albeit rather violent at times -- are not only
in the natural order of things, but they're actually for the good
of the natives.
The media and the public do in fact relish catching
politicians' lies, but these are the small lies -- lies about
money, sex, drug use, and other peccadillos, and the ritual
doubletalk of campaignspeak. A certain Mr. A. Hitler, originally
of Austria, though often castigated, actually arrived at a number
of very perceptive insights into how the world worked. One of
them was this:
The great masses of the people in the very bottom of
their hearts tend to be corrupted rather than consciously
and purposely evil ... therefore, in view of the primitive
simplicity of their minds, they more easily fall a victim
to a big lie than to a little one, since they themselves
lie in little things, but would be ashamed of lies that
were too big.{25}
How many Americans, after all, doubt the official rationale
for dropping the A-bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki -- to obviate
the need for a land invasion of Japan, thus saving thousands of
American lives? However, it's been known for years that the
Japanese had been trying for many months to surrender and that
the US had consistently ignored these overtures. The bombs were
dropped, not to intimidate the Japanese, but to put the fear of
the American god into the Russians. The dropping of the A-bomb,
it has been said, was not the last shot of World War II, but the
first shot of the Cold War.{26}
In 1964, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, when asked about US
involvement in the overthrow of the government of Brazil,
declared: "Well, there is just not one iota of truth in this.
It's just not so in any way, shape, or form." Yet, the United
States had been intimately involved in the coup, its role being
literally indispensable.{27}
In the 1980s, the Reagan administration declared that the
Russians were spraying toxic chemicals over Asia -- the so-called
"yellow rain" -- and had caused thousands of deaths. So precise
was Washington's information they could state at one point that
in Afghanistan 3,042 had died in 47 separate incidents.
President Reagan denounced the Soviet Union for these atrocities
more than 15 times in documents and speeches. The "yellow rain",
it turned out, was pollen-laden feces dropped by huge swarms of
honeybees flying far overhead.{28}
These are three examples, chosen virtually at random.
Numerous others could be given. But at the beginning of the 21st
century do the American people really need to be reminded that
governments lie, that great powers lie greater, that the world's
only superpower has the most to lie about; i.e., cover up? Do I
have to descend to the banality of telling this to my readers?
Apparently so, if we are to judge by all those who swallowed
the "humanitarian" excuse for the bombing of Yugoslavia without
gagging, including many on the left.
The idea of "altruism" has been a recurrent feature of
America's love affair with itself. From 1918 to 1920, the United
States was a major part of a Western invasion of the infant
Soviet Union, an invasion that endeavored to "strangle at its
birth", as Winston Churchill put it, the Russian Revolution,
which had effectively removed one-sixth of the world's land
surface from private capitalist investment. A nation still
recovering from a horrendous world war, in extreme chaos from a
fundamental social revolution, and in the throes of a famine that
was to leave many millions dead, was mercilessly devastated yet
further by the invaders, without any provocation.
When the smoke had cleared, the US Army Chief of Staff put
out a report on the undertaking, which said: "This expedition
affords one of the finest examples in history of honorable,
unselfish dealings ... to be helpful to a people struggling to
achieve a new liberty."{29}
Seventy years later, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff, General Colin Powell, was moved to tell an audience in
California that the United States has "so many friends" in the
Pacific because of "our values, our economic system, and our
altruism".{30} He made these remarks shortly after directing
the slaughter by bombing of a multitude of Panamanian innocents.
Author Garry Wills has commented on this American
benevolence toward foreigners: "We believe we can literally kill
them with kindness, moving our guns forward in a seizure of
demented charity. It is when America is in her most altruistic
mood that other nations better get behind their bunkers."
What is it, then, that I mean to say here -- that the US
government does not care a whit about human life, human rights,
humanity, and all those other wonderful human things?
No, I mean to say that doing the right thing is not a
principle of American foreign policy, not an ideal or a goal of
policy in and of itself. If it happens that doing the right
thing coincides with, or is irrelevant to, Washington's
overriding international ambitions, American officials have no
problem walking the high moral ground. But this is rarely the
case. A study of the many US interventions -- summarized
numerically above, and detailed in the "Interventions" chapter --
shows clearly that the engine of American foreign policy has been
fueled not by a devotion to any kind of morality, nor even simple
decency, but rather by the necessity to serve other masters,
which can be broken down to four imperatives:
1)making the world open and hospitable for -- in current
terminology -- globalization, particularly American-based
transnational corporations;
2)enhancing the financial statements of defense contractors
at home who have contributed generously to members of Congress
and residents of the White House;
3)preventing the rise of any society that might serve as a
successful example of an alternative to the capitalist model;
4)extending political, economic and military hegemony over
as much of the globe as possible, to prevent the rise of any
regional power that might challenge American supremacy, and to
create a world order in America's image, as befits the world's
only superpower.
To American policymakers, these ends have justified the
means, and all means have been available.{31}
In the wake of the 1973 military coup in Chile, which
overthrew the socialist government of Salvador Allende, the
Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs, Jack
Kubisch, was hard pressed to counter charges that the United
States had been involved. "It was not in our interest to have
the military take over in Chile," he insisted. "It would have
been better had Allende served his entire term, taking the nation
and the Chilean people into complete and total ruin. Only then
would the full discrediting of socialism have taken place. The
military takeover and bloodshed has confused the issue."{32}
Though based on a falsehood made up for the occasion -- that
Allende's polices were leading Chile to ruin -- Kubisch's remark
inadvertently expressed his government's strong fealty to the
third imperative stated above.
During the Cold War, US foreign policy was carried out under
the waving banner of fighting a moral crusade against what cold
warriors persuaded the American people, most of the world, and
usually themselves, was the existence of a malevolent
International Communist Conspiracy. But it was always a fraud;
there was never any such animal as the International Communist
Conspiracy. There were, as there still are, people living in
misery, rising up in protest against their condition, against an
oppressive government, a government likely supported by the
United States. To Washington, this was proof that the Soviet
Union (or Cuba or Nicaragua, etc., functioning as Moscow's
surrogate) was again acting as the proverbial "outside agitator".
In the final analysis, this must be wondered: What kind of
omnipresent, omnipotent, monolithic, evil international
conspiracy bent on world domination would allow its empire to
completely fall apart, like the proverbial house of cards,
without bringing any military force to bear upon its satellites
to prevent their escaping? And without an invasion from abroad
holding a knife to the empire's throat?
Enemies without number, threats without end
Now, of course, Washington spinmeisters can't cry "The Russians
are coming, and they're ten feet tall!" as a pretext for
intervention, so they have to regularly come up with new enemies.
America cherishes her enemies. Without enemies, she is a nation
without purpose and direction. The various components of the
National Security State need enemies to justify their swollen
budgets, to aggrandize their work, to protect their jobs, to give
themselves a mission in the aftermath of the Soviet Union;
ultimately, to reinvent themselves. And they understand this
only too well, even painfully. Presented here is Col. Dennis
Long, speaking in 1992, two years after the end of the Cold War,
when he was director of "total armor force readiness" at Fort
Knox:
For 50 years, we equipped our football team, practiced
five days a week and never played a game. We had a clear
enemy with demonstrable qualities, and we had scouted them
out. [Now] we will have to practice day in and day out
without knowing anything about the other team. We won't
have his playbook, we won't know where the stadium is, or
how many guys he will have on the field. That is very
distressing to the military establishment, especially when
you are trying to justify the existence of your organization
and your systems.{33}
The United States had postponed such a distressing situation
for as long as it could. A series of Soviet requests during the
Cold War to establish a direct dialogue with senior NATO
officials were rejected as "inappropriate and potentially
divisive". Longstanding and repeated Soviet offers to dissolve
the Warsaw Pact if NATO would do the same were ignored. After
one such offer was spurned, the Los Angeles Times commented that
the offer "increases the difficulty faced by U.S. policy-makers
in persuading Western public opinion to continue expensive and
often unpopular military programs."{34}
In 1991, Colin Powell touched upon the irony of the profound
world changes in cautioning his fellow military professionals:
"We must not ... hope that it [the changes] will disappear and
let us return to comforting thoughts about a resolute and evil
enemy."{35}
But the thoughts are indeed comforting to the military
professionals and their civilian counterparts. So one month the
new resolute and evil enemy is North Korea, the next month the
big threat is Libya, then China, or Iraq, or Iran, or Sudan, or
Afghanistan, or Serbia, or that old reliable demon, Cuba --
countries each led by a Hitler-of-the-month, or at least a madman
or mad dog; a degree of demonizing fit more for a theocratic
society than a democratic one.
And in place of the International Communist Conspiracy,
Washington now tells us, on one day or another, it's fighting a
War Against Drugs, or military or industrial spying, or the
proliferation of "weapons of mass destruction", or organized
crime, or on behalf of human rights, or, most particularly,
against terrorism. And they dearly want the American public to
believe this. Here, for your terrorist-threat collection, are
some of the headlines appearing in the Washington Post and New
York Times in one 7-week period in early 1999:
Jan. 22: "Clinton Describes Terrorism Threat for 21st Century"
Jan. 23: "President Steps Up War on New Terrorism"
Jan. 23: "Thwarting Tomorrow's Terrors"
Jan. 29: "Anti-Terrorism Powers Grow"
Feb. 1: "Pentagon Plans Domestic Terrorism Team"
Feb. 1: "The Man Who Protects America From Terrorism"
Feb. 2: "U.S. Targeting Terrorism With More Funds"
Feb. 16: "Anti-Terrorism Military Drills Take Parts of Texas by
Surprise"
Feb. 17: "Has the U.S. Blunted Bin Laden?"
Feb. 19: "Spending to Avert Embassy Attacks Assailed as Timid:
Terrorist Threat Looms"
Feb. 19: "Bangladesh: Bin Laden's Next Target?"
Feb. 23: "Preparing for Invisible Killers"
Mar. 7: "Muslim Militants Threaten American Lives"
Mar. 8: "Reagan Building Vulnerable to Attack"
Mar. 14: "2 Groups Appeal U.S. Designation as Terror
Organizations"
Mar. 16: "Clinton Plans Training for Firefighters on Terrorism"
And on January 20, Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen --
a man who has written an ode to the F-15 fighter jet,
literally{36} -- announced that $6.6 billion was to be spent on a
national missile defense system, a revival of President Reagan's
Star Wars system. In explaining this expenditure, Mr. Cohen
cited only one threat -- from North Korea. North Korea! A
country that can't feed its own people is going to wage a missile
attack upon the United States? What possible reason -- other
than an overpowering, irresistible yearning for mass national
suicide -- could North Korea have for launching such an attack?
Yet the average American, reading Cohen's announcement, must have
found it very difficult to believe that one of their "leaders"
could just step forward and publicly proclaim a crazy tale. They
assume there must be something to what the man is saying.
That's how the man gets away with it.
Does the man believe it himself? No more likely than that
President Clinton believes it. In 1993, while in South Korea,
Clinton declared: "It is pointless for them [North Korea] to
develop nuclear weapons. Because if they ever use them it would
be the end of their country." This burst of honesty and common
sense, which visits politicians occasionally, was prompted in
this instance by a journalist's question about how likely it was
that North Korea would comply with the Non-Proliferation
Treaty.{37} Oddly enough, less than a year later, a survey
showed that six times as many young South Koreans feared the
United States as feared North Korea.{38}
Returning to 1999 and its new "threats" -- in August a new
National Security Council global strategy paper for the next
century declared that "the nation is facing its biggest espionage
threat in history."{39}
A remarkable statement. What ever happened to the KGB? Any
Americans now past 30 had it drilled into their heads from the
cradle on that there was a perpetual Soviet dagger aimed at our
collective heart in the hand of the spy next door. Thousands
lost their jobs and careers because of their alleged association
to this threat, hundreds were imprisoned or deported, two were
executed. Surely Senator Joe McCarthy and J. Edgar Hoover are
turning over in their graves.
Meanwhile the drumbeat warnings of a possible chemical or
biological attack upon the United States grow louder with each
passing week. Police, fire and health agencies go through
regular exercises with all manner of sophisticated equipment.
Active-duty Army and Marine Corps personnel are engaged in the
same. The FBI has an extensive hazardous materials unit ready to
rush to the scene of an attack. And now the National Guard has
joined the frenzy, outfitted in full-body protective suits with
air tanks. The General Accounting Office (GAO) has argued that
the National Guard units are redundant and their mission poorly
defined. The Washington Post reported that "In fact, some
critics regard the [Guard] teams largely as an effort to find a
new mission for the Guard and help it avoid deeper budget cuts in
the post Cold War era."{40} As noted, the same can be said about
other elements of the National Security State.
In October 1999, ABC's "Nightline" program ran a five-part
series in which it simulated a biological weapons attack on a
large American city, featuring a squad of terrorists releasing
anthrax spores into the subway system, complete with panic,
death, and rampant chaos. Ted Koppel made the explicit
pronouncement that such an attack was bound to take place in the
US at some future time. As one would expect, the programs were
long on sensationalism and short on science. This was spelled
out later by the director of the Johns Hopkins Center for
Civilian Biodefense Studies.{41} Ironically, the fact that such
a center exists is another sign of the ("threatening") times.
Shortly after this the FBI announced that the Washington
area had become "the number one target in the world" for possible
terrorist attacks. How did they know? Well, "downtown
Washington receives three to six suspicious packages a day".
Anything actually terroristic in any of these packages?
Apparently not.{42}
All this in response to actual chemical, biological or
radiological weapon attacks of -- at last count -- zero. But
there have been many false anthrax reports, no doubt largely
inspired by all the scare talk; talk which never gives the public
a clue to how extremely difficult and unpredictable it actually
would be to create and deliver a serious anthrax attack,
particularly over a wide area; scare talk that also makes more
credible and acceptable the US 1998 bombing of a Sudanese
pharmaceutical plant on the (false) grounds that it was making
chemical and biological weapons.
Air travel is another area where the "threat" mentality
looms larger than life, and common sense. A flight from Atlanta
to Turkey, August 4, 1999, that was about to take off was halted
by the FBI; all 241 passengers were forced to leave the plane,
some of them were questioned, one man was detained; all the
luggage was unloaded and each piece painstakingly matched to a
passenger; bomb-sniffing dogs and explosive experts were rushed
in, and the flight was held up for more than four hours. The
reason? The FBI had received word that one of the passengers
might be "a potential threat to national security". And the
reason for that? The man had paid for his ticket in cash.{43}
Three weeks later, at Chicago's O'Hare Airport, a man was
seen running the wrong way into a passageway normally used by
those exiting the terminal. He disappeared into the crowded
concourse. Neither he nor anything suspicious was found. For
all anyone knew, the man had simply forgotten something somewhere
or had a very urgent need to get to what he thought was the
closest bathroom. Whatever, as a result of this "threatening"
situation, 6,000 passengers were evacuated, at least 120 flights
were canceled, and air traffic was disrupted across the country
for several hours.{44}
With all the scare talk, with all the "threats", what
exactly has taken place in the real world? According to the
State Department, in the period of 1993-1998 the number of actual
terrorist attacks by region was as follows:
Western Europe 766, Latin America 569, Middle East 374, Asia
158, Eurasia 101, Africa 84, North America 14.{45}
It is now well known how during the Cold War the actual
level of Soviet military and economic strength was magnified by
the CIA and Defense Department, how data and events were
falsified to exaggerate the Russian threat, how worst-case
scenarios were put forth as if they were probable and imminent,
even when they failed to meet the demands of plausibility.{46}
One of the most enduring Soviet-threat stories -- the alleged
justification for the birth of NATO -- was the coming Red
invasion of Western Europe. If, by 1999, anyone still swore by
this fairy tale, they could have read a report in The Guardian of
London on newly declassified British government documents from
1968. Among the documents was one based on an analysis by the
Foreign Office joint intelligence committee, which the newspaper
summarized as follows:
The Soviet Union had no intention of launching a military
attack on the West at the height of the cold war, British
military and intelligence chiefs privately believed, in
stark contrast to what Western politicians and military
leaders were saying in public about the "Soviet threat".
"The Soviet Union will not deliberately start general war or
even limited war in Europe," a briefing for the British chiefs of
staff -- marked Top Secret, UK Eyes Only, and headed The Threat:
Soviet Aims and Intentions -- declared in June 1968.
"Soviet foreign policy had been cautious and realistic", the
department argued, and despite the Vietnam war, the Russians and
their allies had "continued to make contacts in all fields with
the West and to maintain a limited but increasing political
dialogue with Nato powers".{47}
Subtlety is not the order of the day. In 1998, the Pentagon
created a new bureaucracy: the Defense Threat Reduction Agency, a
budget already in the billions, personnel numbered in the
thousands, and "made up primarily of agencies founded to reduce
the threat posed by the Soviet Union".{48} It's called
recycling.
The Soviet threat, the terrorist threat, the new enemies,
the same old same old, feverishly fostered at home and abroad,
the mentality that the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, et al. have
had critical, life-saving, catastrophe-preventing missions thrust
upon them, here, there, and everywhere, and we rein these saviors
in on pain of national and world disaster ... working the old
protection racket again.
"I think we are already at war," CIA Director George Tenet
told the Senate in 1997. "We have been on a war footing for a
number of years now."{49}
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the
populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to
safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of
them imaginary.
H.L. Mencken, 1920
Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear --
kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor -- with
the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been
some terrible evil ... to gobble us up if we did not blindly
rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded.
Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have
happened, seem never to have been quite real.
General Douglas MacArthur, speaking of large Pentagon
budgets, 1957{50}
The political spectrum and conspiracies
It's ironic, but the far right in the United States is more open
to believing the worst about American foreign policy than are
most liberals. This may be because those on the far right, being
extremists themselves, do not instinctively shy away from
believing that the government is capable of extreme behavior, at
home or abroad. The radical left and right share a profound
cynicism about their government's very intentions. But those in
between the two poles do not naturally come by such views.
To many of the latter, the statements here about the United
States not meaning well may sound like an example of that
frequent object of ridicule, the "conspiracy theory". They hear
me saying (snicker) that our leaders have gotten together,
covertly, in some secluded safe-house, to maliciously plan their
next assault on everything holy, while throwing out signals
intended to confuse and to obscure their real intentions.
But if our leaders strive for unambiguous righteousness, is
it not a conspiracy? Don't they meet to plan how they're going
to do nice things? Or perhaps they don't have to do this so
formally because since they all mean nice to begin with, it thus
happens quite automatically, naturally, built into the system --
the government system, the corporate system, the military system,
the intelligence system, the government-corporate-military-
intelligence nexus.
But why, then, wouldn't it be the same with meaning bad?
It's not that Americans can't believe in any conspiracy
theory. Witness the remarkably long shelf life of the
International Communist Conspiracy. It's still a highly saleable
commodity.
"Conspiracy" researcher and author Jonathan Vankin has
observed:
Journalists like to think of themselves as a skeptical lot.
This is a flawed self-image. The thickest pack of
American journalists are all too credulous when dealing
with government officials, technical experts, and other
official sources. They save their vaunted "skepticism" for
ideas that feel unfamiliar to them. Conspiracy theories
are treated with the most rigorous skepticism.
Conspiracy theories should be approached skeptically. But
there's no fairness. Skepticism should apply equally to official
and unofficial information. To explain American conspiracy
theories ... I've had to rectify this imbalance. I've opened
myself to conspiracy theories, and applied total skepticism to
official stories.{51}
Like the coverup in Waco. In August 1999 we finally
received official confirmation that the FBI had fired incendiary
devices into the Branch Davidian sect compound in 1993, where 76
people died in a fire the same day. This, after six years of
categorical official denials, while "conspiracy theorists" and
"conspiracy nuts", who insisted otherwise, were ridiculed, or --
the more usual case -- met by the media's most effective weapon:
silence.
Can the truth about the "October Surprise", TWA800,
Jonestown, and Mena, Arkansas under Governor Clinton be far
behind? Yes, far behind. We'll likely never hear an official
admission about those events until well into the new century.
The First Watergate Law of American Politics states: "No
matter how paranoid or conspiracy-minded you are, what the
government is actually doing is worse than you imagine."
The Second Watergate Law of American Politics states: "Don't
believe anything until it's been officially denied."
Both laws are still on the books.
Cold War continuum
Though the putative "communist threat" has disappeared, the
taxpayers still fill tractor-trailers to the bursting with cash
and send them off to what had once been known as the War
Department, then humorously renamed the Defense Department. ...
That department's research into yet more futuristic weapons of
the chemical dust and better ways to kill people en masse
proceeds unabated, with nary a glance back at the body fragments
littering the triumphant fields. ... Belief in an afterlife has
been rekindled by the Clinton administration's new missile
defense system, after universal certainty that Star Wars was dead
and buried. ... NATO has also risen from the should-be-dead, more
almighty than ever. ... Many hundreds of US military
installations, serving a vast panoply of specialized warfaring
needs, still dot the global map, including Guantanamo base in
Cuba, and for the first time in Albania, Macedonia, Hungary,
Bosnia and Croatia. ... Even as you read this, American armed
forces and special operations forces, such as the Green Berets,
are being deployed in well over 100 countries in every part of
the world. ... Washington is supplying many of these nations with
sizeable amounts of highly lethal military equipment, and
training their armed forces and police in the brutal arts,
regardless of how brutal they already are. ... American nuclear
bombs are still stored in seven European countries, if not
elsewhere ... And American officials retain their unshakable
belief that they have a god-given right to do whatever they want,
for as long as they want, to whomever they want, wherever they
want.
In other words, whatever the diplomats and policymakers at
the time thought they were doing, the Cold War skeptics have been
vindicated -- it was not about containing an evil, expansionist
communism after all; it was about American imperialism, with
"communist" merely the name given to those who stood in its way.
In sum total, all these post-Cold War non-changes engender a
scenario out of the 1950s and 1960s. And the 1970s and 1980s.
John Foster Dulles lives! Has Ronald Reagan been faking illness
as he lurks behind the curtain of OZ? Why has all this continued
into the 21st century?
American foreign-policy makers are exquisitely attuned to
the rise of a government, or a movement that might take power,
that will not lie down and happily become an American client
state, that will not look upon the free market or the
privatization of the world known as "globalization" as the summum
bonum, that will not change its laws to favor foreign investment,
that will not be unconcerned about the effects of foreign
investment upon the welfare of its own people, that will not
produce primarily for export, that will not allow asbestos,
banned pesticides, and other products restricted in the developed
world to be dumped onto their people, that will not easily
tolerate the International Monetary Fund or the World Trade
Organization inflicting a scorched-earth policy upon the
country's social services or standard of living, that will not
allow an American or NATO military installation upon its soil ...
To the highly-sensitive nostrils of Washington foreign-policy
veterans, Yugoslavia smelled a bit too much like one of these
governments.
Given the proper pretext, such bad examples have to be
reduced to basket cases; or, where feasible, simply overthrown,
like Albania and Bulgaria in the early 1990s; failing that, life
has to be made impossible for these renegades, as with Cuba,
still. As Michael Parenti has observed: "It has been noted that
the cost of apprehending a bank robber may occasionally exceed
the sum that is stolen. But if robbers were allowed to go their
way, this would encourage others to follow suit and would put the
entire banking system in jeopardy."{52}
And this was the foundation -- the sine qua non -- of
American foreign policy for the entire twentieth century, both
before and after the existence of the Soviet Union, from the
Philippines, Panama and the Dominican Republic in the first
decade of the century, to Peru, El Salvador, and Colombia in the
last decade.
Can we in fact say that the Cold War has actually ended? If
the Cold War is defined as a worldwide contention between the
United States and the Soviet Union for the hearts and minds of
the Third World (for whatever motives), then certainly it is
over. But if the Cold War is seen not as an East-West struggle,
but rather a "North-South" struggle, as an American effort -- as
mentioned above -- to prevent the rise of any society that might
serve as a successful example of an alternative to the capitalist
model, and to prevent the rise of any regional power that might
challenge American supremacy, then that particular map with the
pins stuck in it still hangs on the wall in the Pentagon's War
Room. (Said a Defense Department planning paper in 1992: "Our
first objective is to prevent the re-emergence of a new rival ...
we must maintain the mechanisms for deterring potential
competitors from even aspiring to a larger regional or global
role."{53} [emphasis added])
The current manifestation of this continuum, by whatever
name, can be viewed as yet another chapter in the never-ending
saga of the war of the rich upon the poor. And with the Soviet
presence and influence gone, American interventions are more
trouble-free than ever. (Consider that US friendliness toward
Iraq and Yugoslavia lasted exactly as long as the Soviet Union
and its bloc existed.)
There's a word for such a continuum of policy. Empire. The
American Empire. An appellation that does not roll easily off an
American tongue. No American has any difficulty believing in the
existence and driving passion for expansion, power, glory, and
wealth of the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-
Hungarian Empire, or the British Empire. It's right there in
their schoolbooks. But to the American mind, to American
schoolbooks, and to the American media, the history of empires
has come to a grinding halt.
The American Empire? An oxymoron.
A compelling lust for political, economic and military
hegemony over the rest of the world, divorced from moral
considerations? Suggesting that to Americans is akin to telling
them of one's UFO abduction, except that they're more likely to
believe the abduction story.
Earth is not enough
Previous empires could not even imagine it. The American Empire
is making detailed plans for it. Control of outer space. Not
only control, but planning for wars there. Let us mark the words
of the gentlemen of the Pentagon:
US Space Command -- dominating the space dimension of military
operations to protect US interests and investment. Integrating
Space Forces into warfighting capabilities across the full
spectrum of conflict. ... During the early portion of the 21st
century, space power will also evolve into a separate and equal
medium of warfare. ... The emerging synergy of space superiority
with land, sea, and air superiority will lead to Full Spectrum
Dominance. ... Development of ballistic missile defenses using
space systems and planning for precision strikes from space offers
a counter to the worldwide proliferation of WMD [weapons of mass
destruction]. ... Space is a region with increasing commercial,
civil, international, and military interests and investments. The
threat to these vital systems is also increasing. ... Control of
Space is the ability to assure access to space, freedom of
operations within the space medium, and an ability to deny others
the use of space, if required. ... Control of Space is a complex
mission that casts USCINCSPACE [US Commander-in-Chief of space] in
a classic warfighter role and mandates an established AOR [area of
responsibility].{54} ... With regard to space dominance, we have
it, we like it, and we're going to keep it.{55} ... We will engage
terrestrial targets someday -- ships, airplanes, land targets --
from space. ... We're going to fight in space. We're going to
fight from space and we're going to fight into space.{56}
In 1963, the UN General Assembly adopted by unanimous
acclamation a resolution calling upon all States: "To refrain
from placing in orbit around the earth any objects carrying
nuclear weapons or any other kinds of weapons of mass
destruction, installing such weapons on celestial bodies, or
stationing such weapons in outer space in any other manner."{57}
This expressed hope is still very much alive today. On
January 26, 1999, United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan
told the Conference on Disarmament in Geneva: "One concept which
is now widely shared is that of maintaining outer space as a
weapons-free environment."
The Madman philosophy
In March 1998, an internal 1995 study, "Essentials of Post-Cold
War Deterrence", by the U.S. Strategic Command, the headquarters
responsible for the U.S. strategic nuclear arsenal, was brought
to light. The study stated:
Because of the value that comes from the ambiguity of what the US
may do to an adversary if the acts we seek to deter are carried
out, it hurts to portray ourselves as too fully rational and
cool-headed. The fact that some elements may appear to be
potentially out of control can be beneficial to creating and
reinforcing fears and doubts within the minds of an adversary's
decision makers. This essential sense of fear is the working
force of deterrence. That the US may become irrational and
vindictive if its vital interests are attacked should be a part
of the national persona we project to all adversaries.{58}
The author of these words would have the world believe that
the United States has only been pretending to be "out of control"
or "irrational and vindictive". However, it can be argued --
based on the objective facts of what Washington has inflicted
upon the world, as described in this book -- that for more than
half a century American foreign policy has, in actuality, been
clinically mad.
On the other hand, the desire for world hegemony, per se, is
not necessarily irrational, whatever else one may think of it.
Michael Parenti has pointed out that US foreign policy "may seem
stupid because the rationales offered in its support often sound
unconvincing, leaving us with the impression that policymakers
are confused or out of touch. But just because the public does
not understand what they are doing does not mean that national
security leaders are themselves befuddled. That they are
fabricators does not mean they are fools."{59}
A Truth Commission
In recent years, the people of South Africa, Guatemala and El
Salvador have held official Truth Commissions to look squarely in
the eyes of the crimes committed by their governments. There
will never be any such official body to investigate and document
the wide body of Washington's crimes, although several unofficial
citizens' commissions have done so over the years for specific
interventions, such as in Vietnam, Panama, and Iraq; their
findings were of course ignored by the establishment media (whose
ideology is a belief that it doesn't have any ideology).
In the absence of an official Truth Commission in the United
States, this book is offered up as testimony. Do not spend too
much time looking for a review of it in the New York Times,
Washington Post, or Los Angeles Times.
Washington, DC, January 2000
NOTES
1. Senate Committee on Veterans' Affairs, Is Military Research
Hazardous to Veterans' Health? Lessons Spanning Half a Century,
December 8, 1994, p.5
2. Washington Post, October 2 and 23, 1996 and July 31, 1997 for
the estimated numbers of affected soldiers.
3. Journal of the American Medical Association, September 1,
1999, p.822.
4. Washington Post, October 19, 1999, p.3
5. Is Military Research Hazardous to Veterans' Health? op. cit.,
passim
6. John Kenneth Knaus, Orphans of the Cold War (New York, 1999),
p.312. Knaus was the CIA officer who spoke to the Dalai Lama.
7. Le Nouvel Observateur (France), January 15-21, 1998, p.76.
There are at least two editions of this magazine; with the
perhaps sole exception of the Library of Congress, the version
sent to the United States is shorter than the French version, and
the Brzezinski interview was not included in the shorter version.
8. Washington Post, January 13, 1985, p.30
9. New York Times, March 25, 1977, p.10
10. "60 Minutes", May 12, 1996
11. For the full text of the relevant part of his memo, see The
Economist (London), February 8, 1992, p.66 (US edition)
12. Washington Post, April 25, 1999, p.28
13. John Judis, "K Street Gore", The American Prospect,
July-August 1999, p.18-21
14. Ibid.
15. Washington Post, June 18, 1999. After protesters repeatedly
disrupted Gore's campaign appearances, the US removed South
Africa from the sanction watch list. (Ibid., December 4, 1999,
p.18)
16. Interview with Reagan at the White House, October 29, 1985,
broadcast October 30 on "The World at One", Radio 4, Great
Britain.
17. New York Times, June 13, 1999
18. Ibid., February 14, 1991, p.16
19. "An Oriana Fallaci Interview: Otis Pike and the CIA", New
Republic (Washington, DC), April 3, 1976, p.10
20. Borrowed from former CIA analyst David MacMichael
21. Speaking at the National Press Club, Washington, DC, June 25,
1999.
22. Phrase borrowed from media critic Norman Solomon
23. NPR Morning edition, Mara Liasson, June 11, 1999
24. Washington Post, March 27, 1999
25. Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf (Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 1971;
original version 1925) Vol. 1, chapter 10, p.231
26. William Blum, "Hiroshima: Needless Slaughter, Useful Terror",
Covert Action Quarterly (Washington, D.C.), #53, Summer 1995,
p.22-25
27. William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA
Interventions Since World War II (Common Courage Press, Maine,
1995), chapter 27
28. New York Times, March 9, 1982, p.1; March 23, 1982, p.1 and
14; The Guardian (London) November 3, 1983, March 29, 1984;
Washington Post, May 30, 1986.
29. Los Angeles Times, September 2, 1991, p.1
30. Vital Speeches of the Day, May 1, 1990, p.421, speech
delivered March 23, 1990.
31. For excellent and concise summaries of how and why the United
States planned and achieved world domination, see Noam Chomsky,
What Uncle Sam Really Wants (Odonian Press, Berkeley, 1992) and
Michael Parenti, Against Empire (City Lights Books, San
Francisco, 1995)
32. Thomas Hauser, The Execution of Charles Horman (New York,
1978), p.191. (Horman was an American killed by the Chilean
junta in the wake of the coup.)
33. New York Times, February 3, 1992, p.8
34. New York Times, January 7, 1983, p.4; The Guardian (London),
December 6, 1986 (first quote); Los Angeles Times, October 25,
1989, p.7 (second quote), and October 26.
35. AIR FORCE Magazine (Arlington, VA), March 1991, p.81
36. New York Times, March 21, 1999, p.34
37. Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States (GPO),
1993, Vol. I, p.1060-1, July 11
38. The Economist (London), June 4-10, 1994, p.40
39. Washington Times, August 24, 1999, p.1; the words are those
of the newspaper and may be a paraphrase of the original.
40. Washington Post, August 28, 1999, p.3
41. Donald Henderson, "Dangerous Fictions about Bioterrorism",
Washington Post, November 8, 1999, p.21; see also Roni Kruzman,
"Koppel's 'Biowar of the Worlds'", Extra! (Fairness and Accuracy
in Reporting, NY), January/February 2000, p.21
42. Washington Post, October 29, 1999, p.14
43. Atlanta Journal, August 4, 1999, p.1
44. Washington Post, August 27, 1999
45. State Department, "Patterns of Global Terrorism, 1998",
released April 1999, can be read on their website
46. See, e.g., Tim Weiner, "Military Accused of Lies Over Arms",
New York Times, June 28, 1993, p.10; Tim Weiner, Blank Check (New
York, 1990), p.42-43, for CIA's inflated figures re Soviets; Anne
H. Cahn, "How We Got Oversold on Overkill", Los Angeles Times,
July 23, 1993, about a GAO study; Douglas Jehl & Michael Ross,
"CIA Nominee Faces Charges He Slanted Data", Los Angeles Times,
September 15, 1991, p.1; Arthur Macy Cox, "Why the U.S., Since
1977, Has Been Misperceiving Soviet Military Strength", New York
Times, October 20, 1980, p. 19 (Cox was formerly an official with
the State Department and the CIA)
47. The Guardian (London), January 1, 1999
48. Washington Post, October 2, 1998
49. Ibid., September 9, 1998, p.17
50. Mencken: In Defense of Women (1920); MacArthur: William
Manchester, American Caesar: Douglas MacArthur, 1880-1964 (Dell,
New York, 1978), p.827
51. Jonathan Vankin, Conspiracies, Cover-ups and Crimes:
Political Manipulation and Mind Control in America (New York,
1991), p.120
52. Parenti, op. cit., p.49
53. "Pentagon's Planning Guidance for the Fiscal Years
1994-1999", New York Times, March 8, 1992, p.14
54. United States Space Command: Vision for 2020, excerpts are in
same sequence as found in the publication; put out by U.S. Space
Command, Director of Plans, Peterson AFB, Colorado, August 1997
55. Keith R. Hall, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Space
and Director of the National Reconnaissance Office, speaking to
the National Space Club, September 15, 1997.
56. General Joseph Ashy, at the time Commander-in-Chief of the
U.S. Space Command, cited in Aviation Week and Space Technology
(New York), August 5, 1996, p.51
57. October 17, 1963, UN Resolution number 1884
58. From the study's Introduction, p.8. The Boston Globe, March
2, 1998, p.5 contains almost the entire passage.
59. Parenti, op. cit., p.80
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