Ronald Reagan: Accessory to Genocide
Exclusive: More than any recent U.S. president, Ronald Reagan has been lavished
with honors, including his name attached to Washington’s National Airport. But
the conviction of Reagan’s old ally, ex-Guatemalan dictator Rios Montt, for
genocide means “Ronnie” must face history’s judgment as an accessory to the
crime, reports Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The conviction of former Guatemalan dictator Efrain Rios Montt on charges of
genocide against Mayan villagers in the 1980s has a special meaning for
Americans who idolize Ronald Reagan. It means that their hero was an accessory
to one of the most grievous crimes that can be committed against humanity.
The courage of the Guatemalan people and the integrity of their legal system to
exact some accountability on a still-influential political figure also put U.S.
democracy to shame. For decades now, Americans have tolerated human rights
crimes by U.S. presidents who face little or no accountability. Usually, the
history isn’t even compiled honestly.
By contrast, a Guatemalan court on Friday found
Rios Montt guilty of genocide
and crimes against humanity and sentenced the 86-year-old ex-dictator to 80
years in prison. After the ruling, when Rios Montt rose and tried to walk out of
the courtroom, Judge Yasmin Barrios shouted at him to stay put and then had
security officers take him into custody.
Yet, while Guatemalans demonstrate the strength to face a dark chapter of
their history, the American people remain mostly oblivious to Reagan’s central
role in tens of thousands of political murders across Central America in the
1980s, including some 100,000 dead in Guatemala slaughtered by Rios Montt
and other military dictators.
Indeed, Ronald Reagan by aiding, abetting, encouraging and covering up
widespread human rights crimes in El Salvador, Honduras and Nicaragua as well as
Guatemala bears greater responsibility for Central America’s horrors than does
Rios Montt in his bloody 17-month rule. Reagan supported Guatemala’s brutal
repression both before and after Rios Montt held power, as well as during.
Despite that history, more honors have been bestowed on Reagan than any recent
president. Americans have allowed the naming of scores of government facilities
in Reagan’s honor, including Washington National Airport where Reagan’s name
elbowed aside that of George Washington, who led the War of Independence,
oversaw the drafting of the U.S. Constitution and served as the nation’s first
president.
So, as America’s former reputation as a beacon for human rights becomes a bad
joke to the rest of the world, it is unthinkable within the U.S. political/media
structure that Reagan would get posthumously criticized for the barbarity that
he promoted. No one of importance would dare suggest that his name be stripped
from National Airport and his statue removed from near the airport entrance.
But the evidence is overwhelming that the 40th president of the United States was
guilty as an accessory to genocide and a wide range of other war crimes,
including torture, rape, terrorism and narcotics trafficking. [See Robert
Parry’s Lost History.]
Green Light to Genocide
Regarding Guatemala, the documentary evidence is clear that Reagan and his top
aides gave a green light to the extermination campaign against the Mayan Ixil
population in the highlands even before Rios Montt came to power. Despite
receiving U.S. intelligence reports revealing these atrocities, the Reagan
administration also pressed ahead in an extraordinary effort to arrange military
equipment, including helicopters, to make the slaughter more efficient.
“In the tortured logic of military planning documents conceived under Mr. RÃos
Montt’s 17-month rule during 1982 and 1983, the entire Mayan Ixil population was
a military target, children included,” the New York Times reported from Rios
Montt’s trial last month. “Officers wrote that the leftist guerrillas fighting
the government had succeeded in indoctrinating the impoverished Ixils and
reached ‘100 percent support.’”
So, everyone was targeted in these scorched-earth campaigns that eradicated more
than 600 Indian villages in the Guatemalan highlands. But documents from this
period indicate that these counterinsurgency strategies predated Rios Montt.
And, they received the blessing of the Reagan administration shortly after
Reagan took power in 1981.
A document that I discovered in the archives of the Reagan Library in Simi
Valley, California, revealed that Reagan and his national security team in 1981
agreed to supply military aid to Guatemala’s dictators so they could pursue the
goal of exterminating not only “Marxist guerrillas” but people associated with
their “civilian support mechanisms.”
This supportive attitude took shape in spring 1981 as President Reagan sought to
relax human-rights restrictions on military aid to Guatemala that had been
imposed by President Jimmy Carter and the Democratic-controlled Congress in the
late 1970s. As part of that easing, Reagan’s State Department “advised our
Central American embassies that it has been studying ways to restore a closer,
cooperative relationship with Guatemala,” said a White House “Situation Room
Checklist” dated April 8, 1981.
The document added: “State believes a number of changes have occurred which
could make Guatemalan leaders more receptive to a new U.S. initiative: the
Guatemalans view the new administration as more sympathetic to their problems
[and] they are less suspect of the U.S. role in El Salvador,” where the Reagan
administration was expanding military aid to another right-wing regime infamous
for slaughtering its political opponents, including Catholic clergy.
“State has concluded that any attempt to reestablish a dialogue [with Guatemala]
would require some initial, condition-free demonstration of our goodwill.
However, this could not include military sales which would provoke serious U.S.
public and congressional criticism. State will undertake a series of confidence
building measures, free of preconditions, which minimize potential conflict with
existing legislation.”
In other words, the Reagan administration was hoping that the U.S. government
could get back in the good graces of the Guatemalan dictators, not that the
dictators should change their ways to qualify for U.S. government help.
Soliciting the Generals
The “checklist” added that the State Department “has also decided that the
administration should engage the Guatemalan government at the highest level in a
dialogue on our bilateral relations and the initiatives we can take together to
improve them. Secretary [of State Alexander] Haig has designated [retired]
General Vernon Walters as his personal emissary to initiate this process with
President [Fernando Romeo] Lucas [Garcia].
“If Lucas is prepared to give assurances that he will take steps to halt
government involvement in the indiscriminate killing of political opponents and
to foster a climate conducive to a viable electoral process, the U.S. will be
prepared to approve some military sales immediately.”
But the operative word in that paragraph was “indiscriminate.” The Reagan
administration expressed no problem with killing civilians if they were
considered supporters of the guerrillas who had been fighting against the
country’s ruling oligarchs and generals since the 1950s when the CIA organized
the overthrow of Guatemala’s reformist President Jacobo Arbenz.
The distinction was spelled out in “Talking Points” for Walters to deliver in a
face-to-face meeting with General Lucas. As edited inside the White House in
April 1981, the “Talking Points” read: “The President and Secretary Haig have
designated me [Walters] as [their] personal emissary to discuss bilateral
relations on an urgent basis.
“Both the President and the Secretary recognize that your country is engaged in
a war with Marxist guerrillas. We are deeply concerned about externally
supported Marxist subversion in Guatemala and other countries in the region. As
you are aware, we have already taken steps to assist Honduras and El Salvador
resist this aggression.
“The Secretary has sent me here to see if we can work out a way to provide
material assistance to your government. We have minimized negative public
statements by US officials on the situation in Guatemala. We have arranged for
the Commerce Department to take steps that will permit the sale of $3 million
worth of military trucks and Jeeps to the Guatemalan army.
“With your concurrence, we propose to provide you and any officers you might
designate an intelligence briefing on regional developments from our
perspective. Our desire, however, is to go substantially beyond the steps I have
just outlined. We wish to reestablish our traditional military supply and
training relationship as soon as possible.
“As we are both aware, this has not yet been feasible because of our internal
political and legal constraints relating to the use by some elements of your
security forces of deliberate and indiscriminate killing of persons not involved
with the guerrilla forces or their civilian support mechanisms. I am not
referring here to the regrettable but inevitable death of innocents though error
in combat situations, but to what appears to us a calculated use of terror to
immobilize non politicized people or potential opponents.
“If you could give me your assurance that you will take steps to halt official
involvement in the killing of persons not involved with the guerrilla forces or
their civilian support mechanism we would be in a much stronger position to
defend successfully with the Congress a decision to begin to resume our military
supply relationship with your government.”
In other words, though the “talking points” were framed as an appeal to reduce
the “indiscriminate” slaughter of “non politicized people,” they embraced
scorched-earth tactics against people involved with the guerrillas and “their
civilian support mechanisms.” The way that played out in Guatemala as in nearby
El Salvador was the massacring of peasants in regions considered sympathetic to
leftist insurgents.
Reporting the Truth
U.S. intelligence officers in the region also kept the Reagan administration
abreast of the expanding slaughter. For instance, according to one “secret”
cable from April 1981, and declassified in the 1990s, the CIA was confirming
Guatemalan government massacres even as Reagan was moving to loosen the military
aid ban.
On April 17, 1981, a CIA cable described an army massacre at Cocob, near Nebaj
in the Ixil Indian territory, because the population was believed to support
leftist guerrillas. A CIA source reported that “the social population appeared
to fully support the guerrillas” and “the soldiers were forced to fire at
anything that moved.”
The CIA cable added that “the Guatemalan authorities admitted that ‘many
civilians’ were killed in Cocob, many of whom undoubtedly were non-combatants.”
[Many of the Guatemalan documents declassified in the 1990s can be found at the
National Security Archive’s Web site.]
Despite these atrocities, Reagan dispatched Walters in May 1981 to tell the
Guatemalan leaders that the new U.S. administration wanted to lift the human
rights embargoes on military equipment that Carter and Congress had imposed.
According to a State Department cable on Oct. 5, 1981, when Guatemalan leaders
met again with Walters, they left no doubt about their plans. The cable said
Gen. Lucas “made clear that his government will continue as before, that the
repression will continue. He reiterated his belief that the repression is
working and that the guerrilla threat will be successfully routed.”
Human rights groups saw the same picture, albeit from a less sympathetic angle.
The Inter-American Human Rights Commission released a report on Oct. 15, 1981,
blaming the Guatemalan government for “thousands of illegal executions.”
[Washington Post, Oct. 16, 1981]
But the Reagan administration was set on whitewashing the horrific scene. A
State Department “white paper,” released in December 1981, blamed the violence
on leftist “extremist groups” and their “terrorist methods” prompted and
supported by Cuba’s Fidel Castro.
Fully Onboard
What the documents from the Reagan Library make clear is that the administration
was not simply struggling ineffectively to rein in these massacres as the U.S.
press corps typically reported but was fully onboard with the slaughter of
people who were part of the guerrillas’ “civilian support mechanisms.”
U.S. intelligence agencies continued to pick up evidence of these government-
sponsored massacres. One CIA report in February 1982 described an army sweep
through the so-called Ixil Triangle in central El Quiche province.
“The commanding officers of the units involved have been instructed to destroy
all towns and villages which are cooperating with the Guerrilla Army of the Poor
[the EGP] and eliminate all sources of resistance,” the report said. “Since the
operation began, several villages have been burned to the ground, and a large
number of guerrillas and collaborators have been killed.”
The CIA report explained the army’s modus operandi: “When an army patrol meets
resistance and takes fire from a town or village, it is assumed that the entire
town is hostile and it is subsequently destroyed.” When the army encountered an
empty village, it was “assumed to have been supporting the EGP, and it is
destroyed. There are hundreds, possibly thousands of refugees in the hills with
no homes to return to.
“The army high command is highly pleased with the initial results of the sweep
operation, and believes that it will be successful in destroying the major EGP
support area and will be able to drive the EGP out of the Ixil Triangle. The
well documented belief by the army that the entire Ixil Indian population is
pro-EGP has created a situation in which the army can be expected to give no
quarter to combatants and non-combatants alike.”
The reality was so grotesque that it prompted protests even from some staunch
anticommunists inside the Reagan administration. On Feb. 2, 1982, Richard
Childress, one of Reagan’s national security aides, wrote a “secret” memo to his
colleagues summing up this reality on the ground:
“As we move ahead on our approach to Latin America, we need to consciously
address the unique problems posed by Guatemala. Possessed of some of the worst
human rights records in the region, it presents a policy dilemma for us. The
abysmal human rights record makes it, in its present form, unworthy of USG [U.S.
government] support.
“Beset by a continuous insurgency for at least 15 years, the current leadership
is completely committed to a ruthless and unyielding program of suppression.
Hardly a soldier could be found that has not killed a ‘guerrilla.’”
Rios Montt’s Arrival
But Reagan was unmoved. He continued to insist on expanding U.S. support for
these brutal campaigns, while his administration sought to cover up the facts
and deflect criticism. Reagan’s team insisted
that Gen. Efrain Rios Montt’s
overthrow of Gen. Lucas in March 1982 represented a sunny new day in Guatemala.
An avowed fundamentalist Christian, Rios Montt impressed Official Washington
where the Reagan administration immediately revved up its propaganda machinery
to hype the new dictator’s “born-again” status as proof of his deep respect for
human life. Reagan hailed Rios Montt as “a man of great personal integrity.”
By July 1982, however, Rios Montt had begun a new scorched-earth campaign called
his “rifles and beans” policy. The slogan meant that pacified Indians would get
“beans,” while all others could expect to be the target of army “rifles.” In
October, Rios Montt secretly gave carte blanche to the feared “Archivos”
intelligence unit to expand “death squad” operations in the cities. Based at the
Presidential Palace, the “Archivos” masterminded many of Guatemala’s most
notorious assassinations.
The U.S. embassy was soon hearing more accounts of the army conducting Indian
massacres, but ideologically driven U.S. diplomats fed the Reagan administration
the propaganda spin that would be best for their careers. On Oct. 22, 1982,
embassy staff dismissed the massacre reports as a communist-inspired
“disinformation campaign.”
Reagan personally joined this P.R. spin seeking to discredit human rights
investigators and others who were reporting accurately about massacres that the
administration knew were true. On Dec. 4, 1982, after meeting with Rios Montt,
Reagan hailed the general as “totally dedicated to democracy” and added that
Rios Montt’s government had been “getting a bum rap” on human rights. Reagan
discounted the mounting reports of hundreds of Mayan villages being eradicated.
In February 1983, however, a secret CIA cable noted a rise in “suspect rightwing violence” with kidnappings of students and teachers. Bodies of victims were
appearing in ditches and gullies. CIA sources traced these political murders to
Rios Montt’s order to the “Archivos” in October to “apprehend, hold, interrogate
and dispose of suspected guerrillas as they saw fit.”
Despite these facts on the ground, the annual State Department human rights
survey praised the supposedly improved human rights situation in Guatemala. “The
overall conduct of the armed forces had improved by late in the year” 1982, the
report stated.
Indiscriminate Murder
A different picture, far closer to the secret information held by the U.S.
government, was coming from independent human rights investigators. On March 17,
1983, Americas Watch condemned the Guatemalan army for human rights atrocities
against the Indian population.
New York attorney Stephen L. Kass said these findings included proof that the
government carried out “virtually indiscriminate murder of men, women and
children of any farm regarded by the army as possibly supportive of guerrilla
insurgents.”
Rural women suspected of guerrilla sympathies were raped before execution, Kass
said, adding that children were “thrown into burning homes. They are thrown in
the air and speared with bayonets. We heard many, many stories of children being
picked up by the ankles and swung against poles so their heads are destroyed.”
[AP, March 17, 1983]
Publicly, senior Reagan officials continued to put on a happy face. In June
1983, special envoy Richard B. Stone praised “positive changes” in Rios Montt’s
government, and Rios Montt pressed the United States for 10 UH-1H helicopters
and six naval patrol boats, all the better to hunt guerrillas and their
sympathizers.
Since Guatemala lacked the U.S. Foreign Military Sales credits or the cash to
buy the helicopters, Reagan’s national security team looked for unconventional
ways to arrange the delivery of the equipment that would give the Guatemalan
army greater access to mountainous areas where guerrillas and their civilian
supporters were hiding.
On Aug. 1, 1983, National Security Council aides Oliver North and Alfonso SapiaBosch reported to National Security Advisor William P. Clark that his deputy
Robert “Bud” McFarlane was planning to exploit his Israeli channels to secure
the helicopters for Guatemala. [For more on McFarlanes’s Israeli channels, see
Consortiumnews.com’s “How Neocons Messed Up the Mideast.”]
“With regard to the loan of ten helicopters, it is [our] understanding that Bud
will take this up with the Israelis,” wrote North and Sapia-Bosch. “There are
expectations that they would be forthcoming. Another possibility is to have an
exercise with the Guatemalans. We would then use US mechanics and Guatemalan
parts to bring their helicopters up to snuff.”
Hunting Children
What it meant to provide these upgrades to the Guatemalan killing machine was
clarified during the trial of Rios Montt with much of the testimony coming from
survivors who, as children, escaped to mountain forests as their families and
other Mayan villagers were butchered.
As the New York Times reported, “Pedro Chávez Brito told the court that he was
only six or seven years old when soldiers killed his mother. He hid in the
chicken coop with his older sister, her newborn and his younger brother, but
soldiers found them and dragged them out, forcing them back into their house and
setting it on fire.
“Mr. Chávez says he was the only one to escape. ‘I got under a tree trunk and I
was like an animal,’ Mr. Chávez told the court. ‘After eight days I went to
live in the mountains. In the mountain we ate only roots and grass.’”
The Times reported that “prosecution witnesses said the military considered Ixil
civilians, including children, as legitimate targets. … Jacinto Lupamac Gómez
said he was eight when soldiers killed his parents and older siblings and
hustled him and his two younger brothers into a helicopter. Like some of the
children whose lives were spared, they were adopted by Spanish-speaking families
and forgot how to speak Ixil.”
Elena de Paz Santiago, now 42, “testified that she was 12 when she and her
mother were taken by soldiers to an army base and raped. The soldiers let her
go, but she never saw her mother again,” the Times reported.
Even by Guatemalan standards, Rios Montt’s vengeful Christian fundamentalism had
hurtled out of control. On Aug. 8, 1983, another coup overthrew Rios Montt and
brought Gen. Oscar Mejia Victores to power.
Despite the power shift, Guatemalan security forces continued to murder with
impunity, finally going so far that even the U.S. Embassy objected. When three
Guatemalans working for the U.S. Agency for International Development were slain
in November 1983, U.S. Ambassador Frederic Chapin suspected that “Archivos” hit
squads were sending a message to the United States to back off even mild
pressure for human rights.
In late November, in a brief show of displeasure, the administration postponed
the sale of $2 million in helicopter spare parts. The next month, however,
Reagan sent the spare parts anyway. In 1984, Reagan succeeded, too, in
pressuring Congress to approve $300,000 in military training for the Guatemalan
army.
By mid-1984, Chapin, who had grown bitter about the army’s stubborn brutality,
was gone, replaced by a far-right political appointee named Alberto Piedra, who
favored increased military assistance to Guatemala. In January 1985, Americas
Watch issued a report observing that Reagan’s State Department “is apparently
more concerned with improving Guatemala’s image than in improving its human
rights.”
Reagan’s Dark Side
Despite his outwardly congenial style, Reagan as revealed in the documentary
record was a cold and ruthless anticommunist who endorsed whatever “death squad”
strategies were deployed against leftists in Central America. As Walters’s
“Talking Points” demonstrate, Reagan and his team accepted the idea of
liquidating not only armed guerrillas but civilians who were judged sympathetic
to left-wing causes people who were deemed part of the guerrillas’ “civilian
support mechanisms.”
Across Central America in the 1980s, the death toll was staggering, an estimated
70,000 or more political killings in El Salvador, possibly 20,000 slain from the
Contra war in Nicaragua, about 200 political “disappearances” in Honduras and
some 100,000 people eliminated during the resurgence of political violence in
Guatemala. The one consistent element in these slaughters was the overarching
Cold War rationalization emanating from Ronald Reagan’s White House.
It was not until 1999, a decade after Ronald Reagan left office, that the
shocking scope of the atrocities in Guatemala was comprehensively detailed by a
truth commission that drew heavily on U.S. government documents declassified by
President Bill Clinton. On Feb. 25, 1999, the Historical Clarification
Commission estimated that the 34-year civil war had claimed the lives of some
200,000 people with the most savage bloodletting occurring in the 1980s. The
panel estimated that the army was responsible for 93 percent of the killings and
leftist guerrillas for three percent. Four percent were listed as unresolved.
The report documented that in the 1980s, the army committed 626 massacres
against Mayan villages. “The massacres that eliminated entire Mayan villages are
neither perfidious allegations nor figments of the imagination, but an authentic
chapter in Guatemala’s history,” the commission concluded. The army “completely
exterminated Mayan communities, destroyed their livestock and crops,” the report
said. In the northern highlands, the report termed the slaughter “genocide.”
[Washington Post, Feb. 26, 1999]
Besides carrying out murder and “disappearances,” the army routinely engaged in
torture and rape. “The rape of women, during torture or before being murdered,
was a common practice” by the military and paramilitary forces, the report
found. The report added that the “government of the United States, through
various agencies including the CIA, provided direct and indirect support for
some [of these] state operations.” The report concluded that the U.S. government
also gave money and training to a Guatemalan military that committed “acts of
genocide” against the Mayans. [NYT, Feb. 26, 1999]
During a visit to Central America, on March 10, 1999, President Clinton
apologized for the past U.S. support of right-wing regimes in Guatemala dating
back to 1954. “For the United States, it is important that I state clearly that
support for military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and
widespread repression was wrong, and the United States must not repeat that
mistake,” Clinton said.
Despite the damning documentary evidence and now the shocking judgment of
genocide against Rios Montt, there has been no interest in Washington to hold
any U.S. official accountable, not even a thought that the cornucopia of honors
bestowed on Ronald Reagan should cease or be rescinded.
It remains unlikely that the genocide conviction of Rios Montt will change the
warm and fuzzy glow that surrounds Ronald Reagan in the eyes of many Americans.
The story of the Guatemalan butchery and the Reagan administration’s complicity
has long since been relegated to the great American memory hole.
But Americans of conscience will have to reconcile what it means when a country
sees nothing wrong in honoring a man who made genocide happen.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book,
America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon
and barnesandnoble.com).
China Tip-Toes into Mideast Peace
The pro-Israel lobby has been so effective dominating U.S. policy toward the
Middle East that the success, paradoxically, has made Washington increasingly
irrelevant to the peace process. That has created a vacuum that China and other
nations may try to fill, notes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
By Paul R. Pillar
China this week got about as far as it ever has gotten into the Middle East
peace process by hosting back-to-back visits by Palestinian Authority President
Mahmoud Abbas and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. This was still
only, as the New York Times coverage put it, a dipping of China’s toe into that
process. The odds are that Beijing will not be wading much farther into that
water any time soon.
The new Chinese leadership certainly has plenty on its plate right at home,
including uncontrolled corruption, near-catastrophic environmental degradation,
and the need to adapt to a slowdown in economic growth. Moreover, continued
festering of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict does not hurt Chinese interests as
severely and directly as it hurts the interests of the United States, because of
the latter’s association with the Israeli occupation and other controversial
Israeli actions.
But if President Xi Jinping and his colleagues nonetheless were to involve
themselves more deeply in efforts to resolve this conflict, we should applaud
them, for several reasons. The principal reason is that the outside power that
has now been looked to for decades as the peace process’s deus ex machina ,
i.e., the United States, continues to demonstrate that it is too politically
crippled to perform that role.
The combination of an Israeli government devoted to continued colonization of
conquered and occupied territory and of political forces in the United States
devoted to an unquestioning, right-or-wrong backing of that government have had
this crippling effect.
President Barack Obama has already dispelled any hope that things would be
appreciably different in his second term. His Secretary of State clearly wants
to try to make new things happen, but the President seems in effect to have told
him, “Good luck, my friend, in seeing what you can do, but don’t expect much
help from me with the heavy lifting.”
A second reason to welcome greater involvement by the Chinese is that their own
positions and posture toward the conflict are substantively very sensible,
reasonable, and in line with the characteristics that any plausible settlement
of the conflict would require.
Prime Minister Li Keqiang was on target when he told Netanyahu that “the
Palestinian issue is a core issue affecting the peace and stability of the
Middle East.” When Li said, “As a friend of both Israel and the Palestinians,
China has always maintained an objective and fair stance,” he was more truthful
than if a similar claim were made by the United States, which as Aaron David
Miller has accurately put it, has more often functioned as Israel’s lawyer.
Xi presented to Abbas a “plan” that called for establishment of a Palestinian
state based on the 1967 boundaries and with East Jerusalem as its capital, with
full respect for “Israel’s right to exist and its legitimate security concerns.”
About the only editing one might want to do to the Chinese formulation would be
to refer explicitly to the possibility of land swaps, as in a recently restated
version of the Arab League peace plan.
A further, subsidiary reason greater Chinese involvement with this issue would
be good is that it is the type of constructive global engagement that it would
be good to see China practicing in general. It would bring China closer to
carrying its fair share of the weight of dealing with sticky international
issues, and might encourage positive habits that would have spillover effects on
otherwise unrelated issues.
Another outside power that one might expect to take up the peace process slack
that the United States has proven unable to take up is the European Union. Some
of the possibilities were raised by an open letter published last month by the
collection of former senior officials known as the European Eminent Persons
Group.
The letter is admirably clear and blunt in detailing what needs to be done, and
the deficiencies in what has been done so far, including by Europe. But there
are limitations to what the Europeans are ever likely to do, some of which are
mentioned in Mitchell Plitnick’s look at the eminent persons’ initiative. The
letter-writers are only former officials, after all.
The EU has the impediments to action that come from still being a collection of
governments and something less than a full federation. The Europeans also have
some historical baggage of their own on Arab-Israeli issues that may make it
easier for the Israel lobby to reach across the Atlantic and slap them down, as
in a derisive dismissal by Elliott Abrams of the eminent persons’ letter as a
“useful reminder of European attitudes.” A similar dismissal would be more
difficult to direct at China.
In any case, anyone looking for leadership on this issue from a non-U.S. outside
power should not place all his hopeful eggs in one basket. An earlier phase of
the endless and fruitless Middle East peace process involved a “quartet.” Maybe
it’s time to try a European-Chinese duet.
If President Xi needs additional incentive to take some action and some risks on
this subject, how about this for a motivation: personal leadership on this
subject would be a good way to distinguish himself from all those colleagues of
his who dye their hair the same shade of black and wear identical suits. It
would give him a historical legacy beyond all the problems back home that he
shares with the collective leadership.
Xi ought to aim for a Nobel Peace Prize. Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak
Rabin won the prize for their work on the subject even though what they did
failed to bring lasting peace, and Jimmy Carter also got a Nobel in large part
for his work on the same subject. Barack Obama won the prize just for getting
elected and not being George W. Bush.
If Xi dove into the subject and made any progress at all, he would have a good
chance of making it to Oslo, and deservedly so.
Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be
one of the agency’s top analysts. He is now a visiting professor at Georgetown
University for security studies. (This article first appeared as a blog post at
The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)
The Lure of Violent Revolution
It’s become trendy in some circles mostly on the Right since the election of the
first African-American president but also a bit on the Left to talk breezily of
armed revolution. But bloodshed is wrongheaded and reckless when political space
remains for democratic change, say Bill Moyers and Michael Winship.
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
We were struck this week by one response to our broadcast last week on gun
violence and the Newtown school killings. A visitor to the website wrote, “It is
interesting to me that Bill Moyers, who every week describes the massive levels
of corruption in our government [and] the advocates for gun control, don’t
understand that we who own guns in part own them to be sure that when our
government becomes so corrupt we have guns to do something about it.”
About the same time that man’s post showed up on the web, we saw the startling
survey from Fairleigh Dickinson University’s PublicMind polling organization,
the one finding that nearly three in ten registered voters agree with the
statement, “In the next few years, an armed revolution might be necessary in
order to protect our liberties.” Three out of 10! That includes 44 percent of
Republicans, 27 percent of independents and 18 percent of Democrats.
That poll also noted that a quarter of Americans think that the facts about the
Newtown shootings “are being hidden” and an additional 11 percent “are unsure.”
As Sahil Kapur wrote at the website Talking Points Memo, “The eye-opening
findings serve as a reminder that Americans’ deeply held beliefs about gun
rights have a tendency to cross over into outright conspiracy theories about a
nefarious government seeking to trample their constitutional rights — paranoia
that pro-gun groups like the National Rifle Association have at times helped
stoke.”
Paranoia and just plain meanness. On May 8, Christina Wilkie in The Huffington
Post reported that Connecticut Carry, a pro-gun lobbying group, had issued a
press release detailing the arrest record and financial difficulties of Neil
Heslin, father of one of the children murdered at Newtown’s Sandy Hook
Elementary School. Connecticut Carry accused him of “profiting off of the
tragedy.”
Their release read, in part, “Mr. Heslin has found the employment he has needed
for so long lobbying against the rights of the citizens of Connecticut and the
rest of the country,” and the group implied that he had received payment from
New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s Mayors Against Illegal Guns, which adamantly
denies anything of the sort. Similar smears have been attempted against other
Newtown parents.
This hate in our country egged on by fervid ideologues and profiteering
fearmongers is palpable, stirred by years of irresponsible invective against
public officials and agencies. Gun sales are going through the roof. In a sense,
so much anger and so much disillusionment are understandable in a country where
the gap between rich and poor is so vast that an environment is created in which
brooding resentment is easily hatched.
Sure, there is corruption in government and business crony capitalism is the
offspring of it and when the public sees plutocrats who regard politicians as
the hired help and Washington as the feeding trough, it’s natural to fear that
we are becoming vassals; subjects rather than citizens.
But a violent uprising, with all the bloodshed and chaos that would follow?
Armed revolt is when people are so desperate they kill and are killed. Who would
wash the blood from the streets, restore order after the chaos and bury the
dead? Have we lost our minds?
There is an alternative to force, blood, and suffering. It’s called democracy.
Yes, there is plenty of injustice, greed and sheer wickedness. But don’t mourn
the fact organize. Stop wringing your hands and berating real and imaginary
foes. Join up with others, stand up to the exploiters, throw the rascals out.
If Congress and the White House are crooked and out of touch, come Election Day,
you make sure they lose. And on all the other days, when you can, you work for
change and demand a say. It’s not easy but slow, hard and demanding it takes
long and patient activism to make democracy work. But with committed people
organized and united toward common goals of social justice and accountability,
victories are possible.
Drop your weapons and celebrate that we live in a country where peaceful change
is still possible. Make democracy work.
Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship, senior writer at the think
tank Demos, is senior writer of the weekly public affairs program, Moyers &
Company, airing on public television. Check local airtimes or comment at
www.BillMoyers.com.
Republican Hypocrisy on Benghazi
Exclusive: Official Washington is obsessing over the Benghazi “scandal,” proof
that the Republicans and their right-wing media can make the smallest things big
and the biggest things small. It is a disparity that has distorted how Americans
understand their recent history, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
You have to hand it to the Republicans and their right-wing media: they are
persistent in pushing their conspiracy theories no matter how improbable or
insignificant, just as they are relentless in covering up GOP wrongdoing even
when that behavior strikes at the heart of democratic institutions or costs
countless lives.
So, we have the contrast between the nine high-profile hearings about last
September’s Benghazi attack and Republican determination to cover up Watergate,
Iran-Contra, Iraq-gate, Contra-cocaine trafficking, and the two October Surprise
cases (sabotaging President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks in 1968 and
subverting President Jimmy Carter’s Iran-hostage negotiations in 1980).
In those cases and others, Republicans not only suppressed evidence but mounted
counteroffensives against brave whistleblowers, diligent government
investigators and conscientious journalists. The GOP and its right-wing media
took pleasure in punishing anyone who dug up troublesome truths, even a
conservative Republican such as Iran-Contra special prosecutor Lawrence Walsh.
The Republicans also showed little or no interest in delving into the facts
surrounding terrorist incidents on George W. Bush’s watch, including his failure
to protect the nation from the 9/11 attacks, or examining his war crimes, such
as his deceptive case for invading Iraq and his approval of torture against “war
on terror” detainees.
Granted, part of the blame for those short-circuited investigations must fall on
the Democrats and the mainstream news media for lacking the courage and
integrity to pursue investigations in the face of Republican obstructionism.
With only a few exceptions, Democrats have shied away from confrontations with
Republicans, sometimes fretting that a full accounting might not be “good for
the country.” Mainstream news executives, too, have shown a lack of stomach for
going toe to toe with angry Republicans and their ferocious propagandists.
Thus, there has been a systematic crumbling of investigative will when the
subject of a scandal is a Republican. But near-opposite rules apply when the
subject is a Democrat. No matter how flimsy the evidence, Republicans and the
Right demonstrate a boundless determination to build a mountain of scandal out
of a molehill of suspicions.
The cumulative impact of this investigative imbalance has been that the
narrative of modern American history has been wildly distorted. [See Robert
Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]
Nixon’s ‘Treason’
For instance, few people know that Richard Nixon launched his extra-legal spying
team in 1971 because he was frantically searching for a file that President
Johnson had compiled on how Nixon’s campaign had sabotaged the Vietnam peace
talks in 1968 to get an edge in that close election.
Privately, Johnson termed Nixon’s actions “treason,” but LBJ and his top aides
agreed to stay silent out of concern that the story was so disturbing it might
shake public faith in a prospective Nixon administration if disclosing the facts
did not stop his election.
“Some elements of the story are so shocking in their nature that I’m wondering
whether it would be good for the country to disclose the story and then possibly
have a certain individual [Nixon] elected,” said Defense Secretary Clark
Clifford in a conference call with Johnson on Nov. 4, 1968. “It could cast his
whole administration under such doubt that I think it would be inimical to our
country’s interests.”
However, staying silent also didn’t turn out to be very “good for the country.”
After torpedoing Johnson’s peace deal, Nixon continued the Vietnam War for more
than four years at the cost of some 20,000 more American dead, possibly a
million more Vietnamese killed and the political discord that divided the U.S.
population, turning parents against their own children.
Though not divulging Nixon’s dirty trick, LBJ did order his national security
adviser Walt Rostow to remove the top-secret file containing the wiretap
evidence of Nixon’s back-channel contacts urging South Vietnam to spurn the
peace talks. Nixon later learned from FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover of the file’s
existence, but Nixon’s top aides, H.R. “Bob” Haldeman and Henry Kissinger, could
not locate it.
The missing file became a point of urgency for Nixon in June 1971 when the New
York Times began publishing the Pentagon Papers, the secret history of the
Vietnam War from 1945 to 1967, chronicling mostly Democratic lies that had
ensnared the United States in Vietnam. However, Nixon knew something that few
others did: there was a sequel that was arguably even more disgusting than the
original.
That was the context for Nixon’s order to bring in ex-CIA officer E. Howard Hunt
to organize a team of burglars. Their first target was to be the Brookings
Institution where some of Nixon’s aides believed the missing file was hidden in
the safe. Hunt’s team later spearheaded a series of spying operations that were
exposed on June 17, 1972, when five burglars were caught inside the Democratic
National Committee’s offices at the Watergate.
Over the next two years, the Watergate scandal led to Nixon’s political undoing,
but the investigations remained focused on the cover-up, not the far-moredamning background of the foiled break-in.
With Rostow and other ex-LBJ aides still sitting on what they knew and with
Republicans circumscribing the scope of the investigation and with the news
media enamored of its new favorite saying, “the cover-up is worse than the
crime” the Watergate inquiry never got around to explaining why Nixon started
the burglary team in the first place, i.e. to conceal his blood-drenched
“treason.”
Even four decades later, the conventional wisdom on Watergate that it was a oneoff case of Nixon’s political paranoia followed by a foolhardy cover-up allows
Republicans such as Sen. John McCain of Arizona to claim that the Benghazi case
is worse than Watergate because no one died in Watergate. [For a fuller
treatment of the real Watergate scandal and other Republican successes in
frustrating investigations, see Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]
The Nothing Benghazi Scandal
But the absurdity of the Benghazi “scandal” is that like the intensely
investigated Whitewater “scandal” of the 1990s this Republican obsession is a
non-scandal.
Yes, four U.S. personnel died in what appears to have been a coordinated attack
by an Islamic extremist group on a lightly guarded U.S. mission (which had
become a base for CIA operations). And there are legitimate questions about
levels of security for these quasi-diplomatic outposts.
However, the “scandal” part of the story has centered on an absurd notion: that
the Obama administration conducted a cover-up because it didn’t want to admit
that Islamic terrorists remained active after the killing of Osama bin Laden in
May 2011.
The “proof” of this Benghazi cover-up has been that UN Ambassador Susan Rice
went on Sunday talk shows and made comments derived from “talking points” that
referred to the confusing circumstances of unrest preceding the Benghazi attack
and blamed the lethal assault on “extremists,” not “terrorists” or an al-Qaeda
affiliate.
What makes this “scandal” absurd is that President Barack Obama had already
counted the Benghazi attack as among those “acts of terror” that, he said, would
not shake America’s “resolve.” He did so in the Rose Garden the day after the
assault.
Thus, the Republican conspiracy theory about Obama seeking to black-out the
terrorism connection to Benghazi because he wanted voters to believe that he had
defeated al-Qaeda makes no sense. Obama himself inserted the terror meme, as
Mitt Romney learned during the second presidential debate when the Republican
nominee famously blundered into a correction from CNN’s Candy Crowley.
A review of the various drafts of Rice’s “talking points” also reveals that the
U.S. intelligence community believed, at the time, that the Benghazi attack was
an outgrowth of similar protests raging across the Middle East against an
American video that ridiculed the Prophet Muhammad. That impression of cause and
effect also was common among major U.S. newspapers.
So, Rice appears to have been giving her rendition of the best available
intelligence at the time. And she was doing so on TV talk shows, not in some
official setting such as a congressional hearing or a legal proceeding.
In case no one has noticed, it is common practice on Sunday talk shows for
political figures to spin the facts to benefit their favored positions. If the
new standard for scandal is some misstatement on a TV talk show, there will be
no end to such “scandals.”
Strange Testimony
The latest Benghazi hearing on Wednesday went off in a somewhat different
direction, centering on the account of Gregory Hicks, the then-deputy chief of
mission at the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli who on Sept. 11, 2012 was some 400 miles
away from the attack that killed Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three other
U.S. personnel.
Hicks’s chief complaint was that military commanders from the Africa Command
overruled the leader of a four-member Special Operations team who wanted to fly
from Tripoli to Benghazi to join the fight against Ansar al-Sharia, the
extremist group that was claiming credit for the attack.
In melodramatic and self-serving testimony, Hicks recounted how the disappointed
team commander told him: “I have never been so embarrassed in my life that a
State Department officer has bigger balls than somebody in the military.”
However, Hicks also testified that he was worried about the dangers of rushing
reinforcements to Benghazi. Embassy workers had learned that “the ambassador was
in a hospital controlled by Ansar al-Sharia, the group whose Twitter feed said
it was leading the attack on the consulate,” Hicks said, adding that he also got
several phone calls saying “you can come get the ambassador, we know where he
is.”
That prompted his concern about “wading into a trap,” and he noted that Ansar
al-Sharia also “was calling on an attack on our embassy in Tripoli.”
Pentagon officials offered a parallel explanation for the decision to hold back
on rushing the four-member team to Benghazi, claiming the team could not have
reached Benghazi in time to help and was needed for the protection of the
Embassy in Tripoli.
Anyone who has been involved with or has covered chaotic events like a surprise
terrorist attack would understand how difficult it is to make split-second
decisions with limited or contradictory information. To second-guess commanders
hesitant to risk more loss of life by hastily dispatching soldiers into a
dangerous and confusing situation is the sort of thing that gives Mondaymorning-quarterbacking a bad name.
The GOP Legal Team
There also should be some red flags over Hicks’s choice of legal counsel, the
highly partisan Republican husband-and-wife team of Joseph diGenova and Victoria
Toensing. The two have played roles in both covering up Republican scandals and
in ginning up Democratic ones.
For instance, Toensing was a leading force in smearing former U.S. Ambassador
Joseph Wilson and his wife, Valerie Plame, who was an undercover CIA officer
until George W. Bush’s administration exposed Plame’s CIA work as part of an
effort to discredit Wilson for criticizing one of Bush’s false claims about
Iraq’s WMD.
On Feb. 18, 2007, Toensing went so far as to pen a Washington Post Outlook
article “indicting” Wilson and other Americans who tried to hold Bush’s aides
accountable for destroying Plame’s career. Besides denouncing Wilson, Toensing
disparaged Plame’s undercover work at the CIA by contending that Plame did not
qualify for protection under a law protecting the identity of covert
intelligence officers. Toensing wrote that “Plame was not covert. She worked at
CIA headquarters and had not been stationed abroad within five years of the
date” of her exposure.
Though it might not have been clear to a reader, Toensing was hanging her claim
about Plame not being “covert” on a contention that Plame didn’t meet the
coverage standards of the Intelligence Identities Protection Act. Toensing’s
claim was legalistic at best since it obscured the larger point that Plame was
working undercover in a classified CIA position and was running agents abroad
whose safety would be put at risk by an unauthorized disclosure of Plame’s
identity.
But Toensing, who promoted herself as an author of the Intelligence Identities
Protection Act, wasn’t even right about the legal details. The law doesn’t
require that a CIA officer be “stationed” abroad in the preceding five years; it
simply refers to an officer who “has served within the last five years outside
the United States.”
That would cover someone who while based in the United States went abroad on
official CIA business, as Plame testified under oath in a congressional hearing
that she had done within the five-year period.
Toensing, who appeared as a Republican witness at the same congressional hearing
on March 16, 2007, was asked about her bald assertion that “Plame was not
covert.”
“Not under the law,” Toensing responded. “I’m giving you the legal
interpretation under the law and I helped draft the law. The person is supposed
to reside outside the United States.” But that’s not what the law says, either.
It says “served” abroad, not “reside.”
When asked whether she had spoken to the CIA or Plame about Plame’s covert
status, Toensing said, “I didn’t talk to Ms. Plame or the CIA. I can just tell
you what’s required under the law. They can call anybody anything they want to
do in the halls” of the CIA. In other words, Toensing had no idea about the
facts of the matter; she didn’t know how often Plame might have traveled abroad
in the five years before her exposure; Toensing didn’t even get the language of
the statute correct.
At the Plame hearing, Toensing was reduced to looking like a quibbling kook who
missed the forest of damage done to U.S. national security, to Plame and
possibly to the lives of foreign agents for the trees of how a definition in a
law was phrased, and then getting that wrong, too.
Protecting Bush Senior
DiGenova, who along with Toensing sat behind Hicks during his congressional
testimony on Wednesday, also has performed as a legal hatchet-man for the
Republicans. For instance, after the 1992 election, diGenova was chosen by a
Republican-controlled judicial panel to head up an investigation into President
George H.W. Bush’s attempt to disqualify his Democratic rival, Bill Clinton, by
digging up dirt in Clinton’s passport file.
Though the evidence of Bush’s dirty trick was overwhelming and Bush essentially
admitted to ordering it diGenova found every imaginable excuse to let the exPresident off the hook. DiGenova’s investigation cleared Bush and his
administration of any wrongdoing, saying the probe “found no evidence that
President Bush was involved in this matter.”
However, FBI documents that I reviewed at the National Archives presented a
different picture. Speaking to diGenova and his investigators in fall 1993,
former President Bush said he had encouraged then-White House chief of staff
James Baker and other aides to investigate Clinton and to make sure the
information got out.
“Although he [Bush] did not recall tasking Baker to research any particular
matter, he may have asked why the campaign did not know more about Clinton’s
demonstrating” against the Vietnam War while he was studying in England, said
the FBI interview report, dated Oct. 23, 1993.
“The President [Bush] advised that he probably would have said, ‘Hooray,
somebody’s going to finally do something about this.’ If he had learned that the
Washington Times was planning to publish an article, he would have said, ‘That’s
good, it’s about time.’
“Based on his ‘depth of feeling’ on this issue, President Bush responded to a
hypothetical question that he would have recommended getting the truth out if it
were legal,” the FBI wrote in summarizing Bush’s statements. “The President
added that he would not have been concerned over the legality of the issue but
just the facts and what was in the files.”
Bush also said he understood how his impassioned comments about Clinton’s
loyalty might have led some members of his staff to conclude that he had “a onetrack mind” on the issue. He also expressed disappointment that the Clinton
passport search uncovered so little. “The President described himself as being
indignant over the fact that the campaign did not find out what Clinton was
doing” as a student studying abroad, the FBI report said.
Bush’s comments seem to suggest that he had pushed his subordinates into a
violation of Clinton’s privacy rights. But diGenova, who had worked for the
Reagan-Bush Justice Department, already had signaled to Bush that the probe was
going nowhere.
At the start of the Oct. 23, 1993, interview, which took place at Bush’s office
in Houston, diGenova assured Bush that the investigation’s staff lawyers were
“all seasoned prof[essional] prosecutors who know what a real crime looks like,”
according to FBI notes of the meeting. “[This is] not a gen[eral] probe of
pol[itics] in Amer[ica] or dirty tricks, etc., or a general license to rummage
in people’s personal lives.”
As the interview ended, two of diGenova’s assistants Lisa Rich and Laura
Laughlin asked Bush for autographs, according to the FBI’s notes on the meeting.
Naturally, the ever-appeasing Democrats did nothing to challenge diGenova’s
cover-up in defense of the well-liked ex-President.
[For details, see Robert
Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]
In other words, diGenova and Toensing are personifications of Official
Washington’s double standards on investigations. When the target is a Democrat
(or someone causing trouble for a Republican), the husband-and-wife legal team
twists whatever facts are available into some terrible scandal. Yet, when a
Republican has engaged in illicit activities, diGenova and Toensing find a way
to spin those facts in the most innocent of ways.
The Benghazi “scandal” is just the latest example of how Democrats fall through
the ice when a Republican would skate away.
Investigative reporter Robert Parry broke many of the Iran-Contra stories for
The Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. You can buy his new book,
America’s Stolen Narrative, either in print here or as an e-book (from Amazon
and barnesandnoble.com).
America’s Excessive Nuke Arsenal
Slashing the U.S. nuclear stockpile and still having plenty of bombs left over
for “deterrence” would represent a huge saving to the American taxpayers and
could help leverage more cooperation on nuclear proliferation in other
countries, writes ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman.
By Melvin A. Goodman
The nuclear imbroglio with North Korea has cooled off considerably, and the
nuclear issues with Iran remain on the back burner. At home, however, there is a
new nuclear concern that involves the removal in April of 17 Air Force officers
assigned to stand watch over nuclear-tipped Minuteman missiles at Minot Air
Force Base in North Dakota.
In a blunt memorandum, the deputy commander of the missile unit described a
“crisis” that involved “rot in the crew force.” In view of the lack of career
opportunities for Air Force officers in the missile field, it should not be
surprising that there has been loss of discipline, sloppy performance, and even
the intentional violation of nuclear safety rules.
This incident raises serious questions about the need for the intense alert
status at the missile base where two officers are on constant alert at all times
inside an underground launching control center, ready to launch an
intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) upon presidential order.
Since it is impossible to imagine any foreign policy objectives that would be
served by launching these missiles and, moreover, impossible to calculate the
level of fatalities and devastation that would accompany a nuclear attack at any
level, it is certainly past time for the nuclear powers, including the United
States, to surrender the overwhelming majority of their nuclear weapons.
In order to stop nuclear proliferation and reduce the risk of any use of nuclear
weapons, the United States must examine its own nuclear inventory and find a way
to reduce its nuclear forces.
One of the best-kept defense secrets of the past 60 years has been the high cost
of producing and maintaining nuclear weapons, somewhere between $5 trillion to
$6 trillion, which represents one-fourth of overall defense spending. The total
is roughly equivalent to the total budget spent on the Army or the Navy since
World War II. The staggering cost of maintaining bloated nuclear programs over
the next decade will amount to $600 billion.
When the United States initially began to develop and deploy nuclear weapons,
the military-industrial complex stressed that the huge investment in nuclear
systems would be an overall savings because it would allow for a smaller army
and navy.
The United States has built more than 70,000 nuclear weapons since the end of
World War II and, at the arsenal’s peak in 1967, there were more than 32,000
weapons in the stockpile. Even in the post-Cold War era, the cost of maintaining
and deploying nuclear weapons is more than $25 billion a year. Contrary to the
military’s promise, our army and navy have gotten costlier for taxpayers.
Two decades after the end of the Cold War, the United States still has 2,500
deployed nuclear weapons as well as 2,600 nuclear weapons in reserve, along with
thousands of warheads in its inventory.
In 2011, two U.S. Air Force officers wrote an authoritative essay that pointed
specifically to 331 nuclear weapons as providing an assured deterrence
capability. Other important nuclear powers such as Britain, France, and China
appear to agree, deploying 200 to 300 nuclear weapons as sufficient for
deterrence. The key non-signatories of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (Israel,
India, and Pakistan) have similarly focused on 200 nuclear weapons as the
appropriate size for deterrence.
The United States should consider ending its dependence on the nuclear triad,
which consists of ICBMs, submarine-launched ballistic missiles (SLBMs), and
strategic bombers. The elimination of nuclear weapons from strategic bombers
would reduce the nuclear triad to a more than sufficient dyad, and would bring
savings of more than $40 billion.
The current fleet of 14 nuclear-armed submarines could be cut in half, which
would still leave the United States with 875 nuclear warheads at sea. An end to
production of the D5 SLBM and the retirement of hundreds of Minuteman ICBM
missiles would bring huge savings in operating and maintenance costs.
If the United States reduced its intercontinental ballistic missiles from 500 to
300, it would save $80 billion over the next ten years. Sen. Tom Coburn, ROklahoma, supports such reductions as well as delaying the purchase of
additional strategic bombers for another decade.
In July 2011, General James Cartwright, then deputy chairman of the Joint Chiefs
of Staff, favored reassessing the role of nuclear weapons in today’s
international environment. President Barack Obama wanted to appoint General
Cartwright as chairman of the JCS, but then-Defense Secretary Robert Gates
blocked the appointment and lobbied successfully to be succeeded by then-CIA
Director Leon Panetta, who opposed nuclear reductions.
Fortunately, current Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has ordered a review of all
U.S. forces in order to find areas for reductions and savings. The United States
and its allies have thus far not found a negotiating card for controlling the
nuclear programs in Iran and North Korea, but the Obama administration could
easily find reductions in the U.S. strategic arsenal either unilaterally or
bilaterally with Russia.
This could lead to negotiations with other key nuclear powers (China, Britain,
and France) for reductions in their nuclear inventories. U.S. and Russian
reductions as well as U.S. participation in the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty
could be used to enlist India and Pakistan in the Non-Proliferation Treaty.
It has been largely forgotten that 27 years ago, President Ronald Reagan and
Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev came very close to abolishing their nuclear
inventory at their summit in Reykjavik, Iceland. President Reagan was unwilling
to abandon his Strategic Defense Initiative, which President George W. Bush
actually began to deploy ten years ago.
Today, a majority of former secretaries of state and defense, both Republicans
and Democrats, including George Shultz, William Perry and Henry Kissinger,
support a world free of nuclear weapons, and a remarkable number of new
government and civil panels have embraced the goal of a world without nuclear
weapons.
President Obama supported this goal in a speech in Europe in April 2009, but he
has given no indication of a willingness to accept any political risk in
exchange for nuclear peace and no endorsement of President Dwight D.
Eisenhower’s pledge to rule out waging nuclear war against non-nuclear states.
Despite the end of the Cold War two decades ago and the realization of the
illusion of “limited” nuclear war or the suicidal aspects of “mutual assured
destruction,” there is still no comprehensive approach toward nuclear
disarmament.
Melvin A. Goodman, a former CIA analyst and professor of international security
at the National War College, is the author of National Insecurity: The Cost of
American Militarism. [A version of this article previously appeared at
Counterpunch and is re-posted with the approval of the author.]
Festering Injustice in Bahrain
Over the past two years of Arab unrest, only in Bahrain did a neighboring
country (Saudi Arabia) invade militarily to put down a popular uprising and did
so without U.S. outrage because Bahrain is home to the Fifth Fleet. But the
political injustice of Bahrain remains a regional sore point, writes ex-CIA
analyst Paul R. Pillar.
By Paul R. Pillar
During the Arab Spring, The island kingdom of Bahrain has stuck out as a kind of
sore thumb in the Persian Gulf ever since the Arab Spring got under way. It is
the only one of the six monarchies of the Gulf Cooperation Council that has seen
major political unrest during these past two or three years. It also is a place
where U.S. objectives don’t really fit together. Two principal attributes of
Bahrain underlie these observations.
One is that it has a Shia majority, constituting about 70 percent of the
Bahraini population, but is ruled by a Sunni regime. In that respect it is like
Iraq before Saddam Hussein’s ouster and unlike the other GCC states, which all
have Sunni majorities. Economic patterns correlate with religious ones; Bahraini
Shia are generally less well off than their Sunni countrymen.
The other attribute is that Bahrain has a major military relationship with the
United States, including being the home of the Fifth Fleet. This fact evidently
has dominated the thinking behind U.S. policy on Bahrain. It has been a major
disincentive against rocking boats regarding political and economic rights of
the Bahraini people. When Saudi Arabia sent forces across the causeway to help
the Bahraini regime quell Shia unrest, the United States did not make an issue
of it.
In this part of the world a major expressed U.S. concern is, of course, Iran and
Iranian influence. Bahrain is of special interest in this regard because of a
keen Iranian interest in the place. There have been Iranian statements, going
well back before the advent of the Islamic Republic, describing Bahrain as
rightfully a province of Iran.
During early years of Islamic Republic’s history there certainly were Iranian
efforts at subversion in Bahrain. In more recent years, however, there is no
indication that Iran is trying to topple the Bahraini regime. Iranian influence
comes in a softer form as a champion of greater rights for the majority of the
population.
This week Iranian Foreign Minister Ali Akbar Salehi gave Iran’s soft power a new
twist by stating that the Bahraini government had requested secret Iranian
mediation between itself and its domestic opposition. Salehi said Iran was
willing to use its good offices for this purpose but only openly, not secretly.
The Bahraini Foreign Ministry denied that Bahrain had made any such request of
Iran. It is impossible to know whom to believe, but it is plausible that Manama
might have communicated with Iran about the need to use its influence with the
Shia majority constructively. If Iran really were to contribute openly to
political reconciliation in Bahrain that would be good, and would be the
antithesis of clandestine subversion.
If the United States really is concerned about Iranian influence in this corner
of the Persian Gulf, it is not shaping its relations in a way that effectively
counters that influence. Whatever other purposes the Fifth Fleet may serve,
there is not a plausible external military threat to Bahrain that the fleet
defends against or deters.
Meanwhile, concern about protecting this military equity has led the United
States mostly to turn a blind eye to the unresolved internal conflict that is
the real danger to the Bahraini political order and which has helped Iran in
posing as a friend of the majority of Bahrainis.
Paul R. Pillar, in his 28 years at the Central Intelligence Agency, rose to be
one of the agency’s top analysts. He is now a visiting professor at Georgetown
University for security studies. (This article first appeared as a blog post at
The National Interest’s Web site. Reprinted with author’s permission.)
Who’s at Fault for Guantanamo Mess?
Official Washington’s “tough-guy-ism” no one wanting to look “weak” on “terror”
has stopped sane and humane policies toward Guantanamo. Members of Congress have
blocked President Obama’s efforts to close the prison and he has shied away from
a political battle to do so, as Marjorie Cohn explains.
By Marjorie Cohn
More than 100 of the 166 detainees at Guantanamo are starving themselves to
death. Twenty-three of them are being force-fed.
“They strap you to a chair, tie up your wrists, your legs, your forehead and
tightly around the waist,” Fayiz Al-Kandari told his lawyer, Lt. Col. Barry
Wingard. Al-Kandari, a Kuwaiti held at Guantanamo for 11 years, has never been
charged with a crime.
“The tube makes his eyes water excessively and blood begins to trickle from the
nose. Once the tube passes his throat the gag reflex kicks in. Warm liquid is
poured into the body for 45 minutes to two hours. He feels like his body is
going to convulse and often vomits,” Wingard added.
The United Nations Human Rights Council concluded that force-feeding amounts to
torture. The American Medical Association says that force-feeding violates
medical ethics.
“Every competent patient has the right to refuse medical intervention, including
life-sustaining interventions,” AMA President Jeremy Lazarus wrote to Defense
Secretary Chuck Hagel. Yet President Barack Obama continues the tortuous Bush
policy of force-feeding hunger strikers.
Although a few days after his first inauguration, Obama promised to shutter
Guantanamo, it remains open. “I continue to believe that we’ve got to close
Guantanamo,” Obama declared in his April 30 press conference. But, he added,
“Congress determined that they would not let us close it.”
Obama signed a bill that Congress passed which erected barriers to closure.
According to a Los Angeles Times editorial, “Obama has refused to expend
political capital on closing Guantanamo. Rather than veto the defense
authorization bills that have limited his ability to transfer inmates, he has
signed them while raising questions about whether they intruded on his
constitutional authority.”
“I don’t want these individuals to die,” Obama told reporters. In fact, Obama
has the power to save the hunger strikers’ lives without torturing them. Eightysix more than half of the detainees remaining at Guantanamo have been cleared
for release for the past three years.
Section 1028(d) of the 2013 National Defense Authorization Act empowers the
Secretary of Defense to approve transfers of detainees when it is in the
national security interest of the United States. Fifty-six of the 86 cleared
detainees are from Yemen. Yet Obama imposed a ban on releasing any of them
following the foiled 2009 Christmas bomb plot by a Nigerian man who was
recruited in Yemen. Obama must begin signing these certifications and waivers at
once.
Indeed, Obama said in his press conference, “I think well, you know, I think it
is critical for us to understand that Guantanamo is not necessary to keep
America safe. It hurts us in terms of our international standing. It is a
recruitment tool for extremists. It needs to be closed.”
In addition, Obama’s March 7, 2011, Executive Order 13567 provides for
additional administrative review of detainees’ cases. The Periodic Review Board
(PRB) would provide an opportunity for a detainee to challenge his continued
detention. Yet Obama has delayed by more than a year PRB hearings at which other
detainees could be cleared for release.
Despite a requirement that the PRB begin review within one year, no PRB has yet
been created. Obama should appoint an official to oversee the closure of
Guantanamo and commence periodic reviews immediately so that detainees can
challenge their designations and additional detainees can be approved for
transfer.
Moreover, as suggested by Lt. Col. David Frakt, who represented Guantanamo
detainees before the military commissions and in federal habeas corpus
proceedings, Obama should direct the Attorney General to inform the D.C. Circuit
Court of Appeals that the Department of Justice no longer considers the cleared
detainees to be detainable.
Obama has blocked the release of eight cleared detainees by opposing their
habeas corpus petitions. “[W]hen the Obama administration really wants to
transfer a detainee, they are quite capable of doing so,” Frakt wrote in JURIST.
The Constitution Project’s Task Force on Detainee Treatment, which includes two
former senior U.S. generals and a Republican former congressman and lawyer, Asa
Hutchinson, issued a report that concluded the treatment and indefinite
detention of the Guantanamo detainees is “abhorrent and intolerable.” It called
for the closure of the prison camp by next year.
Twenty-five former Guantanamo detainees issued a statement recommending that the
American medical profession stop its complicity with abuse force-feeding
techniques; conditions on confinement for detainees be improved immediately; all
detainees who have not been charged be released; and the military commissions
process be ended and all those be charged tried in line with the Geneva
Conventions.
The detainees who are refusing food have been stripped of all possessions,
including a sleeping mat and soap, and are made to sleep on concrete floors in
freezing solitary cells.
“It is possible that I may die in here,” said Shaker Aamer through his lawyer,
Clive Stafford Smith. “I hope not, but if I do die, please tell my children that
I loved them above all else, but that I had to stand up for the principle that
they cannot just keep holding people without a trial, especially when they have
been cleared for release.” Aamer, a British father of four, was approved for
release more than five years ago.
Col. Morris Davis, who served as Chief Prosecutor for the Terrorism Trials at
Guantanamo, personally charged Osama bin Laden’s driver Salim Hamdan, Australian
David Hicks, and Canadian teen Omar Khadr. All three were convicted and have
been released from Guantanamo.
“There is something fundamentally wrong with a system where not being charged
with a war crime keeps you locked away indefinitely and a war crime conviction
is your ticket home,” Davis wrote to Obama.
Marjorie Cohn is a professor at Thomas Jefferson School of Law and former
president of the National Lawyers Guild. Her most recent book is The United
States and Torture: Interrogation, Incarceration, and Abuse. See
www.marjoriecohn.com.
In Case You Missed…
Some of our special stories from April focused on the Boston Marathon bombings,
the defeat of gun-sanity legislation, the latest research on the historical
Jesus, and the political rehabilitation of George W. Bush.
“Hollywood’s Dangerous Afghan Illusion” by Robert Parry, revealing a new
document on how Reagan’s White House used Charlie Wilson to sell war
in Afghanistan. April 7, 2013.
“Tyranny of Deception” by Phil Rockstroh, explaining how powerful forces control
the message to control the population, April 9, 2013.
“The Roots of American Bullying” by Rev. Howard Bess, tracing intolerance to
religious edicts. April 10, 2013.
“The Madness of NYT’s Tom Friedman” by Robert Parry, challenging the New York
Times columnist over his failure to understand the motivation of others. April
10, 2013.
“The Right’s Second Amendment Fraud” by Robert Parry, dissecting the false
claims about the “right to bear arms.” April 11, 2013.
“A Palestinian Right to Resist” by Lawrence Davidson, exploring the morality of
resisting oppression. April 13, 2013.
“Russia Bars Bush-Era Torture Lawyers” by Robert Parry, reporting on at least a
modest price to be paid by apologists for torture. April 14, 2013.
“Jesus as a Real-Life Insurrectionist” by Rev. Howard Bess, finding the reality
of a radical rabble-rouser after casting aside the phony “miracles.” April 15,
2013.
“Tales of Reagan’s Guatemala Genocide” by Robert Parry, putting new testimony
about old atrocities in the context of Ronald Reagan’s anticommunism. April 16,
2013.
“Over-Analyzing Terror Incidents” by Paul R. Pillar, questioning the cookiecutter approach of U.S. politicians and pundits to terror attacks. April 17,
2013.
“The Power of False Narratives” by Robert Parry, noting how the Right’s bogus
history about the Second Amendment shot down modest gun control. April 18, 2013.
“Chechen Terrorists and the Neocons” by Coleen Rowley, recalling the
longstanding ties between U.S. neocons and Chechen extremists. April 19, 2013.
“What to Do with G.W. Bush?” by Robert Parry, following the logic of a blueribbon report confirming high-level approval of torture. April 21, 2013.
“Second-Guessing George W. Bush” by Robert Parry, responding to a scheme at
Bush’s new library to put visitors on the spot in defense of Bush’s actions.
April 22, 2013.
“Jesus as Liberation Theologist” by Rev. Howard Bess, explaining how the
historical Jesus promoted economic and social justice. April 23, 2013.
“Another Ignored Russian Warning” by Robert Parry, citing how U.S. officials
spurned Russian cooperation on a high-level treason case after the Cold War
ended. April 23, 2013.
“The Bad Math Behind Austerity” by Beverly Bandler, summing up how right-wing
economists have added to the recession’s misery. April 24, 2013.
“America’s Locked-Down Insecurity State” by Phil Rockstroh, exploring the
fallacies of high-security security. April 26, 2013.
“It’s the Media, Stupid!” by Robert Parry, reporting on new plans by the Koch
Brothers and Rupert Murdoch to expand their media empires. April 26, 2013.
“Obama Drifts Toward Syria War” by Robert Parry, analyzing how President Obama’s
political calculation has increased chances for another U.S. intervention. April
29, 2013.
“Sandra Day O’Connor’s ‘Maybe’ Regret” by Robert Parry, calling out the former
Supreme Court justice for her catastrophic decision to overturn Al Gore’s 2000
victory. April 30, 2013.
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So, please consider a tax-deductible donation either by credit card online or by
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Robert Parry is a longtime investigative reporter who broke many of the IranContra stories for the Associated Press and Newsweek in the 1980s. He founded
Consortiumnews.com in 1995 to create an outlet for well-reported journalism that
was being squeezed out of an increasingly trivialized U.S. news media.
The Spark that Ignited the Vietnam War
Exclusive: A half-century ago, religious clashes in Vietnam — leading to a
dramatic photo of a Buddhist priest burning himself alive — shocked the U.S.
government and drove it deeper into the morass of the Vietnam War, a confluence
of religion and politics that remains relevant today, as war correspondent
Beverly Deepe Keever explains.
By Beverly Deepe Keever
The 40th anniversary of the withdrawal of American troops from the Vietnam War
was recently commemorated, but ignored was the 50th anniversary of an incident
that led to U.S. combat units being sent to the war zone in the first place.
That bloody event is probably not even recalled by the two Vietnam veterans now
heading the Pentagon and State Department, Chuck Hagel and John Kerry,
respectively. Yet it turned out to be an indelible turning-point in the history
of the Vietnam War. And, a half-century later it still warns a nuclearized world
about the power of organized religious groups and the perilous politics of
regime change.
Sketchily reported at first, an initial 134-word wire story described seven
persons killed when a grenade was thrown into a crowd of 3,000 in a Buddhist
demonstration that was Communist-inspired, according to the Vietnamese
government headed by President Ngo Dinh Diem, a Roman Catholic.
The bloodshed occurred on May 8, 1963, as religious followers heralding Buddha’s
birthday began flying flags in Hue just as the Diem government began enforcing a
long-ignored ban on displaying religious flags outside of religious
organizations. Hue was the home of Diem’s brother, Archbishop Ngo Dinh Thuc, who
had hoisted yellow-and-white Vatican flags earlier in the month while
celebrating the 25th anniversary of his ordination as bishop.
Undergirding Buddhist grievances was the French-imposed Decree No. 10, which
Diem had retained, labeling Buddhism as an association, rather than a religion,
thus restricting the power, rights and flag-flying privileges of its followers
compared to those of Roman Catholics.
Perched along the South China Sea 400 miles north of Saigon, and 50 miles south
of the demilitarized zone with North Vietnam, Hue was a storybook city bisected
by the Perfume River, where sampans glided for vendors selling a sweet brew
concocted of lotus seeds. A key center of Buddhist scholarship, it served as the
one-time royal capital of Vietnam that still glistened with ruby-colored
citadels and Forbidden-City-styled Palace.
Saffron-robed Buddhist bonzes and others contested the government’s version of
the Hue melee. They told of eight, not seven, deaths, including children, from
an explosion, from a Catholic government official ordering troops to fire, and
from armored cars crushing demonstrators. The killings were protested the next
day by 10,000-plus Buddhist demonstrators in Hue.
Throughout the sultry summer, Buddhist protesters thrust Vietnam onto the world
stage, and U.S. television screens, with a self-perpetuating chain reaction of
fasting, sit-down strikes, student walkouts, mass meetings, news conferences, a
plea to the United Nations and skirmishes with police. It was like a longdormant volcano rumbling toward eruption.
Rumors circulated in Saigon that several Buddhist bonzes had volunteered to
commit suicide by setting themselves afire to highlight their demands. On June
8, 1963, one elderly bonze, Thich (Venerable) Quang Duc told me, “To die is the
only thing I want because the government is indirectly destroying the
civilization of the Vietnamese people, which depends on the Buddhist culture.” I
cabled these words in his last interview to Newsweek and the London Sunday
Express.
Three days later, Quang Duc moved from a sedan, sat on a brown cushion dropped
onto to a dusty road and was doused with gasoline by two other bonzes. Then he
stretched his hands across his brown robe and lit a match.
“In a flash, he was sitting in the center of a column of flame, which engulfed
his entire body,” and then he was still, recounted AP’s Malcolm Browne, who
captured the suicide on film.
The burning-bonze photo horrified the world. Upon first seeing it, President
John Kennedy exclaimed, “Jesus Christ!” He added: “No news picture in history
has generated so much emotion around the world as that one.”
The U.S. support for Diem grew shaky. Kennedy, America’s first Catholic
president gearing up for re-election the next year, was increasingly embarrassed
by the protests alleging religious persecution from the U.S.-backed president of
South Vietnam who was also a Catholic.
The result: regime change in Saigon. After years of U.S. support that began in
1954 under President Eisenhower, the Kennedy administration encouraged
Vietnamese generals to overthrow Diem on Nov. 1, 1963.
“For the military coup d’etat against Ngo Dinh Diem, the U.S. must accept its
full share of responsibility,” the Pentagon Papers documented in 1971.
“Beginning in August of 1963, we variously authorized, sanctioned and encouraged
the coup efforts of the Vietnamese generals and offered full support for a
successor government.”
The coup and the subsequent murder of Diem (and his younger brother Ngo Dinh
Nhu) stunned the world. Lyndon Johnson, who was then vice president, later
called the coup “the worst mistake we ever made.” More than 32 years later,
Robert McNamara, who was Secretary of Defense at the time, wrote, “I believe
that the United States support of the overthrow of President Diem was a
mistake.”
North Vietnamese President Ho Chi Minh, upon hearing the news, chortled, “I
could scarcely believe that the Americans would be so stupid.”
The regime change led to a revolving door of upheavals throughout the Vietnamese
government and armed forces. Three months after the Diem coup, most chiefs of
the 41 provinces had been replaced at least once, major military commanders had
been replaced twice and, as McNamara subsequently told President Johnson, “the
political structure extending from Saigon down into the hamlets disappeared.”
The military junta that ousted Diem lasted 89 days until it was, in turn,
toppled by an upstart general named Nguyen Khanh. These twinned coups were
described by the leading pro-Communist leader in South Vietnam, Nguyen Huu Tho,
as “gifts from heaven for us.”
Khanh lasted only 390 days before being ousted by other generals and exiled
abroad on Feb. 24, 1965. Six days later, U.S. and South Vietnamese warplanes
began graduated-turning-into-sustained bombing of North Vietnam. In another six
days, on March 8, 1965, the first American combat unit strode ashore near the
demilitarized zone with North Vietnam.
It would take another 2,943 days (or eight-plus years) for the last American
soldier to withdraw from Vietnam on March 29, 1973, as the U.S. suffered the
first clear military failure in its history.
The Hue incident of 50 years ago was a warning about the geopolitical hazards
that can arise from religious ferment as well as a reminder about the dangerous
temptation of regime change. Those warnings were inadequately addressed in the
1960s and have continued to confound policymakers in the 21st Century.
Beverly Deepe Keever was a Saigon-based correspondent who covered the Vietnam
War for a number of news organizations. She has just published a memoir, Death
Zones & Darling Spies.