The Scandal of Lax Government
For decades now, it’s been fashionable to demonize government. After all, that’s
what billions of dollars invested in right-wing think tanks and media outlets
will buy you. There also are genuine abuses by bureaucrats. But lax government
oversight can be a scandal, too, as Bill Moyers and Michael Winship note.
By Bill Moyers and Michael Winship
After a week that reminds us to be ever vigilant about the dangers of government
overreaching its authority, whether by the long arm of the IRS or the Justice
Department, we should pause to think about another threat — from too much
private power obnoxiously intruding into public life.
All too often, instead of acting as a brake on runaway corporate power and
greed, government becomes their enabler, undermining the very rules and
regulations intended to keep us safe.
Think of inadequate inspections of food and the food-related infections which
kill 3,000 Americans each year and make 48 million sick. A new study from Johns
Hopkins shows elevated levels of arsenic — known to increase a person’s risk of
cancer — in chicken meat.
According to the university’s Center for a Livable Future, “Arsenic-based drugs
have been used for decades to make poultry grow faster and improve the
pigmentation of the meat. The drugs are also approved to treat and prevent
parasites in poultry Currently in the U.S., there is no federal law prohibiting
the sale or use of arsenic-based drugs in poultry feed.”
And here’s a story in The Washington Post about toxic, bacteria-killing
chemicals used in poultry plants to clean more chickens more quickly to meet
increased demand and make more money.
According to Amanda Hitt, director of the Government Accountability Project’s
Food Integrity Campaign, “They are mixing chemicals together in these plants,
and it’s making people sick. Does it work better at killing off pathogens? Yes,
but it also can send someone into respiratory arrest.”
So far, the government has done next to nothing. No research into the possible
side effects, no comprehensive recordkeeping on illnesses. “Instead,” the Post
reports, “they review data provided by chemical manufacturers.”
What’s more, the Department of Agriculture is about to allow the production
lines to move even faster, by as much as 25 percent, which means more chemicals,
more exposure, more sickness.
Think of that and think of the 85,000 industrial chemicals available today only
a handful have been tested for safety. Ian Urbina writes in The New York Times,
“Hazardous chemicals have become so ubiquitous that scientists now talk about
babies being born pre-polluted, sometimes with hundred s of synthetic chemicals
showing up in their blood.”
Think, too, of that horrific explosion of ammonium nitrate in the Texas
fertilizer plant. Fifteen people were killed and their little town devastated.
The magazine Mother Jones noted, “Inspections are virtually non-existent;
regulatory agencies don’t talk to each other; and there’s no such thing as a
buffer zone when it comes to constructing plants and storage facilities in
populated areas.”
For years, the Fertilizer Institute, described as “the nation’s leading lobbying
organization of the chemical and agricultural industries,” resisted regulation
and legislators went along. People can lose their lives when federal or state
government winks at bad corporate practices 4,500 workplace deaths annually at a
cost to America of nearly half a trillion dollars.
As columnist and author David Sirota observes, “If all this data was about a
terrorist threat, the reaction would be swift — negligent federal agencies would
be roundly criticized and the specific state’s lax attitude toward security
would be lambasted. Yet, after the fertilizer plant explosion, there has been no
proactive reaction at all, other than Texas Republican Gov. Rick Perry boasting
about his state’s ‘comfort with the amount of oversight’ that already exists.”
Finally, consider this story from ProPublica’s investigative reporter Abrahm
Lustgarten about a uranium company that wanted a mining project in Texas that
threatened to pollute drinking water. The EPA resisted — until the company hired
as its lobbyist the Democratic fundraiser and fixer Heather Podesta, a favorite
of the White House. Her firm was paid $400,000, she pulled the strings, and
presto, the EPA changed its mind and said yes, go ahead and do your dirty work.
In fact, Pro Publica found that “the agency has used a little-known provision in
the federal Safe Drinking Water Act to issue more than 1,500 exemptions allowing
energy and mining companies to pollute aquifers, including many in the driest
parts of the country.”
Of course, in a free society we’ll always be debating the role of government and
its agencies. What are the limits, when is government oversight necessary and
when is it best deterred? But it’s not only government that can go too far.
As long as there are insufficient checks and balances on big business and its
powerful lobbies, we are at their mercy. Their ability to buy off public
officials is an assault on democracy and a threat to our lives and health. When
an entire political system persists in producing such gross injustice, it is
making inevitable wholesale defiance.
Bill Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship, senior writing fellow 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.
Does Woodward Know Watergate?
Exclusive: Republicans are hyping the flap over Benghazi talking points by
calling it “worse than Watergate,” a false narrative that Bob Woodward has
helped along by ignoring new evidence connecting Richard Nixon’s sabotage of
Vietnam War peace talks in 1968 to his political spying in 1971-72, writes
Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward has popped up on TV recently affirming a key
Republican talking point, likening the “scandal” over the Obama administration’s
Benghazi talking points to Richard Nixon’s Watergate scandal, which Woodward
helped make famous.
But, as he joins in hyping the GOP’s Benghazi scandal-mongering, Woodward
doesn’t appear to know that new documentary evidence has transformed our
understanding of Watergate and especially its tie-in to the Vietnam War and how
those documents make comparisons between Watergate and Benghazi both ludicrous
and obscene.
During an appearance on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on May 17, Woodward compared the
administration’s development of talking points for TV appearances by UN
Ambassador Susan Rice in 2012 to Nixon’s mendacious editing of his Oval Office
tapes to conceal the role of his reelection campaign in the break-in at the
Democrats’ Watergate headquarters in 1972.
“You were talking earlier about kind of dismissing the Benghazi issue as one
that’s just political and the president recently said it’s a sideshow,” Woodward
said. “But if you read through all these e-mails, you see that everyone in the
government is saying, ‘Oh, let’s not tell the public that terrorists were
involved, people connected to al-Qaeda. Let’s not tell the public that there
were warnings.’”
Then, noting that four U.S. diplomatic personnel died in the attack on the U.S.
consulate in Benghazi, Libya, on Sept. 11, 2012, Woodward added, “I would not
dismiss Benghazi. It’s a very serious issue. As people keep saying, four people
were killed.”
But Woodward appears to have been relying on Republican talking points in his
understanding of why Obama administration officials decided to leave out some
details from Rice’s talking points, specifically a concern that divulging
certain specifics would compromise the ongoing investigation to catch the
Islamic terrorist believed responsible.
At the time, there also remained genuine confusion over the connection between
the Benghazi attack and angry demonstrations sweeping the Middle East over an
American video mocking the Prophet Muhammad. Indeed, the recently released emails buttress then-CIA Director David Petraeus’s testimony about concerns over
the possibility of harming the investigation.
By contrast, Nixon systematically reviewed tape transcripts of his Oval Office
conversations to remove sections that incriminated him and his top aides in a
felonious cover-up. We also now know what Nixon’s most dangerous secret was,
i.e., why he hired ex-CIA officer E. Howard Hunt to organize an espionage team
in the first place.
Nixon was terrified that a missing file might surface revealing FBI wiretaps of
his 1968 campaign’s sabotage of President Lyndon Johnson’s Vietnam peace talks,
a politically motivated case of obstruction that Johnson privately called
“treason.”
In other words, the ultimate secret of Watergate one that apparently still
remains a mystery to Woodward was that Nixon was terrified that the American
people might learn that he had extended the Vietnam War for an additional four
years to get an edge in a political campaign.
As a result of LBJ’s failed peace initiative, some 20,000 more U.S. soldiers
died along with an estimated one million Vietnamese and countless more dead in
Cambodia. The war also tore apart America’s political and social fabric.
So, to put the flap over the Benghazi talking points in the same sentence with
Nixon’s Watergate crimes suggests either a complete lack of proportionality or
some self-serving agenda. It’s possible that Woodward doesn’t want to
acknowledge the new evidence because it would show that he missed the most
important element of a scandal that made his career.
Recognition of the fuller Watergate scandal also would shatter a favorite saying
of Official Washington, “the cover-up is worse than the crime.” That surely
wouldn’t be true if the Watergate scandal were understood to encompass Nixon’s
treacherous scheme to block Johnson’s Vietnam peace deal.
Memoirs and Documents
We now know based on memoirs of principals and documents available at the LBJ
Library in Austin, Texas, that in 1969, Johnson ordered his national security
aide, Walt Rostow, to remove the wiretap file on Nixon’s peace-talk sabotage
from the White House and that Nixon later learned of the file’s existence from
FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover
However, Nixon’s senior advisers, Henry Kissinger and H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, were
unable to locate the missing file, not realizing that it was in Rostow’s
personal possession. Nixon’s concern about the incriminating wiretaps grew into
a panic after June 13, 1971, when the New York Times began publishing the topsecret Pentagon Papers, which detailed the mostly Democratic lies that had drawn
the United States into the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1967.
As those stories dominated the front pages of newspapers across the nation and
the world, Nixon realized something that few others knew, that there was a
sequel that was arguably even more scandalous, a file containing evidence of his
campaign’s successful sabotage of Johnson’s peace talks, which could have
negotiated an end to the war in 1968.
As the Pentagon Papers dominated the news, Nixon summoned Kissinger and Haldeman
into the Oval Office again on June 17, 1971, and ordered them to redouble their
efforts to locate the missing file. Nixon’s panic is captured on an Oval Office
tape that was made public decades ago but not fully understood.
“Do we have it?” Nixon asked Haldeman about Johnson’s file. “I’ve asked for it.
You said you didn’t have it.”
Haldeman: “We can’t find it.”
Kissinger: “We have nothing here, Mr. President.”
Nixon: “Well, damnit, I asked for that because I need it.”
Kissinger: “But Bob and I have been trying to put the damn thing together.”
Haldeman: “We have a basic history in constructing our own, but there is a file
on it.”
Nixon: “Where?”
Haldeman: “[Presidential aide Tom Charles] Huston swears to God that there’s a
file on it and it’s at Brookings.”
Nixon: “Bob? Bob? Now do you remember Huston’s plan [for White House-sponsored
break-ins as part of domestic counter-intelligence operations]? Implement it.”
Kissinger: “Now Brookings has no right to have classified documents.”
Nixon: “I want it implemented. Goddamnit, get in and get those files. Blow the
safe and get it.”
Haldeman: “They may very well have cleaned them by now, but this thing, you need
to “
Kissinger: “I wouldn’t be surprised if Brookings had the files.”
Haldeman: “My point is Johnson knows that those files are around. He doesn’t
know for sure that we don’t have them around.”
But Johnson did know that the file was no longer at the White House because he
had ordered Rostow to remove it in the final days of his own presidency.
On June 30, 1971, Nixon again berated Haldeman about the need to break into
Brookings and “take it [the file] out.” Nixon even suggested using former CIA
officer E. Howard Hunt to conduct the Brookings break-in.
“You talk to Hunt,” Nixon told Haldeman. “I want the break-in. Hell, they do
that. You’re to break into the place, rifle the files, and bring them in. Just
go in and take it. Go in around 8:00 or 9:00 o’clock.”
Haldeman: “Make an inspection of the safe.”
Nixon: “That’s right. You go in to inspect the safe. I mean, clean it up.”
For reasons that remain unclear, it appears that the Brookings break-in never
took place. Also unclear to historians was the full significance of the missing
file. They knew that it had a connection to Johnson’s peace initiative in
October 1968 but they assumed, mistakenly, that it was a file containing policy
papers, not wiretap evidence.
The ‘X’ Envelope
The missing link to the story was filed away at the LBJ Library, where Rostow
eventually deposited what he labeled “The ‘X’ Envelope.” Rostow transferred the
file to the library after Johnson’s death in 1973 but with instructions that it
not be opened for 50 years. Library officials eventually overrode Rostow’s
mandate but not until 1994 when the envelope was opened and declassification of
its contents began.
But the two-decade delay caused serious damage to the historical record because,
in the interim, a distorted narrative of the Watergate scandal had taken shape
and solidified. Not knowing the contents of the missing file the one that Nixon
thought might be at Brookings led Woodward and other Watergate reporters to
concentrate on the cover-up, not the underlying crime.
Because of that mistaken focus, an entire generation of journalists cut their
teeth saying, “The cover-up is worse than the crime.” There also grew an
animosity toward evidence suggesting that Republicans would go behind the back
of a Democratic president to undermine an important foreign policy initiative
like, say, trying to end the Vietnam War. Somehow disclosing such facts was
deemed not “good for the country.”
So, my discovery of the missing piece of the Watergate mosaic in 2012 was
unwelcome news in many quarters, easier to ignore than to explain. However, the
false narrative of Watergate is not old news; it has become a current reference
point for Republican efforts to undermine another Democratic president on a
foreign policy incident.
Because of the lack of proportionality made possible by the distorted Watergate
narrative Sen. John McCain and other leading Republicans can breezily call the
Benghazi story “worse” than Watergate. Then, by recycling some bad history, Bob
Woodward contributes to the problem. [For details on Rostow’s “X Envelope,” see
Robert Parry’s America’s Stolen Narrative.]
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).
Justice at a Guatemalan Crossroads
The genocide conviction of Guatemala’s ex-dictator Efrain Rios Montt has put
respect for human rights at a crossroads, with one option to reverse the
judgment and another to expand the investigation to Rios Montt’s accomplices in
Guatemala and the U.S., journalist Allan Nairn tells Dennis J. Bernstein.
By Dennis J. Bernstein
In a historic decision, a Guatemalan court convicted former strong man and close
U.S. ally Efrain Rios Montt of genocide and crimes against humanity, sentencing
the 86-year-old ex-general to 80 years in prison.
Journalist Allan Nairn, who has covered the story of the Guatemalan genocide
since the 1980s, was in the courtroom for the recent verdict and told Dennis J.
Bernstein in this interview that there are now two follow-up battles going on.
Those who fought to have Rios Montt convicted often risking their own lives to
do so are pushing to widen the investigation, to focus on other U.S.-supported
mass murderers from the 1980s, including the current president, General Otto
Perez Molina.
Meanwhile, there is the powerful Guatemalan right-wing military oligarchy, with
its hands bloody from the same slaughters blamed on Rios Montt, fighting to have
his conviction annulled by a higher court in Guatemala. [Update: On May 20,
Guatemala’s Constitutional Court ruled 3-2 to overturn Rios Montt’s conviction,
leaving legal confusion about whether a new trial will be required.]
There’s also the issue of U.S. complicity in Guatemala’s human rights atrocities
both during the Reagan administration and, more recently, in the decision to
invite one of Rios Montt’s top generals to study at Harvard University’s Kennedy
School.
DB: Allan, can you tell us about the verdict and the significance of the court
decision?
AN: What happened is that somebody finally enforced the murder laws,
impartially. In this case the murders were massacres committed in the northwest
highlands of Guatemala against the Maya Ixil people. The perpetrator was a
general, a military dictator who was backed by the United States, General Rios
Montt.
Usually, in every country in the world, a perpetrator, a killer with that kind
of position and backing gets away with it. But in this case, it didn’t happen.
General Rios Montt was convicted and sentenced to 80 years in prison. As we
speak, he is in prison, although he’s claiming that he’s ill, so he’s now in a
military hospital, but he’s still locked up. It’s a breakthrough in many ways.
It’s the first time that any country has been able to prosecute a former
president for genocide using its own domestic criminal courts.
More importantly, it’s a prosecution from below. It’s not a case of victor’s
justice where the one who wins the war prosecutes the one who lost the war. This
is a case of survivors whose movement was crushed, but they were able to persist
and use whatever levers of power that exist within the system to bring to
justice one of the killers, a killer who represents a social order that is still
in power.
The same individuals and kinds of individuals who ran Guatemala in 1982 and 1983
still run it today. It’s still the army and the oligarchs; the chambers of
commerce, industry and finance. But due to the brave fight of the survivors of
these massacres, enough political space has been opened up in Guatemala that a
few honest people have been able to rise to positions of importance within the
prosecutorial system and within the judiciary, so this trial was able to move
forward. It is also a breakthrough on the fight against racism and for the
rights of the indigenous people.
Rios Montt, when he seized power in a military coup, took two steps immediately.
The army was already killing civilians – they were doing that for many years.
But Rios Montt changed the strategy. He immediately cut back on the urban
assassinations, the assassinations of national leaders in the capital city,
which had become politically counter-productive.
Instead, he made systematic the massacres that were taking place in the
countryside. He sent the army systematically sweeping through the villages of
the northwest highlands where, at that time, the majority of the Mayan
population was concentrated. He and his army branded them as inherently
subversive. That’s why the prosecution was able to make a charge of genocide and
make it stick.
Of course this was all backed by the U.S. The U.S. has not yet reached a level
of political civilization that Guatemala, especially the Mayan population, who
pushed this trial, has reached. We don’t yet have prosecutions of U.S.
government officials who have been engaged in other similar killings of
civilians around the world and are still involved today, but it should be done.
The U.S. prosecutors should immediately convene a grand jury regarding the
Guatemalan genocide. They should fulfill their responsibility to assist the
Guatemalan prosecutors by divulging to them all internal U.S. documents
regarding those massacres, everything within the CIA, State Department, Pentagon
and the White House. They should also move to indict all U.S. officials from
those agencies, those who are still alive, who played the role of accessory,
accomplice, or worse, to these crimes. They should be willing to extradite to
Guatemala any U.S. officials who are sought by the Guatemalan authorities as
they continue their investigation.
DB: As you said, this was a slaughter-ous attack on the indigenous people in the
highlands. Among the most poignant testimony was that from Rigoberta Menchu,
Nobel Peace Price laureate. Why was her testimony important, and can you remind
people who she is?
AN: Rigoberta was an activist who was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. The
Guatemalan criminal justice system works differently than the U.S. system. In
the U.S., although an individual citizen can bring a civil suit against somebody
else, they cannot bring a criminal action to put somebody in jail. Only the
state can do that.
But in Guatemala, an individual citizen is allowed to bring a criminal action
against another if they can convince the state prosecutors and the courts that
they should move forward. Rigoberta Menchu, quite a few years ago, initiated
legal cases against a range of Guatemalan generals and colonels for their role
in the slaughter. One of them was Rios Montt.
Her cases were blocked In Guatemala, but one of them was eventually taken up in
Spain by the national high court in Spain. Under international law, crimes
against humanity, such as genocide, can be prosecuted by courts in other
countries because they are considered such a grave threat to humanity itself.
The Spanish court took the case very seriously and it is still active to this
day. They tried to extradite various Guatemalan generals to Spain, but they
haven’t succeeded. The work done on that case helped to lay the groundwork for
the case that was brought against Rios Montt and just resulted in the sentence
in Guatemala.
The particular case against Rios Montt was based on a very narrow set of facts –
massacres that took place in one particular period in the Ixil region of the
northwest highlands, which is different from region that Rigoberta and her
family come from. The case was prosecuted on the basis of just 1,771 murders
because the prosecution was able to get the names of the 1,771 victims killed by
the Guatemalan army.
In many cases, their bones were exhumed and forensic scientists were able to
link the bones to names of the murdered people. But the case is far from over,
because the oligarchy, military and retired military, but especially the
oligarchy, are trying to get this case annulled. The constitutional court, which
is the highest court in Guatemala, was supposed to give a ruling that could have
resulted in an annulment of the case and the immediate freeing of Rios Montt
from prison.
They postponed the ruling until Monday. The constitutional court is not taken
seriously as a legal body – it’s a complete political tool of the army and the
oligarchy. There is a big political struggle going on now within the Guatemalan
political establishment as to whether they will take the political risk of
trying to roll back this verdict.
It was a huge step, huge event. If they try to annul it and roll it back, there
will be a big backlash from the Guatemalan public and internationally. But the
leaders of the oligarchy are very jealous of their privileges, which includes
their right to consider themselves superior and to continue to treat indigenous
people as less than full citizens and less than human.
In many of the indigenous communities where the ’80’s massacres took place,
people still live on just a few dollars a day. Rates of malnutrition and infant
mortality are extremely high. People still cannot earn enough from the micro
plots of corn that they work, so have to migrate down to the coast to work on
the plantations during harvest season to try to feed their families.
Most importantly, the oligarchy still wants to retain the prerogative of
murdering people when they feel it’s necessary, even though in Guatemala today
the army does not commit the rural massacres they used to. They do not have the
assassinations of national level activists, as there used to be. But there
continue to be assassinations outside the capital city, of local activists – in
particular in recent months, the people who have been fighting against mining
projects involving Canadian and U.S. companies, brought in by the current
president General Perez Molina.
The local communities are fiercely resisting because they fear the pollution and
other damage that the mining could bring. The rich want the right to kill people
who protest against them, and they fear – and they have a rational basis for
this fear – that if the precedent of the Rios Montt trial is allowed to stand,
it could cramp their style, it could be more difficult for them in the future to
kill off workers who try to organize on their plantations in their factories or
at their mines, so a lot is at stake here and it’s not yet certain that this
verdict will be allowed to stand,
DB: We were talking about Rigoberta Menchu. The story of her family isn’t far
from the horrors – an extreme example – but not far from the horrors we’re
talking about when we talk about this U.S.-supported slaughter machine.
AN: Yes, her family – a number of them were burned alive or their bodies were
never found. This has been life for people in rural areas, in particular the
indigenous people of Guatemala. The slaughter went on for years and years and
years. It all traces back to 1954 when a democratically elected government in
Guatemala was overthrown in a CIA-backed coup. The military ruled uninterrupted
through the 1990s, assassinating and massacring whenever they felt like it.
Today, even though Guatemala now has an electoral system, there’s again a
military man in charge, General Otto Perez Molina. He was the local commander in
the field in the Ixil region, the region of the massacres that got Rios Montt
convicted. At the time, in the middle of the massacres, I met him.
His soldiers – lieutenants, sergeants, corporals – described how they would go
into town armed with death lists provided them by G2 military intelligence,
death lists of people who were suspected of being collaborators of the
guerrillas or critics of the army. They told how they would strangle people with
lassos, slit women open with machetes, shoot people in the head in front of the
neighbors, use U.S. planes, helicopters and 50 gram bombs to attack people if
they fled into the hills.
These are the men of the current president, describing how they did this under
orders. He is now in charge of Guatemala, and is very worried about this
verdict. He allowed the trial to go forward. In the Guatemalan justice system,
the attorney general is politically much more autonomous from the press than the
U.S. attorney general is, so it’s difficult for the president to control what
the attorney general does.
The current attorney general in Guatemala is very honest, with a sense of legal
duty. But Perez Molina still has a great deal of clout. He allowed the trial to
go forward on the understanding that it would only go after Rios Montt and his
co-defendant, a general named Rodriguez Sanchez, and the trial would not touch
Perez Molina. He was basically willing to sacrifice Rios Montt.
But to everyone’s surprise, in the middle of the trial, one witness, a former
soldier, named Perez Molina and said he ordered atrocities. I had been due to
testify about a week after that, and as a result of all this, I was kept off the
stand because Perez Molina was furious that his name came up in the trial. There
was fear that if I took the stand, it would provoke him to shut down the trial
entirely.
As it happened, even though I was kept off the stand and Perez Molina’s name
wasn’t mentioned again, the trial got shut down anyway because the oligarchy and
army started to realize that having the trial go on for weeks and weeks and
weeks of people recounting army massacres was hurting them politically – was
causing tremendous damage with the public, so they shut it down.
The trial was dead for two weeks, but it was revived because of a backlash of
protest from Guatemalan activists, foreign human right supporters, and from some
people in the U.S. Congress who weighed in and exerted pressure. The trial was
then resumed and allowed to reach a verdict.
Perez Molina is very fearful of what could happen. On the night after the
verdict he gave an interview to Spanish language CNN and interviewer Fernando
del Rincon pressed Perez Molina on the interviews he had with me in the middle
of the massacres in the mid-1980s, and his own role in the massacres. As soon as
RIncon began asking about that, the signal from the President in his palace to
CNN suddenly went dead.
Back at the CNN studio they were surprised. The line remained dead for several
minutes. By the time it came back on, and Perez Molina had gathered his wits, he
started fiercely contesting the question, refusing to answer. In the end he said
you’ve got to understand, the guerrillas had recruited entire families as
collaborators – they had women and children as collaborators. It seemed he was
giving a rationale for the killing of families.
After the interview was over – I was in Guatemala at the time – I got to see the
second half of the interview. The CNN access to the interview on the website was
blocked in Guatemala, but some viewers managed to videotape it and put it up on
YouTube. The confrontational interview with Perez Molina got more than 21,000
hits in a matter of hours, which is a huge amount for Guatemala. It was a
sensation. Everybody was talking about it. Then those YouTube interviews were
inexplicably taken down.
Last night I did an interview on CNN en espanol on that same show. I know people
in Guatemala have attempted to put that up on YouTube. We’ll see how long those
stay up there. Perez Molina is clearly very worried about this.
DB: What kind of involvement and documentary evidence could come up about the
U.S. relationship with the Guatemalan slaughter machine at this time?
AN: It started at the top. [Ronald] Reagan personally backed Rios Montt. He met
with him and called him a man of great integrity – said he was getting a bum rap
on human rights. The U.S. had U.S. personnel working inside the G2, the military
intelligence agency that picked the targets for assassination and disappearance.
The CIA carried much of the top Guatemalan army and leadership on their payroll.
The U.S. military attaché in Guatemala was providing advice to the army.
Colonel George Menas told me at the time that he helped develop the sweep
strategy that sent the army into all these mountain villages. He said it was
developed jointly with a General Benedicto Lucas Garcia, and that the attack had
been part of the systematic strategy of Rios Montt.
The U.S. had a Green Beret there who I interviewed and who even took me out on a
maneuver. He was training the Guatemalan military in, among other things, these
are his words – “how to destroy towns.” The U.S. had provided weapons, bombs,
grenades, planes, helicopters – you name it.
The U.S. had also arranged for Israel to step in and become the principal
supplier of hardware to the Guatemalan army, in particular assault rifles, the
Galil automatic rifle. This was because the administration was running into
problems with Congress, which wouldn’t go along with a lot of their plans to aid
the Guatemalan military, so they did an end run by using the government of
Israel. That tactic started in the Carter administration. It was [National
Security Advisor Zbigniew] Brzezinski who helped set up that approach. The U.S.
was supporting the Guatemalan military in a multitude of ways as these crimes
were going on.
Those kinds of actions behind a crime are a crime in itself. It’s similar to
what President George W. Bush said about terrorists – if you arm a terrorist,
you are a terrorist. I think he’s right about that. If you arm a genocidist,
what does that make you? It certainly makes you subject to indictment. The U.S.
courts should move against these surviving U.S. officials, including people like
Elliott Abrams, one of Reagan’s top policymakers on Central America.
There were dozens upon dozens of other top policymakers in the U.S. apparatus
when these crimes were taking place. We don’t know the full extent of U.S.
complicity because although there are some U.S. documents released under the
Freedom of Information Act, in censored form, there are a lot more that remain
classified, including U.S. National Security Agency intercepts of communications
between Rios Montt and his army, and communications within the Guatemalan army.
One interesting thing that came out in the trial, as witness after witness
testified, was a very substantial number of them talked about fleeing into the
mountains and being bombed, attacked and machine gunned from U.S. planes and
helicopters. At the time this was going on, I was aware this was happening in
some cases, but from the testimony of the witnesses, it sounded like these
attacks from U.S. planes and helicopters were more frequent than we realized at
the time. That’s an example of how we don’t know the whole story yet – how
extensive the U.S. complicity was in these crimes.
DB: You worked on a related story about Hector Gramajo who was a general under
Rios Montt and was a key player in the slaughter in the highlands. He got his
masters at the Harvard Kennedy School. I called up the PR guy there and asked
him if he understood that the students were going to classes with a mass
murderer. The response was “I don’t know about the mass murder, but the students
seem to like him.” It suggests a terrible closeness to what happened.
AN: Yes. The web of collaboration between the U.S. – not just the U.S.
government, but also various other powerful institutions in the U.S. – and the
mass murder in Guatemala, as in many other countries, is very extensive. General
Gramajo was one of the top generals under Rios Montt and was one of those
responsible for these massacres. He was brought up to Harvard, being groomed for
the presidency, preparing to come back to Guatemala after Harvard and run for
president.
While he was there, in his graduation robes, he was served with a lawsuit. There
were a number of us who worked for the Center for Constitutional Rights, and we
were able to help mount a lawsuit against Gramajo under the Alien Tort Claims
Act, a civil action, because in this country you can’t bring a criminal action.
It is possible to bring an action under this law, which recently has been
drastically cut back under a ruling by the Roberts Supreme Court, so it’s much
harder to use this law now than it was back then in the 90’s.
Under this civil action, Gramajo had to stand trial in a U.S. federal court for
his role in these massacres as crimes against humanity. The court ordered him to
pay money damages of about 11, 12 or 13 million dollars. He didn’t didn’t show
up, or pay the money, but fled the country and went back to Guatemala. The case
damaged his presidential prospects. It’s a good example that Harvard, completely
knowing who he was, would have him there.
But this happens all the time. Rios Montt personally worked with an evangelical
church that had its origins in the U.S., called the Church of the Word. The
first time I interviewed Rios Montt was in the palace a couple of months after
he seized power, and he said, “I am going to get a billion dollars from Pat
Robertson.” I doubt Robertson told him that, but it’s what Rios Montt said, and
they did work very closely together. He got support from Congressman Jack Kemp
at that time.
Today Rios Montt’s main political spokesperson is his daughter, who is married
to a former U.S. Republican congressman from Illinois, is a former member of
Congress in Guatemala, and was seen as a future presidential candidate in
Guatemala. It’s not like Rios Montt is an isolated monster who stands outside
the U.S. orbit.
Some press accounts portray it this way – the U.S. is the virtuous observer,
looking at what Rios Montt did and saying we are shocked these terrible things
happen and we support the trial. No. Rios Montt was Washington’s man. They’ve
now abandoned him as they’ve abandoned many others like Noriega, Gaddafi,
Saddam, Marcos and so many others. But he was unquestionably Washington’s man –
and not just Washington – a man of other elite institutions as well.
DB; Allan Nairn, thank you so much for your work. Whatever develops, this has
already been a significant, precedent-setting case for human rights, and
particularly for indigenous people.
Dennis J. Bernstein is a host of “Flashpoints” on the Pacifica radio network and
the author of Special Ed: Voices from a Hidden Classroom. You can access the
audio archives at www.flashpoints.net.
Racism and the American Right
Exclusive: From the start of the Republic to today’s Republican ranting against
Barack Obama, racism has been a central element of the American Right. But this
ugly feature of U.S. history has often come concealed behind words praising
traditions, liberty and states’ rights, Robert Parry reports.
By Robert Parry
Racism has been a consistent thread weaving through the American Right from
the early days when Anti-Federalists battled against the U.S. Constitution to
the present when hysterical Tea Partiers denounce the first African-American
president. Other factors have come and gone for the Right, but racism has always
been there.
Though definitions of Right and Left are never precise, the Left has generally
been defined, in the American context, by government actions
mostly the federal
government responding to popular movements and representing the collective will
of the American people seeking to improve the lot of common citizens and to
reduce social injustice.
The Right has been defined by opposition to such government activism. Since the
Founding, the Right has decried government interference with the “free market”
and intrusion upon “traditions,” like slavery and segregation, as “tyranny”
or “socialism.”
This argument goes back to 1787 and opposition to the Constitution’s
centralizing of government power in the hands of federal authorities. In
Virginia, for instance, the Anti-Federalists feared that a strong federal
government eventually would outlaw slavery in the Southern states.
Ironically, this argument was raised by two of the most famous voices for
“liberty,” Patrick Henry and George Mason. Those two Virginians spearheaded the
Anti-Federalist cause at the state’s ratifying convention in June 1788, urging
rejection of the Constitution because, they argued, it would lead to slavery’s
demise.
The irony of Henry and Mason scaring fellow Virginians about the Constitution’s
threat to slavery is that the two men have gone down in popular U.S. history as
great espousers of freedom. Before the Revolution, Henry was quoted as
declaring, “Give me liberty or give me death!” Mason is hailed as a leading
force behind the Bill of Rights. However, their notion of “liberty” and “rights”
was always selective. Henry and Mason worried about protecting the “freedom” of
plantation owners to possess other human beings as property.
At Virginia’s Ratification Convention, Henry and Mason raised other arguments
against the proposed Constitution, such as concerns that Virginia’s preeminence
might not be as great as under the weak Articles of Confederation and that
population gains in the North might erode Virginia’s economic welfare.
But the pair’s most potent argument was the danger they foresaw regarding the
abolition of slavery. As historians Andrew Burstein and Nancy Isenberg wrote in
their 2010 book, Madison and Jefferson, the hot button for Henry and Mason was
that “slavery, the source of Virginia’s tremendous wealth, lay politically
unprotected.”
The Slavery Card
At the center of this fear was the state’s loss of ultimate control over its
militia which could be “federalized” by the President as the nation’s commander
in chief under the new Constitution.
“Mason repeated what he had said during the Constitutional Convention: that the
new government failed to provide for ‘domestic safety’ if there was no explicit
protection for Virginians’ slave property,” Burstein and Isenberg wrote. “Henry
called up the by-now-ingrained fear of slave insurrections the direct result, he
believed, of Virginia’s loss of authority over its own militia.”
Henry floated conspiracy theories about possible subterfuges that the federal
government might employ to deny Virginians and other Southerners the “liberty”
to own African-Americans. Describing this fear-mongering, Burstein and Isenberg
wrote:
“Congress, if it wished, could draft every slave into the military and liberate
them at the end of their service. If troop quotas were determined by population,
and Virginia had over 200,000 slaves, Congress might say: ‘Every black man must
fight.’ For that matter, a northern-controlled Congress might tax slavery out of
existence.
“Mason and Henry both ignored the fact that the Constitution protected slavery
on the strength of the three-fifths clause, the fugitive slave clause, and the
slave trade clause. Their rationale was that none of this mattered if the North
should have its way.”
At Philadelphia in 1787, the drafters of the Constitution had already
capitulated to the South’s insistence on its brutal institution of human
enslavement. That surrender became the line of defense that James Madison, a
principal architect of the new governing structure, cited in his response to
Mason and Henry.
Burstein and Isenberg
wrote, “Madison rose to reject their conspiratorial view.
He argued that the central government had no power to order emancipation, and
that Congress would never ‘alienate the affections five-thirteenths of the
Union’ by stripping southerners of their property. ‘Such an idea never entered
into any American breast,’ he said indignantly, ‘nor do I believe it ever will.’
“Madison was doing his best to make Henry and Mason sound like fear-mongers. Yet
Mason struck a chord in his insistence that northerners could never understand
slavery; and Henry roused the crowd with his refusal to trust ‘any man on earth’
with his rights. Virginians were hearing that their sovereignty was in
jeopardy.”
Despite the success of Mason and Henry to play on the fears of plantation
owners, the broader arguments stressing the advantages of Union carried the day,
albeit narrowly. Virginia ultimately approved ratification by 89 to 79. However,
the South’s obsession over perceived threats to its institution of slavery
remained a central factor in the early decades of the Republic.
Arming Whites
Though today’s Right pretends that the Second Amendment was devised to give
individual Americans the right to own and carry any weapon of their choice so
they can shoot policemen, soldiers and other government representatives in the
cause of anti-government “liberty”
it was primarily a concession to the states
and especially to the South’s fears that were expressed at the Virginia
convention.
Approved by the First Congress as part of the “Bill of Rights,” the Second
Amendment explained its purpose as the need to maintain “the security of a free
State,” an echo of Mason’s concerns about “domestic safety,” i.e. a Southern
state’s ability to maintain slavery by force and defend against slave uprisings.
As the amendment emerged from various committee rewrites, it stated: “A wellregulated Militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of
the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” But that right, of
course, did not extend to all people, not to people of color.
The Second Congress put substance to the structure of state militias by passing
the Militia Acts, which specifically mandated that “white men” of military age
obtain muskets and other supplies for participation in state militias. At the
time, the concerns were not entirely over rebellious slaves, but also over
rebellious poor whites.
Part of the backdrop of the Constitutional Convention in 1787 had been Shays’
Rebellion in western Massachusetts in 1786-1787, an uprising of white farmers
led by a former Continental Army officer, Daniel Shays. After ratification of
the Constitution, the first significant use of federalized militias was in 1794
to crush an anti-tax revolt in western Pennsylvania led by poor whites known as
the Whiskey Rebellion.
That uprising was treated as an act of treason as defined by the U.S.
Constitution, although President Washington used his pardon power to spare rebel
leaders from execution by hanging. Similar mercy was not shown when Southern
states confronted actual or suspected slave revolts. In 1800, Virginia Gov.
James Monroe called out the militia to stop an incipient slave uprising known as
Gabriel’s Rebellion. Twenty-six alleged conspirators were hanged.
Jeffersonian Influences
Of course, slavery and racism were not the only defining characteristics of the
Right during the country’s early years, as economic interests diverged and
political rivalries surfaced. James Madison, for instance, had been a key
protégé of George Washington and an ally of Alexander Hamilton during the
fight for the Constitution.
Madison had even advocated for a greater concentration of power in the federal
government, including giving Congress the explicit power to veto state laws.
However, after the Constitution was in place, Madison began siding with his
Virginian neighbor (and fellow slave-owner) Thomas Jefferson in political
opposition to the Federalists.
In the first years of the constitutional Republic, the Federalists, led by
President Washington and Treasury Secretary Hamilton, pushed the limits of
federal power, particularly with Hamilton’s idea of a national bank which was
seen as favoring the financial interests of the North to the detriment of the
more agrarian South.
The Jeffersonians, coalescing around Jefferson and Madison, fiercely opposed
Hamilton’s national economic planning though the differences often seemed to be
driven by personal animosities and regional rivalries as much as by any grand
ideological vision regarding government authority. The Jeffersonians, for
instance, were sympathetic to the bloody French Revolution, which made a mockery
of the rule of law and the restraint of government power.
Nevertheless, history has generally been kind to Jefferson’s enthusiasm for a
more agrarian America and his supposed commitment to the common man. But what is
left out of this praise for “Jeffersonian democracy” is that Jefferson’s use of
the word “farmers” was often a euphemism for his actual political base, the
slave-owning plantation aristocrats of the South.
At his core, despite his intellectual brilliance, Jefferson was just another
Southern hypocrite. He wrote that “all men are created equal” (in the
Declaration of Independence) but he engaged in pseudo-science to portray
African-Americans as inferior to whites (as he did in his Notes on the State of
Virginia).
His racism rationalized his own economic and personal reliance on slavery. While
desperately afraid of slave rebellions, he is alleged to have taken a young
slave girl, Sally Hemings, as a mistress.
Jefferson’s hypocrisy also surfaced in his attitudes toward a slave revolt in
the French colony of St. Domingue (today’s Haiti), where African slaves took
seriously the Jacobins’ cry of “liberty, equality and fraternity.” After their
demands for freedom were rebuffed and the brutal French plantation system
continued, violent slave uprisings followed.
Hundreds of white plantation owners were slain as the rebels overran the colony.
A self-educated slave named Toussaint L’Ouverture emerged as the revolution’s
leader, demonstrating skills on the battlefield and in the complexities of
politics.
The ‘Black Jacobins’
Despite the atrocities committed by both sides of the conflict, the rebels known
as the “Black Jacobins” gained the sympathy of the American Federalists.
L’Ouverture negotiated friendly relations with the Federalist
administration under President John Adams, and Alexander Hamilton, a native of
the Caribbean himself, helped L’Ouverture draft a constitution.
But events in Paris and Washington soon conspired to undo the promise of Haiti’s
emancipation from slavery. Despite the Federalist sympathies, many American
slave-owners, including Jefferson, looked nervously at the slave rebellion in
St. Domingue. Jefferson feared that slave uprisings might spread northward. “If
something is not done, and soon done,” Jefferson wrote in 1797, “we shall be the
murderers of our own children.”
Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the chaos and excesses of the French Revolution
led to the ascendance of Napoleon Bonaparte, a brilliant and vain military
commander possessed of legendary ambition. As he expanded his power across
Europe, Napoleon also dreamed of rebuilding a French empire in the Americas.
In 1801, Jefferson became the third President of the United States and his
interests at least temporarily aligned with Napoleon’s. The French dictator
wanted to restore French control of St. Domingue and Jefferson wanted to see the
slave rebellion crushed. President Jefferson and Secretary of State
Madison collaborated with Napoleon through secret diplomatic channels. Napoleon
asked Jefferson if the United States would help a French army traveling by sea
to St. Domingue. Jefferson replied that “nothing will be easier than to furnish
your army and fleet with everything and reduce Toussaint [L’Ouverture] to
starvation.”
But Napoleon had a secret second phase of his plan that he didn’t share with
Jefferson. Once the French army had subdued L’Ouverture and his rebel force,
Napoleon intended to advance to the North American mainland, basing a new French
empire in New Orleans and settling the vast territory west of the Mississippi
River.
Stopping Napoleon
In 1802, the French expeditionary force achieved initial success against the
slave army, driving L’Ouverture’s forces back into the mountains. But, as they
retreated, the ex-slaves torched the cities and the plantations, destroying the
colony’s once-thriving economic infrastructure. L’Ouverture, hoping to bring the
war to an end, accepted Napoleon’s promise of a negotiated settlement that would
ban future slavery in the country. As part of the agreement, L’Ouverture turned
himself in.
But Napoleon broke his word. Jealous and contemptuous of L’Ouverture, who was
regarded by some admirers as a general with skills rivaling Napoleon’s, the
French dictator had L’Ouverture shipped in chains back to Europe where he was
mistreated and died in prison.
Infuriated by the betrayal, L’Ouverture’s young generals resumed the war with a
vengeance. In the months that followed, the French army already decimated by
disease was overwhelmed by a fierce enemy fighting in familiar terrain and
determined not to be put back into slavery. Napoleon sent a second French army,
but it too was destroyed. Though the famed general had conquered much of Europe,
he lost 24,000 men, including some of his best troops, in St. Domingue before
abandoning his campaign. The death toll among the ex-slaves was much higher, but
they had prevailed, albeit over a devastated land.
By 1803, a frustrated Napoleon denied his foothold in the New World agreed to
sell New Orleans and the Louisiana territories to Jefferson, a negotiation
handled by Madison that ironically required just the sort of expansive
interpretation of federal powers that the Jeffersonians ordinarily disdained.
However, a greater irony was that the Louisiana Purchase, which opened the heart
of the present United States to American settlement and is regarded as possibly
Jefferson’s greatest achievement as president, had been made possible despite
Jefferson’s misguided and racist collaboration with Napoleon.
“By their long and bitter struggle for independence, St. Domingue’s blacks were
instrumental in allowing the United States to more than double the size of its
territory,” wrote Stanford University professor John Chester Miller in his book,
The Wolf by the Ears: Thomas Jefferson and Slavery. But, Miller observed, “the
decisive contribution made by the black freedom fighters went almost unnoticed
by the Jeffersonian administration.”
Without L’Ouverture’s leadership, the island nation fell into a downward spiral.
In 1804, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, the radical slave leader who had replaced
L’Ouverture, formally declared the nation’s independence and returned it to its
original Indian name, Haiti. A year later, apparently fearing a return of the
French, Dessalines ordered the massacre of the remaining French whites on the
island. Jefferson reacted to the bloodshed by imposing a stiff economic embargo
on Haiti. In 1806, Dessalines himself was brutally assassinated, touching off a
cycle of political violence that would haunt Haiti for the next two centuries.
Even in his final years, Jefferson remained obsessed with Haiti and its link to
the issue of American slavery. In the 1820s, the former president proposed a
scheme for taking away the children born to black slaves in the United States
and shipping them to Haiti. In that way, Jefferson posited that both slavery and
America’s black population could be phased out. Eventually, in Jefferson’s view,
Haiti would be all black and the United States white.
While the racism of Jefferson and many of his followers may be undeniable, it is
not so easy to distinguish between Right and Left in those early years of the
American Republic. Though Hamilton was more open-minded toward freedom for black
slaves, there were elements of his government intervention on behalf of the
fledgling financial sector that might today be regarded as “pro-business” or
elitist as there were parts of Jefferson’s attitude toward greater populism that
might be seen as more “democratic.”
Stumbling toward War
Yet, as the first generation of American leaders passed away and the nation
expanded westward, the issue of slavery remained a threat to America’s unity.
The South’s aggressive defense of its lucrative institution of slavery opened
violent rifts between pro-slave and pro-free settlers in territories to the
west.
The modern distinctions between America’s Right and Left also became more
pronounced, defined increasingly by race. The North, building a manufacturing
economy and influenced by the emancipationist movement, turned increasingly
against slavery, while the South, with a more agrarian economy and much of its
capital invested in slaves, could see no future without the continuation of
slavery.
Politically, those distinctions played out not unlike what Anti-Federalists
George Mason and Patrick Henry had predicted at Virginia’s ratification
convention in 1788. The North gradually gained dominance in wealth and
population and the South’s barbaric practice of slavery emerged as a hindrance
to America’s growing reputation in the world.
So, a key divide of U.S. politics between Right and Left became the differences
over issues of slavery and race. The racist aspects of the Anti-Federalists and
the “Jeffersonian democrats” became a defining feature of the American Right as
captured in the argument for “states’ rights,” i.e., the rights of the Southern
states either to nullify federal laws or to secede from the Union.
Though the concentration of power in Washington D.C. gave rise to legitimate
questions about authoritarianism, the federal government also became the guiding
hand for the nation’s economic development and for elimination of gross regional
injustices such as slavery. Federal action in defense of national principles
regarding justice eventually helped define the American Left.
But the slave-owning South would not go down without a fight. After the election
of Republican Abraham Lincoln in 1860, 11 Southern states seceded from the Union
and established the Confederate States of America with the goal of perpetuating
slavery forever. It took four years of war to force the Southern states back
into the Union and finally bring slavery to an end.
However, the Southern aristocracy soon reclaimed control of the region’s
political structure and instituted nearly a century more of racial oppression
against blacks. During this Jim Crow era, racism and the cruel enforcement of
racial segregation remained central elements of the American Right.
An Anti-Government Coalition
In the latter half of the Nineteenth Century and the early Twentieth Century,
other political and economic factors bolstered the Right, particularly a class
of Northern industrialists and financiers known as the Robber Barons. Their
insistence on laissez-faire economics in the North and their opposition to
reformers such as Theodore Roosevelt dovetailed with anti-federal
attitudes among the South’s white aristocracy.
That coalition, however, was shattered by a string of Wall Street panics and
other economic catastrophes culminating in the Great Depression. With millions
of Americans out of work and many facing starvation, Franklin Roosevelt’s
administration initiated the New Deal which put people back to work building
national infrastructure and imposing government regulations on the freewheeling
ways of Wall Street.
Under Roosevelt, laws were changed to respect the rights of labor unions and
social movements arose demanding greater civil rights for blacks and women. The
Left gained unprecedented ascendance. However, the old alliance of rich Northern
industriasts and Southern segregationists saw dangers in this new assertion of
federal power. The business barons saw signs of “socialism” and the white
supremacists feared “race-mixing.”
After World War II with the United States now a world superpower the continued
existence of institutionalized racism became an embarrassment undermining
America’s claim to be a beacon of human freedom. Finally, spurred on by Martin
Luther King Jr. and other civil rights activists, the federal government finally
moved against the South’s practice of segregation. That reignited the longsimmering conflict between federal power and states’ rights.
Though the federal government prevailed in outlawing racial segregation, the
Right’s anger over this intrusion upon Southern traditions fueled a powerful new
movement of right-wing politicians. Since the Democratic Party led the fight
against segregation in the 1960s, Southern whites rallied to the Republican
Party as their vehicle of political resistance.
Opportunistic politicians, such as Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, deftly
exploited the white backlash and turned much of the Dixie-crat South into solid
Republican Red. This resurgence of white racial resentments also merged with a
reassertion of “libertarian” economics as memories of the Great Depression
faded. In essence, the late Nineteenth Century alliance between segregationist
whites in the South and laissez-faire businessmen in the North was being
reestablished.
This right-wing collaboration reached a new level of intensity in 2008 after the
election of the first African-American president whose victory reflected the
emergence of a multi-racial electorate threatening to end the historic white
political domination of the United States. With the election also coming amid a
Wall Street financial collapse — after years of reduced government regulation —
Barack Obama’s arrival also portended a renewal of federal government activism.
Thus, the age-old battle was rejoined.
Yet, given the cultural tenor of the time, the Right found it difficult to
engage in overt racial slurs against Obama, nor could it openly seek to deny
voting rights to black and brown people. New code words were needed. So Obama’s
legitimacy as an American was questioned with spurious claims that he had been
born in Kenya, and Republicans demanded tighter ballot security to prevent
“voter fraud.”
Today’s Right also recognized that it could not simply emphasize its Confederate
heritage. A more politically correct re-branding was needed. So, the Right
shifted its imagery from the “Stars and Bars” battle flag of the Confederacy to
the “Don’t Tread on Me” flag of the American Revolution. That way, Americans who
don’t overtly see themselves as racist could be drawn into the movement. [See
Consortiumnews.com’s “The Right’s Re-Branding: 1860 to 1776.”]
However, the historical narrative that the Right constructed around the nation’s
Founding was not the one that actually happened. In seeking to present
themselves as the true defenders of the Constitution, the Right had to air-brush
out the failed experiment with the Articles of Confederation, which had made the
states “sovereign” and “independent” with the central government just a “league
of friendship.”
The Constitution represented the nation’s greatest transfer of power into
federal hands in U.S. history, as engineered by Washington, Madison and
Hamilton. Indeed, Madison favored even greater dominance by the central
government over the states than he ultimately got in the Constitution.
However, in the Right’s revisionist version, the Articles of Confederation are
forgotten and the Framers were simply out to create a governing system with
strong states’ rights and a weak federal government. That fabrication played
well with an uneducated right-wing base that could then envision itself using
its Second Amendment rights to fight for the Framers’ vision of “liberty.”
As this right-wing narrative now plays out, Barack Obama is not only a black
Muslim “socialist” oppressing liberty-loving white Christian Americans but he is
a “tyrant” despoiling the beautiful, nearly divine, God-inspired Constitution
that the Framers bestowed upon the nation — including, apparently, those
wonderful provisions protecting slavery.
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).
Failing Fitzgerald’s Masterpiece
Exclusive: As an author, F. Scott Fitzgerald was a master of subtlety in his
characterizations and his style, not exactly the strengths of modern Hollywood,
as is painfully apparent in the latest big-budget, 3-D adaptation of The Great
Gatsby, as Jim DiEugenio explains.
By Jim DiEugenio
There are a number of interesting, but ignored, comparisons between Orson
Welles’s cinematic masterpiece Citizen Kane and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s literary
masterpiece The Great Gatsby.
Young men, who were mature beyond their years, created both works. Welles
completed his film at age 26. Fitzgerald completed his novel at age 29. Neither
man was able to equal, let alone surpass, the excellence he had achieved at such
a young age. Consequently, both looked back ruefully and at times were bitterly
explicit at the early milestones in their careers that they were never able to
match.
Both ended up in Hollywood doing work they considered menial, and far below
their abilities, just to survive. At times they actually lived at other people’s
homes. Welles at director Peter Bogdanovich’s estate in Bel Air; Fitzgerald at
the Encino home of actor Edward Everett Horton.
This was because the true achievement of their early works was not recognized
when they were first released. That recognition took decades to achieve. For
example, at the time of his death in 1940, the book Fitzgerald considered his
finest had sold only 25,000 copies in 15 years. In 1942, Citizen Kane won just
one Oscar, for Best Original Screenplay, and was snubbed for Best Picture and
Best Director.
Further, Citizen Kane and The Great Gatsby share two artistic characteristics.
First, the two works are marvels of both style and technique. As many have
noted, Welles pioneered techniques of artistic expression that no other film
director has surpassed to this day. And when Fitzgerald was at his peak, which
he was here, very few American writers could make complex sentences flow as
gorgeously and effortlessly as he could; yet never losing sight of the meaning
he was trying to convey beneath the words.
And, the meanings of both works strike at the heart of the so-called eponymous
“American Dream,” i.e., the idea that wealth and power and connections will both
make America prosper as a republic, and also bring personal happiness and
fulfillment to its citizens. I know of very few works, perhaps the novels of
Theodore Dreiser qualify, which condemn that concept as harshly or as thoroughly
as Fitzgerald or Welles did.
Fitzgerald’s Frame
Because of the theme he was after, Fitzgerald decided to center his story in New
York, which at that time of the novel the Roaring Twenties had begun to catch up
to London as the financial center of the world. But he deliberately made the
book’s narrator, Nick Carraway, an outsider from the Midwest. (And as we later
discover, Jay Gatsby, whose real name is James Gatz, was also from the west.)
Carraway, who went to Yale, decides to take a job as a stockbroker in New York.
But, by the end of the novel, he is so disgusted with both the people and the
moral milieu of the place that he breaks off with his girlfriend, Jordan Baker,
sells his car, and moves back to the Midwest. (As we shall see, this penultimate
strophe of the novel is inexplicably missing from this present film.)
But although Nick Carraway and his Midwest story begin the novel, we quickly see
that his story soon becomes a framing device around the main action. His tale is
supposed to both parallel and resonate off the actual engine of the plot, which
is the romantic triangle between Gatsby, his long lost love, Daisy Buchanan, and
her husband, the fabulously wealthy Tom Buchanan.
In turn, that triangle is rounded off by an affair Tom is having with a woman
named Myrtle Wilson. Myrtle is far below Tom on the social scale, and she also
has a husband named George, who runs a combination garage/filling station
located between the fictional upper class town of East Egg and New York City.
Nick Carraway is a second cousin to Daisy Buchanan, and he happens to rent a
small bungalow next to Gatsby’s huge mansion in another mythical wealthy enclave
called West Egg. One day he goes to visit his cousin and a young professional
golfer named Jordan Baker is there. At this visit, Carraway learns about Tom
Buchanan’s affair.
He also realizes two things about his mysterious neighbor. First, that Gatsby
gives lavish parties that Jordan Baker has been to, and that Daisy knew Gatsby
from her youth in Louisville.
One day, Nick Carraway gets invited to one of Gatsby’s parties and, by
happenstance, the two neighbors meet and become friends. Nick learns about
Gatsby’s love affair five years previous with Daisy, how they had planned to
marry, and how this was thwarted by the Great War. Nick arranges a meeting
between the two, and this rekindles the lost romance.
As the two begin to see each other, Gatsby insists that Daisy completely
renounce her love for her husband Tom and say that she never loved him. This
struggle culminates in a long and tense two-stage showdown that ends at a room
in the Plaza Hotel in New York. There it is revealed that Daisy cannot bring
herself to do what Gatsby wants her to, and that Tom has found out that Gatsby’s
fortune is based upon his ties to Meyer Wolfsheim, a Jewish-American bootlegger
and gambler.
On the way back from the hotel, Daisy is driving
Gatsby’s car and she hits
Myrtle Wilson and kills her. In another car, Tom sees this and falsely tells
Myrtle’s husband George that Gatsby did the hit-and-run driving.
George then
tracks down Gatsby lying near his pool, whom he kills before taking his own
life.
Nick Callaway helps arrange Gatsby’s funeral, which is attended by almost no one
except his father. He then meets Tom Buchanan on the street. Tom says Gatsby had
it coming for killing Myrtle, revealing that Daisy had lied to him about what
happened. Nick visits the place where he first saw Gatsby standing at the end of
a pier staring at a green light across the bay nearer the Buchanan house.
Disillusioned by all that has happened, he decides to leave New York and return
home.
A Forward Motion
Although the plot includes several major characters, flashbacks and settings,
the forward motion of the story is handled with such skill and dexterity that it
has the effect of a hydraulic transmission: there is nearly no detection of a
shift in place or tone.
What makes this even more impressive is the fact that, strictly speaking, the
book is really a novella. In some versions the text runs to just 176 pages,
meaning there is very little filler in the book. Although Fitzgerald was a
master of descriptive writing, there is very little of that for its own sake.
The author pushes the motion forward and only slows down when he needs to, to
describe an important event or character.
But the marvel of the book is this: In describing the story, characters, and the
author’s technique, I really have not told the reader all that much about the
book. For it really exists in the sharply drawn characterizations, the author’s
memorable depiction of a unique epoch in American history, and his felicitous
use of symbols throughout. All of which give the book a luxurious texture, at
the same time that it lends the novel a rich undercurrent of depth, scope and
meaning.
That final quality is manifest most pungently in the last unforgettable page of
the book where Fitzgerald, after summing up the fate of the rest of the
characters, ends the work with Nick on the beach near Gatsby’s empty house. It
is a lovely crescendo/reverie that almost reaches the level of poetry, summing
up in a few paragraphs the deepest meanings of the story.
Although the ending could have easily been presented visually, that touching and
incandescent coda was not filmed by director Baz Luhrmann in his new movie
adaptation. It is simply presented as text to read. But before presenting the
myriad problems with the disappointing current adaptation, I think it’s
appropriate to address the fact that, historically speaking, Fitzgerald has not
been well served by the film adaptations of his books.
Multiple Adaptations
To my knowledge, this is the eighth effort to film one of his novels. Including
Luhrmann’s rendition, there have been four prior attempts to film The Great
Gatsby; two attempts to adapt Tender is the Night, and one film made of
Fitzgerald’s final, unfinished, novel The Last Tycoon, a book which actually was
about the movie business.
The first version of Gatsby was a silent film starring Warner Baxter. From my
research about it, that film has been lost and only bits and pieces of it
remain. (Some of this can be seen on You Tube.)
In 1949, a talking version of the book was made starring Alan Ladd as Gatsby,
Betty Field as Daisy, and MacDonald Carey as Nick. Reportedly, this version
accented the underworld aspect of the story, turning the tale into at least
partly a film noir. This version was pulled from circulation in 1974, since the
same studio that produced the Ladd version, namely Paramount, also produced the
1974 version.
The 1974 adaptation starred Robert Redford who had not quite attained superstar
status yet as Gatsby, Mia Farrow as Daisy, and Sam Waterston as Nick. It had a
script by Francis Coppola and was directed by the Englishman Jack Clayton, who
had made at least one distinguished film in his career, but that was many years
previous. This picture generated a huge amount of advance publicity, including a
Newsweek cover story. But from the script onward, it turned out to be an
overproduced
misfire.
In 2000, a more modestly produced,and much less ballyhooed–version of the story
was made for cable television. This one starred British actor Toby Stephens as
Gatsby, Mira Sorvino as Daisy, and Paul Rudd as Nick Carraway.
If one includes the productions of the other two novels, this writer has seen
all the available films, with just two exceptions: the 1949 version of The Great
Gatsby and the 1985 TV mini-series version of Tender is the Night. I regret not
seeing the latter, not just because it is very difficult to find anywhere today,
but also because it was reliably praised as being perhaps the finest screen
adaptation of a Fitzgerald novel ever.
As mentioned above, the Alan Ladd version of the book made much, perhaps too
much, of the criminal element. Like so much else in the book, Fitzgerald
artfully lays in this aspect as a suggestive, mysterious background near the
beginning, so that it can be used to powerful effect near the end.
For instance, there are calls made to Gatsby from some large cities, calls we
never actually hear. Then there is a brief meeting between Gatsby, Nick, and
Meyer Wolfsheim, whom, Gatsby informs Nick, fixed the 1919 World Series.
Wolfsheim is clearly meant to suggest Arnold Rothstein, the Jewish-American
racketeer who specialized in organizing mobster influence in professional
athletics, reportedly including the 1919 World Series.
Fitzgerald means to contrast how Gatsby made his money, through his
apprenticeship with Wolfsheim, against Nick’s work in the bond market and Tom
Buchanan’s “honest wealth” in stocks. In fact, near the end, in the duel over
Daisy, Tom uses this underworld angle against Gatsby and states that one of his
Wall Street friends lowered himself and much to his regret got mixed up with
Wolfsheim and Gatsby.
Apparently, back in 1925, Fitzgerald did not foresee how the much more serious
gangsterism of Wall Street would one day clearly outstrip the power and reach of
organized crime. Thereby making the illicit profits of the underworld pale in
comparison to the illicit piracy of “bond salesmen.”
The Fitzgerald Revival
What caused the revival of interest in Fitzgerald that has extended out to this
day? Why is he so much more studied and revered now than in his own time? For,
as I noted, The Great Gatsby did not sell well upon its publication in 1925.
In fact, each of his first two novels, This Side of Paradise and The Beautiful
and Damned, sold more than twice as many copies in their initial run than Gatsby
did in 15 years. And although Fitzgerald always thought it was his best book,
Gatsby did not have anywhere near the critical acclaim while he was alive that
it has today.
Most commentators credit Arthur Mizener’s book, The Far Side of Paradise, with
beginning the Fitzgerald revival. It was published in 1951 and was the first
full-scale biography of Fitzgerald and his mercurial wife Zelda. Although it was
a scholarly look at the writer by a Cornell professor, because Fitzgerald’s life
was so colorful, the book became an unexpected
best-seller.
Mizener’s book became the equivalent of the proverbial first rock in an
avalanche. A whole reconsideration of Fitzgerald took place. His publisher,
Scribner’s, began to reissue his five novels as a set. Academia began to
reexamine the man’s achievement. The Great Gatsby was lavishly praised by such
venerated critics as Lionel Trilling and T. S. Eliot.
By the Sixties, Fitzgerald’s name and reputation had entered the modern American
literary canon. The book made the top ten in both the Modern Library and Time
Magazine lists of the best American 20th Century novels. Today, The Great Gatsby
has sold over ten million copies. It never goes out of print since it is taught
as a standard introduction to the novel at most colleges.
And that immense popularity has contributed to the translation of the book not
only into cinema, but also stage productions. Just this year, there will be
three different theater productions of the novel. One of them an eight-hour
recital of the book itself.
A Subtle Skill
Because of all this devoted analysis, most admirers of his work are today
familiar with how Fitzgerald achieved what he did in this book. First, there is
his flawless writing technique, which reaches a euphony of rhythm and
stateliness that few American writers have ever matched. There is also the
symbology of the book, e.g., the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock that
expands into metaphor, but it is so suffused in Fitzgerald’s depiction of his
characters and the historical period that the symbols never obtrude. Not even at
the end. Connected to this, is the author’s use of understatement to make his
effects, and the high points of his drama, speak louder than they normally
would.
As an example of the last, take the first time that Nick meets Tom’s girlfriend,
Myrtle Wilson. With Nick in his car, Tom picks up Myrtle and brings them both to
an apartment he is renting to carry on the extramarital affair. Myrtle invites
her sister Catherine and two neighbors in the building, a couple called the
McKees, up for some drinks.
There is some small talk by the McKees about Mr. McKee’s hobby, which is
photography, and a bit about Gatsby’s parties and his reputed background from
the war. Myrtle then relates how she met Tom, and how she made a mistake in
marrying her husband. Then Mr. McKee falls asleep and Nick gets drowsy.
Nick, who has been drinking too much, then describes an argument taking place
between Tom and Myrtle over the mentioning of Daisy’s name in public. Defying
Tom, Myrtle starts repeating Daisy’s name over and over. This is Fitzgerald’s
next sentence in the book: “Making a short deft movement, Tom Buchanan broke her
nose with his open hand.”
In the midst of a quiet, expository, almost meanderingly low-key scene, that
sentence has an impact much more potent than its 13, mostly monosyllabic, words.
In fact, once we read it, we can see how the author has been lulling us into a
quiet complacency so that the brutal effect of Tom’s striking a woman who wants
to marry him will be brought home like it was us being struck in the face.
As I watched this scene unfold in front of me in Baz Luhrmann’s film, I could
hardly believe my eyes. First, after the arrival at the apartment, we get the
unmistakable sound of Tom and Myrtle copulating in the bedroom. After this,
Myrtle’s sister Catherine comes to the door, followed by at least seven other
people. None of them, as far as I could see, were the quiet couple, the McKees.
What follows next really resembles something like an orgy. There is loud,
blaring music while everyone is getting drunk. Catherine starts French kissing
Nick in close up shots, and this is intercut with shots of champagne corks
popping. Luhrmann, for no reason I could discern, then takes us outside the
apartment to a black man playing a trumpet outside. Then, the script has Nick
saying something like “I began to like New York.”
Only after all this, does the scene with Tom hitting Myrtle occur. And by then,
because of all the wild clichés that Luhrmann has depicted previously, it has
nowhere near the impact it has in the novel. Instead of saying something about
Myrtle’s yearning for social status, about Tom’s power and brutality, and also
foreshadowing the climactic scene at the Plaza Hotel, where that power and
brutality will assert itself again, it just comes off as being a hackneyed
lover’s quarrel.
And by giving Nick that line out of a commercial about liking New York, that
alters the point that Nick’s outsider character is supposed to make about this
scene. He gets drunk not because he wants to participate in some sex orgy, which
Fitzgerald does not even suggest, he gets drunk because he is bored and then
repulsed by Tom’s actions. In the book, in keeping with the understatement that
sets off the dramatic act, Nick leaves on the elevator with Mr. McKee. He then
ends up at Penn Station waiting for a train while reading the newspaper.
Meeting the Gangster
Take another memorable scene from the book, the one in which Gatsby and Nick go
into New York to eat lunch because he wants to talk to Nick about doing him a
personal favor. At the restaurant, Wolfsheim approaches and sits down thinking
that Gatsby wants to introduce him to Nick for business purposes. During the
scene, Wolfsheim explains how he met Gatsby after the war and took a liking to
him personally because of his good looks and demeanor.
Wolfsheim says quaintly: “There’s the kind of man you’d like to take home and
introduce to your mother and sister.” He then adds that Gatsby is “very careful
about women. He would never so much look at a friend’s wife.”
After this brief conversation based upon a mistaken assumption, Wolfsheim
excuses himself and leaves. Nick asks who he is and Gatsby replies he is a
gambler who fixed the 1919 World Series, a fact that astonishes Nick. Again,
this is a quiet, conversational scene which ends with a compelling discovery
about Gatsby’s business relationships.
Luhrmann moves the scene to a barbershop. He then has the characters walk
through a secret door and step down into a speakeasy, a Luhrmannesque speakeasy.
It features literally scores of people, maybe hundreds, drinking up like there
is no tomorrow. There are also girls dancing in a neatly choreographed musical
number with loud music on the soundtrack.
Luhrmann adds to the frenzy of the scene by employing stop-action frames and
jump cuts in his usual headlong editing style. Then, Wolfsheim actually says
something to Nick about Daisy, and finally, Tom Buchanan comes into the
speakeasy, and Gatsby leaves. Again, the problem is that Luhrmann’s over-the-top
operatics actually defeat the purpose of the scene.
The friendliness and almost tenderness that Wolfsheim shows to his protégé,
Gatsby; the matter-of-fact way Gatsby calls Wolfsheim a gambler who fixed the
World Series, a subtle technique that Fitzgerald employs to show how Gatsby has
adapted to this world; and Nick’s quiet astonishment that he could be in the
milieu of such people. All this is lost in the midst of the visual twists and
pyrotechnics Luhrmann is so addicted to.
The Wrong Director
When I first heard that Luhrmann was going to direct this new adaptation, I had
some reservations since I understood his visual style from his previous film
Moulin Rouge. But I thought back to Elia Kazan’s 1976 film of Fitzgerald’s The
Last Tycoon, and I recalled how Kazan had largely restrained his usual
hyperdramatic style in order to capture some of the atmosphere and feeling of
Fitzgerald. Well, Kazan evidently understood something that Luhrmann did not.
Kazan was trying his best to serve the book. Confirming my worst fear, Luhrmann
wants to give us not The Great Gatsby by Scott Fitzgerald, but The Great Gatsby
by Baz Luhrmann. And the last thing in the world that Luhrmann understands is
understatement, which is very odd because, as Dwight MacDonald once wrote, any
real artist understands that to have effects you have to have contrast, which
Fitzgerald understood very well.
But what Luhrmann does not seem to understand is that if all your scenes scream,
then they drown each other out: that is they all whisper since they are all done
at the same intense pitch.
In addition to his frenetic cutting style, Luhrmann also does something I don’t
ever recall another director doing with a writer of Fitzgerald’s stature. In the
middle of the film, he suddenly starts putting some words from the novel on
screen in white letters, letter by letter. To me, this was jarring and
distracting.
Another textural problem I had was the recurrent use of huge panoramic shots
done by a crane over New York and the surrounding water. I think this was done
for the 3D version of the film. But by doing it repeatedly, it loses its impact
for when it is needed most, which is only in certain spots, especially at the
end of the book.
And then there is the music. In an apparent attempt to cash in on the youth
market, Luhrmann has used some contemporary musicians and singers like Jay-Z,
Fergie, and Beyonce Knowles. Luhrmann wanted to use modern hip-hop pop and
alternative rock and translate these contemporary songs back into Twenties
arrangements.
My questions are: Why not do the opposite? Why not take the music of the Jazz
Age, and modify it with the electronic tools we have today in order to give it a
stereophonic sound? To me, the music does not work either in setting a mood, or
commenting on the story. It seems a simplistic way to make money off the
soundtrack.
Over the Top
As I mentioned above, many people thought that the 1974 version of the film was
overproduced. It may have been. But in comparison to Luhrmann’s adaptation, it
looks like a low-budget B movie. Again, I was taken aback by the depiction of
Nick attending Gatsby’s first party.
In the book, Fitzgerald actually lists the people who attended Gatsby’s parties
that summer. (See the beginning of Chapter Four.) It may be about a hundred or
so people. The first party in Luhrmann’s film easily has ten times that many.
And Luhrmann choreographs it, and I exaggerate here a bit, to resemble something
out of a Busby Berkeley musical. He uses gigantic sets, garish lighting, fast
cutting, loud music, all in the aid of creating a kind of wild bacchanalia. The
problem with this is simple: there is no re-creation of either mood or time. In
other words, there is no transport to a different place in the past.
There is no sense of the epic romantic grandeur Fitzgerald is out to create
through his main character, whom in a line cut from the film one of the minor
characters in the book calls a modern David Belasco, a New York theater
impresario famous around the turn of the century. With Luhrmann’s treatment, one
could call DiCaprio’s Gatsby a modern Ken Russell, the flamboyant English film
director.
Another good example of the contrast between the book and film is the climactic
scene between Tom Buchanan and Gatsby. Daisy has arranged a meeting at her home
to tell
her husband that she and Gatsby are in love and will be leaving. But
the scene shifts to the Plaza Hotel. Realizing what has been going on, Tom has
done some research on Gatsby and his association with Wolfsheim.
And after some back-and-forth bickering between the two men over Daisy, Buchanan
plays his ace card and calls Gatsby a swindler. The argument gets heated and Tom
then reveals that Gatsby’s alleged drugstore business is a really a front for
bootlegging. Fitzgerald subtly caps this scene by using a reference from one of
Gatsby’s first parties, when a girl threw in, among some idle chatter, the rumor
that Gatsby had killed a man. In a masterly return to that early dialogue,
Fitzgerald now recalls the phrase:
“I turned back to Gatsby, and was startled at his expression. He looked, and
this is said in all contempt for the babbled slander of his garden, as if he had
‘killed a man.’ For a moment the set of his face could be described in just that
fantastic way.”
Because of the precise, small-scale way that Fitzgerald has calibrated the scene
with the use of certain words, like swindler; with the details of Daisy trying
to light a cigarette; with the music drifting upwards from the dance hall below
and because these have been used like a jeweler setting diamonds in a Swiss
watch, the impact of the above three sentences is like a giant velvet glove
pushing us back in our seats. Gatsby’s ugly past, which he used to attain the
wealth he thought he needed to win back his lost love, has been tragically
exposed.
Cinematic Histrionics
That kind of artistry does not interest Luhrmann. So again, I sat incredulously
as this scene approached its climax in the film. With all the subtlety of say
Martin Scorsese, DiCaprio first swings his hand back and smashes a glass to the
floor. He then flies into a rage, turns around, and walks across the room to Tom
and stands over him.
And then Luhrmann cuts into a close up of DiCaprio actually getting right into
Tom Buchanan’s face, separated from it by about 10 centimeters. Needless to say,
this is not Fitzgerald and it’s not in keeping with the character he created.
Although some have said that Luhrmann and his co-scenarist Craig Pearce have
followed the story fairly faithfully, I disagree. To the point that I wonder how
many of these reviewers have read the book lately.
Luhrmann and Pearce have adapted the book loosely; it’s a liberal adaptation. In
addition to the points I have already made, they have, for all practical
purposes, jettisoned the entire romance between Nick and Jordan Baker, the
professional golfer Nick meets when he first drives over to see his second
cousin Daisy.
Jordan Baker is in the film, but her role is greatly reduced and there is no
parallel coupling of the two as in the book. Therefore, the story loses a
dimension since Fitzgerald used the Carraway-Baker affair to comment on the
Gatsby-Buchanan affair, and also to differentiate Nick’s character from Gatsby.
Luhrmann and Pearce further tinker with the story by installing their own
framing device. Nick is still the narrator, but at the beginning we see him in
some kind of sanitarium talking with a doctor. The doctor tells him to start
writing down the experience that landed him there. Therefore, the telling of the
story becomes part of the rather trite device of mental therapy. (This is how
those white letters of the novel appear on the screen.)
Pearce and Luhrmann also cut out the final meeting between Nick and Tom, where
Nick learns about Daisy’s deception about running over Myrtle Wilson, and how
this lie led to both Gatsby’s death and the Buchanans leaving the area shortly
afterwards.
Mishandling the Funeral
And what Pearce and Luhrmann do to the ending! One of the most endearing
episodes in the novel is Nick arranging Gatsby’s funeral. He can’t get anyone to
show up, not even Wolfsheim. This is very strange to the Midwesterner since so
many people had taken advantage of the man’s prodigal generosity at his parties.
But unexpectedly, Gatsby’s father shows up. And there follows one of the most
touching scenes in the novel. Mr. Gatz shows Nick a little card he retrieved
from a book his son had. On the card is written a set of rules the boy should
obey in order to advance in the world. Mr. Gatz comments that he always knew his
son would be a formidable figure one day.
The unstated irony, of course, is that those rules did not make Gatsby what he
was. His association with Wolfsheim did.
But besides cutting that out, prior to the funeral, Luhrmann shows us Gatsby
lying in state. And we see scores of people filing by his exposed body in a
casket. Then, realizing that this is the opposite of what Fitzgerald wrote, he
then shows us the sparely attended funeral. Never bothering to explain why so
many would be at the former, yet so few at the latter.
Then there’s the acting. Tobey Maguire, a man whose success I have never been
able to figure out, is Nick. As others have noted, Maguire’s voice is so
nondescript that you forget it very soon after he speaks. So he was not a good
choice for the narrator just on that score.
But as a character, Nick Carraway is the kind of man who has to exist
essentially in a mode of discovery and reaction. Therefore, what was needed was
an actor of real intelligence and resourcefulness who’s own economic means of
expression matched the author’s. Perhaps a young Jon Voight could have pulled it
off. Instead, in Maguire, Luhrmann has cast an actor who could barely handle the
comic book character Spiderman. He’s simply a zero.
As Daisy, Luhrmann gives us the 28-year-old Carey Mulligan who had mostly done
television up until this time. To me, she was as non-descript as Maguire in face
and voice. She never captures the wonderful line Fitzgerald gives to Gatsby
about Daisy: her voice was full of money.
Joel Edgerton is cast as her husband Tom. Fitzgerald means Buchanan to be a
newly rich neighbor trying to affect learning and class and likeability, but
whose natural instincts keep exposing all that as a sham. Edgerton captures none
of that surface. He comes off as a sweaty rugby player almost from the start.
DiCaprio’s Interpretation
To complete the failed ensemble, there is Leonardo DiCaprio as Gatz/Gatsby. The
man who tried being successful the All-American way and found out that it didn’t
work, who then did achieve success the scorned-upon way and tried to hide this
from an upper class of snobs and hypocrites who, in many ways, are worse people
than he.
Gatz/Gatsby is a man who has essentially, by his own will and imagination,
created an illusion of a country squire to aid in sustaining his dream. Very few
actors could create this almost ethereal character who has now become an icon to
millions. The problem is that DiCaprio is really just an earnest yeoman in the
part. He never actually inhabits the character from the inside out.
And Luhrmann does not help him. To create a character like this takes a talented
and dedicated actor being coached by a director who understands how uphill the
journey is, and is willing to be there as a tutor all the way.
Far and away, the best performance I ever saw as
a Fitzgerald hero was a young
Robert DeNiro as Monroe Stahr in The Last Tycoon. DeNiro was directed in that
film by Elia Kazan, one of the founders of the The Actors Studio, and one of the
best actors’ directors ever. DeNiro lost over 40 pounds for that part and he
rehearsed with Kazan on weekends. He needed to master Stahr’s walk and carriage.
Plus, DeNiro did mental exercises so as to perfect the overbearing attitude of a
very bright studio president who had everything under his control.
To put it
mildly, I don’t see any of that kind of hard preparation work in DiCaprio’s
performance. He can’t even capture the externals of the character: his voice
keeps on slipping around without any consistency and there is nothing
ethereal about his bearing or walk.
DiCaprio here is the opposite of what DeNiro was. Not an artist, but a leading
man. A hundred actors could do what he did.
Decades ago, the redoubtable film critic Stanley Kauffmann mapped out two ways
to evaluate adaptations of estimable books: 1.) Does the film create the effect
of the novel in a substantial way? If not, then 2.) Does it create an effect by
way of its own artistry?
There have been films that have achieved the first category e.g. The Spy Who
Came in from the Cold. And there are some who have achieved the second, Roman
Polanksi’s Tess. This film does neither. And it does so in an arrogant, loud and
brash way that is offensive to those who understand the complex statement
Fitzgerald was making about the so-called American Dream.
I have little doubt that if Fitzgerald could see this pastiche, the dirt atop
his grave would be quaking.
Jim DiEugenio is a researcher and writer on the assassination of President John
F. Kennedy and other mysteries of that era. His new book is Destiny Betrayed
(Second Edition) from Skyhorse Publishing.
Reagan and Argentina’s Dirty War
Exclusive: The 87-year-old ex-Argentine dictator Jorge Videla died Friday in
prison where he was serving sentences for grotesque human rights crimes in the
1970s and 1980s. But one of Videla’s key backers, the late President Ronald
Reagan, continues to be honored by Americans, writes Robert Parry.
By Robert Parry
The death of ex-Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, a mastermind of the
right-wing state terrorism that swept Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s,
means that one more of Ronald Reagan’s old allies is gone from the scene.
Videla, who fancied himself a theoretician of anti-leftist repression, died in
prison at age 87 after being convicted of a central role in the Dirty War that
killed some 30,000 people and involved kidnapping the babies of “disappeared”
women so they could be raised by military officers who were often implicated in
the murders of the mothers.
The leaders of the Argentine junta also saw themselves as pioneers in the
techniques of torture and psychological operations, sharing their lessons with
other regional dictatorships. Indeed, the chilling word “disappeared” was coined
in recognition of their novel tactic of abducting dissidents off the streets,
torturing them and then murdering them in secret sometimes accomplishing the
task by chaining naked detainees together and pushing them from planes over the
Atlantic Ocean.
With such clandestine methods, the dictatorship could leave the families in
doubt while deflecting international criticism by suggesting that the
“disappeared” might have traveled to faraway lands to live in luxury, thus
combining abject terror with clever propaganda and disinformation.
To pull off the trick, however, required collaborators in the U.S. news media
who would defend the junta and heap ridicule on anyone who alleged that the
thousands upon thousands of “disappeared” were actually being systematically
murdered. One such ally was Ronald Reagan, who used his platform as a newspaper
and radio commentator in the late 1970s to minimize the human rights crimes
underway in Argentina and to counter the Carter administration’s human rights
protests.
For instance, in a newspaper column on Aug. 17, 1978, some 2½ years into
Argentina’s Dirty War, Reagan portrayed Videla’s junta as the real victims here,
the good guys who were getting a bad rap for their reasonable efforts to protect
the public from terrorism. Reagan wrote:
“The new government set out to restore order at the same time it started to
rebuild the nation’s ruined economy. It is very close to succeeding at the
former, and well on its way to the latter. Inevitably in the process of rounding
up hundreds of suspected terrorists, the Argentine authorities have no doubt
locked up a few innocent people, too. This problem they should correct without
delay.
“The incarceration of a few innocents, however, is no reason to open the jails
and let the terrorists run free so they can begin a new reign of terror. Yet,
the Carter administration, so long on self-righteousness and frequently so short
on common sense, appears determined to force the Argentine government to do just
that.”
Rather than challenge the Argentine junta over the thousands of
“disappearances,” Reagan expressed concern that the United States was making a
grave mistake by alienating Argentina, “a country important to our future
security.”
He mocked U.S. Ambassador Raul Castro who “mingles in Buenos Aires plazas with
relatives of the locked-up suspected terrorists, thus seeming to legitimize all
their claims to martyrdom. It went unreported in this country, but not a single
major Argentine official showed up at this year’s Fourth of July celebration at
the U.S. Embassy an unprecedented snub but hardly surprising under the
circumstances.”
The Cocaine Connection
Reagan’s Argentine friends also took the lead in devising ways to fund the anticommunist crusade through the drug trade. In 1980, the Argentine intelligence
services helped organize the so-called Cocaine Coup in Bolivia, deploying neoNazi thugs to violently oust the left-of-center government and replace it with
generals closely tied to the early cocaine trafficking networks.
Bolivia’s coup regime ensured a reliable flow of coca to Colombia’s Medellin
cartel, which quickly grew into a sophisticated conglomerate for smuggling
cocaine into the United States. Some of those drug profits then went to finance
right-wing paramilitary operations across the region, according to U.S.
government investigations.
For instance, Bolivian cocaine kingpin Roberto Suarez invested more than $30
million in various right-wing paramilitary operations, according to U.S. Senate
testimony in 1987 by an Argentine intelligence officer, Leonardo Sanchez-Reisse.
He testified that the Suarez drug money was laundered through front companies in
Miami before going to Central America, where Argentine intelligence helped
organize a paramilitary force, called the Contras, to attack leftist-ruled
Nicaragua.
After defeating President Carter in Election 1980 and becoming President in
January 1981, Reagan entered into a covert alliance with the Argentine junta. He
ordered the CIA to collaborate with Argentina’s Dirty War experts in training
the Contras, who were soon rampaging through towns in northern Nicaragua, raping
women and dragging local officials into public squares for executions. Some
Contras also went to work in the cocaine-smuggling business. [See Robert Parry’s
Lost History.]
Much as he served as a pitch man for the Argentine junta, Reagan also deflected
allegations of human rights violations by the Contras and various right-wing
regimes in Central America, including Guatemala where another military junta was
engaging in genocide against Mayan villages.
The behind-the-scenes intelligence relationship between the Argentine generals
and Reagan’s CIA puffed up Argentina’s self-confidence so much that the generals
felt they could not only continue repressing their own citizens but could settle
an old score with Great Britain over control of the Falkland Islands, what the
Argentines call the Malvinas.
Even as Argentina moved to invade the islands in 1982, the Reagan administration
was divided between America’s traditional alliance with Great Britain and its
more recent collaboration with the Argentines. Reagan’s U.N. Ambassador Jeane
Kirkpatrick joined the Argentine generals for an elegant state dinner in
Washington.
Finally, however, Reagan sided with British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher
whose counterattack drove the Argentines from the islands and led to the
eventual collapse of the dictatorship in Buenos Aires. However, Argentina only
slowly began to address the shocking crimes of the Dirty War.
Baby Snatching
The trial of Videla and co-defendant Reynaldo Bignone for the baby snatching did
not end until 2012 when an Argentine court convicted the pair in the scheme to
murder leftist mothers and farm their infants out to military personnel, a
shocking process that was known to the Reagan administration even as it worked
closely with the bloody regime in the 1980s.
Testimony at the trial included a videoconference from Washington with Elliott
Abrams, Reagan’s Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs who
said he urged Bignone to reveal the babies’ identities as Argentina began a
transition to democracy in 1983. Abrams said the Reagan administration “knew
that it wasn’t just one or two children,” indicating that U.S. officials
believed there was a high-level “plan because there were many people who were
being murdered or jailed.”
A human rights group, Grandmothers of the Plaza de Mayo, says as many as 500
babies were stolen by the military during the repression from 1976 to 1983.
General Videla was accused of permitting and concealing the scheme to harvest
infants from pregnant women who were kept alive in military prisons only long
enough to give birth. According to the charges, the babies were taken from the
new mothers, sometimes after late-night Caesarean sections, and then distributed
to military families or sent to orphanages.
After the babies were pulled away, the mothers were removed to another site for
their executions. Some were put aboard death flights and pushed out of military
planes over open water.
One of the most notorious cases involved Silvia Quintela, a leftist doctor who
attended to the sick in shanty towns around Buenos Aires. On Jan. 17, 1977,
Quintela was abducted off a Buenos Aires street by military authorities because
of her political leanings. At the time, Quintela and her agronomist husband Abel
Madariaga were expecting their first child.
According to witnesses who later testified before a government truth commission,
Quintela was held at a military base called Campo de Mayo, where she gave birth
to a baby boy. As in similar cases, the infant then was separated from the
mother.
What happened to the boy is still not clear, but Quintela reportedly was
transferred to a nearby airfield. There, victims were stripped naked, shackled
in groups and dragged aboard military planes. The planes then flew out over the
Rio de la Plata or the Atlantic Ocean, where soldiers pushed the victims out of
the planes and into the water to drown.
According to a report by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, the
Argentine military viewed the kidnappings as part of the larger
counterinsurgency strategy.
“The anguish generated in the rest of the surviving family because of the
absence of the disappeared would develop, after a few years, into a new
generation of subversive or potentially subversive elements, thereby not
permitting an effective end to the Dirty War,” the commission said in describing
the army’s reasoning for kidnapping the infants of murdered women. The
kidnapping strategy conformed with the “science” of the Argentine
counterinsurgency operations.
According to government investigations, the military’s intelligence officers
also advanced Nazi-like methods of torture by testing the limits of how much
pain a human being could endure before dying. The torture methods included
experiments with electric shocks, drowning, asphyxiation and sexual perversions,
such as forcing mice into a woman’s vagina. Some of the implicated military
officers had trained at the U.S.-run School of the Americas.
The Argentine tactics were emulated throughout Latin America. According to a
Guatemalan truth commission, the right-wing military there also adopted the
practice of taking suspected subversives on death flights, although over the
Pacific Ocean.
Spinning Terror
Gen. Videla, in particular, took pride in his counterinsurgency theories,
including clever use of words to confuse and deflect. Known for his dapper style
and his English-tailored suits, Videla rose to power amid Argentina’s political
and economic unrest in the early-to-mid 1970s.
“As many people as necessary must die in Argentina so that the country will
again be secure,” he declared in 1975 in support of a “death squad” known as the
Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance. [See A Lexicon of Terror by Marguerite
Feitlowitz.]
On March 24, 1976, Videla led the military coup which ousted the ineffective
president, Isabel Peron. Though armed leftist groups had been shattered by the
time of the coup, the generals still organized a counterinsurgency campaign to
wipe out any remnants of what they judged political subversion.
Videla called this “the process of national reorganization,” intended to
reestablish order while inculcating a permanent animosity toward leftist
thought. “The aim of the Process is the profound transformation of
consciousness,” Videla announced.
Along with selective terror, Videla employed sophisticated public relations
methods. He was fascinated with techniques for using language to manage popular
perceptions of reality. The general hosted international conferences on P.R. and
awarded a $1 million contract to the giant U.S. firm of Burson Marsteller.
Following the Burson Marsteller blueprint, the Videla government put special
emphasis on cultivating American reporters from elite publications.
“Terrorism is not the only news from Argentina, nor is it the major news,” went
the optimistic P.R. message. Since the jailings and executions of dissidents
were rarely acknowledged, Videla felt he could count on friendly U.S. media
personalities to defend his regime, people like former California Gov. Ronald
Reagan.
In a grander context, Videla and the other generals saw their mission as a
crusade to defend Western Civilization against international communism. They
worked closely with the Asian-based World Anti-Communist League and its Latin
American affiliate, the Confederacion Anticomunista Latinoamericana [CAL].
Latin American militaries collaborated on projects such as the cross-border
assassinations of political dissidents. Under one project, called Operation
Condor, political leaders, centrist and leftist alike, were shot or bombed in
Buenos Aires, Rome, Madrid, Santiago and Washington. Operation Condor sometimes
employed CIA-trained Cuban exiles as assassins. [See Consortiumnews.com’s
“Hitler’s Shadow Reaches toward Today,” or Robert Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]
For their roles in the baby kidnappings, Videla, who was already in prison for
other crimes against humanity, was sentenced to 50 years; Bignone received 15
years.
Earlier in May, Guatemala’s ex-dictator Efrain Rios Montt, another close ally of
Ronald Reagan, was convicted of genocide against Mayan Indians in 1982-83 and
was sentenced to 80 years in prison. [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Ronald Reagan:
Accessory to Genocide.”]
Yet, while fragile democracies in places like Argentina and Guatemala have
sought some level of accountability for these crimes against humanity, the
United States continues to honor the principal political leader who aided,
abetted and rationalized these atrocities across the entire Western Hemisphere,
the 40th President of the United States, Ronald Reagan.
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).
Argentina’s Dapper State Terrorist
From the Archive: Ex-Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla, who died Friday in
prison at 87, saw the Dirty War that killed some 30,000 people as an
intellectual exercise in exterminating subversive thought even across
generations by transferring babies of the “disappeared” to military families, as
Marta Gurvich recounted in 1998.
By Marta Gurvich (Originally published Aug. 19, 1998)
Former Argentine president Jorge Rafael Videla, the dapper dictator who launched
the so-called Dirty War in 1976, was arrested on June 9, 1998, for a
particularly bizarre crime of state, one that rips at the heart of human
relations.
Videla, known for his English-tailored suits and his ruthless counterinsurgency
theories, stands accused of permitting, and concealing, a scheme to harvest
infants from pregnant women who were kept alive in military prisons only long
enough to give birth.
According to the charges, the babies were taken from the new mothers, sometimes
by late-night Caesarean sections, and then distributed to military families or
shipped to orphanages. After the babies were pulled away, the mothers were
removed to another site for their executions.
Yet, after Videla’s arrest in 1998, Argentina was engulfed in a legal debate
over whether Videla could be judged a second time for these grotesque
kidnappings. After democracy was restored in Argentina, Videla was among the
generals convicted of human rights crimes, including “disappearances,” tortures,
murders and kidnappings.
In 1985, Videla was sentenced to life imprisonment at the military prison of
Magdalena. But, on Dec. 29, 1990, amid rumblings of another possible military
coup, President Carlos Menem pardoned Videla and other convicted generals. Many
politicians considered the pardons a pragmatic decision of national
reconciliation that sought to shut the door on the dark history of the so-called
Dirty War when the military slaughtered as many as 30,000 Argentineans.
Relatives of the victims, however, continued to uncover evidence that children
taken from their mothers’ wombs sometimes were being raised as the adopted
children of their mothers’ murderers. For 15 years, a group called Grandmothers
of the Plaza de Mayo demanded the return of these kidnapped children, estimated
to number as many as 500.
After years of detective work, the Grandmothers documented the identities of 256
missing babies. Of those, however, only 56 children were ever located and seven
of them had died. Aided by breakthroughs in genetic testing, the Grandmothers
succeeded in returning 31 children to their biological families. Thirteen were
raised jointly by their adoptive and biological families and the remaining cases
bogged down in court custody battles.
The Baby Harvest
But the baby kidnappings gained a new focus in 1997 with developments in the
case of Silvia Quintela, a leftist doctor who attended to the sick in shanty
towns around Buenos Aires. On Jan. 17, 1977, Quintela was abducted off a Buenos
Aires street by military authorities because of her political leanings. At the
time, Quintela and her agronomist husband Abel Madariaga were expecting their
first child.
According to witnesses who later testified before a government truth commission,
Quintela was held at a military base called Campo de Mayo, where she gave birth
to a baby boy. As in similar cases, the infant then was separated from the
mother. What happened to the boy is still not clear, but Quintela reportedly was
transferred to a nearby airfield.
There, victims were stripped naked, shackled in groups and dragged aboard
military planes. The planes then flew out over the Rio de la Plata or the
Atlantic Ocean, where soldiers pushed the victims out of the planes and into the
water to drown.
After democracy was restored in 1983, Madariaga, who had fled into exile in
Sweden, returned to Argentina and searched for his wife. He learned about her
death and the birth of his son. Madariaga came to suspect that a military
doctor, Norberto Atilio Bianco, had kidnapped the boy. Bianco had overseen
Caesarean sections performed on captured women, according to witnesses. He then
allegedly drove the new mothers to the airport.
In 1987, Madariaga demanded DNA testing of Bianco’s two children, a boy named
Pablo and a girl named Carolina, both of whom were suspected children of
disappeared women. Madariaga thought Pablo might be his son. But Bianco and his
wife, Susana Wehrli, fled Argentina to Paraguay, where they resettled with the
two children. Argentine judge Roberto Marquevich sought the Biancos’
extradition, but Paraguay balked for 10 years.
Finally, faced with demands from the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights,
Paraguay relented. Bianco and Wehrli were returned to face kidnapping charges.
But the two children, now young adults with small children of their own, refused
to return to Argentina or submit to DNA testing.
Though realizing they were adopted, Pablo and Carolina did not want to know
about the fate of their real mothers and did not want to jeopardize the middleclass lives they had enjoyed in the Bianco household. [For more details about
this case, see “Baby-Snatching: Argentina’s Dirty War Secret.”]
As an offshoot of the Bianco case, Judge Marquevich ordered the arrest of
Videla. The judge accused the former dictator of facilitating the snatching of
Pablo and Carolina as well as four other children. Marquevich found that Videla
was aware of the kidnappings and took part in a cover-up of the crimes. The
aging general was placed under house arrest.
In a related case, another judge, Alfredo Bagnasco, began investigating whether
the baby-snatching was part of an organized operation and thus a premeditated
crime of state. According to a report by the Inter-American Commission on Human
Rights, the Argentine military viewed the kidnappings as part of a larger
counterinsurgency strategy.
“The anguish generated in the rest of the surviving family because of the
absence of the disappeared would develop, after a few years, into a new
generation of subversive or potentially subversive elements, thereby not
permitting an effective end to the Dirty War,” the commission said in describing
the army’s reasoning for kidnapping the infants of murdered women.
The kidnapping strategy conformed with the “science” of the Argentine
counterinsurgency operations. The Dirty War’s clinical anti-communist
practitioners refined torture techniques, sponsored cross-border assassinations
and collaborated with organized-crime elements.
According to government investigations, the military’s intelligence officers
advanced Nazi-like methods of torture by testing the limits of how much pain a
human being could endure before dying. The torture methods included experiments
with electric shocks, drowning, asphyxiation and sexual perversions, such as
forcing mice into a woman’s vagina. Some of the implicated military officers had
trained at the U.S.-run School of the Americas.
‘Pink Panther’
Behind this Dirty War and its excesses stood the slight, well-dressed,
gentlemanly figure of Gen. Videla. Called “bone” or the “pink panther” because
of his slim build, Videla emerged as a leading theorist for international anticommunist strategies in the mid-1970s.
Videla’s tactics were emulated throughout Latin America and were defended by
prominent American right-wing politicians, including Ronald Reagan. [Regarding
Reagan’s personal embrace of “dirty war” tactics, see Consortiumnews.com’s “How
Reagan Promoted Genocide.”]
Videla rose to power amid Argentina’s political and economic unrest in the
early-to-mid 1970s. “As many people as necessary must die in Argentina so that
the country will again be secure,” he declared in 1975 in support of a “death
squad” known as the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance. [See A Lexicon of Terror
by Marguerite Feitlowitz.]
On March 24, 1976, Videla led the military coup which ousted the ineffective
president, Isabel Peron. Though armed leftist groups had been shattered by the
time of the coup, the generals still organized a counterinsurgency campaign to
eradicate any remnants of what they judged political subversion.
Videla called this “the process of national reorganization,” intended to
reestablish order while inculcating a permanent animosity toward leftist
thought. “The aim of the Process is the profound transformation of
consciousness,” Videla announced.
Along with selective terror, Videla employed sophisticated public relations
methods. He was fascinated with techniques for using language to manage popular
perceptions of reality. The general hosted international conferences on P.R. and
awarded a $1 million contract to the giant U.S. firm of Burson Marsteller.
Following the Burson Marsteller blueprint, the Videla government put special
emphasis on cultivating American reporters from elite publications.
“Terrorism is not the only news from Argentina, nor is it the major news,” went
the optimistic P.R. message.
Since the jailings and executions of dissidents were rarely acknowledged, Videla
felt he could deny government involvement. He often suggested that the missing
Argentines were not dead, but had slipped away to live comfortably in other
countries.
“I emphatically deny that there are concentration camps in Argentina, or
military establishments in which people are held longer than is absolutely
necessary in this fight against subversion,” he told British journalists in
1977. [See A Lexicon of Terror.]
A Crusade
In a grander context, Videla and the other generals saw their mission as a
crusade to defend Western Civilization against international communism. They
worked closely with the Asian-based World Anti-Communist League and its Latin
American affiliate, the Confederacion Anticomunista Latinoamericana [CAL].
Latin American militaries collaborated on projects such as the cross-border
assassinations of political dissidents. Under one project, called Operation
Condor, anti-government political leaders, centrist and leftist alike, were shot
or bombed in Buenos Aires, Rome, Madrid, Santiago and Washington. Operation
Condor often employed CIA-trained Cuban exiles as assassins.
In 1980, four years after the coup, the Argentine military exported its terror
tactics into neighboring Bolivia. There, Argentine intelligence operatives
helped Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie and major drug lords mount a brutal
putsch, known as the Cocaine Coup.
The bloody operation turned Bolivia into the first modern drug state and
expanded cocaine smuggling into the United States. [For more details, see Robert
Parry’s Secrecy & Privilege.]
Videla’s anything-goes anti-communism struck a responsive chord with the Reagan
administration which came to power in 1981. President Reagan quickly reversed
President Jimmy Carter’s condemnation of the Argentine junta’s record on human
rights. Reagan’s U.N. Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick even hosted the urbane
Argentine generals at an elegant state dinner.
More substantively, Reagan authorized CIA collaboration with the Argentine
intelligence service for training and arming the Nicaraguan Contras. The Contras
were soon implicated in human rights atrocities and drug smuggling of their own.
But the Contras benefitted from the Reagan administration’s own “perception
management” operation which portrayed them as “the moral equivalent of the
Founding Fathers.” [For details, see Parry’s Lost History.]
In 1982, however, the Argentine military went a step too far. Possibly deluded
by its new coziness with Washington, the army invaded the British-controlled
Falkland Islands. Given the even-closer Washington-London alliance, the Reagan
administration sided with Margaret Thatcher’s government, which crushed the
Argentine invaders in a brief war.
The humiliated generals relinquished power in 1983. Then, after democratic
elections, the new president Raul Alfonsin created a truth commission to collect
evidence about the Dirty War crimes. The grisly details shocked Argentines and
the world.
Ongoing Echo
Some Argentine analysts believe that repercussions from that violent era
continued for decades, with organized crime rampant and corruption reaching into
the highest levels of the government, especially during the administration of
President Menem, who pardoned Videla and other practitioners of the Dirty War.
Menem’s sister-in-law, Amira Yoma, reportedly was under investigation in Spain
for money-laundering. A reporter investigating mob ties was burned alive.
Relatives of a prosecutor examining gold smuggling were tortured by having their
faces mutilated. Jewish targets have been bombed.
Michael Levine, a former star agent for the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration
who served in Argentina, was not surprised by this violent carryover into the
1990s. “The same militaries and police officers that committed human rights
crimes during the coup are holding positions in the same forces,” Levine said.
Elsewhere, foreign governments whose citizens were victims of the Dirty War also
pressed individual cases against Videla and other former military leaders. These
countries included Germany, Spain, Italy, Sweden, Denmark and Honduras.
Yet, in Argentina, Menem’s pardon protected Videla and the others from facing
any significant punishment for their acts, at least for a time. Menem refused to
extradite the former military leaders to other countries. He also dragged his
heels on purging the armed forces of thousands of officers implicated in Dirty
War offenses.
So, the lingering case implicating Videla in harvesting babies from doomed women
represented one of the last chances for Argentina to hold the dictator
accountable, and to come to grips with the terrible crimes of its recent past.
Marta Gurvich is an Argentine journalist who has written about political and
social issues in Latin America.
Editor’s Update: In 1998, Videla was found guilty of kidnapping in the case of
Silvia Quintela and other “disappeared.” He spent 38 days in prison before being
transferred to house arrest due to health concerns. However, after the election
of President Nestor Kirchner in 2003, another effort was made to hold the Dirty
War leaders accountable.
On Dec. 22, 2010, Videla was sentenced to life in a civilian prison for the
deaths of 31 prisoners, killed after his 1976 coup. Then, on July 5, 2012,
Videla was sentenced to 50 years in prison for the systematic kidnapping of
children during his tenure.
The precise role of Pope Francis I, the former Argentine Cardinal Bergoglio, in
the Dirty War remains something of a mystery. His defenders claim he privately
appealed to Videla to spare the lives of two ex-Jesuit priests who had been
abducted and tortured, while his critics claim that his dismissal of the two
priests made them easy targets for the military. [See Christopher Dickey’s
account at The Daily Beast.]
In October 2012, Bergoglio issued a collective apology for the behavior of
Argentina’s Catholic Church during the Dirty War, but blamed both the military
and leftists for the carnage, angering some Argentines because the overwhelming
majority of human rights crimes were committed by the military against unarmed
political dissidents.
During the Dirty War, much of the Catholic hierarchy actively supported the
military junta and opposed public resistance to the security forces as they
“disappeared” alleged leftists off the streets. Some Catholic leaders who did
speak out against the repression were themselves targeted for death.
At the time, Bergoglio was one of the Church’s rising stars who chose the
politically (and physically) safe posture of maintaining silence, lodging no
public protest, staying on good terms with the junta and now asserting that he
undertook a few private efforts to save lives.
Yet, after the Dirty War, amid efforts to exact some accountability for the
political slaughter, Bergoglio resisted cooperation with human right trials and,
when he finally testified in 2010, his answers were evasive, human rights
attorney Myriam Bregman told the Associated Press.
Regarding the practice of harvesting babies from doomed women and then farming
them out to military families, Bergoglio has insisted that he didn’t know of the
practice until well after the Dirty War was over.
However, Estela de la Cuadra family contradicted Bergoglio’s claim of ignorance
in citing a 1977 case in which Jesuits in Rome urged Bergoglio to intervene
regarding the kidnapping of Estela’s sister Elena, who was five months’
pregnant. The police reported back that the woman was a communist and thus was
killed but her baby girl was first delivered and then given to an “important”
family.
“Bergoglio has a very cowardly attitude when it comes to something so terrible
as the theft of babies,” Estela de la Cuadra told the AP. “The question is how
to save his name, save himself. But he can’t keep these allegations from
reaching the public. The people know how he is.”
Boston Suspect’s Writing on the Wall
Exclusive: Hiding and near death, Boston Marathon bombing suspect Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev reportedly scrawled on the inside of a boat that he did what he did to
avenge innocent Muslims killed by U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, a rare look
at the why behind “terrorism,” writes ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern.
By Ray McGovern
Quick, somebody tell CIA Director John Brennan about the handwriting on the
inside wall of the boat in which Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was hiding before Boston-area
police riddled it and him with bullets. Tell Brennan that Tsarnaev’s note is in
plain English and that it needs neither translation nor interpretation in
solving the mystery: “why do they hate us?”
And, if Brennan will listen, remind him of when his high school teachers, the
Irish Christian Brothers, taught him the meaning of “handwriting on the wall” in
the Book of Daniel and why it became an idiom for predetermined, imminent doom.
CBS senior correspondent John Miller, who before joining CBS served in the
Office of the Director of National Intelligence, broke the handwritten-note
story Thursday on CBS This Morning. He described what Dzhokhar Tsarnaev
scribbled on the side of the boat as he lay bleeding “from multiple gunshot
wounds” in the boat. Here, according to Miller’s sources, is what Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev’s note said:
“The [Boston] bombings were in retribution for the U.S. crimes in places like
Iraq and Afghanistan [and] that the victims of the Boston bombing were
collateral damage, in the same way innocent victims have been collateral damage
in U.S. wars around the world.
Summing up, that when you attack one Muslim you
attack all Muslims.”
My experience with now-CBS-This-Morning’s Charlie Rose is that he does listen
closely. Thus, I believe it is to his credit that he seemed determined, with his
follow-up question, to drive home what I think is by far the most important
point:
Co-anchor Charlie Rose: “Does it [the note] answer questions about motives?”
Miller: “Well it does … there it is in black and white literally.”
Co-anchor Norah O’Donnell: “But they still believe he was self-radicalized and
not part of a larger group, right?”
Miller: “That’s right. …”
Note to CIA Director Brennan
If you didn’t understand much about such motives three years ago, after Umar
Farouk Abdulmutallab tried to down an airliner over Detroit on Christmas Day
2009, here’s a chance to learn. I actually felt embarrassed for you when you
then-White House counter-terrorism adviser were asked on Jan. 7, 2010, two weeks
after the almost-catastrophe over Detroit, to explain why people want to kill
Americans. I’m sure you remember; it turned out to be Helen Thomas’s swan song.
It took the questioning of the then-89-year old veteran correspondent Thomas to
show how little you were willing to share (or how little you knew) about what
leads terrorists to do what they do. As her catatonic White House press
colleagues took their customary dictation, Thomas posed an adult query that
spotlighted the futility of government plans to counter terrorism with more
high-tech gizmos and intrusions on the liberties and privacy of the traveling
public.
She asked why Abdulmutallab did what he did: “And what is the motivation? We
never hear what you find out on why.” It was a highly revealing dialogue; this
is how it went. Remember?
You: “Al-Qaeda is an organization that is dedicated to murder and wanton
slaughter of innocents. They attract individuals like Mr. Abdulmutallab and use
them for these types of attacks. He was motivated by a sense of religious sort
of drive. Unfortunately, al-Qaeda has perverted Islam, and has corrupted the
concept of Islam, so that he’s (sic) able to attract these individuals. But alQaeda has the agenda of destruction and death.”
Thomas: “And you’re saying it’s because of religion?”
You: “I’m saying it’s because of an al-Qaeda organization that used the banner
of religion in a very perverse and corrupt way.”
Thomas: “Why?”
You: “I think this is a, long issue, but al-Qaeda is just determined to carry
out attacks here against the homeland.”
Thomas: “But you haven’t explained why.”
Actually, there is a ton of information explaining why people try, for example,
to explode bombs in Times Square, in airliners over Detroit, in remote CIA
outposts in Afghanistan just to kill Americans, even when it means killing
themselves. [See, for example, Consortiumnews.com’s “Answering Helen Thomas on
Why.”]
It was painful to watch you suggest on Jan. 7, 2010, that, apparently in some
mysterious way, some folks are hard-wired at birth for the “wanton slaughter of
innocents,” and your contention that in the case of Abdulmutallab alQaeda/Persian Gulf was able to jump-start that privileged 23-year old Nigerian,
inculcate in him the acquired characteristics of a terrorist, and persuade him
to do the bidding of al-Qaeda/Persian Gulf.
Your words were a real stretch as to how the well-heeled Abdulmutallab, without
apparent prior terrorist affiliations, was suddenly transformed into an
international terrorist ready to die while killing innocents.
Perhaps no one told you that the young Nigerian had particular trouble with
Israel’s wanton slaughter of more than a thousand civilians in Gaza the year
before, a brutal campaign defended by Washington as justifiable self-defense.
You ought to take the time to learn about these things.
Till next time, Ray.
How to Spin This One
An important element in intelligence analysis is to understand the why, what’s
the motive. That doesn’t mean you sympathize with what someone did. It does mean
that you understand that knowing why is an important starting point for future
prevention of similar acts.
Yet, virtually no one in the U.S. political/media hierarchy has dared to
discuss, in a candid way, the issue of motivation. All the American people
normally get is boilerplate about how al-Qaeda evildoers are perverting a
religion and exploiting impressionable young men.
There is almost no discussion about why so many people in the Muslim world
object to U.S. policies so strongly that they are inclined to resist violently
and even resort to suicide attacks. So how will the media spin Dzhokhar
Tsarnaev’s handwritten note?
Well, we’ve already watched CBS’s Norah O’Donnell come up with the familiar
“self-radicalization” shibboleth. She tied the concept to a lack of ties with a
larger group, but “self-radicalization” is normally employed to create the
impression that hard-wired “violent Muslim extremists” simply look in the mirror
one day and say to themselves, My, this looks like a good day to selfradicalize.
Also regularly trotted out is the “homegrown-violent-extremists” moniker
employed as recently as Thursday by FBI Director Robert Mueller III in Senate
testimony.
Other “mainstream media” and government officials will keep blaming terrorism on
Islam, as the Wall Street Journal does Friday in repeating the claim that
Dzhokhar Tsarnaev told the FBI earlier that he and his dead brother “were acting
as jihadists motivated by Muslim religious anger at the U.S.” (In other words,
pay no heed to what he scribbled on the side of the boat as he thought he was
dying.)
Rarely has there been any official or quasi-official acknowledgement of the main
problem. But there was a major exception in the fall of 2004 in an unclassified
study published by the Pentagon-appointed U.S. Defense Science Board. Directly
contradicting what President George W. Bush was saying at the time, the board
stated:
“Muslims do not ‘hate our freedom,’ but rather, they hate our policies. The
overwhelming majority voice their objections to what they see as one-sided
support in favor of Israel and against Palestinian rights, and the longstanding,
even increasing support for what Muslims collectively see as tyrannies, most
notably Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Pakistan, and the Gulf States.”
That’s not spin. That’s the assessment of professionals who were reading the
handwriting on the wall.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing ministry of the ecumenical
Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington.
He was a CIA analyst for 27
years and now serves on the Steering Group of Veteran Intelligence Professionals
for Sanity (VIPS).
The Sad Lesson of Alan Hart
Sailing against a strong prevailing wind is not easy, certainly not like
breezing along with the wind to your back. Author Alan Hart discovered that
truth in criticizing Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians, but his acceptance
of defeat should not stop others from advocating for truth and justice, says
Lawrence Davidson.
By Lawrence Davidson
Alan Hart is an author and a journalist, the former Middle East Chief
Correspondent for Britain’s Independent Television News and a former BBC
Panorama presenter whose beat was the Middle East. He has written a number of
books, including Arafat: Terrorist or Peacemaker? (1984) and the three-volume
Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews (2009-2010).
He is also a longtime activist for various causes, particularly his three-decade
struggle on behalf of justice for the Palestinian people.
On April 25, Alan Hart literally turned in his resignation letter. In it he
states, “I am withdrawing from the battlefield of the war for the truth of
history as it relates to making and sustaining of the conflict in and over
Palestine.” Why did he do this? In Hart’s opinion, the struggle for justice in
Palestine is “mission impossible.” [See Consortiumnews.com’s “Pursuing Truth
about Israel/Palestine.”]
The information/propaganda war between Zionists and those, such as himself,
supporting the Palestinians (which, in any case, had always been “the most
asymmetric of all information wars”) is lost. He notes that the Western media
still follow a Zionist line and asserts that most of the Western populations
remain either pro-Israel or indifferent to the Israeli-Palestinian struggle.
Hart blames this alleged Zionist victory in the propaganda war on a lack of
financial support for those trying to write and speak out for Palestinian
justice, and contrasts their plight to the situation of the Zionist writers and
advocates, who enjoy almost unlimited funds.
Hart feels it is mainly wealthy Palestinians and other Arabs who have failed to
support pro-Palestinian activists. These wealthy Arabs have failed to step
forward because they either are afraid of Zionist retribution that would damage
their businesses or careers, or are afraid of their own Arab governments, which
do not want trouble with Israel because of assertive actions by pro-Palestinian
wealthy citizens.
Hart’s Plight
With all due respect to Mr. Hart, who certainly does deserve our respect, I
can’t help asking myself whether his assessment of this “war for the truth of
history” is objectively true or an expression of personal disappointments.
According to his own explanation, his decision to leave the struggle is
connected to the fact that Arab publishers and media failed to financially
support and promote his recent book Zionism: The Real Enemy of the Jews.
This was a great disappointment to him because the Arab media had serialized his
prior work on Yasser Arafat and this had brought him “a significant income.” He
had obviously made the assumption that the situation would repeat itself.
So strong was that expectation that, as Mr. Hart tells us in his resignation
statement, he made certain decisions, such as mortgaging his property in order
to support the production of the Zionism study, which have now brought him into
financial distress. Hart appears to see the failure of Arab money to come to his
assistance as indicative of Arab failure to support the Palestinian cause.
As disappointing as the Arab failure to promote Hart’s important work on Zionism
may be, it is not accurate to conclude, as Hart does, that most wealthy Arabs
“do not care about the occupied and oppressed Palestinians.” Before the first
Iraq war, both public and private Arab money generously supported the PLO.
Yasser Arafat’s attempt to mediate that conflict and prevent a war against Iraq
stopped most (but never all) of that support.
Whether the wealthy Arabs could now do much more is another question. However,
and this is an important point, this is not the same question as to whether
Western supporters of the Palestinian cause should or should not give up.
Hart is correct that in the past 30 years supporters of Palestinian justice have
not been able to create the necessary critical mass of public opinion to change
the policies of national governments. However, that does not mean there has been
no progress. It does not mean this is a lost cause.
I, too, have been a strong supporter of the Palestinians for decades, and I have
seen a tremendous difference over time. Thirty years ago you could not
critically raise the subject of Israel in public, and thus the Zionists had a
monopoly on the entire history of this issue. That is emphatically not the case
today.
Despite Alan Hart’s unfortunate experience, the fact is that, at a popular
level, the Zionists have lost control of the Palestine narrative. There are
other real positive signs in this struggle that Hart fails to mention, including
the progress of the Boycott Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement; the
continuing maturation of counter-lobbies, particularly in the United States; and
the growing worldwide recognition of Israeli criminality, which has slowly
increased that country’s sense of isolation. In other words, there is more to
this than the Arab failure to support Mr. Hart’s latest work.
Measuring Success
One has to also understand that success and failure come on many levels. On the
macro level, progress is slow, but as pointed out above, it is far from
nonexistent. Sometimes you just need to know where to look to see the ongoing
activity.
For instance, in the case of the United States, there are a growing number of
organizations that are constantly busy getting out the message of Israeli crimes
and the Palestinian demand for justice. There are the U.S. Campaign to End the
Israeli Occupation (a coalition of almost 400 member groups and organizations),
Jewish Voices for Peace, and the Council for the National Interest, to name just
a few.
The struggle against Israeli apartheid might well be, as it was in the case of
South Africa, multigenerational. But among the many organizations waging this
struggle there is no sign of slacking.
On the micro level, success comes when one is consistently true to one’s
principles in a manner that is personally acceptable. No one is asking Western
supporters of the Palestinian cause to go bankrupt or put themselves in physical
danger, although in the latter case notably heroic individuals such as Rachel
Corey and Tom Hurndall have chosen to do so, with tragic results.
However, there are less dangerous routes. To do what you can in a steady,
consistent way for a just cause in which you believe is already to have achieved
success at the personal level. We struggle not only for the cause, but also
because of who we are.
Alan Hart is an admirable man who has done admirable things, and we all owe him
our thanks for his contributions to the Palestinian cause. But his decision to
retire from the field should in no way be taken as a sign that that cause is
lost. It is emphatically not lost. It has made significant progress over the
past three decades and it is well positioned to make more progress in the
future.
Lawrence Davidson is a history professor at West Chester University in
Pennsylvania. He is the author of Foreign Policy Inc.: Privatizing America’s
National Interest; America’s Palestine: Popular and Official Perceptions from
Balfour to Israeli Statehood; and Islamic Fundamentalism.
New Hope from Pakistan’s Vote
Many of the U.S. problems in Afghanistan stem from a misguided relationship with
pro-Islamist elements of Pakistani intelligence dating back to the 1980s. But
Pakistan’s recent election offers new hope if Official Washington can step back
and see the bigger picture, writes ex-CIA analyst Paul R. Pillar.
By Paul R. Pillar
The victor in the recent Pakistani elections, Nawaz Sharif, has indicated he
places high priority on improving relations between Pakistan and India.
Sharif made some significant strides in promoting detente between the two South
Asia powers during a previous stint as prime minister, and he wants to recoup
ground that was later lost after the terrorist attack in Mumbai in 2008 by a
Pakistani-based group. Wasting no time, Sharif has invited Indian Prime Minister
Manmohan Singh to Pakistan to attend Sharif’s swearing-in.
This is all to the good, and has received recognition as such in India (although
with caution in the case of the right-wing nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party).
Americans, however, need to be prepared for how a successful Sharif may bring
about some changes in Pakistani-U.S. relations that may not seem so good in
Washington.
This is suggested by an editorial earlier this week in a major Indian daily, the
Hindustan Times. The editorial said that part of what Indians ought to hope for
from a new administration in Islamabad is “a government that will understand
that cutting dependence on the United States and China is only possible if
Pakistan has a modus vivendi with India.”
Note the implication that understandably can raise American eyebrows: a looser
Pakistani relationship with the United States may accompany a less hostile
Pakistani relationship with India.
Sharif is indeed likely to do a good number of things that will not sit well in
Washington. Some of these things he would be doing anyway, but some of them will
be related to his attempted rapprochement with India.
The political realities he faces include, besides the Islamist militants who
have become a bigger part of Pakistani affairs in recent years, a Pakistani
military that ended his last prime ministry with a coup and whose main reason
for existence is to defend the country against arch-adversary India.
The more political risks Sharif takes in improving relations with that
adversary, the more he will have to bolster his nationalist credentials
elsewhere, including on matters involving relations with the United States.
There will be a tendency in Washington to judge Sharif’s performance piecemeal,
involving whatever is the latest concern about security in northwest Pakistan or
something else. It would be better to take a more strategic view with the big
lines of conflict in South Asia in mind.
Indian-Pakistani rapprochement is still worthwhile and very much in U.S.
interests, even if it is accompanied by greater nationalist testiness in U.S.Pakistani relations. It is worthwhile partly because stability in the
relationship between the region’s two nuclear-armed powers is important in its
own right. It also is worthwhile because improvement in that relationship will
make it easier for Washington to deal with some other regional issues important
to it.
The most prominent of those issues involves Afghanistan. The background to just
about every Pakistani policy and action about Afghanistan that is unhelpful,
including ones involving the continued Pakistani relations with the Afghan
Taliban, is Pakistani concern about India.
To Pakistan, Afghanistan is its strategic depth in the standoff with India, and
it gets apoplectic over any inroads that India itself makes in Afghanistan. The
more that the Indian-Pakistani relationship improves, the less intense will be
the apoplexy and the less troublesome a player Pakistani is likely to be on
issues involving Afghanistan.
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.)