Published on Alternet (http://www.alternet.org)
The
American Empire: Murder Inc.
January 4, 2016
Terror,
intimidation and violence are the glue that holds empire together. Aerial
bombardment, drone and missile attacks, artillery and mortar strikes, targeted
assassinations, massacres, the detention of tens of thousands, death squad
killings, torture, wholesale surveillance, extraordinary renditions, curfews,
propaganda, a loss of civil liberties and pliant political puppets are the
grist of our wars and proxy wars.
Countries
we seek to dominate, from Indonesia and Guatemala to Iraq and Afghanistan, are
intimately familiar with these brutal mechanisms of control. But the reality of
empire rarely reaches the American public. The few atrocities that come to
light are dismissed as isolated aberrations. The public is assured what has
been uncovered will be investigated and will not take place again. The goals of
empire, we are told by a subservient media and our ruling elites, are virtuous
and noble. And the vast killing machine grinds forward, feeding, as it has
always done, the swollen bank accounts of defense contractors and corporations
that exploit natural resources and cheap labor around the globe.
There are
very few journalists who have covered empire with more courage, tenacity and
integrity than Allan Nairn. For more than three decades, he has reported from
Central America, East Timor, Palestine, South Africa, Haiti and Indonesia—where
Indonesian soldiers fractured his skull and arrested him. His reporting on the
Indonesian government massacres in East Timor saw him branded a “threat to
national security” and officially banned from occupied East Timor. Nairn
returned clandestinely to East Timor on numerous occasions. His dogged
reporting of torture and killing of civilians by the Indonesian military
contributed to the U.S. Congress suspending military aid to Jakarta in 1993. He
exposed U.S. complicity with death squads and paramilitary organizations
carrying out murderous rampages in El Salvador, Guatemala and Haiti. During the
2014 presidential elections in Indonesia, where he spends much of his time,
Nairn was threatened with arrest for exposing presidential candidate Prabowo
Subianto’s role in atrocities. Nairn’s reporting on army massacres was an
important component in the trial of former Guatemalan President Efrain Ríos
Montt. Gen. Montt ordered the killing of over 1,700 people in the Ixil region
of the country in the early 1980s and was convicted in 2013 of genocide and
crimes against humanity. He was sentenced to 80 years in prison. The conviction
was later overturned.
Nairn, whom
I spoke with in New York, reaches back to the genocide carried out against
Native Americans, the institution of slavery and the murder of hundreds of
workers and labor union organizers in the 19th and early 20th century to
explain the roots of American imperial violence. He noted that, although
wholesale massacres have become taboo on American soil in recent generations,
the FBI was carrying out selective assassinations of black radicals,
including Fred Hampton [3], in the
1960s. And police show little constraint in gunning down unarmed people of
color in poor communities.
But
overseas there are no restrictions. The indiscriminate slaughter of real or
imagined opponents is considered a prerogative of imperial power. Violence is
the primary language we use to speak to the rest of the world. Equivalents
of Wounded Knee [4] and My Lai[5] take place beyond our
borders with an unacknowledged frequency.
“To this
day,” Nairn said, “it is politically permissible for U.S. forces to carry out
or sponsor assassinations of civilians—students, journalists, religious
leaders, peasant organizers, whomever. In fact, in U.S. politics, if presidents
are reluctant, or seem reluctant to do this, they get castigated. They get
called a wimp. George Bush Sr. came under vicious attack when he attempted
through covert means to mount a coup in Panama against [Manuel] Noriega and it
failed. And there was a cover [6][of
Newsweek, with the headline ‘Fighting the “Wimp Factor” ’] where they were
attacking Bush Sr. for not being strong enough.”
“I think it
was within a week after that he invaded Panama formally, an invasion that
included the burning of the neighborhood called El Chorrillo [7], where
hundreds were killed, a poor neighborhood. The New York Times then ran a front-page analysis [8] by
R.W. Apple which said that Bush Sr. had completed his presidential initiation
rite by demonstrating his willingness to shed blood,” Nairn went on. “Not his
own blood, but the blood of foreigners, including of foreign civilians.”
“It’s
basically a refusal on the part of American society to enforce the murder laws
when the killings are done by presidents or generals, and where the victims are
foreigners,” he said. “Now, all big powers do this. But in the recent period,
because the U.S. has been the dominant power, the U.S. has the biggest death
toll. If you added all the operations up it would go into the several millions.
Just to list the ones that I’ve personally seen and tried to expose and fight
against: Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Honduras, Haiti, South Africa,
Palestine, East Timor, Indonesia, southern Thailand. I’m sure I’m leaving out a
few. The U.S. has used the Pentagon, the CIA, occasionally the State Department
to set up or back local forces, help them gather intelligence on dissidents,
and help them provide the means to carry out systematic assassinations.”
Assassinations
and torture are often accompanied in these wars and proxy wars by massacres by
government troops that routinely “wipe out whole villages,” Nairn said,
“The
Guatemalan military did that, especially during the early ’80s when the Reagan
administration was backing them enthusiastically under the time of the dictator
Gen. Rios Montt,” Nairn said. “They would go into villages in the Mayan
highlands in the northwest. ... I was there, I spoke to the soldiers as they
were doing it, I spoke to survivors … [and] they would decapitate people. They
would crucify people. They would use the tactics that ISIS today puts on video
that are now shocking the world.”
“The powers
have always been willing to use these tactics,” he said. “And for centuries
they were proud of it. All you have to do is look at the holy texts of the
major religions—the Bible, the Quran, the Torah. They’re full of one massacre
after another. People forget. The story of David and Goliath is put forward as
a great story. At the end of that story David decapitates Goliath. He parades
around holding up his head. For years and years the powers were proud of these
tactics. They advertised it.”
“As recently as the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, U.S. presidents
were still boasting about it,” Nairn said. “Go back and read [Roosevelt’s]
writings. He’s repeatedly … talking about the necessity to shed blood, the
necessity to kill. Otherwise a person could not be healthy, otherwise a polity
could not be healthy. This was Teddy Roosevelt. You can’t do that in today’s
U.S. You can’t do that really in any major country today. The only partial
exception to that at the level of rhetoric is Israel. Israeli generals and
politicians still talk openly about the need to shed Palestinian blood. But
they’re really the only ones. Everywhere else—Europe, Russia, China, the
U.S.—they have to hide their [activities].”
I first met
Nairn in 1984 while I was covering the war in El Salvador. In that year he
published an explosive investigative piece in The Progressive magazine
titled “Behind the Death Squads.” [9] The
article detailed U.S. backing, training and arming of the death squads in El
Salvador that were murdering, and often torturing and mutilating, hundreds of
people a month. His article led to an investigation by the Senate Intelligence
Committee.
U.S.
commanders in Iraq, attempting to quell the Sunni insurgency in 2004, reached
back to the terror tactics used in El Salvador. They formulated a plan called “The Salvador Option” [10] to
train and arm Shiite paramilitary units. Former U.S. Army Col. James Steele,
who in the 1980s in El Salvador headed the U.S. Military Group or MilGroup,
which advised the Salvadoran army during the war, was sent to Iraq by Donald
Rumsfeld as a civilian adviser. Steele, who had fought in Vietnam, was assigned
to the Iraqi paramilitary Special Police Commandos, a unit known as the “Wolf
Brigade.”
U.N.
officials, and an investigative team from The Guardian newspaper, later accused
these Shiite paramilitary units of widespread death-squad killings and running
a network of clandestine detention centers that carried out torture while under
Steele’s supervision. The Shiite paramilitary units, which were given money
from a $2 billion fund controlled directly by Gen. David Petraeus, terrorized
and enraged the Sunni population. The abuse, torture, assassinations and
network of clandestine prisons fueled Iraq’s sectarian civil war and led to the
creation of radical Sunni groups such as Islamic State.
“The
Salvadoran death squad apparatus was created by the U.S., starting during the
Kennedy administration through mainly U.S. Special Forces and the CIA,” Nairn
said. “[They] … created this intelligence-gathering system which linked
Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua. They would have central files organized for them
with the help of the CIA. They would teach them [the squads] how to go out and
watch on a systematic basis the campuses, the courts, the plantations [and]
especially the factories, run by the local oligarchs but also the American
investors. They would compile files.”
Nairn spent
13 hours interviewing former Salvadoran Gen. Jose Alberto Medrano, the
godfather of the Salvadoran death squads, who was assassinated a year later, in
1985, by the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front (FMLN) rebels.
“He
explained to me how Salvadoran priests, nuns, catechists [and] unionists were
all controlled by Moscow,” Nairn said. “He would draw these schematics showing
from Moscow to Havana to here to there. And he said they all became targets; it
was our mission to kill them. He described in great detail how he did this
while working on the payroll of the United States.”
“These were
the death squads that produced actions like the rape and murder of the nuns [11],” Nairn
said, referring to American lay missionary Jean Donovan and three American
nuns—Dorothy Kazel, Maura Clarke and Ita Ford—who were killed by national guard
soldiers in El Salvador in December 1980. Eight months earlier, the death
squads had carried out the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero. More than
75,000 Salvadorans died in the conflict, thousands at the hands of the death
squads, which often “disappeared” their victims.
“The world
is finally starting to understand what’s involved with political killing when
they see the videos of ISIS,” Nairn said. “… In Salvador, not only would they
kill but they would cut off hands, they would cut off arms, and they would
display their handiwork on the road. Passersby would see it. In the same
period—I spent most of those years in Guatemala, which was even worse—they were
killing more than 100,000, perhaps more than 200,000 by some estimates. One day
in the library of the Polytechnica, the military academy of Guatemala, I found
the Spanish translation of a U.S. military counterinsurgency document. It gave
instructions on how to create terror; this was the way they put it. And they
described methods used in the Philippines in the campaign against the Huks[12].”
“In the
case of the Philippines they were talking about leaving the bodies by the
rivers,” he said. “So you mutilate the bodies, you cut them, you amputate, and
then you display the bodies on the riversides to stir terror in the population.
And of course that’s exactly what ISIS is doing today.”
The same
tactics were used in Indonesia against ethnic Chinese, labor organizers,
artists, intellectuals, student leaders and members of the Indonesian Communist
Party (PKI) after the 1965 U.S.-backed anti-communist purge that eventually
ousted the independence leader President Sukarno. Sukarno was replaced in a
1967 coup by Gen. Suharto, who brutally ran the country for 31 years. During
the army and paramilitary killings as many as a million Indonesians were
murdered. The bodies were often left[13] floating
in rivers or on roadsides.
“The CIA
weighed in with a list of 5,000 targets for assassination,” Nairn said. “The
U.S. press was hailing it at the time. They were calling it a gleam of light in
Asia. Gen. Suharto was installed in power as a result of this process. Suharto
later, in the mid-’70s, sought the permission of President Ford and Henry
Kissinger to invade the small neighboring country of East Timor, which was then
emerging into independence from having been a Portuguese colony. They gave the
green light. They just said do it quickly. They went in [and] killed a third of
the population.”
“In ’91
they staged a massacre in front of a cemetery, which I happened to survive,” he
said. “I was there with Amy Goodman [14]. They
killed more than 200 people right before our eyes. They fractured my skull with
their American M-16 rifle butts.
“This is
standard procedure. I’ve tried to go over to the countries where the repression
is most intense, and where the U.S. is backing it, and expose it and stop it.”
“It’s
systematic,” he went on. “It’s the exact same tactics in country after country,
with local adaptations, and often the officers are all trained at the same U.S.
military bases—Fort Bragg, Fort Benning, Leavenworth [and] at the Inter-American
Defense College, in the case of the Latin American officers.”
“It’s not
unique to the U.S.,” Nairn said. “This is standard for big powers. … If you
wanted to have any kind of impact in politics you had to align yourself with
some kind of killer force, be it the Americans, NATO or the Taliban, or some
other armed faction capable of fast mass killing. Without that you had no
chance.”
“In
Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, it’s reached the point of political and social
breakdown,” Nairn said. “There’s no stopping it. It’s out of control. There are
not two sides. It [has fractured into] many sides. It’s analogous to what
happened in Cambodia, with the massive U.S. bombing of Cambodia, which paved
the way for the rise of the Khmer Rouge [15]. [It has
destroyed] any semblance of normal politics or even society. In that kind of
environment the most evil, the most violent, have a better chance to rise and
prevail.”
Ceaseless
war and indiscriminant killing define the U.S. imperial power. But this policy,
he said, has backfired.
“Unless you
have enough of an enemy out there, unless you have enough fighting going on,
unless you have enough drama going on, a big powerful state, one of whose
pillars is war, like the United States, or like, say, today’s Israel—[both of
them examples] of Sparta-type states—they can’t sustain themselves,” he said.
“They need a high level of dramatic tension. They have to constantly be provoking,
constantly causing trouble here and there.”
“We’re now
in a moment where these operations of willful murder on the part of the U.S.
and provocation have come back to bite [the United States],” he said. “That
doesn’t usually happen. There was no consequence like that from Central
America. There was no consequence like that from Haiti, Palestine or South
Africa. But in this case it happened. Operations like the U.S. backing of the mujahedeen [16] to
repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan … the U.S. backing of the various
anti-Assad Islamist forces in Syria, have given birth to first al-Qaida and
then ISIS. That wasn’t the U.S. intention. They didn’t want to create al-Qaida
in the sense of the al-Qaida that attacks the U.S. They didn’t want to create
an ISIS, which is now a political nightmare.”
“The Bible
says they sow the wind, they shall reap the whirlwind,” he said. “Well, usually
that isn’t true. It’s not true most of the time. It’s like the other slogan:
The people united will never be defeated. Not true. The people united get
defeated all the time. They get crushed. They get massacred. They get thrown
into mass graves. But sometimes you sow the wind and you do reap the whirlwind.
And that’s what’s happening now to the West with ISIS.”
Chris
Hedges, a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter, writes a regular column for Truthdig [2] every
Monday. Hedges' most recent book [17] is
"Wages of Rebellion: The Moral Imperative of Revolt."
[19]
Links:
[1] http://www.alternet.org/authors/chris-hedges
[2] http://www.truthdig.com/
[3] http://www.blackpast.org/aah/hampton-fred-1948-1969
[4] http://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/wounded-knee
[5] http://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/my-lai-massacre
[6] https://www.google.com/search?q=fighting+the+wimp+factor&biw=1024&bih=467&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiAp6HvpozKAhVLyWMKHeIbCHsQ_AUIBygC&dpr=1.88
[7] http://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/28/weekinreview/the-world-in-panama-counting-the-invasion-dead-is-a-matter-of-dispute.html
[8] http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/21/world/fighting-in-panama-the-implications-war-bush-s-presidential-rite-of-passage.html?pagewanted=all
[9] http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/nairnelsalvadorbtds.html
[10] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/06/pentagon-iraqi-torture-centres-link
[11] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/11/09/bringing-el-salavador-nun-killers-to-justice.html
[12] https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=huks
[13] http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_act_of_killing_20130923
[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Goodman
[15] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-10684399
[16] http://asianhistory.about.com/od/glossaryko/g/Who-Were-the-Mujahideen-of-Afghanistan.htm
[17] http://www.truthdig.com/bazaar/wages_of_rebellion
[18] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on The American Empire: Murder Inc.
[19] http://www.alternet.org/
[20] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
[2] http://www.truthdig.com/
[3] http://www.blackpast.org/aah/hampton-fred-1948-1969
[4] http://www.history.com/topics/native-american-history/wounded-knee
[5] http://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/my-lai-massacre
[6] https://www.google.com/search?q=fighting+the+wimp+factor&biw=1024&bih=467&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiAp6HvpozKAhVLyWMKHeIbCHsQ_AUIBygC&dpr=1.88
[7] http://www.nytimes.com/1990/10/28/weekinreview/the-world-in-panama-counting-the-invasion-dead-is-a-matter-of-dispute.html
[8] http://www.nytimes.com/1989/12/21/world/fighting-in-panama-the-implications-war-bush-s-presidential-rite-of-passage.html?pagewanted=all
[9] http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/nairnelsalvadorbtds.html
[10] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/06/pentagon-iraqi-torture-centres-link
[11] http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2014/11/09/bringing-el-salavador-nun-killers-to-justice.html
[12] https://www.google.com/?gws_rd=ssl#q=huks
[13] http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_act_of_killing_20130923
[14] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amy_Goodman
[15] http://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-pacific-10684399
[16] http://asianhistory.about.com/od/glossaryko/g/Who-Were-the-Mujahideen-of-Afghanistan.htm
[17] http://www.truthdig.com/bazaar/wages_of_rebellion
[18] mailto:corrections@alternet.org?Subject=Typo on The American Empire: Murder Inc.
[19] http://www.alternet.org/
[20] http://www.alternet.org/%2Bnew_src%2B
Donations can be sent
to the Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 325 E. 25th St., Baltimore, MD
21218. Ph: 410-366-1637; Email: mobuszewski [at] verizon.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives."
Eugene Victor Debs
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