Chapter Five

Ruling the World

1. Adam Smith used the phrase "principal architects" in decrying the mercantile system, which he argued benefited those who designed it at the expense of the vast majority. See Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976 (original 1776). His exact words (Book IV, ch. VII, pt. III, pp. 180-181):

It cannot be very difficult to determine who have been the contrivers of this whole mercantile system; not the consumers, we may believe, whose interest has been entirely neglected; but the producers, whose interest has been so carefully attended to; and among this latter class our merchants and manufacturers have been by far the principal architects. In the mercantile regulations, which have been taken notice of in this chapter, the interest of our manufacturers has been most peculiarly attended to; and the interest, not so much of the consumers, as that of some other sets of producers, has been sacrificed to it.

Smith's emphasis on the basic class conflict is evident throughout his work, though this fact is grossly misrepresented and falsified by contemporary ideology. See for example the following (Book I, ch. XI, p. 278; Book IV, ch. VII, pt. III, p. 133):

The interest of the dealers, however, in any particular branch of trade or manufactures, is always in some respects different from, and even opposite to, that of the public. . . . The proposal of any new law or regulation of commerce which comes from this order, ought always to be listened to with great precaution, and ought never to be adopted till after having been long and carefully examined, not only with the most scrupulous, but with the most suspicious attention. It comes from an order of men, whose interest is never exactly the same with that of the public, who have generally an interest to deceive and even to oppress the public, and who accordingly have, upon many occasions, both deceived and oppressed it. . . . [The monopoly of Great Britain over its colonies], I have endeavoured to show, though a very grievous tax upon the colonies, and though it may increase the revenue of a particular order of men in Great Britain, diminishes instead of increasing that of the great body of the people.

For more on Smith, see chapter 6 of U.P. and its footnote 10; and footnote 91 of chapter 10 of U.P. See also chapter 2 of U.P. and its footnote 58.

2. For more on anarchism, or libertarian socialism, see Peter Marshall, Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, London: HarperCollins, 1992 (valuable survey of anarchist thought and experiments, with detailed bibliography). See also the text of chapter 6 of U.P. and its footnote 18; and chapter 10 of U.P. and its footnote 16.

3. On Lenin's and Trotsky's destruction of socialist initiatives in Russia and their guiding philosophies, see chapter 7 of U.P. and its footnote 3; and footnote 21 of this chapter.

4. On Russia's Third World status prior to 1917, see for example, Teodor Shanin, Russia as a "Developing Society" -- The Roots of Otherness: Russia's Turn of the Century, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985, Vol. 1, pp. 103f, 123f, 187f. An excerpt (pp. 103-104, 124):

In 1900 the income per capita in Russia was three times lower than in Germany, four times below the U.K., one-third lower than even the Balkans. Because of the extreme diversity between the very rich and the very poor these average figures still understate the poverty of Russia's poor. . . . Much poorer than Western Europe, Russia was not actually "catching up" in terms of the aggregate income per capita, productivity or consumption.

D.S. Mirsky, Russia: A Social History, London: Cresset/ New York: Century, 1952, p. 269 ("by 1914, Russia had gone a good part of the way toward becoming a semi-colonial possession of European capital"); Z.A.B. Zeman, The Making and Breaking of Communist Europe, Oxford: Blackwell, 1991, ch. 1 and pp. 57-58. On the history of Eastern Europe as an underdeveloped region, see for example, John Feffer, Shock Waves: Eastern Europe After the Revolutions, Boston: South End, 1992, ch. 1.

On the East-West rift in the context of the Third World generally, see for example, L.S. Stavrianos, Global Rift: The Third World Comes of Age, New York: Morrow, 1981, chs. 3 and 16.

5. On comparative East and West European economic development in the twentieth century, see for example, World Bank, World Development Report 1991: the Challenge of Development, New York: Oxford University Press, 1991, p. 14. The World Bank's statistics indicate that Eastern European per capita gross domestic product compared to that of the O.E.C.D. (the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, which is composed of the rich Western countries) declined from 64 to 57 percent between 1830 and 1913, then rose to 65 percent by 1950; declined to 63 percent by 1973; then fell to 56 percent by 1989. The overall growth rate from 1913 to 1950 was higher for Eastern Europe than for the O.E.C.D. countries (1.4 percent versus 1.1 percent), and higher from 1950 to 1989 for the O.E.C.D. countries than for Eastern Europe (2.3 percent versus 2.0 percent). The Bank's statistics indicate that Eastern Europe's per capita gross domestic product was 15.7 percent higher than Latin America's in 1913, but 77.6 percent higher by 1989. Furthermore, none of these figures take into account wealth distribution, which was far more skewed in both the O.E.C.D. countries and Latin America than in Eastern Europe.

On the catastrophic economic decline in the former Soviet Empire after 1989, see footnote 10 of this chapter.

6. For the World Bank's assessment, see "The World Bank and Development: An N.G.O. Critique and a World Bank Response," in Trócaire Development Review, Dublin: Catholic Agency for World Development, 1990, pp. 9-27. An excerpt (p. 21, ¶9):

The Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China have until recently been among the most prominent examples of relatively successful countries that deliberately turned away from the global economy. But their vast size made inward-looking development more feasible than it would be for most countries, and even they eventually decided to shift policies and take a more active part in the global economy.

Chomsky remarks (Year 501: The Conquest Continues, Boston: South End, 1993, pp. 73-74):

A more accurate rendition would be that their "vast size" made it possible for [the Soviet Union and China] to withstand the refusal of the West to allow them to take part in the global economy on terms other than traditional subordination, the "active part in the global economy" dictated to the [Third World] in general by the world rulers.

See also, Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective: A Book of Essays, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1962, p. 150 (noting the Soviet Union's "approximate sixfold increase in the volume of industrial output by the mid-1950s"). And see footnotes 8 and 108 of this chapter.

7. Western planners' concern over Communism as a form of economic independence is stated bluntly, for example, in an extensive 1955 study sponsored by the Woodrow Wilson Foundation and the National Planning Association, conducted by a representative segment of the U.S. elite (including the Chairman of the Board of the General American Investors Company, the Associate Director of the Ford Foundation, the Dean of the Columbia Business School, and the Dean of Harvard's Graduate School of Public Administration). See William Yandell Elliott, ed., The Political Economy of American Foreign Policy: Its Concepts, Strategy, and Limits, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1955. An excerpt (p. 42; emphasis added):

The Soviet threat is total -- military, political, economic and ideological. Four of its specific aspects are important for an understanding of present and prospective international economic problems. It has meant:

(1) A serious reduction of the potential resource base and market opportunities of the West owing to the subtraction of the communist areas from the international economy and their economic transformation in ways which reduce their willingness and ability to complement the industrial economies of the West;

(2) A planned disruption of the free world economies by means of Soviet foreign economic policy and subversive communist movements;

(3) A long-term challenge to the economic pre-eminence of the West arising from the much higher current rates of economic growth (particularly of heavy industry) in the Soviet system;

(4) A source of major insecurity in the international economy due to the fact that Soviet communism threatens not merely the political and economic institutions of the West but the continued existence of human freedom and humane society everywhere.

See also footnotes 8, 32 and 108 of this chapter; and chapter 2 of U.P. and its footnote 52.

8. On Western planners' fears of Soviet developmental success, see for example, Record No. 55, June 12, 1956, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955-1957, Vol. XXVI ("Central and Southeastern Europe"), Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1992, p. 116. In June 1956, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles told German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer that "the economic danger from the Soviet Union was perhaps greater than the military danger." The U.S.S.R. was "transforming itself rapidly . . . into a modern and efficient industrial state," while Western Europe was still stagnating.

Similarly, after speaking to President Kennedy in 1961, British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan wrote in his diary that the Russians "have a buoyant economy and will soon outmatch Capitalist society in the race for material wealth." See Richard Reeves, President Kennedy: Profile of Power, New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993, p. 174 [citing Alistair Horne, Harold Macmillan, Volume II: 1957-1986, New York: Viking, 1989, p. 303].

Likewise, a State Department Report from the period warned:

[T]he U.S.S.R., like Dr. Johnson's lady preacher, has been able to do it all. We need always reflect that for the less developed countries of Asia, the U.S.S.R.'s economic achievement is a highly relevant one. That the U.S.S.R. was able to industrialize rapidly, and as they see it from scratch is, despite any misgivings about the Communist system, an encouraging fact to these nations.

See Dennis Merrill, Bread and the Ballot: the United States and India's Economic Development, 1947-1963, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1992, p. 123.

A 1961 memorandum from President Kennedy's Special Assistant, Arthur Schlesinger, explained with respect to Latin America:

The hemisphere['s] level of expectation continues to rise -- stimulated both by the increase in conspicuous consumption and by the spread of the Castro idea of taking matters into one's own hand. At the same time, as living standards begin to decline, many people tend toward Communism both as an outlet for social resentment and as a swift and sure technique for social modernization. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union hovers in the wings, flourishing large development loans and presenting itself as the model for achieving modernization in a single generation.

See "Report To The President On Latin American Mission," March 10, 1961, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Vol. XII ("The American Republics"), Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996, Record No. 7, p. 13. See also footnotes 7 and 108 of this chapter.

On U.S. Cold War policies, see for example, Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992; Lynn Eden, "The End of U.S. Cold War History?," International Security, Vol. 18, No. 1, Summer 1993, pp. 174-207 (discussing Leffler's study and the new consensus on the Cold War that it helped to establish among diplomatic historians); Gabriel Kolko, Confronting the Third World: United States Foreign Policy, 1945-1980, New York: Pantheon, 1988 (with further citations to the internal government planning record on U.S. Cold War policies); Frank Kofsky, Harry Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation, New York: St. Martin's, 1993, Appendix A (showing that internal U.S. government estimates of Soviet military capabilities and intentions after World War II were highly dismissive of their capabilities, and were "virtually unanimous in concluding that the Soviets currently had no wish to initiate hostilities with the West"). On the role of economic considerations in the Cold War, see also chapter 2 of U.P. and its footnotes 3, 4 and 5; and chapter 3 of U.P. and its footnotes 3, 4, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11.

9. On profiteering from aid to the former Soviet Empire, see for example, John Fialka, "Helping Ourselves: U.S. Aid to Russia Is Quite a Windfall -- For U.S. Consultants," Wall Street Journal, February 24, 1994, p. A1. An excerpt:

The U.S. has pledged $5.8 billion in aid to the former Soviet Union, most of it destined for Russia; there is dancing in the streets -- though not the streets of Russia. The chief celebrants? Hordes of U.S. consultants who are gobbling up much of the U.S. aid pie . . . pocketing between 50% and 90% of the money in a given aid contract. . . .

Nowhere is the disappointment more acute than in the aid targeted for nuclear disarmament -- a field where Russians have considerable unemployed expertise. There was much excitement in Russia when Washington unveiled a $1.2 billion program to help dismantle Russia's aging nuclear arsenal and re-employ its scientists in civilian research. The Russians thought much of the money was coming to them, but it hasn't. So far, the Pentagon, which runs the program, has contracted for $754 million of U.S. goods and experts. Defense officials say it was Congress's suggestion to use Americans where "feasible"; they have taken the admonition a step further by making it a "guiding tenet."

Barry Newman, "Disappearing Act: West Pledged Billions of Aid to Poland -- Where Did It All Go?," Wall Street Journal, February 23, 1994, p. A1. An excerpt:

Under conditions attached by donors, more than half the country's potential [aid] credits must be spent on Western exports -- from corn to economists -- a practice called "tied aid" long frowned on in the Third World. . . . Just as aid for Western advice has mostly aided Western advisers, Western business has been the biggest gainer from the West's business loans. Aid agencies have a pronounced preference for safe bets. The money they are supposed to lend to inspire enterprise in the East often goes to Westerners, or it goes nowhere at all.

Janine R. Wedel, Collision and Collusion: The Strange Case of Western Aid to Eastern Europe, 1989-1998, New York: St. Martin's, 1998.

See also, "While the Rich World Talks," Economist (London), July 10, 1993, p. 13 (U.K. edition). An excerpt:

To the man in the street aid is synonymous with charity, money doled out to alleviate poverty abroad and guilt at home. But in the case of much of the aid rich countries give to poorer ones, the main motive has not been to end poverty but to serve the self-interest of the giver, by winning useful friends, supporting strategic aims or promoting the donor's exports. One glaring example is that almost half of America's aid budget over the past decade has been earmarked for Egypt and Israel. Peace in the Middle East may be worth a lot to America, and to the world, but neither Israel nor even Egypt is among the world's neediest countries. The cold war's end has not yet made the motives of aid givers any less political. . . .

The richest 40% of the developing world's population still gets more than twice as much aid per head as the poorest 40%. Countries that spend most on guns and soldiers, rather than health and education, get the most aid per head. And about half of all aid is still tied to the purchase of goods and services from the donor country.

This regular practice concerning Western "aid" money certainly is not new. See for example, Tom Barry and Deb Preusch, The Soft War: The Uses and Abuses of U.S. Economic Aid in Central America, New York: Grove, 1988, especially Part One (on the role of U.S. economic aid as an interventionary tool in Central America, focusing especially on U.S. A.I.D.); William Borden, The Pacific Alliance: United States Foreign Economic Policy and Japanese Trade Recovery, 1947-1955, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984, pp. 182f (on the role of aid programs in East Asia).

For an early statement of the underlying policy by the Deputy Administrator for the U.S. Agency for International Development, see House of Representatives, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, Winning the Cold War: The U.S. Ideological Offensive, Part VIII ("U.S. Government Agencies and Programs"), January 15 and 16, 1964, 88th Congress, 2nd Session, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1964, pp. 954-960 (Frank M. Coffin outlined the "Objectives of the U.S. A.I.D. Program" as being "not development for the sake of sheer development," but the "fostering of a vigorous and expanding private sector" in order "to open up the maximum opportunity for domestic private initiative and enterprise and to insure that foreign private investment, particularly from the United States, is welcomed and well treated"). See also footnote 14 of this chapter; and footnote 28 of chapter 10 of U.P.

10. On some of the human costs of the capitalist "reforms" in Russia and Eastern Europe, see for example, Stephen F. Cohen, "Why Call It Reform?," Nation, September 7, 1998, p. 6. An excerpt:

Russia's underlying problem is an unprecedented, all-encompassing economic catastrophe -- a peacetime economy that has been in a process of relentless destruction for nearly seven years. [Gross Domestic Product] has fallen by at least 50 percent and according to one report by as much as 83 percent, capital investment by 90 percent and, equally telling, meat and dairy livestock herds by 75 percent. . . .

So great is Russia's economic and thus social catastrophe that we must now speak of another unprecedented development: the literal demodernization of a twentieth-century country. When the infrastructures of production, technology, science, transportation, heating and sewage disposal disintegrate; when tens of millions of people do not receive earned salaries, some 75 percent of society lives below or barely above the subsistence level and at least 15 million of them are actually starving; when male life expectancy has plunged to 57 years, malnutrition has become the norm among schoolchildren, once-eradicated diseases are again becoming epidemics and basic welfare provisions are disappearing; when even highly educated professionals must grow their own food in order to survive and well over half the nation's economic transactions are barter -- all this, and more, is indisputable evidence of a tragic "transition" backward to a premodern era.

On the earlier U.N.I.C.E.F. report discussed in the text, see for example, Frances Williams, "Unicef criticises economic reform's high human cost," Financial Times (London), January 27, 1994, p. 2. An excerpt:

Economic and social reforms in central and eastern Europe have proved far more costly in human terms than originally anticipated, with a massive rise in poverty and widespread social disintegration, the United Nations Children's Fund says in a report [Public Policy and Social Conditions] published yesterday. . . .

The report, which documents the impact of the economic slump on living conditions in nine countries since 1989, points out that . . . the spread of poverty, surging death rates, plunging birth rates, falling school enrollment and an unstoppable crime wave have reached "truly alarming proportions." "These costs are not only the cause of unnecessary suffering and waste of human lives but also represent a source of considerable instability and social conflict that could threaten the entire reform process," Unicef argues. Crude death rates (for the population as a whole) were up 9 per cent in Romania, 12 per cent in Bulgaria and 32 per cent in Russia. Between 1989 and 1993 the yearly number of deaths in Russia rose by more than 500,000.

The New York Times's article on the topic -- a few months after this report from the foreign press -- reviews some possible reasons for the growing death rate in Russia, but with a curious omission: the economic "reforms" which the paper so strongly advocated. See Michael Specter, "Climb in Russia's Death Rate Sets Off Population Implosion," New York Times, March 6, 1994, section 1, p. 1.

See also, Victoria Graham, "UNICEF Says Health Crisis Threatens Eastern European Reforms," A.P., October 6, 1994 (Westlaw database # 1994 WL 10102786)("there were more than 800,000 avoidable deaths from 1989 through 1993 in Albania, Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, Russia, Slovakia and Ukraine"); Julie Corwin, "Russia in Crisis: The Next Battle," U.S. News and World Report, October 18, 1993, p. 47 (in June 1992, 43.2 percent of the Russian population lived in poverty, compared to 2.5 percent from 1975 to 1980; per capita G.N.P. has dropped to 65.4 percent of 1990 level); Martin Wolf, "The Birth Pangs of a Capitalist Eastern Europe," Financial Times (London), September 28, 1992, p. 5 (from early 1989 through mid-1991, according to International Monetary Fund and World Bank statistics, industrial output fell by 45 percent and prices rose 40-fold in Poland; figures for the rest of Eastern Europe were not much better); U.N.I.C.E.F., Public Policy and Social Conditions: Central and Eastern Europe in Transition, Florence (Italy), November 1993; Stephen F. Cohen, Failed Crusade: America and the Tragedy of Post-Communist Russia, New York: Norton, 2000. And see Eve Pell, "Capitalism Anyone?," San Francisco Chronicle, August 21, 1994, p. 5/Z1 ("more Mercedes are sold [in Moscow] than in New York").

For some examples of how Eastern Europe is being "reintegrated" into its traditional Third World service role, see for example, Kevin Done, "A new car industry set to rise in the east," Financial Times (London), September 24, 1992, p. 23 (commenting that General Motors opened a $690 million assembly plant in the former East Germany, where workers are willing to "work longer hours than their pampered colleagues in western Germany," at 40 percent of the wage and with few benefits); Anthony Robinson, "Green shoots in communism's ruins," Financial Times (London), October 20, 1992, "Survey of World Car Industry" section, p. VII (wages in Poland are 10 percent of those demanded by West German workers, kept that way "thanks largely to the Polish government's tougher policy on labour disputes"); Alice Amsden, "Beyond Shock Therapy" [and related articles under the heading "After the Fall"], American Prospect, Spring 1993, pp. 87f.

11. For an article attributing votes for Communist Parties in the early 1990s to "nostalgia," see for example, Celestine Bohlen, "Nationalist Vote Toughens Russian Foreign Policy," New York Times, January 25, 1994, p. A6 ("As the elections showed, nostalgia for the old empire is a potent issue in Russia these days, with many Russians disillusioned by what they see as a string of unfulfilled promises from the West").

For other reports on public opinion in the former Soviet Empire at the time, see for example, "Poll finds most East Europeans have doubts about democracy," Chicago Tribune, February 25, 1993, p. 8 (a Gallup poll of ten East bloc countries found that 63 percent of those questioned opposed what's known as "democracy," an increase of 10 percent since 1991); Andrew Hill, "Ex-Soviet citizens fear free market," Financial Times (London), February 25, 1993, p. 2 (a European Community poll in February 1993 found that most Russians, Belarussians, and Ukranians oppose the move to a free market and feel that "life was better under the old communist system"); Steven Erlanger, "2 Years After Coup Attempt, Yeltsin Warns of Another," New York Times, August 20, 1993, p. A2 ("Relatively reliable polls indicate that the number of Russians who believe that their lives will be better under capitalism has dropped from 24 percent in 1991 to 18 percent" in 1993); "Order disguised as chaos," Economist (London), March 13, 1993, p. 4 ("Surveys in nearly all [former Soviet bloc] countries show a swing back towards socialist values, with 70% of the population saying the state should provide a place to work, as well as a national health service, housing, education, and other services"). See also chapter 10 of U.P. and its footnote 63.

12. For Schoultz's study, see Lars Schoultz, "U.S. Foreign Policy and Human Rights Violations in Latin America: A Comparative Analysis of Foreign Aid Distributions," Comparative Politics, January 1981, pp. 149-170. An excerpt (pp. 155, 157):

The correlations between the absolute level of U.S. assistance to Latin America and human rights violations by recipient governments are . . . uniformly positive, indicating that aid has tended to flow disproportionately to Latin American governments which torture their citizens. In addition, the correlations are relatively strong. . . . United States aid tended to flow disproportionately to the hemisphere's relatively egregious violators of fundamental human rights.

Furthermore, with regard to relative (i.e. per capita) -- as opposed to absolute (i.e. per country) -- U.S. aid to Latin American countries and human rights violations by the recipient governments, Schoultz also found (p. 162):

As in the case of absolute aid levels, these correlations are uniformly positive. Thus, even when the remarkable diversity of population size among Latin American countries is considered, the findings suggest that the United States has directed its foreign assistance to governments which torture their citizens.

The study also demonstrates that this correlation cannot be attributed to a correlation between aid and need.

See also, Lars Schoultz, Human Rights and United States Policy toward Latin America, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981. And see footnote 14 of this chapter.

13. On rising U.S. aid to Colombia and its human rights record, see for example, Human Rights Watch/Americas Watch, State of War: Political Violence and Counterinsurgency in Colombia, Human Rights Watch, December 1993, at pp. 134, 131. In addition to documenting massive human rights abuses, this report notes that for fiscal year 1994, the Clinton administration requested that military financing and training funds for Colombia be increased by over 12 percent -- reaching about half of proposed military aid for all of Latin America -- and indicated that if Congressional budget cuts for the Pentagon interfered with these plans, it "intend[ed] to use emergency drawdown authority to bolster the Colombia account." From 1984 through 1992, 6,844 Colombian soldiers were trained under the U.S. International Military Education and Training Program, over two thousand of them from 1990 to 1992 as atrocities were mounting. See also, Human Rights Watch, War Without Quarter: Colombia and International Humanitarian Law, New York: Human Rights Watch, 1998; Human Rights Watch/Americas, Colombia's killer networks: The military-paramilitary partnership and the United States, New York: Human Rights Watch, 1996.

On the slaughter of dissidents in Colombia, see for example, Douglas Farah, "Leftist Politician Killed in Colombia," Washington Post, March 23, 1990, p. A15 (the Patriotic Union party had "lost some ground," "in part because so many of its local and regional leaders were killed," including at least eighty in the first three months of 1990 alone); James Brooke, "A Colombian Campaigns Amid Risks of Drug War," New York Times, September 24, 1989, section 1, p. 1 ("political violence is believed to have taken the lives of 4,000 people in Colombia last year"); Amnesty International, Political Violence in Colombia: Myth and reality, London: Amnesty International Publications, March 1994. An excerpt (pp. 1, 3, 5, 16):

Since 1986, over 20,000 people have been killed for political reasons -- the majority of them by the armed forces and their paramilitary protegés. . . . Perhaps the most dramatic expression of political intolerance in recent years had been the systematic elimination of the leadership of the left-wing coalition Patriotic Union (U.P.). Over 1,500 of its leaders, members and supporters have been killed since the party was created in 1985. Anyone who takes an active interest in defending human rights, or investigating massacres, "disappearances" or torture, is in a similar position. . . .

Colombia's backers, notably the United States of America, have also remained silent when aid destined to combat drug-trafficking was diverted to finance counter-insurgency operations and thence the killing of unarmed peasants. . . . [T]he perception of drug-trafficking as the principal cause of political violence in Colombia is a myth. . . . Statistics compiled by independent bodies and by the government itself clearly show that by far the greatest number of political killings are the work of the Colombian armed forces and the paramilitary groups they have created. . . . In 1992 the Andean Commission of Jurists estimated that drug traffickers were responsible for less than two per cent of non-combat politically motivated killings and "disappearances"; some 20 per cent were attributed to guerrilla organizations and over 70 per cent were believed to have been carried out by the security forces and paramilitary groups.

The report also describes so-called "social cleansing" programs in Colombia (16, 18, 23-24):

The murder of people designated "socially undesirable" -- homosexuals, prostitutes, minor drug peddlers, petty criminals and addicts, vagrants, street children and the mentally disturbed -- has become endemic in Colombia's major cities. These killings are known as "social cleansing operations" and are generally attributed to, if not claimed by, so-called "death squads" with fearsome names such as Terminator, Kan Kil, Mano Negra, Los Magnificos, Cali Limpia. . . . [S]everal cases have produced evidence that the "death squads" were drawn from the security forces, particularly the National Police, and were often supported by local traders. . . . The Catholic Church's Intercongregational Commission for Justice and Peace documented over 1,900 "social cleansing" murders between 1988 and 1992, 500 of them in 1992. . . .

The Council of State, Colombia's highest judicial administrative body . . . ordered the Ministry of Defence to pay the equivalent of 500 grams of gold each to [one victim's] parents. . . . The military attitude towards "social cleansing" was illustrated by the Ministry of Defence's response to the compensation claim: " . . .[t]here is no case for the payment of any compensation by the nation, particularly for an individual who was neither useful nor productive, either to society or to his family, but who was a vagrant whose presence nobody in the town of Liborina wanted."

On the Colombian government's strikingly effective public relations campaign to improve its image and justify continued massive U.S. aid, employing the P.R. firm Sawyer/Miller, see John C. Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge Is Good For You!: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry, Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1995, pp. 143-148 ("the firm devised a multi-stage campaign: first, reposition Colombia in the public mind from villain to victim. Then, turn the victim into a hero, and then a leader in the war on drugs").

14. For other studies confirming Lars Schoultz's findings, see for example, Michael Klare and Cynthia Arnson, Supplying Repression, Washington: Institute for Policy Studies, 1981, at p. 6 (study concluding that the United States provides "guns, equipment, training, and technical support to the police and paramilitary forces most directly involved in the torture, assassination, and abuse of civilian dissidents"); Edward S. Herman, The Real Terror Network: Terrorism in Fact and Propaganda, Boston: South End, 1982, ch. 3 (showing that U.S.-controlled aid has been positively related to investment climate and inversely related to the maintenance of a democratic order and human rights); Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism -- The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume I, Boston: South End, 1979; Michael T. Klare and Cynthia Arnson, "Exporting Repression: U.S. Support for Authoritarianism in Latin America," in Richard R. Fagen, ed., Capitalism and the State in U.S.-Latin American Relations, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1979, pp. 138-168. See also, Teresa Hayet, Aid As Imperialism, New York: Penguin, 1971 (early work on the dominance of U.S. economic and political interests in the decision-making processes of the international financial and lending agencies, including their origination, funding, and staffing); Michael Tanzer, The Political Economy of International Oil and the Underdeveloped Countries, Boston: Beacon, 1969, ch. 8 (same). For Schoultz's study, see footnote 12 of this chapter.

Chomsky clarifies that this correlation between U.S. aid and human rights violations does not imply that the United States is rewarding some ruling group for torture, death squads, destruction of unions, elimination of democratic institutions, etc. Instead, he explains (Towards A New Cold War: Essays on the Current Crisis and How We Got There, New York: Pantheon, 1982, pp. 206-207):

These are not a positive priority for U.S. policy; rather, they are irrelevant to it. The correlation between abuse of human rights and U.S. support derives from deeper factors. The deterioration in human rights and the increase in U.S. aid and support each correlate, independently, with a third and crucial factor: namely, improvement of the investment climate, as measured by privileges granted foreign capital. The climate for business operations improves as unions and other popular organizations are destroyed, dissidents are tortured or eliminated, real wages are depressed, and the society as a whole is placed in the hands of a collection of thugs who are willing to sell out to the foreigner for a share of the loot -- often too large a share, as business regularly complains. And as the climate for business operations improves, the society is welcomed into the "Free World" and offered the specific kind of "aid" that will further these favorable developments.

15. On systematic hideous abuses in regions of greatest U.S. influence, see especially footnotes 23 and 24 of this chapter, and also its footnotes 12, 13 and 14. See also chapter 2 of U.P. and its footnotes 15 and 54; footnotes 8 and 38 of chapter 4 of U.P.; footnote 11 of chapter 7 of U.P.; and chapter 8 of U.P. and its footnotes 32, 57 and 85.

16. For Truman's attitude towards Stalin, see for example, Robert H. Ferrell, ed., Dear Bess: the Letters from Harry to Bess Truman, 1910-1959, New York: Norton, 1983. In letters to his wife, Truman wrote (pp. 520-522):

I like Stalin. He is straightforward. Knows what he wants and will compromise when he can't get it. . . . Uncle Joe gave his dinner last night. There were at least twenty-five toasts -- so much getting up and down that there was practically no time to eat or drink either -- a very good thing. . . . Since I'd had America's No. 1 pianist to play for Uncle Joe at my dinner he had to go me one better. I had one and one violinist -- and he had two of each. . . . The old man loves music. . . . Stalin felt so friendly that he toasted the pianist when he played a Tskowsky (you spell it) piece especially for him.

Robert H. Ferrell, ed., Off the Record: The Private Papers of Harry S. Truman, New York: Penguin, 1980. Similarly, in his private papers, Truman wrote (pp. 44, 53):

"A common everyday citizen [in Russia] has about as much say about his government as a stock holder in the Standard Oil of New Jersey has about his Company. But I don't care what they do. They evidently like their government or they wouldn't die for it. I like ours so let's get along." "I can deal with Stalin. He is honest -- but smart as hell."

For discussion of the attitudes of Truman and other Washington officials towards Stalin and his regime, see for example, Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992. An excerpt (pp. 15, 52-53):

At the end of the war, U.S. officials . . . wanted to cooperate with the Kremlin. But they harbored a distrust sufficiently profound to require terms of cooperation compatible with vital American interests. Truman said it pointedly when he emphasized that the United States had to have its way 85 percent of the time. Senator Arthur H. Vandenberg, the Republican spokesman on foreign policy, was a little more categorical: "I think our two antipathetical systems can dwell in the world together -- but only on a basis which establishes the fact that we mean what we say when we say it. . . ."

Humanitarian impulses also were a minor influence on U.S. policy. Principles were espoused because they served American interests and because they accorded with American ideological predilections and not because top officials felt a strong sense of empathy with the peoples under former Nazi rule and potential Soviet tutelage. . . . [I]n Washington, top officials -- Truman, Byrnes, Leahy, Forrestal, Patterson, Davies, Grew, Dunn, Lincoln -- rarely thought about the personal travail caused by war, dislocation, and great power competition. . . . Suffering had to be relieved and hope restored in order to quell the potential for revolution. Rarely does a sense of real compassion and/or moral fervor emerge from the documents and diaries of high officials. These men were concerned primarily with power and self-interest, not with real people facing real problems in the world that had just gone through fifteen years of economic strife, Stalinist terror, and Nazi genocide.

Perhaps nothing better illustrates this moral obtuseness than the way top U.S. officials felt about Stalin. Who could doubt his barbarism? Although the full dimensions of the Gulag were not known, the trials, purges, and murders of the 1930's were a matter of public record. Yet far from worrying about their inability to satisfy Stalin's paranoia, American officialdom had great hope for Stalin in 1945. He appeared frank and willing to compromise. Truman liked him. . . . Lest one think these were the views of a naive American politician, it should be remembered that crusty, tough-nosed Admiral Leahy had some of the same feelings. And so did Eisenhower, Harriman, and Byrnes. . . . What went on in Russia, Truman declared, was the Russians' business. The president was fighting for U.S. interests, and Uncle Joe seemed to be the man with whom one could deal. . . . Truman, among others, frequently voiced concern for Stalin's health; it would be a "real catastrophe" should he die. If "it were possible to see him [Stalin] more frequently," Harriman claimed, "many of our difficulties would be overcome."

See also, Frank Kofsky, Harry Truman and the War Scare of 1948: A Successful Campaign to Deceive the Nation, New York: St. Martin's, 1993.

17. On Churchill's attitude towards Stalin, see for example, Lloyd C. Gardner, Spheres of Influence: The Great Powers Partition Europe, From Munich to Yalta, Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1993, pp. 235, 207, 240 (Churchill praised Stalin as a "great man, whose fame has gone out not only over all Russia but the world"; he spoke warmly of his relationship of "friendship and intimacy" with the bloodthirsty tyrant; "My hope," Churchill said, "is in the illustrious President of the United States and in Marshal Stalin, in whom we shall find the champions of peace, who after smiting the foe will lead us to carry on the task against poverty, confusion, chaos, and oppression"; during the war he signed his letters to Stalin, "Your friend and war-time comrade"; in February 1945, after the Yalta Conference, Churchill told his Cabinet that "Premier Stalin was a person of great power, in whom he had every confidence," and that it was important that he should remain in charge).

18. For Churchill's remark about the British occupation of Greece, see Winston Churchill, The Second World War, Volume 6, Triumph and Tragedy, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1953. His exact words (p. 249):

Do not hesitate to act as if you were in a conquered city where a local rebellion is in progress. . . . We have to hold and dominate Athens. It would be a great thing for you to succeed in this without bloodshed if possible, but also with bloodshed if necessary.

For Churchill's praise of Stalin's restraint, see Lloyd C. Gardner, Spheres of Influence: The Great Powers Partition Europe, From Munich to Yalta, Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1993 (citing declassified British cabinet records). Churchill stated to the British Cabinet with regard to Stalin and Greece that (p. 244):

[T]he Russian attitude [at the Yalta conference] could not have been more satisfactory. There was no suggestion on Premier Stalin's part of criticism of our policy. He had been friendly and even jocular in discussions of it. . . . Premier Stalin had most scrupulously respected his acceptance of our position in Greece. He understood that the emissary sent to the U.S.S.R. by the Greek Communists had first been put under house arrest, and then sent back. . . . The conduct of the Russians in this matter had strengthened [Churchill's] view that when they made a bargain, they desired to keep it.

See also, Lawrence S. Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 1943-1949, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982, pp. 6-9, 23-28; David F. Schmitz, Thank God They're On Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921-1965, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999, ch. 4. And see footnote 72 of this chapter.

19. On the U.S. government and business community's support for Hitler and Mussolini before World War II, see for example, Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1995, especially pp. 46-64; David F. Schmitz, Thank God They're On Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921-1965, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999, chs. 1 and 3; David F. Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988; John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: the View from America, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972.

The reasons for the warm American response to Fascism and Nazism that are detailed in these books are explained quite openly in the internal U.S. government planning record. For instance, a 1937 Report of the State Department's European Division described the rise of Fascism as the natural reaction of "the rich and middle classes, in self-defense" when the "dissatisfied masses, with the example of the Russian revolution before them, swing to the Left." Fascism therefore "must succeed or the masses, this time reinforced by the disillusioned middle classes, will again turn to the Left." The Report also noted that "if Fascism cannot succeed by persuasion [in Germany], it must succeed by force." It concluded that "economic appeasement should prove the surest route to world peace," a conclusion based on the belief that Fascism as a system was compatible with U.S. interests. See Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940, p. 140; see also, Daniel Yergin, Shattered Peace: The Origins of the Cold War and the National Security State, Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1977, p. 26 (U.S. Ambassador to Russia William Bullitt "believed that only Nazi Germany could stay the advance of Soviet Bolshevism in Europe").

At the same time, Britain's special emissary to Germany, Lord Halifax, praised Hitler for blocking the spread of Communism, an achievement that brought England to "a much greater degree of understanding of all his [i.e. Hitler's] work" than heretofore, as Halifax recorded his words to the German Chancellor while Hitler was conducting his reign of terror in the late 1930s. See Lloyd Gardner, Spheres of Influence: The Great Powers Partition Europe, From Munich to Yalta, Chicago: Ivan Dee, 1993, p. 13. See also, Clement Leibovitz, The Chamberlain-Hitler Deal, Edmonton, Canada: Les Éditions Duval, 1993 (fascinating 533-page study reproducing vast documentation, largely from recently-declassified British government sources, of the secret British deal allowing Hitler free rein to expand in Eastern Europe; this deal was "motivated by anti-communism" and was "not a sudden policy quirk but was the crowning of incessant efforts to encourage Japan and Germany 'to take their fill' of the Soviet Union" [p. 6]. Leibovitz's study also establishes conclusively, from a wide variety of sources, that there was great sympathy for Hitler's and Mussolini's policies among the British establishment).

Furthermore, although Hitler's rhetorical commitments and actions were completely public, internal U.S. government documents from the 1930s refer to him as a "moderate." For example, the American chargé d'affaires in Berlin wrote to Washington in 1933 that the hope for Germany lay in "the more moderate section of the [Nazi] party, headed by Hitler himself . . . which appeal[s] to all civilized and reasonable people," and seems to have "the upper hand" over the violent fringe. "From the standpoint of stable political conditions, it is perhaps well that Hitler is now in a position to wield unprecedented power," noted the American Ambassador, Frederic Sackett. See Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940, pp. 140, 174, 133, and ch. 9; Foreign Relations of the United States, 1933, Vol. II ("British Commonwealth, Europe, Near East and Africa"), Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1949, pp. 329, 209.

The U.S. reaction to Fascist Italy before the war was similar. A high-level inquiry of the Wilson administration determined in December 1917 that with rising labor militancy, Italy posed "the obvious danger of social revolution and disorganization." A State Department official noted privately that "If we are not careful we will have a second Russia on our hands," adding: "The Italians are like children" and "must be [led] and assisted more than almost any other nation." Mussolini's Blackshirts solved the problem by violence. They carried out "a fine young revolution," the American Ambassador to Italy observed approvingly, referring to Mussolini's March on Rome in October 1922, which brought Italian democracy to an end. Racist goons effectively ended labor agitation with government help, and the democratic deviation was terminated; the United States watched with approval. The Fascists are "perhaps the most potent factor in the suppression of Bolshevism in Italy" and have much improved the situation generally, the Embassy reported to Washington, while voicing some residual anxiety about the "enthusiastic and violent young men" who have brought about these developments. The Embassy continued to report the appeal of Fascism to "all patriotic Italians," simple-minded folk who "hunger for strong leadership and enjoy . . . being dramatically governed." See Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940, pp. 14, 36, 44, 52; Foreign Relations of the United States, 1919, Vol. I ("Paris Peace Conference"), Washington: United States Government Printing Office, 1942, p. 47.

As time went on, the American Embassy was well aware of Mussolini's totalitarian measures. Fascism had "effectively stifled hostile elements in restricting the right of free assembly, in abolishing freedom of the press and in having at its command a large military organization," the Embassy reported in a message of February 1925, after a major Fascist crackdown. But Mussolini remained a "moderate," manfully confronting the fearsome Bolsheviks while fending off the extremist fringe on the right. His qualifications as a moderate were implicit in the judgment expressed by Ambassador Henry Fletcher: the choice in Italy is "between Mussolini and Fascism and Giolitti and Socialism, between strong methods of internal peace and prosperity and a return to free speech, loose administration and general disorganization. Peace and Prosperity were preferred." (Giolitti was the liberal Prime Minister, who had collaborated with Mussolini in the repression of labor but now found himself a target as well.) See Schmitz, The United States and Fascist Italy, 1922-1940, pp. 76-77f.

On the views of U.S. corporations towards Fascism, including details of participation in the plunder of Jewish assets under Hitler's Aryanization programs -- notably, the Ford Motor Company -- see for example, Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1995, especially ch. 5 (on Ford's role in Aryanization of Jewish property, see pp. 62-63). An excerpt (p. 64):

Many U.S. companies bought substantial interests in established German companies, which in turn plowed that new money into Aryanizations or into arms production banned under the Versailles Treaty. According to a 1936 report from Ambassador William Dodd to President Roosevelt, a half-dozen key U.S. companies -- International Harvester, Ford, General Motors, Standard Oil of New Jersey, and du Pont -- had become deeply involved in German weapons production. . . .

U.S. investment in Germany accelerated rapidly after Hitler came to power, despite the Depression and Germany's default on virtually all of its government and commercial loans. Commerce Department reports show that U.S. investment in Germany increased some 48.5 percent between 1929 and 1940, while declining sharply everywhere else in continental Europe. U.S. investment in Great Britain . . . barely held steady over the decade, increasing only 2.6 percent.

Bradford C. Snell, American Ground Transport: A Proposal for Restructuring the Automobile, Truck, Bus, and Rail Industries, Hearings Before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary, Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly, 93rd Congress, 2nd Session, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974, pp. 16-23 (discussing the major role that General Motors, Ford, and to a lesser extent Chrysler, played in the Nazi war effort); Edwin Black, I.B.M. and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance Between Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation, New York: Crown, 2001; Reinhold Billstein et al., Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors, and Forced Labor in Germany during the Second World War, New York: Berghahn, 2000; Gerard Colby Zilg, Du Pont: Behind the Nylon Curtain, Englewood Cliffs (NJ): Prentice-Hall, 1974, especially pp. 292-314, 353-354 (on corporate leaders' plans for a fascist coup in the U.S. in 1934, and on the Du Pont Company's arming of the rising Axis powers in the 1930s). For more on the fascist coup plot -- discussed in Zilg's outstanding study -- see Union Calendar No. 44, Report No. 153, "Investigation of Nazi and Other Propaganda," February 15, 1935, House of Representatives, 74th Congress, 1st Session, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1935 (C.I.S. Serial Set #9890, pp. 9-10); Dickstein-McCormick Special Committee on Un-American Activities, "Investigation of Nazi Propaganda Activities and Investigation of Certain Other Propaganda Activities," beginning June 5, 1934, House of Representatives, 73rd Congress, 2nd Session, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1935 (C.I.S.#688-3-B), especially Testimony of Major-General Smedley D. Butler (Ret.) on November 20, 1934, pp. 8-20, and following testimony, pp. 20-128 (microfiche cards 7 and 8 of 15).

For a sample of the U.S. business press's attitudes, see "The State: Fascist and Total," Fortune, July 1934 [special issue devoted to Italian Fascism], pp. 47-48. This issue comments approvingly that "the purpose and effect of Fascism" is "to unwop the wops," and that the idea that the Italians ought to resent Fascism "is a confusion, and we can only get over it if we anesthetize for the moment our ingrained idea that democracy is the only right and just conception of government." See also, John P. Diggins, Mussolini and Fascism: the View from America, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972; John C. Stauber and Sheldon Rampton, Toxic Sludge Is Good For You!: Lies, Damn Lies and the Public Relations Industry, Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1995, p. 149.

On protection of former Nazis and Fascists after World War II by the U.S. and British governments, see footnote 80 of this chapter. On post-war protection by the U.S. of Japanese Fascists who developed and tested biological weapons, see footnote 62 of chapter 8 of U.P.

On the U.S. government's refusal to admit into the United States most Jewish and other refugees fleeing from the Holocaust, see for example, Arthur D. Morse, While Six Million Died: A Chronicle of American Apathy, New York: Random House, 1967; David S. Wyman, Paper Walls: America and the Refugee Crisis, 1938-1941, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1973; Saul S. Friedman, No Haven for the Oppressed: United States Policy toward Jewish Refugees, 1938-1945, Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1973; Alfred M. Lilienthal, The Zionist Connection: What Price Israel?, New York: Dodd, Mead, 1978 (on the unwillingness of American Zionists to support plans for bringing European Jews to the United States in 1942; instead, they wanted them to go to Palestine).

On U.S. attitudes towards the Spanish Fascist leader Francisco Franco, see footnote 61 of this chapter; and the text of chapter 6 of U.P.

On U.S. attitudes towards Fascist Japan, see for example, Noam Chomsky, "The Revolutionary Pacifism of A.J. Muste: On the Backgrounds of the Pacific War," in Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins: Historical and Political Essays, New York: Pantheon, 1969, pp. 159-220.

Chomsky explains that it was not until European Fascism attacked U.S. interests directly that it became an avowed enemy, and the American reaction to Japanese Fascism was much the same.

20. For The Nation's cover story, see "Norman Rush contemplates the bust of socialism . . . and why we will all miss it so much," Nation, January 24, 1994, article on p. 90 ("The socialist experiment is over and the capitalist experiment roars to its own conclusion").

21. For contemporaneous criticism of the Bolsheviks by leftists, see for example, Rosa Luxemburg, The Russian Revolution, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961 (original 1918)(sympathetic and fraternal, but incisive, critique of Bolshevism written in prison). An excerpt (pp. 62, 71):

To be sure, every democratic institution has its limits and shortcomings, things which it doubtless shares with all other human institutions. But the remedy which Trotsky and Lenin have found, the elimination of democracy as such, is worse than the disease it is supposed to cure; for it stops up the very living source from which alone can come the correction of all the innate shortcomings of social institutions. That source is the active, untrammeled, energetic political life of the broadest masses of the people. . . . The whole mass of the people must take part in [economic and social life]. Otherwise, socialism will be decreed from behind a few official desks by a dozen intellectuals. Public control is indispensably necessary. Otherwise the exchange of experiences remains only within the closed circle of the officials of the new regime. Corruption becomes inevitable. Socialism in life demands a complete spiritual transformation in the masses degraded by centuries of bourgeois class rule.

Bertrand Russell, The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism, London: Allen and Unwin, 1962 (original 1920)(written after an invited, month-long official tour of Soviet Russia). An excerpt (pp. 9-10, 26-29):

By far the most important aspect of the Russian Revolution is as an attempt to realize socialism. I believe that socialism is necessary to the world, and believe that the heroism of Russia has fired men's hopes in a way which was essential to the realization of socialism in the future. . . . But the method which Moscow aims at establishing socialism is a pioneer method, rough and dangerous, too heroic to count the cost of the opposition it arouses. I do not believe that by this method a stable or desirable form of socialism can be established. . . .

When a Russian Communist speaks of dictatorship, he means the word literally, but when he speaks of the proletariat, he means the word in a Pickwickian [i.e. highly specialized] sense. He means the "class-conscious" part of the proletariat, i.e., the Communist Party. He includes people by no means proletarian (such as Lenin and Chicherin) who have the right opinions, and he excludes such wage earners as have not the right opinions, whom he classifies as lackeys of the bourgeoisie. . . . Opposition is crushed without mercy, and without shrinking from the methods of the Tsarist police, many of whom are still employed at their old work. . . . Bolshevism is internally aristocratic and externally militant. The Communists . . . are practically the sole possessors of power, and they enjoy innumerable advantages in consequence.

M. Sergven [probably a pseudonym for the Russian anarcho-syndicalist Gregory Maksimov], "Paths of Revolution," in Libertarian Analysis, Vol. 1, No. 1, Winter 1970, pp. 9-12 [originally published in Voln'nyi Golos Truda (The Free Voice of Labor), Moscow, September 16, 1918, pp. 1-2]. An excerpt:

[T]he proletariat is gradually being enserfed by the state. It is being transformed into servants over whom there has risen a new class of administrators -- a new class born mainly from the womb of the so-called intelligentsia. . . . We do not mean to say that . . . the Bolshevik party had set out to create a new class system. But we do say that even the best intentions and aspirations must inevitably be smashed against the evils inherent in any system of centralized power. . . . The Revolution . . . threw itself into the arms of the old tyrant, centralized power, which is squeezing out its life's breath. We were too unorganized, too weak, and so we have allowed this to happen.

Emma Goldman, "Afterword to My Disillusionment in Russia," in Alix Kates Shulman, ed., Red Emma Speaks: Selected Writings and Speeches By Emma Goldman, New York: Vintage, 1972, pp. 337-358 (original 1923)(written after two years of living in Soviet Russia). An excerpt (pp. 340, 343, 353-354):

For several months following October [the Bolsheviks] suffered the popular forces to manifest themselves, the people carrying the Revolution into ever-widening channels. But as soon as the Communist Party felt itself sufficiently strong in the government saddle, it began to limit the scope of popular activity. All the succeeding acts of the Bolsheviki, all their following policies, changes of policies, their compromises and retreats, their methods of suppression and persecution, their terrorism and extermination of all other political views -- all were but the means to an end: the retaining of the State power in the hands of the Communist Party. Indeed, the Bolsheviki themselves (in Russia) made no secret of it. . . .

True Communism was never attempted in Russia, unless one considers thirty-three categories of pay, different food rations, privileges to some and indifference to the great mass as Communism. In the early period of the Revolution it was comparatively easy for the Communist Party to possess itself of power. All the revolutionary elements, carried away by the ultra-revolutionary promises of the Bolsheviki, helped the latter to power. Once in possession of the State the Communists began their process of elimination. All the political parties and groups which refused to submit to the new dictatorship had to go. First the Anarchists and Left Social Revolutionists, then the Mensheviki and other opponents from the Right, and finally everybody who dared aspire to an opinion of his own. Similar was the fate of all independent organizations. They were either subordinated to the needs of the new State or destroyed altogether, as were the Soviets, the trade unions and the coöperatives -- three great factors for the realization of the hopes of the Revolution. . . .

It is not only Bolshevism, Marxism, and Governmentalism which are fatal to revolution as well as to all vital human progress. The main cause of the defeat of the Russian Revolution lies much deeper. It is to be found in the whole Socialist conception of revolution itself. The dominant, almost general, idea of revolution -- particularly the Socialist idea -- is that revolution is a violent change of social conditions through which one social class, the working class, becomes dominant over another class, the capitalist class. It is the conception of a purely physical change, and as such it involves only political scene shifting and institutional rearrangements. Bourgeois dictatorship is replaced by the "dictatorship of the proletariat" -- or by that of its "advance guard," the Communist Party; Lenin takes the seat of the Romanovs, the Imperial Cabinet is rechristened Soviet of People's Commissars, Trotsky is appointed Minister of War, and a labourer becomes the Military Governor General of Moscow. That is, in essence, the Bolshevik conception of revolution, as translated into actual practice. And with a few minor alterations it is also the idea of revolution held by all other Socialist parties. This conception is inherently and fatally false. Revolution is indeed a violent process. But if it is to result only in a change of dictatorship, in a shifting of names and political personalities, then it is hardly worth while. . . . It is at once the great failure and the great tragedy of the Russian Revolution that it attempted (in leadership of the ruling political party) to change only institutions and conditions, while ignoring entirely the human and social values involved in the Revolution.

For a much earlier critique of Leninist organizational principles, see Rosa Luxemburg, Leninism or Marxism?, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961 (original 1904). An excerpt (p. 102):

If we assume the viewpoint claimed as his own by Lenin and we fear the influence of intellectuals in the proletarian movement, we can conceive of no greater danger to the Russian party than Lenin's plan of organization. Nothing will more surely enslave a young labor movement to an intellectual elite hungry for power than this bureaucratic strait jacket, which will immobilize the movement and turn it into an automaton manipulated by a Central Committee. On the other hand, there is no more effective guarantee against opportunist intrigue and personal ambition than the independent revolutionary action of the proletariat, as a result of which the workers acquire the sense of political responsibility and self-reliance. What is today only a phantom haunting Lenin's imagination may become reality tomorrow.

For a classic discussion of the reactionary character of the Bolshevik takeover by a participant in the events, see Voline [i.e. Vsevolod Mikhailovich Eichenbaum], The Unknown Revolution, 1917-1921, Detroit: Black & Red, 1974 (original 1947).

22. For the Walters program, see "Americans Beware! -- Danger in Guatemala," 20/20, A.B.C. television news-magazine, June 3, 1994, transcript #1422-1.

23. On kidnapping of children, see footnote 24 of this chapter. On child slavery, child sex slavery, and child labor throughout U.S.-dominated Third World domains, see for example, Reuters, "Exploitation of children documented in world study," Christian Science Monitor, December 19, 1979, "Living" section, p. 15. An excerpt:

Almost 200 million children throughout the world may be slaving away, often in dismal poverty, according to a new international study of child labor. Children have been maimed in India to become more effective beggars, sold to work under appalling conditions in factories in Thailand, and turned into Latin American chattel slaves at the age of three. . . . The 170-page book [Child Workers Today, by James Challis and David Elliman], sponsored by the London-based Anti-Slavery Society, is peppered with pitiful examples. . . .

Latin America is singled out in the book as the continent where child labor will probably be harder to eradicate than anywhere else in the world. In countries with large Indian populations like Bolivia, girls as young as three are "adopted" by white families, the book says. Traditionally they are sexually available to the sons of the family, not allowed to marry, and the children they conceive become virtual chattel slaves in turn.

George C. Moffett III, "Use of Child Labor Increases Worldwide," Christian Science Monitor, July 21, 1992, p. 8. An excerpt:

It is one of the grimmer ironies of the age that even as global employment rates for adults are declining, the incidence of child labor -- often forced, frequently debilitating -- is on the increase. As many as a quarter of all children between ages 10 and 14 in some regions of the world may be working, according to a report issued today by the Geneva-based International Labor Organization (I.L.O.) . . . The report defines child labor as a condition in which children are exploited, overworked, deprived of health and education -- "or just deprived of their childhood."

Just how many children are affected is hard to say, since most work illegally or for small merchants, family cottage industries, and farms, where they are "invisible to the collectors of labor-force statistics," says the I.L.O. study, entitled "Child Labor: A Dramatically Worsening Global Problem." It says the figure is certainly in the hundreds of millions, including 7 million in Brazil alone.

Amport Tantuvanich, A.P., "Slavery the fate of these children," Boston Globe, September 24, 1978, p. 32. An excerpt:

They labor hour after hour without a break around furnaces that generate 1450 degree heat. Their arms and hands bear scars from burns and cuts which management treats with herbal ointments, toothpaste, fish sauce and pain killers. But these workers in a Bangkok glass factory are children. They are among tens of thousands in Thailand that officials acknowledge are illegally employed and often cheated and abused. Some are sold by their parents to factory owners and become virtual slaves. . . .

In one of the biggest raids this year, police rescued 63 children from jail-like conditions in a tinsel-paper factory in Bangkok. Some of the children told police they were "purchased" by the factory, which had sent a broker to recruit young workers in northeastern Thailand. . . . The children in the glass factory work 10 hours a day, seven days a week. They are paid the equivalent of 90 cents a day. . . . Labor specialists say that a combination of wide-open free enterprise and a lack of labor-union power contributes to the child labor problem. Under laws laid down by Thailand's military government, strikes and other labor union activities are forbidden.

John Stackhouse, "The girls of Tamil Nadu," Globe & Mail (Toronto), November 20, 1993, p. D1. An excerpt:

On these drought-stricken plains of Tamil Nadu in Southern India, close to 100,000 children -- three-quarters of them girls -- go to work every morning in match factories, fireworks plants, rock quarries, tobacco mills, repair shops and tea houses. Together, they make up the single biggest concentration of child labour in the world.

In an age when child labour has disappeared from much of the world, it continues to be rampant in South Asia. The Operations Research Group, a respected Indian organization, has pegged the number of full-time child workers at 44 million in India, with perhaps 10 million more toiling in neighbouring Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal and Sri Lanka -- a total almost equal to the population of Britain.

See also, Ian Black, "Peace or no peace, Israel will still need cheap Arab labour," New Statesman (U.K.), September 29, 1978, pp. 403-404. An excerpt:

Just after 4 a.m., as the sky begins to pale, you can see small groups of people standing around the pumps, huddled in corners, leaning against walls. They have just scrambled off dilapidated trucks and vans that bring them daily from Gaza, Khan Younis and Rafiah in Northern Sinai, and they are clutching plastic bags containing their food for the day. Some are no more than six or seven years old. The scene has become known in Israel as the Children's Market at the Ashkelon junction.

By 5 o'clock the sun is up and the first employers are arriving. They come in jeeps from the prosperous Moshavim (small private or semi-collective farms) situated on either side of the now invisible "green line" -- the pre-1967 border. They are at once surrounded by swarms of waiting workers. In broken Hebrew -- but fluent enough to cover the bare essentials of selling themselves for the day -- the little labourers persuade the Israelis of their skills: "Sir I good work sir, 60 pounds all day sir" and so on. . . . Sometimes they are paid in full for their work -- usually a meagre, subsistence wage; often they are cheated even on that. And since their employment is illegal, there is little they can do.

24. On kidnapping and murder of children in U.S.-dominated Third World domains -- for organ transplants and otherwise -- see for example, Hugh O'Shaughnessy, "Takeaway babies farmed to order," Observer (London), October 1, 1993, p. 14. An excerpt:

San Salvador's eastern slum suburb . . . [is] home to El Salvador's urban proletariat -- and to its flourishing baby trade. Here are the casas de engorde, or "fattening houses," where newborn babies, preferably male and not too dark-skinned, are brought to be plumped up for sale. Usually run by lawyers in collaboration with nurses and baby minders, the fattening houses have the job of cleaning up the babies, freeing them of worms, lice and nits, and feeding them so they fetch the best price. The best price for a good-looking male child is now between £7,000 and £10,000 -- double the price a decade ago, say lawyers familiar with the trade in El Salvador and Guatemala. Bought for, say, £200 from kidnappers or poor mothers, the baby farmers aim to sell the "goods" for at least 30 times their initial investment.

Though the furtive trade is impossible to quantify, estimates say several thousand children are sold every year from Central America. Though the majority of young people kidnapped or bought in El Salvador are destined for adoption in Canada, the United States or Italy, there can be little doubt that some go to Britain. In addition to the babies sold to childless couples in rich countries, there are others bought by criminals involved in pornography, prostitution or drugs, or by intermediaries in the growing international trade in human organs. . . . In Honduras . . . the practice is for baby farmers to adopt retarded children and use their organs as "spare parts." In Guatemala City, the fire service and the undertakers are notorious for trading in the organs of the dead, young and old, particularly in the corneas of the eyes. . . .

[O]n 1 June 1982, when Nelson was six months old, the Salvadorean army came to the untidy village of San Antonio de la Cruz on the banks of the River Lempa, supposedly as part of a military operation called La Guinda (The Glace Cherry) directed against the left-wing guerrillas of the F.M.L.N. Instead, they had a very successful day's baby-hunting. After surrounding the village, the army loaded their helicopters with 50 babies, including Nelson. Their parents have never seen them since. . . . [Nelson's mother, Maria Magdalena,] desperately clung to the helicopter, but the soldiers pushed her off.

Jan Rocha and Ed Vulliamy, "Brazilian children 'sold for transplants,'" Guardian Weekly (U.K.), September 30, 1990, p. 10. An excerpt:

Brazilian federal police have been ordered by the Justice Ministry to investigate allegations that children ostensibly adopted by Italian couples are being used for illicit organ transplants in Europe. Italian authorities have been asked by Interpol to look into the allegations, which include claims that Brazilian children are being killed in Europe and their kidneys, testicles, livers and hearts sold for between £20,000 and £50,000. Such a trade is known to exist in Mexico and Thailand. . . . Handicapped children are said to be preferred for transplant operations. . . .

False papers are obtained for stolen babies in many ways. Police discovered that Rita de Cassia Costa, aged 21, had "given birth" three times last year: once to her own child, and twice to give an identity to stolen babies. She was arrested with a lawyer, Dorivan Matias Teles, who is accused of involvement in an international network allegedly supplying babies for "brain death" operations to enable them to be maintained alive until their organs were needed for transplants.

Robert Smith, "European Parliament Denunciation: The Trafficking of Central American Children," Report on Guatemala (Guatemala News and Information Bureau, Oakland, CA), Vol. 10, Issue 3, July/August/September 1989, pp. 4-5 (reprinting the text of the European Parliament's November 1988 resolution on the trafficking of Central American children). An excerpt:

Since 1987, numerous clandestine "human farms," houses where small children are kept and fed prior to being sold, have been discovered in Guatemala and Honduras. . . . According to Marta Gloria Torres, member of the Representation of the United Guatemalan Opposition (RUOG), "A few cases are for adoptions, but the great majority is for organ transplants or for prostitution." Near one farm discovered in San Pedro Sula, Honduras, the corpses of many infants were found, all with one or more organs removed. . . . There are some reports of widows and parents, driven by poverty, actually selling their own young children to these brokers. But in the last few years, Guatemalan newspapers have reported a great number of young children kidnapped from their parents' homes, from hospitals, and off the streets. . . .

The first "casa de engorde" ("fattening-up house") was discovered by the police in Guatemala in February, 1987. Children found inside were destined for the United States and Israel as organ donors, according to those arrested in the raid. In the following month, another house was closed down in the capital. Records found inside indicate that between October 1985 and March of 1986, 150 children were sold outside the country. In June of 1988 alone, the Military Police found and closed five of these underground houses. . . . Doctor Luís Genaro Morales, president of the Guatemalan Pediatric Association, says child trafficking "is becoming one of the principal non-traditional export products," and that it generates $20 million of business a year.

Samuel Blixen [Uruguayan journalist], "'War' waged on Latin American street kids," Latinamerica press (Lima; Noticias Aliadas), November 7, 1991, p. 3. An excerpt:

Against a backdrop of increasing poverty and street crime a new type of death squad has sprung up: "clean-up squads," or "avengers." They target and exterminate street kids, and many believe they are assisted by police and financed by the business sector. Surviving as beggars, thieves, prostitutes, drug runners or cheap factory workers, street kids are considered the criminals of the future and their elimination will supposedly prevent future problems. Some victims are gunned down while they are sleeping below bridges, on vacant lots and in doorways. Others are kidnapped, tortured and killed in remote areas.

In Brazil, the bodies of young death squad victims are found in zones outside the metropolitan areas with their hands tied, showing signs of torture and riddled with bullet holes. . . . Street girls are frequently forced to work as prostitutes. . . . In Guatemala City, the majority of the 5,000 street kids work as prostitutes. In June 1990, eight children were kidnapped on a street in the capital by men riding in a jeep. Three bodies were later found in a clearing with their ears cut off and eyes gouged out: a warning about what could happen to possible witnesses. . . . In a rare case, 12 groups accused of murdering children were broken up in Rio de Janeiro last July. Minister of Health Alceni Guerra blamed business owners and merchants for financing the death squads. . . . Yet, the murders continue to increase. In Rio de Janeiro and in São Paulo reports indicate an average of three children under the age of 18 are killed daily. According to statistics from the Legal Medical Institute, 427 children in Rio de Janeiro have been killed this year. Almost all the murders have been attributed to death squads. . . .

In the Brazilian state of Rondonia on the Bolivian border, approximately 1,000 children work as virtual slaves extracting tin and another 2,000 adolescents work as prostitutes, according to union sources. Private employment agencies in Puerto Maldonado, capital of the Peruvian jungle department of Madre de Dios, recruit children to pan for gold. The children are sold to the highest bidder, according to Vicente Solorio, head of an investigation commission of the Peruvian Labor Ministry. . . . Children work 18 hours a day in water up to their knees and are paid a daily ration of bananas and boiled yucca, reported a young campesina who escaped after eight months of forced labor.

Gilberto Dimenstein (introduction by Jan Rocha), Brazil: War on Children, London: Latin America Bureau, 1991. An excerpt (pp. 21, 2):

"There is definitely a process of extermination of young people going on in various parts of the country. And I have to recognise that, unfortunately, there are members of the police force who are involved in the killing or who are giving protection to the killers," admits Hélio Saboya, head of the Justice Department in Rio de Janeiro. . . . Almeida Filho, head of the Justice Department in Pernambuco, the biggest state in the country's north-east region . . . is accustomed to reading reports of murders of young people in which the victims have suffered the most sadistic torture: genital organs severed, eyes poked out, bodies burned by cigarette ends and slashed by knives. . . .

There are an estimated 25 million deprived children in Brazil, and of these between seven and eight million are on the streets. . . . During the day, the street children's main concern is survival -- food. To get it they beg, pick pockets, steal from shops, mug tourists, look after parked cars, shine shoes, or search litter bins. Frequently glue takes the place of food. They sniff it from paper bags and for a few glorious moments forget who or where they are.

Amnesty International, Political Violence in Colombia: Myth and reality, London: Amnesty International Publications, March 1994. An excerpt (pp. 21-23):

A "social cleansing" operation uncovered in the northwest port city of Barranquilla in February 1992 caused widespread revulsion in Colombia. University security guards and police officers were killing people and selling their bodies to the illegal trade in organs and corpses. The operation came to light when one of the intended victims survived and escaped.

Oscar Hernández said that security guards had lured him and other paper collectors to the grounds of the Free University in Barranquilla by telling them they could collect discarded cartons and bottles outside the University's School of Medicine. Once inside the university grounds, the refuse collectors were shot or beaten to death with clubs. Oscar Hernández was beaten unconscious and was presumably believed to be dead. When he regained consciousness early the following morning he found himself in a room with several corpses. He escaped and raised the alarm to a passing police patrol. . . . Security guards and the head of the dissecting room were arrested and reportedly confessed that the traffic in bodies had been going on for two years.

U.N. Economic and Social Council, Commission on Human Rights, E/CN.4/Sub.2/1992/34, June 23, 1992 (testimony of University of São Paulo (Brazil) Professor of Theology Father Barruel that "75 percent of the corpses [of murdered children] reveal internal mutilation and the majority have their eyes removed").

On the "voluntary" sale of organs, see for example, Kenneth Freed, "Desperation: Selling an Eye or a Kidney," Los Angeles Times, September 10, 1981, section 1, p. 1. An excerpt:

Paulo Ricardo dos Santos Barreto and Maria Fatima Lopes don't know each other, but they share something -- an extraordinary despair that is driving them to risk mutilation of their own bodies, even blindness. The two young people -- he is 22 and she 19 -- are among the growing number of Brazilians so crushed by poverty that they are willing to sell their bodies. Not for prostitution, although that is common enough here. No, Barreto is advertising a kidney, Lopes a cornea. "I sometimes live on bread and water," Barreto said in explaining his situation. "I can't exist like this. There is no other way out. . . ."

Barreto and Lopes are not alone. In a country where at least 15% of the people are jobless and millions more earn less than $200 a month and inflation is 120% a year, poverty is giving birth to monstrous acts of desperation. The Sunday classified ads of Rio's biggest newspapers are a register of this despair, increasingly full of offers by people to sell parts of themselves -- kidneys and eyes for the most part. In a recent Sunday edition of O Globo, there were 10 ads offering to sell kidneys and three more for corneas.

Hugh O'Shaughnessy, "Murder And Mutilation Supply Human Organ Trade," Observer (London), March 27, 1994, p. 27. An excerpt:

In January, a 29-year-old unemployed French electrician advertised in a Strasbourg newspaper to exchange one of his kidneys for a job. As in the Third World, so in cash-strapped Eastern Europe, where selling one's organs can be a source of hard currency. A call last week to Robert Miroz, a kidney agent in the Polish city of Swidnica, confirmed that organs were available; the price of a kidney was quoted as pounds 12,000. Polish middlemen send their potential donors to a hospital in Western Europe where the best-matched candidate sells his kidney for cash in hand and a written undertaking from the recipient to bear all the costs of his post-operative treatment.

It should be noted that trade in body parts does not pass entirely without censure: in 1994, President Clinton approved a National Security Council recommendation to impose limited sanctions against Taiwanese exports, to punish Taiwan "for its alleged failure to crack down adequately on trafficking in rhino horns and tiger parts." See Jeremy Mark, "U.S. Will Punish Taiwan for Trade In Animal Parts," Wall Street Journal, April 4, 1994, p. A8.

25. For the Amnesty International report discussing "social cleansing" in Colombia, see footnotes 13 and 24 of this chapter.

26. On the emerging market in organs in Eastern Europe, see for example, Hugh O'Shaughnessy, "Murder And Mutilation Supply Human Organ Trade," Observer (London), March 27, 1994, p. 27. An excerpt:

A children's home in St. Petersburg, Russia, is giving away children in its care to foreigners and does not bother to register the addresses to which they go. The evidence, though circumstantial, points strongly to the orphans being robbed of their organs and tissues. Dr. Jean-Claude Alt, an anaesthetist in Versailles and a leading campaigner against illegal trading in human organs, says: "People come to the home offering to adopt children with any ailment from a hare lip to Down's Syndrome and severe mental disturbance. Their only stipulation is that they have no heart trouble. What reasonable conclusion can you draw from that?" . . .

[T]hose with money who have wanted to jump the queues for kidneys in Western Europe have gone to the Third World, where donors sell their organs for cash. At a hospital in Bombay last week, Dr. Martin de Souza said a kidney transplant would cost about pounds 7,500 fully inclusive. The price is similar in the Philippines capital, Manila.

On the emerging market in children in Eastern Europe, see for example, Gabrielle Glaser, "Booming Polish Market: Blond, Blue-Eyed Babies," New York Times, April 19, 1992, section 1, p. 8. An excerpt:

Poland's opening to Western market forces has brought an unexpected side effect: a booming traffic in the country's blond, blue-eyed babies. . . . Western embassies in Warsaw have reported a striking rise in the number of residence visas and passports granted to Polish infants and toddlers. . . . In some cases, officials say, poor, pregnant women give up their babies in exchange for money directly. But most often, they say, administrators of homes for single mothers, as well as the attorneys involved in the adoptions, receive up to tens of thousands of dollars. . . . [S]ome of the cases reported are linked to the Roman Catholic Church. . . .

In a recent article, Marek Baranski wrote about one woman in the city of Lublin who gave her unborn child up for adoption to an American couple in December 1991 after being pressed by the nuns caring for her in a church home for single mothers. Since the article appeared, Mr. Baranski said he has received several dozen letters, most of them anonymous, from women throughout Poland who wrote of having the same treatment in church-run homes. . . . [T]he mother superior of one home received up to $25,000 for each baby boy and $15,000 for each baby girl. . . . Two visitors driving a foreign car went to [this] home. . . . The mother superior at the home, Sister Benigna, greeted the visitors with blessings and proudly displayed her papal award for "defending life," an honor Pope John Paul II bestows on anti-abortion crusaders in his native Poland. "How can I help you, dears?" she said, offering tea. When the two said that they were journalists, Sister Benigna rose to her feet. "There was a very bad article about us," she said. "It has given us great moral discomfort. I cannot give you any information. Good-bye."

On the economic collapse in Eastern Europe, see footnote 10 of this chapter.

27. For Aviles's and other officials' statements about trade in children, see for example, Hugh O'Shaughnessy, "Takeaway babies farmed to order," Observer (London), October 1, 1993, p. 14. This article quotes Victoria de Aviles, the Salvadoran government Procurator for the Defence of Children, as follows: "We know there is a big trade in children in El Salvador, for pornographic videos, for organ transplants, for adoption and for prostitution. We want to extend the use of checking identities of children by using D.N.A. We will certainly look into what evidence you have -- even if it involves the army. . . . We found the latest casa de engorde [i.e. 'fattening house' where newborn babies are plumped up for sale] in San Marcos in July. There were six children there."

In addition, the article cites the Guatemalan police spokesman Fredy Garcia Avalos, and the European Parliament's findings, as follows:

The police in Guatemala, who are not known for exaggerating the seriousness of their country's problems, say they have investigated 200 cases of baby trafficking and discovered four casas de engorde. Fredy Garcia Avalos, the police spokesman, says the racket is being run by lawyers, nurses, handlers and stand-in mothers. One little village, Boca del Monte, he says, has achieved modest fame as a centre for baby farming. The villagers make a standard charge of £18 a month to fatten up a baby while the legal documentation relating to foreign adoption is sorted out. . . .

According to a report on the trade in transplant organs adopted by the European Parliament in Strasbourg, only a quarter of the 4,000 Brazilian children authorised for adoption in Italy were really adopted. The rest, the report's authors say, were chopped up for their organs in undercover hospitals in Mexico and Europe to the order of the Camorra, the Mafia of Naples.

For reports by other sources about the organ trade and widespread abuse of children, see footnotes 23 and 24 of this chapter. See also footnote 13 of this chapter.

28. For Adams's phrase, see Robert F. Smith, What Happened in Cuba? A Documentary History, New York: Twayne, 1963, pp. 27-28, Document 5. His exact words:

Cuba, almost in sight of our shores, from a multitude of considerations has become an object of transcendent importance to the political and commercial interests of our Union. . . . [I]n looking forward to the probable course of events for the short period of half a century, it is scarcely possible to resist the conviction that the annexation of Cuba to our federal republic will be indispensable to the continuance and integrity of the Union itself. It is obvious however that for this event we are not yet prepared. . . .

But there are laws of political as well as of physical gravitation; and if an apple severed by the tempest from its native tree cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its own unnatural connection with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can gravitate only towards the North American Union, which by the same law of nature cannot cast her off from its bosom.

See also, Richard Drinnon, White Savage: the Case of John Dunn Hunter, New York: Schocken, 1972, p. 158 (Thomas Jefferson advised President Madison to offer Napoleon a free hand in Spanish America in return for the gift of Cuba to the United States, and wrote to President Monroe in 1823 that the U.S. should not go to war for Cuba, "but the first war on other accounts will give it to us, or the Island will give itself to us, when able to do so"); Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America, New York: Norton, 1983 (2nd revised and expanded edition 1993), pp. 13-25.

29. On the timing of the formal U.S. decision to overthrow Castro, see for example, Jules Benjamin, The United States and the Origins of the Cuban Revolution: An Empire of Liberty in an Age of National Liberation, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. An excerpt (pp. 186-189, 207):

Though State Department liberals were later pilloried by U.S. conservatives as pro-Castro dupes who had allowed a totalitarian regime to be constructed on the island, as early as October 1959 -- before there was any Soviet presence in Cuba and while opposition media still existed -- these liberals shifted policy to one of overthrowing Castro's regime. . . . "Not only have our business interests in Cuba been seriously affected," the [secret policy paper formulating the change] went on, "but the United States cannot hope to encourage and support sound economic policies in other Latin American countries and promote necessary private investments in Latin America if it is or appears to be simultaneously cooperating with the Castro program. . . ."

On January 18 [1960] the C.I.A. set up a special task force (Branch 4 of the Western Hemisphere Division) composed mainly of veterans of the 1954 operation against Arbenz in Guatemala. The task force prepared a wide-ranging assault on the Castro regime. Early in March this plan was approved by the secret high-level study group that oversaw all major covert operations. The approved program was sent to Eisenhower on March 14. Three days later the president met with Allen Dulles and gave final approval to the plan. . . . A separate project to assassinate Castro and other top Cuban leaders, under discussion since December 1959, was also implemented by the C.I.A. Several of the actual attempts on Castro's life were carried out by the agency with the cooperation of the U.S. Mafia. All of these actions were to be complemented by a program of economic denial and, eventually, of widespread economic warfare. . . .

[T]he original plan for the overthrow of Castro [was] drawn up in March 1960 and set in motion by President Eisenhower. The planning document states: "The purpose of the program outlined herein is to bring about the replacement of the Castro regime with one more devoted to the true interests of the Cuban people and more acceptable to the U.S. in such a manner as to avoid any appearance of U.S. intervention."

On Castro's early anti-Communist stance, see for example, Richard E. Welch, Response to Revolution: The United States and the Cuban Revolution, 1959-1961, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985. An excerpt (pp. 10-14):

[A] widely held myth holds that Fidel Castro was a communist from the beginning of his career as a Cuban revolutionary. . . . Here is a myth that is not an exaggeration but a lie. Castro at twenty-one was a left-leaning student who disliked authority and had feelings of guilt and suspicion toward his own class, the Cuban bourgeoisie. He was a revolutionary in search of a revolution, but he was not a communist. By temperament a caudillo [military leader], and by the definitions of U.S. political history never a democrat, Castro only became a Marxist sometime between fall 1960 and fall 1961. Castro himself is partially responsible for the myths surrounding his conversion to Marxist ideology. During a long speech on 2 December 1961 he declared himself a Marxist-Leninist and in parts of that rambling oration seemed to imply that he had long been sympathetic to socialist doctrine. These portions were inaccurately translated in early press reports and subsequently taken out of context by his enemies in the United States. . . . Actually the chief theme of this confused and self-exculpatory address was that although he had always been a socialist intuitively, he was initially in thralldom to bourgeois values. Only by hard study and several stages had he come to a full appreciation of the superior wisdom of Marx and Lenin. . . .

Castro's initial program called for representative democracy as well as social reform and made no demands for the nationalization of land and industry. . . . The Cuban Revolution evolved from a variant of democratic reformism to a variant of communism, and its radicalization is best understood when its early years are divided into three separate periods. These periods cannot be given specific dates, but a logical three-part chronological division identifies as phase one, January-October 1959; phase two, November 1959-December 1960; and phase three, 1961 and spring 1962. Historians differ over the labels to be given these three phases. For the historian who sees Castro's adoption of communism as the main theme of the Cuban Revolution, phase one might be labeled "from anticommunism to anti-anticommunism"; phase two, "from anti-anticommunism to pro-communism"; and phase three, "from pro-communism to communist."

See also, William Appleman Williams, The United States, Cuba, and Castro: An Essay on the Dynamics of Revolution and the Dissolution of Empire, New York: Monthly Review, 1962, p. 112 ("Castro moved . . . to attack the Communist challenge to his leadership. He did so very bluntly and angrily on May 8 and 16 [1959], dissociating himself from the Communist Party and its ideas and programs. He subsequently acted in June to block Communist influence in the labor movement"); Wayne S. Smith, The Closest of Enemies: A Personal and Diplomatic Account of U.S.-Cuban Relations Since 1957, New York: Norton, 1987, p. 44 ("C.I.A. Deputy Director C.P. Cabell confirmed during testimony before a Senate subcommittee in November 1959 . . . 'Castro,' he said, 'is not a Communist . . . the Cuban Communists do not consider him a Communist party member or even a pro-Communist'"); Warren Hinckle and William W. Turner, The Fish Is Red: The Story of the Secret War Against Castro, New York: Harper and Row, 1981, p. 33 (the C.I.A.'s Latin America political action officer, Frank Bender, concluded: "Castro is not only not a Communist . . . he is a strong anti-Communist fighter").

30. On Kennedy's implementation of Operation MONGOOSE, see chapter 1 of U.P. and its footnote 21.

31. On Cuba's achievements, see for example, Michael Stührenberg, "Pulling Cuban Soldiers Out of Angola," Die Zeit (West Germany), in World Press Review, December 1988, pp. 30-32. An excerpt:

Today, more than 10,000 Cuban doctors, teachers, construction workers, and engineers work in 37 African, Asian, and Latin American countries. . . . For Cubans, international service is a sign of personal courage, political maturity, and an uncompromising attitude toward the "imperialist enemy." In schools, civilian assistance is taught as the highest virtue. . . . Especially among teachers and construction workers, the will to do service exceeds the demand. "The waiting lists are getting longer," sighs the director of Cubatécnica, Cuba's state bureau for non-military aid. . . . "The more critical a situation becomes somewhere, the more people want to go. When we were trying to find 2,000 teachers for Nicaragua a few years ago, we got 29,500 applications. Shortly thereafter, four of our teachers were killed by the Contras. Subsequently, 92,000 teachers applied for service. . . ."

[T]he reservoir of volunteers for international service seems inexhaustible: In 1985, 16,000 Cuban civilians worked in Third World countries. In that same year, the U.S. had fewer than 6,000 Peace Corps development assistants in 59 countries and about 1,200 specialists from the Agency for International Development in 70 countries. . . . Today, Cuba has more physicians working abroad than any industrialized nation, and more than the U.N.'s World Health Organization. Countries, like Angola, with little money, an infant mortality rate of more than 30 percent, and life expectancy of less than 50 years, receive free Cuban aid. To get doctors from international organizations, Angola would have to pay $1,500 to $2,000 a month for one physician, not to mention the costs of accommodations that meet the requirements of a Western doctor. . . . Cuba's international emissaries indeed are . . . not party theoreticians, but men and women who live under conditions that most development aid workers would not accept. And that is the basis for their success.

Tom J. Farer, "Human Rights and Human Welfare in Latin America," Daedalus, Fall 1983, pp. 139-170. An excerpt (pp. 155-157):

[T]here is a consensus among scholars of a wide variety of ideological positions that, on the level of life expectancy, education, and health, Cuban achievement is considerably greater than one would expect from its level of per capita income. A recent study comparing 113 Third World countries in terms of these basic indicators of popular welfare ranked Cuba first, ahead even of Taiwan.

Morris Morley and Chris McGillion, "That man in Havana may be there for some time," Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), January 7, 1992, p. 9. An excerpt:

That Cuba has survived at all under these circumstances [i.e. the U.S. embargo] is an achievement in itself. That it registered the highest per capita increase in gross social product (wages and social benefits) of any economy in Latin America -- and almost double that of the next highest country -- over the period 1981-1990 is quite remarkable.

Moreover, despite the economic difficulties, the average Cuban is still better fed, housed, educated and provided for medically than other Latin Americans, and -- again atypically -- the Cuban Government has sought to spread the burden of the new austerity measures equally among its people. Indeed, one only has to compare the growing inequality, decaying infrastructure, massive health problems, creeping stagnation, and rising poverty elsewhere in Latin America to believe that Fidel Castro's Cuba will be around for quite some time yet.

Tim Golden, "Health Care, Cuba's Pride, Falls on Hard Times," New York Times, October 30, 1994, section 1, p. 1. An excerpt:

Five years into the crushing economic crisis set off by the collapse of Cuba's preferential trading partnerships in the former East block . . . even the most basic medicines are often scarce. . . . And for a country now thought to have a per-capita income comparable to that of its poorest neighbors, the broad measures of its health may be even more impressive than in years past: infant mortality, estimated to have fallen to 9.4 deaths for every 1,000 live births last year, was only a shade higher than that in the United States; life expectancy at birth, 75.5 years in 1992, nearly equaled that of Luxembourg. . . . Health officials say the shortages have been aggravated by the United States economic embargo, which was tightened in 1992.

On Castro's repressions, see for example, Amnesty International, Political Imprisonment in Cuba, London: Cuban-American National Foundation and Amnesty International, 1987. For comparison with the human rights records of neighboring countries in Latin America, see footnote 13 of chapter 1 of U.P. (Guatemala); footnote 15 of chapter 2 of U.P. (El Salvador and Guatemala); footnotes 48 and 55 of this chapter (El Salvador and Haiti); and footnote 54 of chapter 8 of U.P. (Guatemala).

32. The "demonstration effect" on other poor countries -- or "threat of a good example" -- that occurs when one Third World nation begins successful independent development is an extremely important topic. Chomsky argues that it is crucial to understanding the Vietnam War and post-war U.S. policies towards Vietnam; the Central America interventions of the 1980s; U.S. attacks on Cuba and the longstanding embargo; the 1983 Grenada invasion; and other major foreign policy events.

For one example of an internal U.S. government warning about a potential "demonstration effect" on other Third World countries from Cuba, see Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America, New York: Norton, 1983 (2nd revised and expanded edition 1993). An excerpt (p. 157):

"Cuba's experiment with almost total state socialism is being watched closely by other nations in the hemisphere," the Agency [the C.I.A.] told the White House in April 1964, "and any appearance of success there could have an extensive impact on the statist trend elsewhere in the area."

The same concern about Cuba's developmental successes also is expressed in other now-declassified U.S. government planning documents. See for example, "United States Policy Toward Latin America," July 3, 1961, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961-1963, Vol. XII ("The American Republics"), Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1996, Record No. 15. An excerpt (p. 33):

Latin America today is in a state of deep unrest. Most of its countries are economically underdeveloped and socially backward. The distribution of land and other forms of national wealth greatly favors the propertied classes. The masses suffer from poor housing, malnutrition and illiteracy. In many countries large rural groups, which include most of the Indian peoples, are not integrated into the economic and social life of the nation. The poor and underprivileged, stimulated by the example of the Cuban revolution, are now demanding opportunities for a decent living. Meanwhile, the population is increasing much more rapidly than the rate of production. International communism, encouraged by its successes in Cuba and assisted by the Castro regime, is trying to take advantage of this explosive situation to subvert other countries of the hemisphere.

For another example of U.S. planners' concern about the threat of successful independent development having a "demonstration effect" in the Third World, see Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, New York: Summit, 1983. This book recounts U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger's warning that the contagious example of Salvador Allende's Chile might infect not only Latin America but also Southern Europe -- not in fear that Chilean hordes were about to descend upon Rome, but that Chilean successes might send to Italian voters the message that democratic social reform was a possible option and thus contribute to the rise of social democracy and Eurocommunism that was greatly feared by Washington and Moscow alike. An excerpt (p. 270):

[According to former National Security Council staff member Roger Morris,] Kissinger . . . seemed to be truly concerned about Allende's election: "I don't think anybody in the government understood how ideological Kissinger was about Chile. I don't think anybody ever fully grasped that Henry saw Allende as being a far more serious threat than Castro. If Latin America ever became unraveled, it would never happen with a Castro. Allende was a living example of democratic social reform in Latin America. All kinds of cataclysmic events rolled around, but Chile scared him. He talked about Eurocommunism [in later years] the same way he talked about Chile early on. Chile scared him." Another N.S.C. aide recalls a Kissinger discussion of the Allende election in terms of Italy, where the Communist Party was growing in political strength. The fear was not only that Allende would be voted into office, but that -- after his six-year term -- the political process would work and he would be voted out of office in the next election. Kissinger saw the notion that Communists could participate in the electoral process and accept the results peacefully as the wrong message to send Italian voters.

See also footnotes 7, 8, 68 and 108 of this chapter; chapter 1 of U.P. and its footnote 20; and chapter 2 of U.P. and its footnote 8.

The threat of independence in one Third World country being a dangerous example that might "infect" others often is masked by planners as a military threat. See for example, Dean Acheson [U.S. Secretary of State, 1948 to 1952], Present at the Creation: My Years at the State Department, New York: Norton, 1969. An excerpt (p. 219):

In the past eighteen months . . . Soviet pressure on the Straits, on Iran, and on northern Greece had brought the Balkans to the point where a highly possible Soviet breakthrough might open three continents to Soviet penetration. Like apples in a barrel infected by one rotten one, the corruption of Greece would infect Iran and all to the east. It would also carry infection to Africa through Asia Minor and Egypt, and to Europe through Italy and France, already threatened by the strongest domestic Communist parties in Western Europe.

Chomsky remarks that, as Acheson well knew, Soviet pressure on the Straits and Iran had been withdrawn already and Western control was firmly established. Further, there was no evidence of Soviet pressure on Northern Greece -- on the contrary, Stalin was unsympathetic to the Greek leftists (see footnote 18 of this chapter).

The degree to which such deceptions are conscious is debatable -- but that issue is not particularly relevant. As Chomsky notes (Deterring Democracy, New York: Hill and Wang, 1991, pp. 100-102):

We need not suppose that the appeal to alleged security threats is mere deceit. The authors of [documents such as] N.S.C. 68 may have believed their hysterical flights of rhetoric, though some understood that the picture they were painting was "clearer than truth." In a study of policymakers' attitudes, Lars Schoultz concludes that they were sincere in their beliefs, however outlandish: for example, that Grenada -- with its population of 100,000 and influence over the world nutmeg trade -- posed such a threat to the United States that "an invasion was essential to U.S. security." The same may be true of those who, recalling our failure to stop Hitler in time, warned that we must not make the same mistake with Daniel Ortega [in Nicaragua], poised for world conquest. And Lyndon Johnson may have been sincere in his lament that without overwhelming force at its command, the United States would be "easy prey to any yellow dwarf with a pocket knife," defenseless against the billions of people of the world who "would sweep over the United States and take what we have. . . ."

In such cases, we need not conclude that we are sampling the productions of psychotics; that is most unlikely, if only because these delusional systems have an oddly systematic character and are highly functional, satisfying the requirements stipulated in the secret documentary record. Nor need we assume conscious deceit. Rather, it is necessary only to recall the ease with which people can come to believe whatever it is convenient to believe, however ludicrous it may be, and the filtering process that excludes those lacking these talents from positions of state and cultural management. In passing, we may note that while such matters may be of interest to those entranced by the personalities of leaders, for people concerned to understand the world, and perhaps to change it, they are of marginal concern at best, on a par with the importance for economists of the private fantasies of the C.E.O. while he (or rarely she) acts to maximize profits and market share. Preoccupation with these matters of tenth-order significance is one of the many devices that serve to divert attention from the structural and institutional roots of policy, and thus to contribute to deterring the threat of democracy, which might be aroused by popular understanding of how the world works.

Chomsky is referring in the above quotation to: Lars Schoultz, National Security and United States Policy towards Latin America, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1987, pp. 239f; Lyndon Johnson, Congressional Record, House of Representatives, 80th Congress, 2nd Session, Vol. 94, Part II, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, March 15, 1948, p. 2883 (the full text of Johnson's first comment: "No matter what else we have of offensive and defensive weapons, without superior air power America is a bound and throttled giant; impotent and easy prey to any yellow dwarf with a pocket knife"); Lyndon Johnson, "Remarks to American and Korean Servicemen at Camp Stanley, Korea: November 1, 1966," Public Papers of the Presidents, 1966, Book II, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1967. The full text of Johnson's second comment (p. 563):

There are 3 billion people in the world and we have only 200 million of them. We are outnumbered 15 to 1. If might did make right they would sweep over the United States and take what we have. We have what they want.

The fact that the "Soviet threat" was consciously used as a false cover for concerns such as those articulated by Kissinger in the above quotation, however, has been acknowledged even by those who endorse the policies. See for example commentary in Stanley Hoffmann, Samuel P. Huntington et al., "Vietnam Reappraised" [colloquium], International Security, Summer 1981, pp. 3-26. Huntington, the Eaton Professor of the Science of Government and Director of the Olin Institute of Strategic Studies at Harvard University, frankly explained (p. 14):

[Y]ou may have to sell [intervention or other military action] in such a way as to create the misimpression that it is the Soviet Union that you are fighting. That is what the United States has done ever since the Truman Doctrine.

33. For future Secretary of State Albright's comment, see Robert S. Greenberger, "New U.N. Resolution Condemning Iraq May Spur Tensions Between U.S., Allies," Wall Street Journal, October 17, 1994, p. B10. An excerpt:

Ambassador Albright made clear yesterday that, if need be, the administration is prepared to act alone. "We recognize this area as vital to U.S. national interests and we will behave, with others, multilaterally when we can and unilaterally when we must," she said, speaking on A.B.C.'s "This Week with David Brinkley."

Julia Preston, "Security Council Reaction Largely Favorable to U.S. Raid," Washington Post, June 28, 1993, p. A12. An excerpt:

[Ambassador Madeleine Albright commented to the U.N. Security Council:] "President Clinton has often said we will act multilaterally where we can and unilaterally where we must. This [i.e. Clinton's 1993 missile attack against Iraq in retaliation for an alleged Iraqi plot to assassinate former President George Bush] was a case where we felt we were justified to act alone."

34. On the medical journal articles about Cuba, see for example, Colum Lynch, "U.S. embargo is blamed for increase in Cuban deaths, illness," Boston Globe, September 15, 1994, p. 12. An excerpt:

Two years after the United States further tightened trade restrictions on Cuba, the economic embargo has contributed to an increase in hunger, illness, death and to one of the world's largest neurological epidemics in the past century, according to U.S. health experts.

Two independent reports to be published next month in American medical journals say the 33-year-old embargo has driven the prices of imported medicines and vitamins well beyond the reach of the cash-strapped country, has prevented Cuba from gaining access to essential spare parts for life-saving medical equipment, and has eroded the country's capacity for manufacturing its own medical products. The upshot has been a rapid decline in the Cuban health care system. Mortality rates for people 65 and older rose 15 percent from 1989 to 1993. Deaths from easily treatable afflictions such as pneumonia and influenza have increased sharply, as have the number of fatal infectious diseases. . . .

"We always talk about Fidel Castro killing people," said Dr. Anthony Kirkpatrick, an anesthesiologist at the University of South Florida who co-authored an article on Cuba's health crisis to be published in October in the Journal of the Florida Medical Association. "Well, the fact is that we are killing people." A second report scheduled in the October issue of the journal Neurology cites the U.S. embargo for exacerbating the most alarming public health crisis in Cuba in recent memory. In the past two years, according to the study's author, Dr. Gustavo Roman, the former chief of neuro-epidemiology at the National Institutes of Health, U.S. restrictions on food, medicine and access to up-to-date medical databases, have helped to encourage the spread of a rare neurological disease that has stricken more than 60,000 Cubans, leaving 200 legally blind. The disease, an optic nerve disorder last observed in tropical prison camps in Southeast Asia in World War II, is caused by a combination of poor diet, scarcity of the vitamin thiamine, high consumption of sugar and overexertion.

See also, Anthony F. Kirkpatrick, "Role of the U.S.A. in shortage of food and medicine in Cuba," The Lancet (London), Vol. 348, No. 9040, November 30, 1996, pp. 1489-1491; Victoria Brittain, "Children die in agony as U.S. trade ban stifles Cuba," Guardian (U.K.), March 7, 1997, p. 3. An excerpt:

The United States trade embargo against Cuba has led to needless deaths, left hospitalised children lying in agony as essential drugs are denied them, and forced doctors to work with medical equipment at less than half efficiency because they have no spare parts for their machinery, according to an American study. Health and nutrition standards have been devastated by the recent tightening of the 37-year-old U.S. embargo, which includes food imports, a team of American doctors, research scientists and lawyers said after a year-long study of the country.

Cubans' daily intake of calories dropped a third between 1989 and 1993, the American Association for World Health reports [in its study, Denial of Food and Medicine: The Impact of the U.S. Embargo on Health and Nutrition in Cuba]. . . . A humanitarian catastrophe has been averted, the report says, only by the high priority the Cuban government has given to health spending, despite a steadily worsening economic environment. . . . The team visited a paediatric ward which had been without the nausea-preventing drug, metclopramide HCl, for 22 days. It found that 35 children undergoing chemotherapy were vomiting on average 28 to 30 times a day. Another girl, aged five, in a cancer ward lacking Implantofix for chemotherapy, was being treated through her jugular vein because all her other veins had collapsed. She was in excruciating pain. . . .

Forty-eight per cent of the 215 new drugs being tested in the U.S. are specifically for treatment of breast cancer. The embargo denies them to Cuban women. "Only the pre-existing excellence of the system and the extraordinary dedication of the Cuban medical community have prevented infinitely greater loss of life and suffering," the report says. Despite the difficulties, the country's infant mortality rate is still only half that of Washington D.C., and in access to health services, immunisations and life expectancy, Cuba compares with Europe.

Chomsky remarks: "These do not count as human rights violations; rather, the public version is that the goal of the sanctions is to overcome Cuba's human rights violations" (Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs, Boston: South End, 2000, p. 147).

35. On U.S. corporate concern over the embargo and foreign companies' willingness to violate it, see for example, Gail DeGeorge, "Almost Tasting Trade: U.S. companies want to be ready for post-embargo Cuba -- whenever," Business Week, September 19, 1994, p. 32; Gail DeGeorge, "Fidel's End Run Around Uncle Sam: Cuba is attracting more foreign investors -- despite the embargo," Business Week, May 9, 1994, p. 47.

36. One reference was found in the U.S. press to the roundups of Panamanian union leaders after the invasion -- in the 25th and 26th paragraphs of an article in the Boston Globe. See Diego Ribadeneira, "Resentment of U.S. spreads in Panama City," Boston Globe, January 1, 1990, p. 1. The reference:

Marco Gandasegui, director of the Center for Latin American Studies, a research institute [in Panama, stated:] "With thousands of American troops in the streets, you aren't going to see people staging anti-American demonstrations." But in what was perhaps the first public anti-American display, several dozen Panamanians demonstrated Thursday against U.S. soldiers as they arrested two leaders of the telecommunications union. They were suspected of possessing arms but none were found. They were arrested anyway, because, according to U.S. diplomats, they were on a list of several hundred people whom the Endara government seeks to detain.

As for why the people on the list -- mostly political activists and labor leaders -- were wanted, a senior official in the U.S. Embassy said, "We weren't given any details, just that the Endara government wanted us to get them. They're bad guys of some sort, I guess."

For reports about the Panama invasion and its aftermath outside of the mainstream U.S. press, see for example, Ramsey Clark [former U.S. Attorney General], The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf, New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1992. An excerpt (pp. 126-127):

I flew to Panama on the first day commercial flights were permitted to operate after the U.S. invasion. . . . Surveying devastated neighborhoods; finding a 120 x 18-foot mass grave; talking with Red Cross, hospital, and morgue workers, and religious, human rights, labor, student, and other leaders, I readily counted hundreds of civilians dead. The press, however, initially asked no questions about civilian casualties. When eventually prodded in early January, General Stiner repeatedly stated that 83 civilians were killed, and the media faithfully reported that number. A press conference I held before leaving Panama, like a number held thereafter by a private commission formed to investigate and report on Panama, was virtually ignored by the mass media. Estimates of casualties from that commission and many other religious, human rights, and health groups ranged from 1,000 to 7,000 dead. By 1992 a consensus was emerging around 4,000 Panamanians killed. Yet the media used only the final Pentagon figure of 345 Panamanian deaths when it explained why angry crowds disrupted President Bush's visit to Panama in June 1992.

Linda Hossie, "Skepticism growing in Panama over official invasion casualty toll," Globe & Mail (Toronto), January 8, 1990, p. A9. An excerpt:

Sources in Panama City tell stories of hundreds of Panamanian soldiers gunned down from U.S. helicopters after fleeing their headquarters in Old Panama or while trapped in a dead-end street near Fort Amador. Others claim that a large number of bodies were burned on a city beach and that as many as 600 people are buried in mass graves. . . . Virtually all the Panamanians interviewed agreed that the vast majority of the dead are civilians.

Alexander Cockburn, "Beneath a peak in Darien: the conquest of Panama," Nation, January 29, 1990, p. 114. An excerpt:

Roberto Arosemena, a professor of sociology well known in Panama for his fifteen-year nonviolent resistance to military dictatorship [said] . . . U.S. troops . . . had conducted rigorous searches, usually destroying property and acting without regard for children and old people. Now, he said, there is an extreme display of U.S. forces throughout the city. They patrol neighborhoods in eight-to-fifteen-person units, carrying combat rifles. When Panamanians accompany them, it is always in a ratio of the Panamanian to two G.I.s, and the Panamanians never carry anything heavier than a pistol.

According to Arosemena, about 1,200 people are currently detained in camps in the U.S. military compound. He spoke to one man who had been held, a civilian former government worker, who told him that detainees were bound hand and foot, eyes blindfolded and mouths bandaged. They were loaded into trucks and when they reached the installation they were thrown out, some of them suffering injuries. Then they were interrogated by U.S. military personnel.

John Weeks and Phil Gunson, Panama: Made in the U.S.A., London: Latin America Bureau, 1991, especially chs. 1 and 5.

37. For the New York Times's report that Quayle did not tour El Chorrillo, see Robert Pear, "Quayle Gets Warm Welcome in Panama," New York Times, January 29, 1990, p. A3. The exact words:

Pro-American sentiment is expressed more forcefully by affluent and middle-class Panamanians than by those with lower incomes. Mr. Quayle did not visit impoverished neighborhoods like Chorillo, where houses were destroyed in fighting after the American invasion. Nor did he visit people made homeless by fighting.

38. For Beamish's article, see Rita Beamish, "Quayle Gets Assurances of Panamanian Drug-Money Reform," A.P., January 29, 1990 (Westlaw database # 1990 WL 5988786). The passage reads:

Before leaving Panama City, Quayle took a driving tour of the impoverished Chorrillo neighborhood. Several blocks were leveled by fire and bombing during the U.S. attack, including the headquarters of Noriega's Panamanian Defense Force. As his motorcade slowly drove by the area, onlookers gathered in groups and peered out windows, watching in stony silence. Their reaction was in stark contrast to the enthusiastic cheering Sunday from a well-dressed congregation at a Roman Catholic church Quayle attended in another neighborhood.

39. There have been, in fact, two references in the major U.S. press to Panama's annual day of mourning -- one in the "Metro" section of the Los Angeles Times, and the other in a story picked up from the French wire-service Agence France-Presse and published in the Chicago Sun-Times. See "A Troubled Panama One Year After," Los Angeles Times, December 21, 1990, p. B6; James Aparicio, A.F.P., "Endara's status slips in Panama," Chicago Sun-Times, December 22, 1991, p. 46.

A few local papers in the United States also have mentioned Panama's annual day of mourning. See for example, "Panama Notes Invasion Anniversary," Courier-Journal (Louisville, KY), December 21, 1990, p. A15 ("The government dubbed the date a 'day of national reflection,' while the families of Panamanians killed in the invasion set a 'grand black march' of protest for the evening"); A.P., "Mourning In Panama," Sacramento Bee (CA), December 21, 1993, p. A20.

40. On the Endara government's statement about the U.S. "military occupation," see for example, "News in Brief: Panama; Two Scathing Reports," Central America Report (Guatemala City, Guatemala: Inforpress Centroamericana), Vol. XXI, No. 4, February 4, 1994, p. 8. An excerpt:

In surprisingly strong terms for a government office, CONADEHUPA [the Panamanian governmental National Human Rights Commission] argues that the rights to self-determination and sovereignty of the Panamanian people continue to be violated by the "state of occupation by a foreign army." Among violations committed by the U.S. army, CONADEHUPA lists the campaign Strong Roads 93, air force flights in different provinces, the participation of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (D.E.A.) in search and seizure operations, a D.E.A. agent's assault on a Panamanian journalist and incidents of attacks on Panamanian citizens by U.S. military personnel.

41. On the international organizations' actions against the U.S. invasion and Panama's occupation, see for example, "Panama ousted from the Group of Eight," Central America Report (Guatemala City, Guatemala: Inforpress Centroamericana), Vol. XVII, No. 13, April 6, 1990, p. 99. An excerpt:

President Guillermo Endara's government receives one of its worst diplomatic setbacks since taking office, as the Group of Eight [what are considered the major Latin American democracies] formally ousts Panama from the organization, claiming the Endara government is illegal and demanding new elections. . . .

At the sixth meeting of the Group of Eight on March 30, foreign ministers from seven countries (Panama was suspended in 1988) issued their most forceful dictum against Panama to date. Basically they agreed on three points: Panama's permanent separation from the G-8, a call for immediate presidential elections and the limiting of activities by U.S. troops. . . . The final resolution noted that "the process of democratic legitimation in Panama requires popular consideration without foreign interference, that guarantees the full right of the people to freely choose their governments. . . ." The G-8 suggests that the U.S. military is operating outside of its mandate, affecting Panama's sovereignty and independence as well as the legality of the Endara government.

John Weeks and Phil Gunson, Panama: Made in the U.S.A., London: Latin America Bureau, 1991 (on the U.S. invasion's illegality under international law, see Appendix 1). An excerpt (p. 92):

Regional bodies were unanimous in their condemnation of the invasion and their calls for fresh elections. The Organization of American States approved a resolution "deeply deploring" the U.S. military intervention, with only the U.S. itself voting against.

See also, Charles Maechling [former senior State Department official and professor of international law], "Washington's Illegal Invasion," Foreign Policy, Summer 1990, pp. 113-131.

42. On Noriega being on the U.S. payroll during the height of his narcotics trafficking, see for example, John Weeks and Andrew Zimbalist, "The failure of intervention in Panama," Third World Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 1, January 1989, pp. 3f. An excerpt (pp. 8-11):

It is generally recognised, indeed common knowledge, that Noriega enjoyed close relations with agencies of the United States government, particularly the Central Intelligence Agency, but also the United States military. The role of Noriega as a U.S. informant and conduit for information began in the late 1960s, when he began serving as Director of Intelligence for the Panamanian National Guard, and continued uninterrupted until quite recently, despite allegedly strong evidence of his involvement in illegal activities associated with the drug trade. . . . [I]t is generally agreed . . . that the U.S. government was aware of these accusations long before it chose to rid Panama of Noriega: the drug charge apparently had been known almost twenty years previously; the election-rigging occurred in 1984 and the U.S. embassy in Panama was well aware of it; the murder in question (of Hugo Spadafora) happened in 1985. . . . [A]s Senator Paul Simon pointed out on 28 April 1988 to the U.S. Senate, "We tolerated [Noriega's] drug dealings because he was helping the Contras." And according to the February 1988 congressional testimony of José Blandón (Noriega's erstwhile consul in New York), Noriega received a monthly stipend from the C.I.A. . . .

Noriega's drug dealings did not present an insurmountable obstacle to cooperation with him in the view of U.S. officials. In 1986, after briefing the Attorney-General, Edwin Meese, about his investigation into drug-trafficking in Central America, U.S. Department of Justice Attorney for Miami, Jeffrey Kellner, was told by Meese to sidetrack his inquiry for political reasons. Other actions of the U.S. government itself suggest that it was not intensely concerned about the General's drug-related activities until after it had decided he had to go. As surprising as it may seem in retrospect, in May 1986 John Lawn, director of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Agency, sent a letter to Noriega expressing "deep appreciation for [your] vigorous anti-drug policy." And in May 1987 (a year after the mid-1986 newspaper revelations about Noriega's drug involvement) Meese, the highest-ranking law enforcement official in the United States, congratulated the Panamanian government on its cooperation in joint U.S.-Panamanian anti-drug activities.

Frederick Kempe, "Ties That Blind: U.S. Taught Noriega To Spy, but the Pupil Had His Own Agenda," Wall Street Journal, October 18, 1989, p. 1. An excerpt:

Before American foreign policy set out to destroy Noriega, it helped create him out of the crucible of Panama's long history of conspirators and pirates. . . . In 1960, for example, when Mr. Noriega was both a cadet at an elite military academy in Peru and a spy-in-training for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency, he was detained by Lima authorities for allegedly raping and savagely beating a prostitute, according to a U.S. Embassy cable from that period. The woman had nearly died. But U.S. intelligence, rather than rein in or cut loose its new spy, merely filed the report away. Mr. Noriega's tips on emerging leftists at his school were deemed more important to U.S. interests. . . . Mr. Noriega's relationship to American intelligence agencies became contractual in either 1966 or 1967, intelligence officials say. His commanding officer at the Chiriqui Province garrison, Major Omar Torrijos, gave him an intriguing assignment: Mr. Noriega would organize the province's first intelligence service. The spy network would serve two clients: the Panamanian government, by monitoring political opponents in the region, and the U.S., by tracking the growing Communist influence in the unions organized at United Fruit Co.'s banana plantations in Bocas del Toros and Puerto Armuelles. . . .

During the Nixon administration, the Drug Enforcement Administration became dismayed at the extent of the G-2's [Panama's spy service, in which Noriega was chief of intelligence,] connections to arrested drug traffickers. . . . [After a suspension during the Carter administration, the] Reagan administration also put Mr. Noriega's G-2 back on the U.S. payroll. Payments averaged nearly $200,000 a year from the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and the C.I.A. Although working for U.S. intelligence, Mr. Noriega was hardly helping the U.S. exclusively. He allegedly entered into Panama's first formal business arrangement with Colombian drug bosses, according to Floyd Carlton, a pilot who once worked for Mr. Noriega and who testified before the U.S. grand jury in Miami that would ultimately indict the Panamanian on drug charges. . . . [H]e helped steal the May 1984 Panamanian elections for the ruling party. But just one month later, he also contributed $100,000 to a Contra leader, according to documents released for Oliver North's criminal trial in Washington D.C. . . . Mr. Noriega was accused of ordering in 1985 the beheading of Hugo Spadafora, his most outspoken political opponent and the first man to publicly finger Mr. Noriega on drug trafficking charges. . . . [T]he unfolding Iran-Contra scandal took away Mr. Noriega's insurance policy [with the U.S. government]. . . . During negotiations with American officials in May 1988 over proposals to drop the U.S. [drug crime] indictments in exchange for his resignation, Mr. Noriega often asked almost plaintively how the Americans, whom he had helped for so many years, could turn against him.

John Dinges, "Two Noriegas: Trafficker, Law Enforcer," Op-Ed, New York Times, January 12, 1990, p. A35 (noting that all but one of the drug charges in Noriega's 1988 indictment related to activities that took place before 1984, when he was a favored U.S. client); Kevin Buckley, Panama: The Whole Story, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991, especially pp. 18-19, 40-67; Seymour M. Hersh, "Panama Strongman Said To Trade In Drugs, Arms and Illicit Money," New York Times, June 12, 1986, p. A1; Seymour M. Hersh, "U.S. Aides In '72 Weighed Killing Officer Who Now Leads Panama," New York Times, June 13, 1986, p. A1 (according to a named U.S. official, as early as the Nixon administration in 1972 the U.S. had "hard intelligence about the extent of General Noriega's involvement in drug trafficking").

Chomsky explains the background of Noriega's quick fall from grace (Deterring Democracy, New York: Hill and Wang, 1991, pp. 158-159):

The reasons for the invasion of Panama were not difficult to discern. . . . One black mark against Noriega was his support for the Contadora peace process for Central America, to which the U.S. was strongly opposed. His commitment to the war against Nicaragua was in question, and when the Iran-Contra affair broke, his usefulness was at an end. On New Year's Day 1990, administration of the Panama Canal was to pass largely into Panamanian hands, and a few years later the rest was to follow, according to the Canal Treaty. A major oil pipeline is 60 percent owned by Panama. Clearly, traditional U.S. clients had to be restored to power, and there was not much time to spare. With January 1 approaching, the London Economist noted, "the timing was vital" and a new government had to be installed. [See "Gunning for Noriega," Economist (London), December 23, 1989, p. 29; Martha Hamilton, "Canal Closing Underscores U.S. Concern: Waterway Shuts Down for First Time in Its 75-Year History," Washington Post, December 21, 1989, p. A31.]

43. For McGovern's Op-Ed, see George McGovern, "A Betrayal of American Principles," Washington Post, January 16, 1990, p. A23. An excerpt:

The night after U.S. forces invaded Panama seeking to spread democracy and capture Gen. Noriega I was invited to give my reaction on network television. I begged off, partly because of family obligations and partly because I regarded the invasion as a mistake that I was reluctant to criticize while American forces were still positioning themselves. . . .

Like Grenada in 1983 and a dozen other 20th century American invasions of defenseless little countries to the south of us who needed to be taught proper conduct, the invasion of Panama seems to be good for public morale. . . . Nonetheless, this invasion was illegal and mistaken on all important counts. History, I believe, will so judge it, possibly in the near future. The president acted in violation of international law, of the U.N. Charter and of the Charter of the Organization of American States -- to say nothing of our own Constitution.

44. On the scale and nature of the U.S. public relations industry's propaganda efforts, see chapter 10 of U.P. and its footnotes 51 and 75.

45. On the U.S. military occupation of Panama at the time of the invasion and its "dry runs" a few days beforehand, see for example, Bill Baskervill, "Former Combat Commanders Critique Panama Invasion," A.P., February 25, 1990 (Westlaw database # 1990 WL 5992986). An excerpt:

The Dec. 20 assault on Panama that ousted dictator Manuel Noriega was planned and polished for months. The 13,000 U.S. troops based in Panama were at well-stocked bases and provided intelligence on the Panamanian Defense Forces and protection for the 14,000 invading troops. . . .

"It was a very, very easy operation, a very, very soft target," said [Retired Colonel David Hackworth, one of the nation's most decorated soldiers]. . . . "I feel the operation could have been done by 100 Special Forces guys who could have gotten Noriega. This big operation was a Pentagon attempt to impress Congress just when they're starting to cut back on the military. . . ." [T]he principal flaw in the invasion was the loss of surprise. Huge C-141 transport planes were landing at 10-minute intervals at Howard Air Force Base in Panama City as the invasion hour approached.

William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1995, ch. 50. An excerpt (pp. 310-311):

For months . . . the United States had been engaging in military posturing in Panama. U.S. troops, bristling with assault weapons, would travel in fast-moving convoys, escorted by armored vehicles, looking for all the world as if they planned to attack someone. U.S. Marines descended from helicopters by rope to practice emergency evacuation of the embassy. Panamanian military camps were surrounded and their gates rattled amid insults by U.S. servicemen. In one episode, more than 1,000 U.S. military personnel conducted an exercise that appeared to be a rehearsal of a kidnap raid, as helicopters and jet aircraft flew low over Noriega's house and American raiders splashed ashore nearby.

For some insight into the decision to use super-advanced technology during the invasion, see for example, John D. Morrocco, "F-117A Fighter Used in Combat For First Time in Panama," Aviation Week and Space Technology, January 1, 1990, pp. 32f. An excerpt:

The U.S. Air Force employed the Lockheed F-117A stealth fighter in combat for the first time in support of an air drop of Army Rangers against a Panama Defense Forces installation at Rio Hato during the American invasion of Panama. . . . There were conflicting reports as to the rationale for employing the sophisticated aircraft, which cost nearly $50 million apiece, to conduct what appeared to be a simple operation. . . . The Panamanian air force has no fighter aircraft, and no military aircraft are stationed permanently at Rio Hato. . . .

Franz R. Manfredi . . . an aeronautical engineering consultant and charter operator based in Panama City, said he was astonished to hear the U.S. Air Force has employed the F-117A on the mission against Rio Hato. "They could have bombed it with any other aircraft and not been noticed," he said. Manfredi said there is no radar at the Rio Hato airport, which operates only during the daylight hours. . . . Defense Secretary Richard B. Cheney, who visited Rio Hato on Dec. 25 and observed the craters left by the 2000-lb. bombs, said, "the reason we used that particular weapon is because of its great accuracy. . . ." By demonstrating the F-117A's capability to operate in low-intensity conflicts, as well as its intended mission to attack heavily defended Soviet targets, the operation can be used by the Air Force to help justify the huge investment made in stealth technology . . . to an increasingly skeptical Congress.

For a report on the Stealth fighter's actual performance, see Michael R. Gordon, "Inquiry Into Stealth's Performance In Panama Is Ordered by Cheney," New York Times, April 11, 1990, p. A19. An excerpt:

Senior Pentagon officials disclosed last week that the [Stealth fighter] plane's first combat mission in Panama was marked by pilot error and a failure, by hundreds of yards, to hit a critical target. The disclosure was embarrassing for the Pentagon, which has promoted the radar-eluding planes as highly precise weapons. . . .

The plane's mission in the Dec. 20 invasion of Panama was to drop bombs close enough to two barracks at the Rio Hato military base to stun Panamanian soldiers, without killing them. Mr. Cheney, based on Air Force information, initially said the two fighters had delivered their bombs with pinpoint accuracy. But senior Pentagon officials said last week that one of the planes had missed its target by more than 300 yards. . . . Defense Secretary Cheney ordered an inquiry. In the months after the invasion, the Air Force publicly rejected suggestions that the mission had not been properly executed, despite some reports to the contrary.

46. For one acknowledgment of the popular constraints on invasions by the Bush administration at the time of the Gulf War, see chapter 7 of U.P. and its footnote 58. For other examples, see chapter 1 of U.P. and its footnotes 4 and 5.

47. On the change in attitude of sectors of the Church towards the poor of Latin America, see for example, Penny Lernoux, Cry of the People: United States Involvement in the Rise of Fascism, Torture, and Murder and the Persecution of the Catholic Church in Latin America, New York: Doubleday, 1980; Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America, New York: Norton, 1983 (2nd revised and expanded edition 1993), pp. 218-225. On the U.S. response, see chapter 2 of U.P. and its footnote 15; and footnote 48 of this chapter.

Note that it was not "Communism" that caused the U.S. onslaught, but the threat of reform. As Chomsky emphasizes (The Washington Connection And Third World Fascism -- The Political Economy of Human Rights: Volume I, Boston: South End, 1979, p. 260):

It cannot be overstressed that while the church increasingly calls for major social changes, the vast bulk of its efforts have been directed toward the protection of the most elemental human rights -- to vote, to have the laws enforced without favor, to be free from physical abuse, and to be able to organize, assemble, and petition for betterment.

48. For the Americas Watch study, see Americas Watch, El Salvador's Decade of Terror: Human Rights Since the Assassination of Archbishop Romero, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991. An excerpt (pp. ix-x):

The murder of Archbishop Romero in 1980 and the massacre of six prominent Jesuit intellectuals, their housekeeper, and her daughter in 1989 bracket a tragic and violent decade in Salvadoran history. The fact that the Jesuit murders were carried out by officers and troops from the elite Atlacatl Battalion, created, trained, and armed by the United States, makes clear that U.S. assistance is not buying human rights protection for the people of El Salvador. In both cases, and in thousands of others in the intervening years, U.S. officials clung to the notion that the military was not responsible. In the Jesuit case, they discounted reports of military involvement for two months, until the weight of the evidence made the army's role impossible to ignore. It is almost certain that the murder of Father Ignacio Ellacuría and the others was engineered at the highest level of the army, and it is absolutely certain that the high command acted repeatedly to cover up its involvement, sometimes with the collusion of U.S. Embassy officials.

49. On Saudi Arabia's human rights violations, see for example, Amnesty International, The 1996 Report on Human Rights Around the World, New York: Hunter House, 1996. An excerpt (pp. 266, 265-266):

Amnesty International continued to express concern about the detention of people for the peaceful expression of their political or religious beliefs. . . . New information came to light about the torture and ill-treatment of detainees in 1994. The victims included political and criminal prisoners. The most common methods of torture used included falaqa (beatings on the soles of the feet), beatings, suspension by the wrists, and electric shocks. Among the victims was Gulam Mustafa, a Pakistani national, who was reportedly subjected to electric shocks and had a metal stick inserted into his anus while held in a detention centre for drug offenses in Jeddah in May 1994. . . . Up to 200 other political detainees arrested in 1993 and 1994 . . . continued to be held without charge or trial and without access to any legal assistance. . . .

The judicial punishments of amputation and flogging continued to be imposed for a wide range of offenses, including theft, consumption of alcohol and sexual offenses. At least nine people . . . had their right hands amputated. . . . They had been convicted on charges of theft, burglary and robbery. The punishment of flogging was widely used. . . . There was a sharp increase in the number of executions, the vast majority carried out by public beheading. . . . Defendants facing the death penalty have no right to be formally represented by defence lawyers during their trials. Confessions, even when obtained under torture, are apparently accepted in court as evidence and may be the sole evidence on which conviction is based.

50. On Hekmatyar's terror, narco-trafficking, and U.S. support, see for example, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The C.I.A., Drugs and the Press, London: Verso, 1998, ch. 11. An excerpt (pp. 255-256, 263-264):

The mujahedin were scarcely fighting for freedom . . . but instead to impose one of the most repressive brands of Islamic fundamentalism known to the world, barbarous, ignorant and notably cruel to women. . . . Though the U.S. press . . . portrayed the mujahedin as a unified force of freedom fighters, the fact (unsurprising to anyone with an inkling of Afghan history) was that the mujahedin consisted of at least seven warring factions, all battling for territory and control of the opium trade. The I.S.I. [Pakistan's secret police, a U.S. asset in the region,] gave the bulk of the arms -- at one count 60 percent -- to a particularly fanatical fundamentalist and woman-hater Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, who made his public debut at the University of Kabul by killing a leftist student. In 1972 Hekmatyar fled to Pakistan, where he became an agent of the I.S.I. He urged his followers to throw acid in the faces of women not wearing the veil, kidnapped rival leaders, and built up his C.I.A.-furnished arsenal against the day the Soviets would leave and the war for the mastery of Afghanistan would truly break out. Using his weapons to get control of the opium fields, Hekmatyar and his men would urge the peasants, at gun point, to increase production. They would collect the raw opium and bring it back to Hekmatyar's six heroin factories in the town of Koh-i-Soltan. . . .

American D.E.A. agents were fully apprised of the drug running of the mujahedin in concert with Pakistani intelligence and military leaders. In 1983 the D.E.A.'s congressional liaison, David Melocik, told a congressional committee, "You can say the rebels make their money off the sale of opium. There's no doubt about it. These rebels keep their cause going through the sale of opium." But talk about "the cause" depending on drug sales was nonsense at that particular moment. The C.I.A. was paying for everything regardless.

Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics Of Heroin: C.I.A. Complicity In The Global Drug Trade, Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill, 1991, pp. 445-460, especially pp. 449-452; Human Rights Watch, Human Rights Watch World Report 1993, New York, December 1992, pp. 151-153.

51. On U.S. moves to undermine Aristide following his election, see for example, Special Delegation of the National Labor Committee Education Fund in Support of Worker and Human Rights in Central America, Haiti After the Coup: Sweatshop or Real Development?, New York, April 1993. An excerpt (pp. 22, 25, 27):

In the middle of the constitutional government's short reign, U.S. A.I.D. [the Agency for International Development] was declaring that "signals" from the Aristide Administration "to the business community have been mixed." U.S. A.I.D. went on the attack saying that, "decisions have been made which could be highly detrimental to economic growth, for example in the areas of labor and foreign exchange controls." U.S. A.I.D. was displeased with the fact that the democratically elected government wanted to place temporary price controls on basic foodstuffs so the people could afford to eat. . . .

Under the Aristide government . . . U.S. A.I.D., which had spent tens of millions of U.S. tax dollars since 1980 to foster offshore investment in Haiti's low wage assembly sector, stopped promoting investment. . . . After 67.5 percent of the Haitian people had voted for change, U.S. A.I.D. worked with the Haitian business elite to keep things the same. As the Aristide government came into office, U.S. A.I.D. allocated $7.7 million to Prominex [a front group for business organizations that received 99 percent of its funding from U.S. A.I.D.] . . . $12 million in loans to business, and $7 million to foster democracy "from a business perspective" -- a total of $26.7 million.

Deidre McFadyen, Pierre LaRamée and the North American Congress on Latin America, eds., Haiti: Dangerous Crossroads, Boston: South End, 1995, ch. 6. An excerpt (p. 190):

An April 1992 report on Haiti from the Inter-Hemispheric Education Resource Center details how "N.E.D. [the U.S. National Endowment for Democracy] and A.I.D. have tried to craft a carefully tailored electoral democracy based on conservative interest groups. . . ." After President Aristide's victory, support for political projects in Haiti soared with the addition of a five-year, $24-million package for "democracy enhancement." The aim of the program was to strengthen conservative forces within the legislature, the local government structures and civil society at large. And, as summed up by the Resource Center report, "to unravel the power and influence of grassroots organizations that formed the popular base of the Aristide government." The U.S. government went to special lengths to counter the demands of Haiti's labor movement. According to research conducted by the National Labor Committee, "U.S. A.I.D. used U.S. tax dollars to actively oppose a minimum-wage increase from $0.33 to $0.50 an hour proposed by the Aristide government."

See also, William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1995, ch. 55. An excerpt (pp. 373-374):

[T]he National Endowment for Democracy -- which was set up to do overtly, and thus more "respectably," some of what the C.I.A. used to do covertly -- . . .in conjunction with the Agency for International Development (A.I.D.), was busy in Haiti. It gave $189,000 to several civic groups that included the Haitian Center for the Defense of Rights and Freedom, headed by Jean-Jacques Honorat. Shortly after Aristide's ouster, Honorat became the prime minister in the coup government. . . .

In the years prior to the coup, the N.E.D. also gave more than $500,000 to the Haitian Institute for Research and Development (I.H.R.E.D.). This organization played a very partisan role in the 1990 elections when it was allied with U.S.-favorite Marc Bazin, former World Bank executive, and helped him create his coalition. . . . I.H.R.E.D. was led by Leopold Berlanger who, in 1993, supported the junta's sham election aimed at ratifying the prime ministership of Bazin, Honorat's successor and a political associate of Berlanger. Another recipient of N.E.D. largesse was Radio Soleil, run by the Catholic Church in a manner calculated to not displease the dictatorship of the day. During the 1991 coup -- according to the Rev. Hugo Triest, a former station director -- the station refused to air a message from Aristide. The N.E.D. has further reduced the U.S. Treasury by grants to the union association Federation des Ouvriers Syndiques, founded in 1984 with Duvalier's approval, so that Haiti, which previously had crushed union-organizing efforts, would qualify for the U.S. Caribbean Basin Initiative economic package. But despite its name and unceasing rhetoric, the National Endowment for Democracy did not give a dollar to any of the grassroots organizations that eventually merged to form Aristide's coalition.

52. On the successes of the Aristide regime before the coup, see for example, Special Delegation of the National Labor Committee Education Fund in Support of Worker and Human Rights in Central America, Haiti After the Coup: Sweatshop or Real Development?, New York, April 1993. An excerpt (pp. 35-36):

In July 1991, the Consultative Group for Haiti -- composed of 11 countries and 10 international donors -- met at the World Bank's office in Paris. . . . In what the Inter-American Development Bank (I.D.B.) referred to as a "show of support by the international community," the Consultative Group committed more than $440 million in aid to the Aristide government. According to [the World Bank's Caribbean Director Yoshiaki] Abe, the donors strongly endorsed the new government's investment program. . . . [Q]uoting the I.D.B.: "In February 1991, when Haiti's first democratically elected government took office, the economy was in an unprecedented state of disintegration." But "the Aristide administration acted quickly to restore order to the government's finances." In the eight months before the coup the Aristide government:

- Reduced the country's foreign debt by $130 million.

- Increased its foreign exchange reserves from near zero to $12 million.

- Increased government revenues "owing to the success of the tax collection measures and the government's anticorruption campaign."

- "To curb expenditures, the government streamlined the bloated public service and eliminated fictitious positions in government and government enterprise."

- Made significant inroads to curb the enormous flow of contraband trade, while lowering duties and simplifying the customs system.

- Brought "the inflation rate down dramatically from 26 percent in December 1990 to 11 percent in August 1991."

- Established a "uniform exchange rate system at the market rate."

- Signed an agreement with the International Monetary Fund.

Deidre McFadyen, Pierre LaRamée and the North American Congress on Latin America, eds., Haiti: Dangerous Crossroads, Boston: South End, 1995, p. 104 (reporting that there was "a 75% reduction in human rights abuses during Aristide's seven months in office"); Editorial, "For Haitians, Cruelty and Hope," New York Times, January 17, 1993, section 4, p. 16 ("During the seven months of [Aristide's] presidency in 1991, the flow of boat people all but dried up," but after the coup the mass exodus of refugees from Haiti resumed).

The U.S. government sought to portray Aristide's short time in power very differently. See for example, Amy Wilentz, "Haiti: The September Coup," Reconstruction, Vol. 1, No. 4, 1992. An excerpt (pp. 102-103):

Under Aristide's administration . . . military and paramilitary human-rights violations came to a virtual halt. . . . Since Aristide's overthrow, international discussion -- briefly enthusiastic on his behalf -- has focused on alleged flaws in his human-rights record. The United States State Department, according to the New York Times, circulated a thick notebook filled with alleged human rights violations. Inaccurate statistics about Aristide's human rights record were reportedly compiled and circulated by CHADEL, the human-rights organization of Jean-Jacques Honorat, now the prime minister of Haiti's illegal and unconstitutional interim government. International human-rights organizations like Amnesty International, Americas Watch, the National Coalition for Haitian Refugees, and the Washington Office on Haiti have all found, however, that of the five presidents who have held power since Jean-Claude Duvalier fell in 1986, Aristide had by far the best human-rights record.

Oddly, this is the first time in the post-Duvalier era that the United States government has been so deeply concerned with human rights and the rule of law in Haiti. Under the previous four presidents (three of them Duvalieriste, two of them military men), the State Department did not circulate notebooks of violations; rather, it occasionally argued for the reinstatement of aid -- including military aid -- based on unsubstantiated human-rights improvements.

Linda Diebel, "The generals knew all along they would win," Toronto Star, November 14, 1993, p. E6. An excerpt:

[A] dossier on Aristide [claiming] "he's a psychotic manic depressive with homicidal and necrophiliac tendencies . . ." turned into the much-publicized Aristide report by the Central Intelligence Agency [which asserted a list of Aristide's supposed crimes while in office]. . . .

Three days after the coup that toppled Aristide, he's in exile in Venezuela. The U.S. publicly supports his return. Yet American Ambassador Alvin Adams summons reporters from the New York Times, the Washington Post and other major U.S. outlets to private meetings and briefs them on Aristide's alleged crimes. The main line is that he's unstable, and wanted to see his enemies die with burning tires around their necks. Much of the evidence was provided by [the dossier].

53. For the New York Times's article on the embargo "exemption," see Barbara Crossette, "U.S. Plans to Sharpen Focus Of Its Sanctions Against Haiti," New York Times, February 5, 1992, p. A8. An excerpt:

The Bush Administration said today that it would modify its embargo against Haiti's military Government to punish anti-democratic forces and ease the plight of workers who lost jobs because of the ban on trade. . . . [T]he State Department announced that the Administration would be "fine tuning" its economic sanctions. . . . The Treasury Department would also grant licenses to American companies to resume assembling goods in Haiti for re-export, the State Department said. . . .

The decision to modify the United States embargo is the latest in a series of Administration moves that have been alternatively tough or concessionary as Washington tries to stem the flow of Haitian refugees while looking for more effective ways to hasten the collapse of what the Administration calls an illegal Government in Haiti.

A more straightforward account appeared in the Times a few days later. See Howard W. French, "Democracy Push In Haiti Blunted: Leaders of Coup Gleeful After U.S. Loosens Its Embargo and Returns Refugees," New York Times, February 7, 1992, p. A5. An excerpt:

With . . . the relaxation of a United States embargo against Haiti, the momentum of a four-month-old effort to restore democracy in this country appears to have been badly blunted. . . . On Tuesday, when Washington announced that it would begin selectively removing sanctions against industrial concerns to help revive a choking economy, the mood of optimism among many who supported the coup turned to bravado and frankly expressed glee. At ceremonies Wednesday, where officers carrying ivory-handled swords saluted the promotion of the army commander, Raoul Cedras, to the rank of lieutenant general amid the boom of a 21-gun salute, the new mood of confidence was everywhere in evidence. . . .

United States diplomats denied that the total embargo was being lifted or that Haiti's coup was being recognized. But they said the human and economic costs that a blanket embargo had caused were too high for the meager results the sanctions had produced, bringing the provisional Government to the negotiating table.

54. The fact that U.S. trade with Haiti rose dramatically under Clinton despite the "embargo" was reported in the international business press. See George Graham, "Disgruntled Washington backs away from Aristide," Financial Times (London), February 19, 1994, p. 3. An excerpt:

U.S. imports from Haiti rose by more than half last year [1993], to Dollars 154m, thanks in part to an exemption granted by the U.S. Treasury for imports of goods assembled in Haiti from U.S. parts. [Exports also rose to $221 million]. . . . The Clinton administration still formally declares its support for Mr. Aristide, but scarcely disguises its wish for a leader more accommodating to the military . . . [while] European diplomats in Washington are scathing in their comments on what they see as the United States's abdication of leadership over Haiti.

55. For some of the ways in which a "message" was sent to the Haitian coup leaders by the U.S. government, see for example, Robert S. Greenberger, "Would-Be Dictators Are Watching to See If O.A.S. Can Restore Democracy in Haiti," Wall Street Journal, January 13, 1992, p. A11. An excerpt:

Last fall the [Bush] administration said it would consider freezing any U.S. assets of military officers who participated in the coup, and of their wealthy Haitian backers . . . [and] was considering temporarily lifting U.S. visas for these people, who travel frequently to the U.S. to shop or visit relatives. But neither step was taken. . . .

Mr. Torricelli [Chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs] and others concede that one difficulty in getting support for stronger action against Haiti has been Mr. Aristide's record. He was overwhelmingly elected in Haiti's first free election and is immensely popular with the poor. But his fiery rhetoric sometimes incited class violence. . . . [T]he economic embargo . . . has been a blunt instrument, punishing mostly the urban poor and having minimal impact on the privileged.

Lee Hockstader, "Haitian Opposition Feels Betrayed," Guardian Weekly (U.K.), February 16, 1992, p. 17. An excerpt:

When Washington unilaterally last week eased its tough economic embargo -- which had been urged by the O.A.S. [Organization of American States] against Haiti -- after U.S. business leaders complained, it undercut its own credibility in the hemisphere both as a team player and as a democratic champion. The effect of the policy zig-zags has almost certainly been to convince Haiti's anti-democratic forces that Washington's opposition to the coup was disingenuous, according to observers here. "When you have a giant that neglects to take effective action, that neglect is interpreted as condoning" the coup, said an American with years of business experience in Haiti. "If the U.S. sincerely wanted Aristide back, they should take measures that are tailor-made to influence the people who made the coup. And they haven't gone after those people. . . ."

Aristide, the leftist priest given to militantly anti-American rhetoric, had been viewed with overt suspicion by the U.S. Embassy in Haiti for years before he entered politics. In the wake of the Sept. 30 coup, Bush voiced his reluctance to mount an invasion to restore the ousted leader. Then U.S. officials voiced their displeasure about his human rights record and commitment to the democratic process. Finally, the sweeping embargo imposed by Washington Nov. 5 was relaxed last week in what administration officials presented as a "fine-tuning." A telling moment came just 10 days after Aristide was ousted when Maj. Michel Francois, the self-appointed police chief and reputed leader of the coup, was asked in an interview how the coup leaders could withstand U.S. pressure given Washington's support for Aristide. "You really think so?" he asked with an amused smile, signaling skepticism about Washington's stated backing for Aristide.

Ian Martin [director of the U.N./O.A.S. Mission in Haiti from April through December 1993], "Haiti: mangled multilateralism," Foreign Policy, Summer 1994, pp. 72-88. An excerpt (pp. 72-73, 77, 80, 82-83, 85):

On Monday, October 11, 1993, the U.S.S. Harlan County was due to dock at Port-au-Prince. The ship was to disembark U.S. and Canadian troops. . . . [A]s diplomats and journalists went to the port, they were confronted with a hostile demonstration of armed thugs. The next day, instead of waiting in the harbor while the Haitian military was pressured to ensure a safe landing, the Harlan County turned tail for Guantánamo Bay. Officials of the U.N. and the Organization of American States (O.A.S.) were aghast. . . . The U.N. and O.A.S. had been neither consulted nor informed of the decision by President Bill Clinton's National Security Council to retreat. . . . The organizers of the Haitian protest could hardly believe their success. "My people kept wanting to run away," Emmanuel Constant, leader of the right-wing FRAPH [the Front for the Advancement and Progress of Haiti, a paramilitary organization responsible for much of the terror], later told an American journalist. "But I took the gamble and urged them to stay. Then the Americans pulled out! We were astonished. That was the day FRAPH was actually born. . . ." U.S. officials, who had been in direct discussion with the [Haitian] military, concluded that the army needed further reassurance of its future. . . .

On July 3 Cédras [the coup leader] signed the Governors Island Agreement [providing that he and other military leaders would have amnesty and "early retirement" after Aristide returned to Haiti on October 30]. . . . The four-month period before Aristide's return -- a compromise from Cédras's initial proposal of six to eight months -- was presented to Aristide's negotiators as the minimum period for deploying the police and military missions. But Aristide believed the military would have ample time to frustrate his return. . . . By [August 27] it had become all too clear that the human rights situation since Governors Island had seriously deteriorated. . . . [T]he violence was carried out with an impunity implying police complicity, and the purpose seemed to be to terrorize those localities that had been the hotbeds of support for Aristide. As the weeks went on, the political character of the violence grew increasingly clear. . . . The military's declaration that public political activity would not be permitted was reinforced in a calculated message to the nation when businessman Antoine Izméry, who had defied the military in organizing peaceful but highly publicized displays of support for Aristide, was dragged from a commemorative mass on September 11 and executed in the presence of international observers. The civilian mission's investigation found that the assassination team, which included a person identified as a member of the armed forces as well as several "attachés," arrived and departed the scene escorted by police vehicles.

See also, Ronald G. Shafer, "Haiti's President stirs unease despite Clinton's backing," Wall Street Journal, October 1, 1993, p. A1 ("U.S. officials press Haitian lawmakers to move on amnesty [of death squad leaders] and upgrading the Haitian police force. U.S. officials say that the 600 troops being sent to Haiti starting next week won't be used to provide security for Aristide"); Steven A. Holmes, "U.N. Force to Rely on Haitians to Keep Order," New York Times, October 1, 1993, p. A5 (the U.S. Mission to Haiti "will have no mandate to stop Haitian soldiers and paramilitary elements from committing atrocities. 'It is not a peacekeeping role,' Secretary of Defense Aspin said. . . . 'We are doing something other than peacekeeping here'"); Pamela Constable, "As Aristide return nears, raids abound," Boston Globe, October 1, 1993, p. 2 (the Clinton administration announced that the U.N. Mission to Haiti, including its U.S. elements, "will rely on the Haitian military and police to maintain order").

On the devastating effects of the coup on Haitian civil society, see for example, Douglas Farah, "Grass Roots of Democracy in Haiti: All but Dead," International Herald Tribune, May 10, 1994, p. 3. An excerpt:

The Haitian Army and its allies have damaged democratic institutions and grass-roots organizations that had begun to grow in Haiti to such an extent that they will take years to rebuild even if Haiti's military leaders surrender power, according to diplomats and human-rights workers. . . .

Haitians and foreigners who work outside the capital said that not only the pro-Aristide movement, but even nonpolitical local or community organizations had been repressed. Thousands of community leaders have been driven into hiding, effectively decapitating virtually all local organizations. "The forced displacement of tens, if not hundreds of thousands of Haitians is part of the military's strategy to destroy all forms of organization or opposition," [a joint report by the National Coalition for Haitian Refugees and Human Rights Watch-Americas] said. . . . "Even if you send Aristide back, it will be too late," [Reverend Antoine Adrien] said. "Those returning will control nothing. All the militants are in hiding and the popular organizations are dismantled. You don't rebuild those things overnight."

Douglas Farah, "Aristide's Followers Targeted in Haiti," Guardian Weekly (U.K.), April 24, 1994, p. 17. An excerpt:

The army and its civilian allies in Haiti are engaged in massive terrorism aimed at dismantling the last vestiges of organized support for exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. . . . Human rights workers said . . . the military's willingness to engage in forms of terror . . . include[s] the systematic rape of women, usually wives or relatives of men sought because they supported Aristide; the kidnapping of small children of activists; the extensive use of clandestine prisons to hold and torture captured Aristide supporters; and the mutilation of bodies before dumping them in public places to be eaten by pigs.

Americas Watch and National Coalition for Haitian Refugees, Silencing a People: The Destruction of Civil Society in Haiti, New York: Human Rights Watch, February 1993 (detailing the repression of Haitian civil society, organization by organization; noting at p. 4 that "Indeed, far from a peripheral casualty of the coup, these organizations were as much the target of the army's repression as was the elected Aristide government. Violence unprecedented in Haiti was directed against popular organizations, the independent media, the Ti Legliz or popular church, and anyone else who brought together previously powerless people").

In the nine months following the 1991 coup -- during which these rampant massacres were taking place -- the New York Times devoted 54 percent of its coverage of Haiti to human rights abuses attributable to Aristide's supporters, which were less than 1 percent of the total abuses. Other U.S. newspapers, though less extreme, reflected the same extraordinary bias. See Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting, "Human Rights in Haiti," Extra!, January/February 1993, p. 22 (reporting a survey of the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Miami Herald from September 30, 1991, to June 30, 1992). An excerpt:

In the three months following the coup, the three papers devoted only slightly fewer paragraphs to discussing supposed human rights abuses under Aristide as to the ongoing violence under the new military regime (43 percent vs. 57 percent). In other words, less than a dozen deaths that might be attributed to Aristide's followers were given almost as much weight as the 1,500 or more people killed in the coup or soon after. More than 80 paragraphs in the entire nine-month period surveyed were devoted to human rights abuses under the Aristide government -- 29 percent of all paragraphs dealing with human rights. This ratio was generally consistent in all three papers.

See also, Doug McCabe and Greg Geboski, "Haiti Report," Z Magazine, March 1993, pp. 9-11 (reporting data from the same survey).

For exceptional reporting on the links between the U.S. government and the Haitian death squad and coup leaders, see Allan Nairn, "The eagle is landing: U.S. forces occupy Haiti," Nation, October 3, 1994, p. 344; Allan Nairn, "Behind Haiti's Paramilitaries: our man in FRAPH," Nation, October 24, 1994, p. 458; Allan Nairn, "He's our S.O.B.: Emmanuel Constant, leader of the FRAPH in Haiti," Nation, October 31, 1994, p. 481; Allan Nairn, "Haiti Under the Gun: How U.S.-backed Paramilitaries Rule," Nation, January 15, 1996, p. 11; Allan Nairn, "Our payroll, Haitian hit: 1993 slaying of the justice minister in Haiti," Nation, October 9, 1995, p. 369; Allan Nairn, "Haiti under cloak: reported infiltration of the Haitian National Police by the Central Intelligence Agency," Nation, February 26, 1996, p. 4.

The U.S. government's assistance to the perpetrators of the massacres continued long after the coup leaders stepped down. See for example, Kenneth Roth [Executive Director of Human Rights Watch], "U.S. Must Release Evidence on Haitian Abuses," Letter, New York Times, April 12, 1997, section 1, p. 18. An excerpt:

[The Clinton] Administration is obstructing efforts to extend the rule of law to [Haiti's new police] force by refusing to give important evidence of past abuses to Haitian prosecutors. Although Haiti's murderous army has been formally abolished, many former soldiers have been incorporated into the 5,000-strong Haitian National Police, including 130 former military officers and more than 1,000 lower-ranking soldiers. The vetting of former soldiers to exclude those with records of serious human rights abuse was often perfunctory, in part because of a lack of reliable evidence. One of the best sources of evidence are 160,000 documents, including photographs of torture victims, that the United States military seized from the Haitian Army and its paramilitary allies in 1994. The Clinton Administration refuses to return these documents without first removing the names of Americans.

The Administration's apparent motive is to avoid embarrassing revelations about the involvement of American intelligence agents with the military regime that ruled Haiti. The Haitian Government has refused to accept the documents on these terms. To deprive Haitian prosecutors of this information is to sacrifice Haiti's efforts . . . to extend the rule of law to its police.

56. For the Platt's Oilgram story, see Paul Sonali and Allyson LaBorde, "Texaco Says It Didn't Break Haiti Ban, U.S. Government Studying Fines," Platt's Oilgram, September 20, 1994, p. 3. An excerpt:

Responding to an Associated Press report that federal investigators were trying to find out why the Treasury Dept.'s Office of Foreign Assets Control (O.F.A.C.) had not fined Texaco for violations of the embargo, Texaco said that "it had acted in a totally legal and morally responsible manner in establishing a blind trust to run Texaco Caribbean's operations in Haiti" after the U.S. imposed sanctions in October 1991.

According to A.P., based on government documents, O.F.A.C. officials said in a 1993 report that Texaco should be fined $1.6-million for 160 embargo violations. However, O.F.A.C. didn't follow through because of contacts between top Texaco officials and Bush Administration representatives.

For coverage of this story in the local U.S. press, see for example, A.P., "Ex Treasury Chief May Have Sidestepped Haiti Embargo: Aide 'Protected' Brady After Being Ordered to Drag Feet on Crackdown of Texaco, diary shows," Rocky Mountain News (Denver, CO), October 2, 1994, p. 83A (the Office of Foreign Assets director was told to "go slow" on Texaco by Treasury Secretary Nicholas Brady). For the Wall Street Journal's reference, see "Bentsen Orders Probe Into Treasury's Role In Texaco Haiti Case," Wall Street Journal, September 21, 1994, p. A4 (mentioning the A.P. stories). In an untitled two-paragraph "News Summaries" segment, U.S.A. Today also referred to Bentsen's ordering an investigation (September 21, 1994, p. 3A).

The Associated Press continued to investigate the story -- but the major U.S. media did not publish its news-wire articles. See for example, John Solomon, A.P., "Agency Head Failed to Stop Texaco Leak, Citing Bush Treasury Secretary," September 18, 1994 (Westlaw database # 1994 WL 10136202); John Solomon, A.P., "Treasury Secretary Asks for Probe in Haiti Embargo Case," September 20, 1994 (Westlaw database # 1994 WL 10129184); John Solomon, A.P., "Assets Control Director Ignored Advice to Remove Self from Texaco Case," September 29, 1994 (Westlaw database # 1994 WL 10140200); John Solomon, A.P., "Diary: OFAC Director was 'Protecting' Brady in Texaco-Haiti Case," October 1, 1994 (Westlaw database # 1994 WL 10156738).

57. For the text of Bill Clinton's speech, see "In the Words of the President: The Reasons Why the U.S. Must Invade Haiti," New York Times, September 16, 1994, p. A10.

58. For a Canadian article on the length of Aristide's term, see Dave Todd, Southam News, Telegraph Journal (New Brunswick), September 17, 1994. An excerpt:

[Clinton's plan amounts to] three years of stolen democracy. . . . By deducting them from, rather than adding them to, Aristide's suspended presidency, a key political objective will be achieved . . . [namely] a partial legitimization of the 1991 coup d'état against Aristide.

59. The term "structural adjustment" refers to a series of economic "reforms" which the International Monetary Fund and World Bank demand before giving loans to Third World governments to pay off their existing international debts. These include: privatizing state enterprises, devaluing local currencies, raising food prices, lowering deficits by reducing consumer subsidies and charging for social services like health care and education, dismantling regulation of the private sector, limiting protectionist measures for foreign trade, and creating various incentives for foreign investment. See also footnote 64 of chapter 10 of U.P. And see footnote 41 of chapter 6 of U.P.

60. On the World Bank's structural adjustment package for Haiti after the coup, see Allan Nairn, "Aristide Banks on Austerity," Multinational Monitor, July/August 1994, pp. 7-9. The plan's paragraph 10 directs that: "the renovated state must focus on an economic strategy centered on the energy and initiative of Civil Society, especially the private sector, both national and foreign." Nairn reports that the plan commits Haiti:

to eliminate the jobs of half of its civil servants, "drastic[ally]" slash tariffs and import restrictions, eschew price and foreign exchange controls, grant "emergency" aid to the export sector, enforce an "open foreign investment policy," create special corporate business courts "where the judges are more aware of the implications of their decisions for economic efficiency," rewrite its corporate laws, "limit the scope of state activity" and regulation, and diminish the power of President Aristide's executive branch in favor of the more conservative Parliament.

61. On the case of the Roosevelt administration, the Neutrality Act, and the Spanish Civil War, see for example, Dante A. Puzzo, Spain and the Great Powers, 1936-1941, New York: Columbia University Press, 1962, pp. 150-155, 262 n. 27. This study notes that although technically the Neutrality Act of 1935 did not apply to Spain until it was later amended, the Roosevelt administration made it clear in the summer of 1936 that the U.S. wanted no "interference" in the Spanish war, "a policy that served, in effect, to equate the legitimate Spanish government with the insurgents [i.e. Franco's Fascists]." Companies such as Martin Aircraft that wished to maintain trade with the non-Fascist Republican government were told that supplying the Republic "would not follow the spirit of the Government's policy," in the words of Acting Secretary of State William Phillips. When an American arms exporter, Robert Cuse, insisted on his legal right to ship airplanes and aircraft engines to the Republic in December 1936, he was denounced by Roosevelt as "unpatriotic. . . . He represents the 10 percent of business that does not live up to the best standards." Compare the Cuse case with that of Thorkild Rieber, related in the text following this footnote in U.P. and footnote 64 of this chapter.

62. On Thorkild Rieber's Nazism, see for example, Herbert Feis, The Spanish Story: Franco and the Nations at War, New York: Knopf, 1948, Appendix 1, pp. 269-271. On Texaco's ships being redirected, see footnotes 63 and 64 of this chapter.

63. For contemporary left-wing press reporting of the Texaco story, see for example, "Oil for Lisbon Goes to Franco," Industrial Worker, Vol. XIX, May 22, 1937, p. 1. See also, "Conspiracy Against Spain," Man! A Journal of the Anarchist ideal and Movement (New York), Vol. V, No. 4, June 1937, pp. 1, 3 (discussing many embargo violations that aided Franco); Allen Guttmann, The Wound in the Heart: America and the Spanish Civil War, New York: Free Press, 1962, pp. 66-67, 137-138.

64. For diplomatic histories mentioning the Texaco story, see for example, Herbert Feis, The Spanish Story: Franco and the Nations at War, New York: Knopf, 1948, pp. 269-271. This study reports that for falsely declaring that the oil shipments were going to France and not to Spain, Texaco was fined $22,000 by the Treasury Department. See also, Gabriel Jackson, The Spanish Republic and the Civil War: 1931-39, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965, p. 256 (discussing the story, but not mentioning the fact that Texaco was violating its prior agreement with the Republic).

The episode also was mentioned four years after the fact in a glowing Life magazine profile of Thorkild "Cap" Rieber -- "soberly regarded by his fellow workers as the greatest oil man alive." See Joseph J. Thorndike Jr., "'Cap' Rieber: He Came Off a Tanker to Build an Oil Empire and Prove that Industrial Daring is not Dead," Life, July 1, 1940, pp. 56-68. The reference (p. 62):

Rieber's dealings with the Franco Government in Spain were a shrewd gamble. When the Spanish civil war broke out in July, 1936, Texaco had five tankers on the high seas bound for Spain. Rieber was in Paris. He flew to Spain, took a good look around and forthwith ordered the tankers to deliver their oil to the Insurgents [Franco's Fascists]. . . . For the next two years Texaco supplied Franco with all the oil he needed, while the Loyalists never had enough.

If Franco had lost, Texaco would have been out some $6,000,000. But the gamble won and not only did victorious Franco pay his bill but the Spanish monopoly is currently buying all its oil from Texaco. For ambitious young men Rieber is a prime example of what it takes to be a successful tycoon.

65. For studies of the post-World War II U.S. campaign to destroy anti-fascist elements internationally and to return traditional ruling groups to power, see Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945, New York: Pantheon, 1968 (updated edition 1990); Gabriel Kolko and Joyce Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945-1954, New York: Harper & Row, 1972. These books were the first major scholarly efforts to document this history, and remain extremely valuable and unique in their scope and depth despite the flood of new scholarship since -- although, because they do not adhere to approved orthodoxies, it is considered a violation of scholarly ethics in the American academic community to refer to them. See also, David F. Schmitz, Thank God They're On Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorships, 1921-1965, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999, especially ch. 4.

On operations in Greece, see footnote 72 of this chapter. On operations in Italy, see footnotes 66, 67, 71, 75, 76, 77 and 79 of this chapter. On operations in France, see footnotes 71 and 79 of this chapter. On operations in Germany, see footnotes 69 and 71 of this chapter. On operations in Korea, see chapter 8 of U.P. and its footnote 67.

On operations in Japan, see for example, Joe Moore, Japanese Workers and the Struggle for Power, 1945-1947, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983, especially ch. 7. An excerpt (pp. 188-189, 191):

S.C.A.P. [the Supreme Command for the Allied Powers, i.e. the post-war U.S. administration in Japan,] had become convinced of the necessity of putting limitations on the workers' freedom of action after coming face to face with the power and radicalism of the working-class movement in spring 1946 and having to make the decision that even the maintenance of an unpopular conservative government was greatly preferable to allowing the left-wing opposition to come to power. . . . S.C.A.P. henceforth put its emphasis upon the building of a healthy labor movement that would avoid politics and radical actions such as production control, while encouraging business and government leaders to resist such worker excesses. . . . The Yoshida cabinet was only too happy to return to the anti-labor policies of the past, and encourage union-busting tactics including use of the police to suppress disputes to a degree that would have been unimaginable even a few months before. As if to underscore S.C.A.P.'s approval, on several notable occasions even U.S. military police participated. The new policy was called, in a cynical phrase current among S.C.A.P. officials, "housebreaking" the labor movement. . . .

[The Civil Information and Education Sector of S.C.A.P.] suppressed whole issues of left-wing publications, and the censors riddled many others with their blue pencils. Henceforth, left-wing writers could no longer count upon freedom of the press to ensure that unpopular opinions got into print. On 18 May, [U.S. General Kermit] Dyke had already seen General MacArthur [the U.S commander] and secured his consent to clamp down on the press unions. Two days after that, [the chief of the C.I.E., Major Daniel] Imboden issued a strong warning to the press, threatening to close down "irresponsible" papers as General Hodge had done in Korea. He stated that "labor unions had no right and could not dictate the editorial policy of a newspaper" for "that was the right of the owners and men who are nominated by the owners."

Michael Schaller, The American Occupation of Japan: The Origins of the Cold War in Asia, New York: Oxford University Press, 1985, especially pp. 44-51; Howard B. Schonberger, Aftermath of War: Americans and the Remaking of Japan, 1945-1952, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1989, especially ch. 4 and pp. 62-64; Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945, New York: Pantheon, 1968 (updated edition 1990), ch. 21. See also, Bruce Cumings, The Origins of the Korean War, Vol. II ("The Roaring of the Cataract, 1947-1950"), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990. An excerpt (pp. 56-57):

Only Japan held [U.S. State Department planner George] Kennan's attentions in East Asia, and his new notoriety and strategic placement in 1947 made it possible for him to author the "reverse course," or what we may call the Kennan Restoration. . . . The operative document for the reverse course, developed in draft form under Kennan's aegis in September 1947 . . . envisioned a Japan that would be "friendly to the United States," amenable to American leadership in foreign affairs, "industrially revived as a producer primarily of consumer's goods and secondarily of capital goods," and active in foreign trade; militarily it would be "reliant upon the U.S. for its security from external attack." The paper reserved to the United States "a moral right to intervene" in Japan should "stooge groups" like the Japanese Communist Party threaten stability. Leaving little to the imagination, it went on: "Recognizing that the former industrial and commercial leaders of Japan are the ablest leaders in the country, that they are the most stable element, that they have the strongest natural ties with the U.S., it should be U.S. policy to remove obstacles to their finding their natural level in Japanese leadership." Thus Kennan called for an end to the purge of war criminals and business groups who supported them.

On operations in Thailand, see for example, Frank C. Darling [former C.I.A. analyst and Thailand specialist], Thailand and the United States, Washington: Public Affairs Press, 1965, chs. II and III, especially pp. 65, 69 (the dictator of Thailand under the Japanese, Phibun Songkhram, who had in fact declared war against the United States, was reinstalled in an American-supported military coup in 1948 and thereby became "the first pro-Axis dictator to regain power after the war").

On operations in Indochina, see for example, Archimedes L.A. Patti, Why Viet Nam?: Prelude to America's Albatross, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980.

On operations in French North Africa, the first area liberated by U.S. forces in World War II, see for example, Stephen E. Ambrose, Rise to Globalism: American Foreign Policy Since 1938, Baltimore: Penguin, 1971, ch. 2, especially pp. 54-66. An excerpt (pp. 55-59):

The United States took the view that one could do business with Vichy [the pro-Nazi government in southern France during World War II]. Much in Pétain's [the Vichy chief of state] program appeared to Roosevelt and Hull [the British Prime Minister] to represent the best hope for France, especially those parts that stood for work, patriotism, and stability. . . . The President did everything in his power to stop de Gaulle's rise, primarily because of his fear that the French people upon liberation would, as they had in the past, run to an extreme. . . . What made [de Gaulle] even more dangerous was the way that he flirted with the forces of the left, especially the communists in the Resistance. "France faces a revolution when the Germans have been driven out," the President once said, and he feared that the man most likely to profit from it would be de Gaulle.

Roosevelt spent much time searching for an alternative to de Gaulle. He might have wanted to turn to Vichy, but Pétain was too thoroughly brushed with the tar of the collaborationist. Roosevelt's best hope was the French Army, which represented the forces of stability and conservatism without appearing to be pro-Nazi. . . . By accident, Admiral Jean Darlan was in Algiers when the [Allied] invasion hit. Darlan was bitterly anti-British, author of Vichy's anti-semitic laws, and a willing collaborationist, but he was also the Commander-in-Chief of Vichy's armed forces and he was ready to double-cross Pétain. He agreed to a deal proposed by Clark and Murphy, which required him to order the French to lay down their arms, in return for which the Allies made him the Governor General of all French North Africa. Within a few days the French officers obeyed Darlan's order to cease fire, and a week after the invasion Eisenhower flew to Algiers and approved the deal. . . . The result was that in its first major foreign-policy venture in World War II, the United States gave its support to a man who stood for everything Roosevelt and Churchill had spoken out against in the Atlantic Charter. As much as Goering or Goebbels, Darlan was the antithesis of the principles the Allies said they were struggling to establish.

66. On U.S. fears about the 1948 Italian election and the U.S. operation to sway it, see for example, James E. Miller, "Taking Off the Gloves: The United States and the Italian Elections of 1948," Diplomatic History, Vol. 7, No. 1, Winter 1983, pp. 35-55 (on U.S. use of covert funding and military supplies, sponsorship of massive propaganda efforts, and employment of the threat of cutting off aid, in order to sway the 1948 Italian election); Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War, New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988, pp. 89-95 (on the C.I.A.'s use of former Nazi collaborators for postwar operations to help avert an Italian Communist electoral victory); John Lamberton Harper, America and the Reconstruction of Italy, 1945-1948, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 1986, especially ch. 9; William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1995, ch. 2. See also footnotes 67, 71, 75, 76, 77 and 79 of this chapter.

67. On U.S. efforts to keep the working-class parties out of power in Italy through the 1960s and the contemplation of a coup, see for example, Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection, New York: Sheridan Square, 1986, ch. 4 (on the coup plan in the 1960s by the C.I.A.-dominated organization S.I.F.A.R., see pp. 78-81). An excerpt (pp. 73-74):

Enormous resources were poured into Italy to manipulate the postwar elections. A Marshall Plan subsidy of some $227 million was voted by Congress just prior to the Italian elections of April 18, 1948. . . . In the mid-1970s the Pike Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives estimated that $65 million had been invested in Italian elections in the period 1948-68. Ten million dollars was pumped into the election of 1972. Former C.I.A. officer Victor Marchetti estimated C.I.A. outlays were $20-30 million a year in the 1950s, dropping to a mere $10 million a year in the 1960s. These funds were also used to subsidize newspapers, anticommunist labor unions, Catholic groups, and favored political parties (mainly the Christian Democrats). . . .

Following the victory of the Right in the elections of April 1948, a new, secret antisubversive police force was established under the Ministry of Interior, with U.S. advisers. This was filled largely from the old fascist secret police of Mussolini. At the same time, the fascist party Italian Social Movement (M.S.I.) began a massive expansion program, with the assistance of U.S. intelligence officials. M.S.I. had significant backing from business interests in both Italy and the United States, and probably received financial support from the U.S. government. The honorary chairman of M.S.I. was Prince Junio Valerio Borghese, the long-time fascist leader, who had been protected by the United States at the end of the war. General Vito Miceli, another M.S.I. leader, received an $800,000 U.S. subsidy through U.S. Ambassador Graham Martin in 1972. M.S.I. official Luigi Turchi was a guest of honor at the Nixon White House in 1972.

"The C.I.A. in Italy: An Interview with Victor Marchetti," in Philip Agee and Louis Wolf, eds., Dirty Work: the C.I.A. in Western Europe, Secaucus, NJ: Lyle Stuart, 1978, pp. 168-173; John Ranelagh, The Agency: the Rise and Decline of the C.I.A., New York: Simon & Schuster, 1986, especially pp. 115f; William Colby with Peter Forbath, Honorable Men: My Life in the C.I.A., New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978, ch. 4; Sallie Pisani, The C.I.A. and the Marshall Plan, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991, pp. 106-107.

On this topic, Herman and Brodhead also cite: Giuseppe De Lutiis, Storia dei servizi segreti in Italia, Rome: Editori Reuniti, 1985; Gianni Flamini, Il partido del golpe: Le strategie della tensione e del terrore dal primo centrosinistra organico al sequestro Moro, Vol. I, Ferrara: Italo Bovolenta, 1981; Roberto Faenza and Marco Fini, Gli Americani in Italia, Milan: Feltrinello, 1976. See also footnotes 66, 68, 71, 75, 76, and 77 of this chapter.

68. On U.S. intervention in Italy in the 1970s, see for example, William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1995, ch. 18. An excerpt (p. 120):

It is not known when, if ever, the C.I.A. ended its practice of funding anti-Communist groups in Italy. Internal Agency documents of 1972 reveal contributions of some $10 million to political parties, affiliated organizations, and 21 individual candidates in the parliamentary elections of that year. At least $6 million was passed to political leaders for the June 1976 elections. And in the 1980s, C.I.A. Director William Casey arranged for Saudi Arabia to pay $2 million to prevent the Communists from achieving electoral gains in Italy. Moreover, the largest oil company in the United States, Exxon Corp., admitted that between 1963 and 1972 it had made political contributions to the Christian Democrats and several other Italian political parties totaling $46 million to $49 million. Mobil Oil Corp. also contributed to the Italian electoral process to the tune of an average $500,000 a year from 1970 to 1973. There is no report that these corporate payments derived from persuasion by the C.I.A. or the State Department, but it seems rather unlikely that the firms would engage so extravagantly in this unusual sideline with complete spontaneity. . . .

[An] Italian newspaper, the Daily American of Rome, for decades the country's leading English-language paper, was for a long period in the 1950s to the '70s partly owned and/or managed by the C.I.A. "We 'had' at least one newspaper in every foreign capital at any given time," the C.I.A. admitted in 1977, referring to papers owned outright or heavily subsidized, or infiltrated sufficiently to have stories printed which were useful to the Agency or suppress those it found detrimental.

A.P., "Italian Asks Probe Of Story On C.I.A.," Boston Globe, July 23, 1990, p. 10. An excerpt:

President Francesco Cossiga [of Italy] has called for an investigation into a report that the C.I.A. encouraged terrorism in Italy in the 1970s, his office said yesterday. The report on state-owned R.A.I. television alleged that the C.I.A. paid Licio Gelli, grandmaster of the secret Propaganda Due Masonic lodge, to foment terrorist activities. The P-2 has been accused of seeking to install a right-wing dictatorship in Italy during the 1970s with the help of secret service officials. . . . The R.A.I. report was based mainly on interviews with two men who claimed to have worked for the C.I.A.

Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection, New York: Sheridan Square, 1986, pp. 81-87 (discussing a 1984 report of the Italian Parliament on the clandestine right-wing organization P-2 and other neo-fascist groups in Italy who, working closely with elements of the Italian military and secret services, were preparing a virtual coup in the 1970s to impose an ultra-right regime and to block the rising forces of the left).

For some insight into U.S. planners' reasons for intervening in Italian politics, see for example, Raymond L. Garthoff, Détente and Confrontation: American-Soviet Relations from Nixon to Reagan, Washington: Brookings Institution, 1985. An excerpt (pp. 487-488, 490):

The "major problem" in the Western alliance, [U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger] continued, one that was overtaking U.S.-Western European differences, was "the domestic evolution in many European countries . . ." [in the mid-1970s towards] the development of Euro-communism. . . . In April [1976] Kissinger publicly warned against the possibility of the P.C.I. [Italian Communist Party] participating in a coalition government in Italy. . . . [He stated:] "The extent to which such a party follows the Moscow line is unimportant. Even if Portugal had followed the Italian model, we would still have been opposed. . . . [T]he impact of an Italian Communist Party that seemed to be governing effectively would be devastating -- on France, and on N.A.T.O., too. . . ."

Eurocommunism was the term coined in 1975-76 to denote the new current of Western European communism that stressed independence of action for each party and embodied varying degrees of democratic and pluralistic tendencies. . . . [T]he United States perceived Eurocommunism as threatening its interests in Western Europe . . . [and] the Soviet Union also came to see Eurocommunism as threatening its interests in Eastern Europe.

69. For Kennan's statement about the West "walling off" Western Germany, see "The Chargé in the Soviet Union (Kennan) to the Secretary of State," March 6, 1946, Foreign Relations of the United States 1946, Vol. V ("The British Commonwealth: Western and Central Europe"), Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1969, pp. 516-520. Kennan's exact words (p. 519):

It seems to me unlikely that such a country [postwar Germany] once unified under a single administration and left politically to itself and to the Russians would ever adjust itself to its western environment successfully enough to play a positive and useful role in world society as we conceive it. If this is true then we have and have had ever since our acceptance of Oder-Neisse Line [the new German/Polish border] only two alternatives: (1) to leave remainder of Germany nominally united but extensively vulnerable to Soviet political penetration and influence or (2) to carry to its logical conclusion the process of partition which was begun in the east and to endeavor to rescue western zones of Germany by walling them off against eastern penetration and integrating them into international pattern of western Europe rather than into a unified Germany. I am sure Russians themselves are confident that if rump Germany west of Oder-Neisse were to be united under single administration there would be no other single political force therein which could stand up against Left Wing bloc with Russian backing.

See also, John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy, New York: Oxford University Press, 1982, p. 76 (in another document, Kennan stated: the "trend of our thinking means . . . that we do not really want to see Germany reunified at this time, and that there are no conditions on which we would really find such a solution satisfactory"); Carolyn Eisenberg, "Working-Class Politics and the Cold War: American Intervention in the German Labor Movement, 1945-49," Diplomatic History, Vol. 7, No. 4, Fall 1983, especially pp. 297-305 (concluding that the decision to divide Germany was fueled by the fear of "a unified, centralized, politicized labor movement committed to a far-reaching program of social change"); Geoffrey Warner, "Eisenhower, Dulles and Western Europe, 1955-1957," International Affairs, Vol. 69, No. 2, April 1993, pp. 319-329 (review of declassified documents on the subject); Melvyn Leffler, "The United States and the Strategic Dimensions of the Marshall Plan," Diplomatic History, Summer 1988, pp. 277-306. For a contemporary discussion of Stalin's "forgotten" 1952 proposal for reunification and neutralization of Germany, see James P. Warburg, Germany: Key to Peace, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1953, pp. 188-194.

70. On the scale of the French resistance during the Nazi occupation, see for example, Robert Paxton, Vichy France: Old Guard and New Order, New York: Knopf, 1972, pp. 294-295 (estimating that resistance participation in France at its peak, "at least as officially recognized after the war," involved about 2 percent of the French adult population while perhaps 10 percent were willing to read a resistance newspaper).

71. On the American and British operation to dismantle the anti-fascist resistance in Northern Italy and to restore the traditional industrial order, see for example, Federico Romero, The United States and the European Trade Union Movement, 1944-1951, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989 (translation 1992), especially chs. 2 and 5. Note that this is an approving account of the British and American actions. An excerpt (pp. 52-59):

A few days after the liberation [of the industrial north of Italy, British Labour Party attaché W.H.] Braine left for a rapid turn through the northern cities. In Bologna, Milan, Turin, and Genoa he ran into an unexpected situation. The industrial plants were in good condition and working order. Activist optimism was to be seen everywhere. There were many serious problems, but the social fabric did not seem as torn apart as it was in the south. The first decrees of the Committee of National Liberation in Northern Italy (C.L.N.A.I.) and its rudimentary but effective administrative framework unequivocally demonstrated the existence of a new government. It was thin but widespread, and the Allies had to reckon with it. . . . Braine requested immediate decisions on three important issues. He asked for suspension of the C.L.N.A.I. decrees blocking all dismissals [of workers], paying a "liberation bonus" to the workers, and establishing worker-management councils (C.D.G.) in industrial plants. The Allies and the Italian government must prevent the "arbitrary replacement" of business leaders with commissioners appointed by the workers or by the C.L.N. The Italian government must promptly prepare regulations, under the guidance of the A.C.C. [Allied Control Commission], to govern bargaining over wages and layoffs. . . .

The resistance, useful though it was from a military point of view, had always inspired mistrust among the Allies, since it was a free political and social movement that was hard to control. It was coming out at this moment as a source of independent power and as such had to be changed. . . . The Allies took drastic steps to prevent the worker and partisan mobilization in the enthusiasm following the liberation from leading to durable power structures, from imposing radical changes in property ownership and hierarchy in industry, and from setting up an uncontrolled anti-Fascist purge inspired by class-based criteria. . . . The A.M.G.'s attention was drawn in particular to the worker-management councils, whose legitimacy was contested, in accord with the views of the industrialists and the moderate political forces, and which, it was feared, could evolve into instruments for socializing industry. The intention was to restore all power and responsibility for the operation of industrial plants to the hands of management, leaving a purely consultative role for the worker-management councils. . . . A.M.G. power had been able to keep the working-class drive for political power in check, to rein in the most radical impulses of victorious antifascism, and to place the structure of industrial power under control, thus saving the prerogatives of the entrepreneurs. Sufficient bounds had been placed on labor mobilization to channel it into less damaging courses, laying a basis for institutionalizing and regulating the bargaining process.

Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945, New York: Pantheon, 1968 (updated edition 1990), ch. 3, especially pp. 61-63, 436-439 (on the successes of the Italian resistance during the war and its destruction by the Allied powers); Basil Davidson, Scenes From The Anti-Nazi War, New York: Monthly Review, 1980, especially pp. 251-278 (memoir of a later-eminent historian of Africa who participated in the anti-Nazi underground in Italy and Yugoslavia during World War II; recounting the heroism and radical-democratic aspirations of the Italian resistance and the American and British policy to suppress the popular forces as the Nazis were defeated). See also, Gianfranco Pasquino, "The Demise of the First Fascist Regime and Italy's Transition to Democracy: 1943-1948," in Guillermo O'Donnell, Philippe C. Schmitter, and Laurence Whitehead, Transitions from Authoritarian Rule: Prospects for Democracy, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1986, pp. 45-70 (brief overview of Italian politics after the war). And see footnotes 66, 67, 75, 76, 77 and 79 of this chapter.

On the U.S. operations in post-World War II France, see for example, Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945, New York: Pantheon, 1968 (updated edition 1990), ch. 4 and pp. 439-445; Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics Of Heroin: C.I.A. Complicity In The Global Drug Trade, Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill, 1991, chs. 1 and 2.

On the enthusiastic involvement of the mainstream U.S. labor leadership in the operations to restore the old industrial order to power in Northern Italy -- in part by reorienting the new Italian unions from their radical-democratic structure to American-style, leadership-dominated "business unionism" -- see for example, Federico Romero, The United States and the European Trade Union Movement, 1944-1951, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1989 (translation 1992), especially pp. 16-41, 149.

On the U.S. labor leadership's complicity in the overall U.S. and British post-war effort to destroy unions internationally, see also, for example, Roy Godson, American Labor and European Politics: The A.F.L. as a Transnational Force, New York: Crane, Russak, 1976, especially pp. 52-53, 75, 104, 117-137. This book, based on internal A.F.L. documents, explains in glowing terms and frames as a great humanitarian achievement in defense of democracy, liberty, and a free trade union movement, how the A.F.L. exploited postwar starvation in Europe to transfer power to its own associates by keeping food from their opponents (pp. 3, 104, 116); employed gangsters as strike breakers to split the labor movement (pp. 120-125); undermined efforts of French labor to block shipments to the French forces attempting to reconquer Indochina (p. 135); split the Confédération Générale du Travail, a major French union in the key industries of coal mining, communications, and transportation, in 1947 as part of its efforts to "restore the internal balance of political power and prevent a shift to the extreme left" (pp. 117-132); and so on. However, the book skirts the Mafia connection, which is detailed in footnote 79 of this chapter.

Other studies of this topic include: Ronald Radosh, American Labor and United States Foreign Policy, New York: Random House, 1969 (review of U.S. labor leaders' rigid Cold War positions on foreign policy matters, and their active participation in reining in left-wing labor movements internationally); Ronald Filippelli, American Labor and Postwar Italy, 1943-1953: A Study of Cold War Politics, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989; Sallie Pisani, The C.I.A. and the Marshall Plan, Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991, pp. 99-100 (on U.S. labor leaders' activities in postwar France); Howard B. Schonberger, Aftermath of War: Americans and the Remaking of Japan, 1945-1952, Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1989, ch. 4 (on U.S. labor leaders' activities in occupied Japan); Fred Hirsh and Richard Fletcher, The C.I.A. and The Labour Movement, Nottingham, U.K.: Spokesman, 1977. See also, Thomas Braden, "I'm glad the C.I.A. is 'immoral,'" Saturday Evening Post, May 20, 1967, p. 10 ("It was my idea to give the $15,000 to Irving Brown [of the A.F.L.]. He needed it to pay off his strong-arm squads in the Mediterranean port, so that American supplies could be unloaded against the opposition of the Communist dock workers").

Similar attitudes have persisted in the U.S. union leadership until the present. See for example, Aaron Bernstein, "Is Big Labor Playing Global Vigilante?: The A.F.L.-C.I.O. Spends Millions A Year To Fight Communism Overseas -- Fueling A Bitter Internal Battle," Business Week, November 4, 1985, pp. 92-96. An excerpt:

Through a group of little-known institutes, the A.F.L.-C.I.O. spends $43 million a year in 83 countries -- often for anticommunist projects that tend to merge with the [Reagan] Administration's foreign policy themes. . . . Their combined spending nearly matches the A.F.L.-C.I.O.'s $45 million U.S. budget. Some $5 million of the foreign affairs money comes from dues of member unions. The other $38 million comes largely from two government sources. One is the Agency for International Development (A.I.D.) . . . The other is the National Endowment for Democracy (N.E.D.), a congressionally funded foundation started with the aid of conservative Senator Orrin G. Hatch (R-Utah) to "sell the principles of democracy" abroad. . . .

[C]onservative foreign policies are nothing new for labor: The A.F.L.-C.I.O. has long been proud of the role International Affairs Dept. Director Irving J. Brown and his predecessor Jay Lovestone have played in fighting communism around the world since World War II.

72. On the destruction of the anti-Nazi resistance and restoration of Nazi collaborators in Greece by Britain and the U.S., see for example, Lawrence S. Wittner, American Intervention in Greece, 1943-1949, New York: Columbia University Press, 1982. This study describes the rise of the anti-fascist resistance during and after the Nazi occupation (pp. 2-3), and the British -- followed by the U.S. -- campaign of violent suppression of the Greek popular movement and reinstitution of the traditional order, once the Nazis were forced from Greece. An excerpt (pp. 31, 33-35, 80, 88, 154, 149):

Britain's defeat of E.A.M. [National Liberation Front, the main anti-fascist resistance organization] in December 1944 shattered the hegemony of the left, emboldened the right, and opened the way for a royalist takeover of the organs of state power: the police, the army, and the administration. . . . Throughout the countryside, right-wing mobs brutalized or killed leftists, republicans, and their families. National guardsmen attacked left-wing editors and smashed their printshops. . . . As usual, the Russians accepted such developments with a cynical equanimity. "This war is not as in the past," Stalin . . . [said] in the spring of 1945. "Whoever occupies a territory also imposes on it his own social system. . . ." By the end of World War II, then, American policymakers were ready for the counterrevolutionary initiatives of subsequent years. . . .

Behind American policy, as behind that of Britain and Russia, lay the goal of containing the Greek left. . . . "It is necessary only to glance at a map," Truman declared [in his March 12, 1947, speech announcing the Truman Doctrine], to see that if Greece should fall to the rebels, "confusion and disorder might well spread throughout the entire Middle East. . . ." Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Jr . . . protested that "this fascist government through which we have to work is incidental. . . ."

[K]ey American officials, particularly in the U.S. embassy, agreed with the Greek authorities on the necessity of harsh measures. . . . American officials initially provided undeviating support for political executions. . . . Although "some of those persons imprisoned and sentenced to death after the December 1944 rebellion may not have been at that time hardened Communists, it is unlikely that they have been able to resist the influence of Communist indoctrination organizations existing within most prisons," [said the U.S. chargé d'affaires in Athens, Karl Rankin]. . . . In May [1947], the British ambassador reported that members of the U.S. embassy had been discussing "the necessity" of outlawing the K.K.E. [the Greek Communist Party]. . . . That December, with the rebellion in full sway, the Athens government passed a law formally dissolving the K.K.E., E.A.M., and all groups associated with them; seizing their assets; and making the expression of revolutionary ideas a crime subject to imprisonment. From the standpoint of American officials, this was a struggle to the death.

The study concludes that during the Greek civil war, "an estimated 158,000 of Greece's 7.5 million people [were] killed"; 800,000 were made refugees; and untold others were wounded or imprisoned (p. 283).

U.S. leaders' disregard for Greek self-determination and democracy continued long after the war, evidenced for example by the following incident (p. 303):

In 1964, when [Greek Prime Minister] George Papandreou met with Lyndon Johnson in Washington, the atmosphere could hardly have been chillier. To make possible the establishment of N.A.T.O. bases on Cyprus, now independent and nonaligned, the President demanded the adoption of the "Acheson plan," which entailed the partition of Cyprus between Greece and Turkey. Moreover, he threatened to withdraw N.A.T.O. aid if Greece did not accept the plan. When Papandreou responded that, "in that case, Greece might have to rethink the advisability of belonging to N.A.T.O.," Johnson retorted that "maybe Greece should rethink the value of a parliament which could not take the right decision." Later, the Greek ambassador remonstrated that "no Greek parliament could accept such a plan," only to have the American President explode: "Fuck your parliament and your constitution. America is an elephant, Cyprus is a flea. Greece is a flea. If these two fellows continue itching the elephant, they may just get whacked by the elephant's trunk, whacked good. . . . If your Prime Minister gives me talk about democracy, parliament and constitution, he, his parliament and his constitution may not last very long."

See also, Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943-1945, New York: Pantheon, 1968 (updated edition 1990), ch. 8 and pp. 428-436; Gabriel Kolko and Joyce Kolko, The Limits of Power: The World and United States Foreign Policy, 1945-1954, New York: Harper & Row, 1972, chs. 8 and 15; William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and C.I.A. Interventions Since World War II, Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1995, ch. 3. And see footnote 65 of this chapter.

73. On the destruction of the anti-fascist resistance in Korea, see chapter 8 of U.P. and its footnote 67.

74. On U.S. support for far-right elements and economic subversion in post-war Italy, see footnotes 66, 67, 68 and 79 of this chapter.

75. For N.S.C. 1 and further discussion, see National Security Council Memorandum 1/3, "Position of the United States With Respect to Italy in the Light of the Possibility of Communist Participation in the Government by Legal Means," and State-Army-Navy-Air Force Coordinating Committee [S.A.N.A.C.C.] Memorandum 390/1, "Provision of U.S. Equipment to the Italian Armed Forces," March 8 and January 16, 1948, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, Vol. III ("Western Europe"), Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974, pp. 775-779, 757-762. N.S.C. 1, not all of which is declassified, provided (p. 779):

In the event the Communists obtain domination of the Italian government by legal means, the United States should:

(a.) Immediately take steps to accomplish a limited mobilization, including any necessary compulsory measures, and announce this action as a clear indication of United States determination to oppose Communist aggression and to protect our national security.

(b.) Further strengthen its military position in the Mediterranean.

(c.) Initiate combined military staff position in the Mediterranean.

(d.) Provide the anti-Communist Italian underground with financial and military assistance.

(e.) Oppose Italian membership in the United Nations.

76. On Kennan's view that the U.S. should intervene militarily in Italy to prevent its election, see for example, George Kennan, "The Director of the Policy Planning Staff (Kennan) to the Secretary of State," March 15, 1948, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1948, Vol. III ("Western Europe"), Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1974. An excerpt (p. 849):

I question whether it would not be preferable for Italian Government to outlaw Communist Party and take strong action against it before elections. Communists would presumably reply with civil war, which would give us grounds for reoccupation [of] Foggia fields or any other facilities we might wish. That would admittedly result in much violence and probably a military division of Italy; but we are getting close to the deadline and I think it might well be preferable to a bloodless election victory, unopposed by ourselves, which would give the Communists the entire peninsula at one coup and send waves of panic to all surrounding areas.

See also, James E. Miller, "Taking Off the Gloves: The United States and the Italian Elections of 1948," Diplomatic History, Vol. 7, No. 1, Winter 1983, pp. 35-55 at p. 51.

77. For the Pike Committee Report, see C.I.A.: The Pike Report, Nottingham, U.K.: Spokesman Books, 1977, especially pp. 193-195, 203-211; or Special Supplements, Village Voice, February 16 and 23, 1976 (reprinting leaked copies of the first two Parts of the Pike Committee Report, which had been suppressed by the U.S. House of Representatives on January 29, 1976). The Report notes that C.I.A. interference in Italian politics included a subsidy of more than $65 million given to approved political parties and affiliations, from 1948 through the early 1970s. See also footnotes 67 and 68 of this chapter.

78. For some of the scholarship on post-war U.S. subversion in Italy, see footnotes 66, 67 and 71 of this chapter.

Edward Herman's and Frank Brodhead's book -- mentioned in the text -- exposes the fraudulent "Bulgarian Connection" theory, supported by the Western media and instigated by the C.I.A., which held that the right-wing Turkish terrorist Mehmet Ali Agca, who attempted to assassinate the Pope in Italy in 1981, was a Bulgarian and K.G.B. agent. See Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, The Rise and Fall of the Bulgarian Connection, New York: Sheridan Square, 1986.

79. On the post-war reconstruction of the Mafia by the U.S. as part of its campaign to destroy the European labor movement, see for example, Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics Of Heroin: C.I.A. Complicity In The Global Drug Trade, Brooklyn: Lawrence Hill, 1991, chs. 1 and 2 (updated edition of the classic work on U.S. government involvement in drug-running, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, New York: Harper and Row, 1972). An excerpt (pp. 25, 36-38):

In Sicily the O.S.S. [the Office of Strategic Services, the forerunner of the C.I.A.], through the Office of Naval Intelligence, initially allied with the Mafia to assist the Allied forces in their 1943 invasion. Later, the alliance was maintained to check the growing strength of the Italian Communist party on the island. . . . As Allied forces crawled north through the Italian mainland, American intelligence officers became increasingly upset about the leftward drift of Italian politics. Between late 1943 and mid-1944, the Italian Communist party's membership had doubled, and in the German-occupied northern half of the country an extremely radical resistance movement was gathering strength. . . . Rather than being heartened by the underground's growing strength, the U.S. army became increasingly concerned about its radical politics and began to cut back its arms drops to the resistance in mid-1944. . . .

As Italy veered to the left in 1943-1944, the American military became alarmed about its future position in Italy, and O.S.S. felt that [Sicily's] naval bases and strategic location in the Mediterranean might provide a future counterbalance to a Communist mainland. . . . Don Calogero [an Italian mobster] rendered . . . services to the anti-Communist effort by breaking up leftist political rallies. On September 16, 1944, for example, the Communist leader Girolama Li Causi held a rally in Villalba that ended abruptly in a hail of gunfire as Don Calogero's men fired into the crowd and wounded nineteen spectators. . . . The Allied occupation and the subsequent slow restoration of democracy reinstated the Mafia with its full powers, put it once more on the way to becoming a political force, and returned to the Onorata Societa the weapons which Fascism had snatched from it. . . ."

In 1946 American military intelligence made one final gift to the Mafia -- they released [American mobster] Lucky Luciano from prison and deported him to Italy, thereby freeing one of the criminal talents of his generation to rebuild the heroin trade. . . . Within two years after Luciano's return to Italy, the U.S. government deported more than one hundred more mafiosi as well. And with the cooperation of his old friend Don Calogero and the help of many of his former followers from New York, Luciano was able to build an awesome international narcotics syndicate soon after his arrival in Italy.

The study also describes how the U.S. government helped to reestablish the Corsican Mafia in France when the C.I.A. employed the Corsican syndicates to forcibly break Marseille's powerful Communist labor unions during dock strikes in 1947 and 1950. These actions "put the Corsicans in a powerful enough position to establish Marseille as the postwar heroin capital of the Western world" between 1948 and 1972 (pp. 44-61).

See also, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The C.I.A., Drugs and the Press, London: Verso, 1998, ch. 5; Henrik Krüger, The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence, & International Fascism, Boston: South End, 1980 (on the probable involvement of the C.I.A., Mafiosi, certain Southeast Asians and elements of the Nixon White House in the sudden shift of the U.S. heroin supply route from Marseilles to Southeast Asia and Mexico in the early 1970s). On the involvement of the U.S. labor leadership in these actions, see footnote 71 of this chapter.

Chomsky explains the reason for the C.I.A.'s ongoing involvement with the drug racket since World War II (Deterring Democracy, New York: Hill and Wang, 1991, p. 119):

There are good reasons why the C.I.A. and drugs are so closely linked. Clandestine terror requires hidden funds, and the criminal elements to whom the intelligence agencies naturally turn expect a quid pro quo. Drugs are the obvious answer. . . . One prime target for an authentic "Drug War" would therefore be close at hand.

For other studies of U.S. government complicity in the global drug-trade (the major source is McCoy's book, cited above), see for example, Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The C.I.A., Drugs and the Press, London: Verso, 1998 (tracing the entire history from France and Sicily, to Southeast Asia, Afghanistan, and Latin America, with extensive references to more detailed sources); Leslie Cockburn, Out of Control: The Story of the Reagan Administration's Secret War in Nicaragua, the Illegal Arms Pipeline, and the Contra Drug Connection, New York: Atlantic Monthly, 1987 (on the complicity of the Reagan-Bush administrations in the drug rackets in Central America in the 1980s as part of their support for contra operations in Nicaragua); Peter Dale Scott and Jonathan Marshall, Cocaine Politics: Drugs, Armies, and the C.I.A. in Central America, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991 (updated edition 1998); Gary Webb, Dark Alliance: The C.I.A., the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion, New York: Seven Stories, 1998; Jonathan Kwitny, The Crimes of Patriots: A True Tale of Dope, Dirty Money, and the C.I.A., New York: Norton, 1987, especially chs. 3 and 26. See also, Ahmed Rashid, "Gang Warfare: mujahideen forces on verge of collapse," Far Eastern Economic Review, September 14, 1989, pp. 23-24 (on the heroin trade by the U.S.-funded mujahedin in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation, with 750 tons of opium produced in Afghanistan in 1989). And see footnote 50 of this chapter (on U.S. support for the heroin trade in Afghanistan); the text of chapter 1 of U.P.; and the text of chapter 10 of U.P.

After years of denial, the C.I.A. conceded in October 1998 that it had concealed from Congress and other government agencies its knowledge that contra groups in Nicaragua in the 1980s had from the beginning decided to smuggle drugs into the U.S. to support their operations. The New York Times -- which for years had angrily attacked those who charged C.I.A. complicity in contra drug-smuggling -- reported this important revelation on the Saturday of a three-day holiday, on an inside page. See James Risen, "C.I.A. Said to Ignore Charges of Contra Drug Dealing in '80s," New York Times, October 10, 1998, p. A7. Furthermore, Risen's article omitted reference to the crucial fact that, as C.I.A. Inspector General Fred Hitz acknowledged to Congress, the C.I.A. knew of the contra-drug links and received a waiver from Reagan's Attorney General in 1982 that allowed it to keep this knowledge secret -- an omission which sustained the pretense that the C.I.A. was simply acting as a "rogue" agency, rather than the obedient executor of the will of the White House. This fact was reported elsewhere, but not in the New York Times. See for example, Walter Pincus, "Inspector: C.I.A. Kept Ties With Alleged Traffickers," Washington Post, March 17, 1998, p. A12 ("The inspector general also said that under an agreement in 1982 between then-Attorney General William French Smith and the C.I.A., agency officers were not required to report allegations of drug trafficking involving non-employees, which was defined as meaning paid and non-paid assets [i.e. agents], pilots who ferried supplies to the contras, as well as contra officials and others"). Moreover, the edition of the New York Times that was sold in New York City omitted six important paragraphs of Risen's article which appeared in editions of the paper that were sold elsewhere, and these paragraphs also were omitted from the version that appears on the Nexis computer database.

The C.I.A. Inspector General's report is available on the Internet at www.odci.gov/cia/publications/cocaine2 (note that the report does not try to reach definitive conclusions about whether contra-drug allegations were correct -- it deals primarily with the C.I.A.'s response to information it received that the contras were involved in drug-running).

80. On the protection and employment of Nazi war criminals by the U.S. and British governments and the Vatican, see for example, Christopher Simpson, Blowback: America's Recruitment of Nazis and Its Effects on the Cold War, New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1988 (on Rauff, the inventor and administrator of the gas truck execution program which murdered approximately 250,000 people in unspeakable filth and agony, see pp. 92-94; on Gehlen, Hitler's most senior intelligence officer on the brutal Eastern Front, see pp. 40-72, 248-263, 279-283; on Barbie, the Gestapo's "Butcher of Lyons," see pp. 185-195; on the Vatican's role, see pp. 175-198). An excerpt from the book's introduction (pp. xii-xiv):

In a nutshell, the Justice Department's study [in 1983] acknowledged that a U.S. intelligence agency known as the Army Counterintelligence Corps (C.I.C.) had recruited Schutzstaffel (S.S.) and Gestapo officer Klaus Barbie for espionage work in early 1947; that the C.I.C. had hidden him from French war crimes investigators; and that it had then spirited him out of Europe through a clandestine "ratline" -- escape route -- run by a priest who was himself a fugitive from war crimes charges. . . . Since the Barbie case broke open, however, there has been a chain of new discoveries of Nazis and S.S. men protected by and, in some cases, brought to the United States by U.S. intelligence agencies. One, for example, was S.S. officer Otto von Bolschwing, who once instigated a bloody pogrom in Bucharest and served as a senior aide to Adolf Eichmann. According to von Bolschwing's own statement in a secret interview with U.S. Air Force investigators, in 1945 he volunteered his services to the Army C.I.C., which used him for interrogation and recruitment of other former Nazi intelligence officers. Later he was transferred to the C.I.A., which employed him as a contract agent inside the Gehlen Organization, a group of German intelligence officers that was being financed by the agency for covert operations and intelligence gathering inside Soviet-held territory. The C.I.A. brought the S.S. man to the United States in 1954.

Following the revelation of the von Bolschwing affair, new evidence turned up concerning U.S. recruitment of still other former S.S. men, Nazis, and collaborators. According to army records obtained through the Freedom of Information Act (F.O.I.A.), S.S. Obersturmführer Robert Verbelen admitted that he had once been sentenced to death in absentia for war crimes, including the torture of two U.S. Air Force pilots. And, he said, he had long served in Vienna as a contract spy for the U.S. Army, which was aware of his background. Other new information has been uncovered concerning Dr. Kurt Blome, who admitted in 1945 that he had been a leader of Nazi biological warfare research, a program known to have included experimentation on prisoners in concentration camps. Blome, however, was acquitted of crimes against humanity at a trial in 1947 and hired a few years later by the U.S. Army Chemical Corps to conduct a new round of biological weapons research. Then there is the business of Blome's colleague Dr. Arthur Rudolph, who was accused in sworn testimony at Nuremberg of committing atrocities at the Nazis' underground rocket works near Nordhausen but was later given U.S. citizenship and a major role in the U.S. missile program in spite of that record. Each of these instances -- and there were others as well -- casts substantial doubt on the Justice Department's assertion that what happened to Barbie was an "exception. . . ." The fact is, U.S. intelligence agencies did know -- or had good reason to suspect -- that many contract agents that they hired during the cold war had committed crimes against humanity on behalf of the Nazis.

For other studies discussing the U.S. operations to protect and employ Nazi war criminals, see for example, Mary Ellen Reese, General Reinhard Gehlen: the C.I.A. Connection, Fairfax, VA: George Mason University Press, 1990; Erhard Dubringhaus, Klaus Barbie: The Shocking Story Of How The U.S. Used This Nazi War Criminal As An Intelligence Agent -- A First Hand Account, Washington: Acropolis, 1984; John Loftus, The Belarus Secret, New York: Knopf, 1982, ch. 5; Tom Bower, Klaus Barbie: The "Butcher of Lyons," New York: Pantheon, 1984; Magnus Linklater, Isabel Hinton and Neal Ascherson, The Nazi Legacy: Klaus Barbie and the Rise of International Fascism, New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1984; Kai Hermann, "A Killer's Career," Stern (Germany), May 10 and following, 1984 (six-part series based upon declassified U.S. government documents and interviews conducted in Bolivia); Tom Bower, The Paperclip Conspiracy: The Hunt for the Nazi Scientists, Boston: Little, Brown, 1987; Linda Hunt, Secret Agenda: The United States Government, Nazi Scientists, and Project Paperclip, 1945-1990, New York: St. Martin's, 1991; John Gimbel, Science, Technology, and Reparations: Exploitation and Plunder in Postwar Germany, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990; E.H. Cookridge, Gehlen: Spy of the Century, New York: Random House, 1971; Charles Higham, Trading With the Enemy: An Exposé of the Nazi-American Money Plot, New York: Delacorte, 1983; Ladislas Farago, Aftermath: Martin Bormann and the Fourth Reich, New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974; Christopher Simpson, The Splendid Blond Beast: Money, Law, and Genocide in the Twentieth Century, Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1995, pp. 236-239 (on the protection of Walter Rauff); Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, Whiteout: The C.I.A., Drugs and the Press, London: Verso, 1998, chs. 6 and 7.

See also, Eugene J. Kolb [former U.S. counterintelligence corps officer and Chief of Operations in the Augsburg region of Germany], "Army Counterintelligence's Dealings With Klaus Barbie," Letter, New York Times, July 26, 1983, p. A20 (defending the employment of Barbie on the ground that "To our knowledge, his activities had been directed against the underground French Communist Party and Resistance, just as we in the postwar era were concerned with the German Communist Party and activities inimical to American policies in Germany"). And see Michael McClintock, Instruments of Statecraft: U.S. Guerrilla Warfare, Counter-insurgency and Counter-terrorism, 1940-1990, New York: Pantheon, 1992, especially ch. 3 (important study of U.S. intelligence's absorption after World War II of Nazi methods and practitioners into U.S. special warfare doctrine).

81. On aid organizations' successes at the time of the U.S. intervention in Somalia, see for example, Alex de Waal and Rakiya Omaar, "Doing Harm by Doing Good?: The International Relief Effort in Somalia," Current History, May 1993, pp. 198-202. An excerpt (p. 199):

It was abundantly clear at the time [of the U.S. intervention] that the famine was almost over when the troops pushed inland from Mogadishu. One of the force's unexpected problems was counseling soldiers bewildered by the absence of masses of starving people. By the time he was forced to resign as special U.N. envoy in late October after publicly criticizing the U.N. for its slow response to the crisis, Mohamed Sahnoun was already recommending a halt to massive food imports. Excellent rainfall meant that a good harvest was expected for January. Rain and the tenacity of Somali farmers ended the famine, not foreign intervention.

Somalia Operation Restore Hope: A Preliminary Assessment, London: African Rights, May 1993, pp. 2-5 (whereas the U.S./U.N. intervention was justified by the claim that 70 to 80 percent of food aid was being lost to criminal elements, the International Committee of the Red Cross estimated aid losses at only 20 percent; other relief agencies concurred, and described this level of aid loss as "pretty good" in comparison with other relief operations).

82. On U.S. support for Siad Barre during the years before the Somalia intervention, see for example, Catherine Besteman, Unraveling Somalia: Race, Violence, and the Legacy of Slavery, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999. An excerpt (pp. 15, 17):

In order to maintain military bases in Somalia that could monitor affairs in the [Persian] Gulf, the United States government provided $163.5 million in military technology and four times that much in economic aid during 1980-88. By the late 1980s, Somalia was receiving 20 percent of U.S. aid to Africa. . . . The value of arms alone imported by Somalia [from the West] during the two decades of Barre's rule totaled nearly two billion dollars. . . . By the early 1980s, the Somali state was one of the most militarized in Africa. . . .

[In the late 1980s] the government killed tens of thousands of its own people; almost half a million northern Somalis fled from Barre's repression into Ethiopia, and over half a million were displaced within the north. By the final years of the 1980s when the Somali state began to wage open war against its own citizens, its international patrons could no longer ignore the fact that foreign aid supported Somalia's extreme militarization and state repression.

83. On U.S. officials' frank acknowledgments of the Somalia intervention as a Pentagon P.R. operation, see for example, John Lancaster, "For Marine Corps, Somalia Operation Offers New Esprit; Mission Could Generate 'Good News' As Service Confronts Shrinking Budgets," Washington Post, December 6, 1992, p. A34. An excerpt:

With a Marine amphibious strike force of 1,800 men forming the vanguard of the planned U.S.-led military relief effort in Somalia, the smallest of the nation's military services is suffused both with anxiety and a sense that a successful mission could yield a public relations bonanza at just the right time. It is a sense that is shared by all the services, as they seek to showcase their capabilities and usefulness at a time when Congress is under intense pressure to produce post-Cold War defense savings.

"I'd be lying if I said that never occurred to us," said Brig. Gen. Thomas V. Draude, chief of public affairs for the Marine Corps. "Here's what looks like a good news story. American service personnel are helping to solve an absolutely horrible situation, and these are things the American people should be aware of." Along the same lines, Army Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, during a Thursday briefing on the Somalia operation delivered what he termed a "paid political advertisement" on behalf of the administration's planned "base force" of 1.6 million uniformed personnel.

See also, Editorial, "It's More Than A Show," Guardian Weekly (U.K.), December 20, 1992, p. 18. An excerpt:

It is too easy to make a joke or draw too sweeping a conclusion about the antic aspect of what happened when the U.S. Navy Seals and Marines went ashore in Mogadishu last week. There they were in camouflage paint and combat gear, only to be greeted -- and, it is said, temporarily blinded, not to say confounded and embarrassed -- not by armed resistance but by the glare of T.V. lights and a swarming civilian press corps already arrived.

84. On the Catholic population of Northern Ireland initially welcoming the British forces in 1969, see for example, John O'Beirne Ranelagh, A Short History of Ireland, Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2nd Edition, 1994, pp. 268-269.

85. On military casualties of the U.S. intervention in Somalia, see for example, Alex de Waal, "U.S. War Crimes in Somalia," New Left Review, No. 230, July/August 1998, pp. 131-144. An excerpt (p. 143):

There were times when [U.S. troops] shot at everything that moved, took hostages, gunned their way through crowds of men and women, finished off any wounded who were showing signs of life. Many people died in their homes, their tin roofs ripped to shreds by high-velocity bullets and rockets. Accounts of the fighting frequently contain such statements as this: "One moment there was a crowd, and the next instant it was just a bleeding heap of dead and injured." Even with a degree of restraint on the part of the gunners, the technology deployed by the U.S. Army was such that carnage was inevitable.

One thing that the U.S. and U.N. never appreciated was that, as they escalated the level of murder and mayhem, they increased the determination of Somalis to resist and fight back. By the time of the 3 October battle, literally every inhabitant of large areas of Mogadishu considered the U.N. and U.S. as enemies, and were ready to take up arms against them. People who ten months before had welcomed the U.S. Marines with open arms were now ready to risk death to drive them out.

Eric Schmitt, "Somali War Casualties May Be 10,000," New York Times, December 8, 1993, p. A14 (reporting U.S. government estimates of "6,000 to 10,000 Somali casualties in four months last summer" alone -- with "two-thirds" of these being women and children -- as compared to 26 American soldiers killed); Somalia: Human Rights Abuses By The United Nations Forces, London: African Rights, July 1993, pp. 2-34 (reporting atrocities by U.S. and U.N. troops, including attacking a hospital, bombarding political meetings, and shooting into crowds of demonstrators).

86. On Sahnoun's plan and his firing, see for example, Chris Giannou, "Reaping the Whirlwind: Somalia After the Cold War," in Phyllis Bennis and Michel Moushabeck, eds., Altered States: A Reader in the New World Order, New York: Olive Branch, 1993, pp. 350-361 at pp. 357-358. See also footnote 81 of this chapter.

87. On the requirement of international law that diplomatic means to avoid war must be pursued, see for example, United Nations Charter, Article 33, reprinted in Ramsey Clark, The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf, New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1992, Appendix XI, pp. 290-291.

88. Iraq's pre-war diplomatic overtures, all summarily rejected by the U.S. government and essentially ignored by the U.S. media, included the following:

(1) On August 12, 1990, Saddam Hussein proposed a settlement linking Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait to withdrawal from other illegally occupied Arab lands: Syria from Lebanon, and Israel from the territories it conquered in 1967. See for example, Editorial, "The issue is still Kuwait," Financial Times (London), August 13, 1990, p. 12 (Iraq's proposal "may yet serve some useful purpose" in offering "a path away from disaster . . . through negotiation"; the "immediate issue" is for "Iraq to get out of Kuwait," but however unsatisfactory Iraq's proposal may be as it stands, "The onus is now on everyone involved, including Middle Eastern and western powers, to seize the initiative and harness diplomacy to the show of political, military and economic force now on display in the Gulf"). In the United States, the Iraqi proposal was dismissed with utter derision: television news that day featured George Bush racing his power boat, jogging furiously, playing tennis and golf, and otherwise expending his formidable energies on important pursuits; the proposal merited only one dismissive sentence in a news story on the blockade of Iraq in the next day's New York Times, and excerpts from the proposal appeared without comment on an inside page. See Michael Gordon, "Bush Orders Navy to Halt All Shipments of Iraq's Oil and Almost All Its Imports," New York Times, August 13, 1990, p. A1; A.P., "Confrontation in the Gulf -- Proposals by Iraqi President: Excerpts From His Address," New York Times, August 13, 1990, p. A8.

(2) On August 19, 1990, Saddam Hussein proposed that the matter of Kuwait be left an "Arab issue," to be dealt with by the Arab states alone, without external interference, in the manner of the Syrian occupation of Lebanon and Morocco's attempt to take over Western Sahara. See for example, John Kifner, "Proposal by Iraq's President Demanding U.S. Withdrawal," New York Times, August 20, 1990, p. A6 (with accompanying text of the Iraqi proposal). Chomsky comments (Deterring Democracy, New York: Hill and Wang, 1991, p. 191):

The proposal was dismissed on the reasonable grounds that, in this arena, Hussein could hope to gain his ends by the threat and use of force. One relevant fact was overlooked: the Iraqi dictator was again stealing a leaf from Washington's book. The traditional U.S. position with regard to the Western Hemisphere is that "outsiders" have no right to intrude. If the U.S. intervenes in Latin America or the Caribbean, it is a hemispheric issue, to be resolved here, without external interference [i.e. the "Monroe Doctrine"].

(3) On August 23, 1990, a former high-ranking U.S. official delivered another Iraqi proposal to National Security Adviser Brent Scowcroft; this proposal, confirmed by the emissary who relayed it and by memoranda, finally was made public in an article by Knut Royce in the suburban New York newspaper Newsday on August 29, 1990. According to sources involved and documents, Iraq offered to withdraw from Kuwait and allow foreigners to leave in return for the lifting of sanctions, guaranteed access to the Persian Gulf, and full control of the Rumailah oilfield "that extends slightly into Kuwaiti territory from Iraq" (Royce), about two miles over a disputed border. Other terms of the proposal, according to memoranda that Royce quotes, were that Iraq and the U.S. negotiate an oil agreement "satisfactory to both nations' national security interests," "jointly work on the stability of the gulf," and develop a joint plan "to alleviate Iraq's economical and financial problems." There was no mention of U.S. withdrawal from Saudi Arabia, or other preconditions. A Bush administration official who specializes in Mideast affairs described the proposal as "serious" and "negotiable." See Knut Royce, "Secret Offer: Iraq Sent Pullout Deal to U.S.," Newsday, August 29, 1990, p. 3. The New York Times noted the Newsday report briefly on the continuation page of an article on another topic, citing government spokespersons who dismissed it as "baloney." However, after framing the matter properly, the Times conceded that the story was accurate, quoting White House sources who said the proposal "had not been taken seriously because Mr. Bush demands the unconditional withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait." The Times also noted quietly that "a well-connected Middle Eastern diplomat told the New York Times a week ago [that is, on August 23rd] of a similar offer, but it, too, was dismissed by the Administration." See R.W. Apple, Jr., "Confrontation in the Gulf: Opec to Increase Oil Output to Offset Losses From Iraq; No U.S. Hostages Released," New York Times, August 30, 1990, p. A1. See also, Knut Royce, "U.S.: Iraqi Proposal Not Worth a Response," Newsday, August 30, 1990, p. 6. An excerpt:

The administration has acknowledged Newsday reports that possible peace feelers were received from Iraqi officials offering to withdraw from Kuwait in return for the lifting of economic sanctions and other concessions, but they were dismissed as not serious. Asked why they were not pursued to test whether they were serious, the senior official said, "I don't know."

(4) On December 4, 1990, the business pages of the New York Times and Wall Street Journal reported a "near-panic of stock buying late in the day," after a British television report of an Iraqi proposal to withdraw from Kuwait, apart from the disputed Rumailah oilfields which extend two miles into Kuwait, with no other conditions except Kuwaiti agreement to discuss a lease of the two Gulf islands after the withdrawal. See Howard Hoffman, "Late Rumor of Iraqi Peace Offer Pulls Prices Higher in Buying Binge," Wall Street Journal, December 5, 1990, p. C2; A.P., "Price of Crude Oil Seesaws, Then Settles Higher at $29.15," New York Times, December 4, 1990, p. D2. The news-wires carried this story, but not the news sections of the major U.S. newspapers. See for example, Lisa Genasci, "Baghdad Offers to Free Soviets, Kuwait Deal Could Be in Works," A.P., December 4, 1990 (Westlaw database # 1990 WL 6034433). News reports in the U.S. did, however, express uneasiness that proposed discussions with Iraq "might encourage some European partners to launch unhelpful peace feelers." See for example, Gerald Seib, "Baker Mission Is a Risky Move for Bush; Aides Fear Gambit May Damage Coalition," Wall Street Journal, December 3, 1990, p. A16.

(5) In late December 1990, Iraq made another proposal, disclosed by U.S. officials on January 2, 1991: an offer "to withdraw from Kuwait if the United States pledges not to attack as soldiers are pulled out, if foreign troops leave the region, and if there is an agreement on the Palestinian problem and on the banning of all weapons of mass destruction in the region." Officials described the offer as "interesting," because it dropped the border issues and "signals Iraqi interest in a negotiated settlement." A State Department Mideast expert described the proposal as a "serious prenegotiation position." The Newsday report notes that the U.S. "immediately dismissed the proposal." See Knut Royce, "Iraq Offers Deal to Quit Kuwait," Newsday, January 3, 1991, p. 5 (city edition, p. 4). This offer passed without mention in the national press, and was barely noted elsewhere. The New York Times did, however, report on the same day that P.L.O. leader Yasser Arafat, after consultations with Saddam Hussein, indicated that neither of them "insisted that the Palestinian problem be solved before Iraqi troops get out of Kuwait"; according to Arafat, "Mr. Hussein's statement Aug. 12, linking an Iraqi withdrawal to an Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip, was no longer operative as a negotiating demand," all that was necessary was "a strong link to be guaranteed by the five permanent members of the Security Council that we have to solve all the problems in the Gulf, in the Middle East and especially the Palestinian cause." See Patrick Tyler, "Arafat Eases Stand on Kuwait-Palestine Link," New York Times, January 3, 1991, p. A8. Chomsky underscores the point (Deterring Democracy, New York: Hill and Wang, 1991, pp. 206-207):

Two weeks before the deadline for Iraqi withdrawal, then, it seemed that war might be avoided on these terms: Iraq would withdraw completely from Kuwait with a U.S. pledge not to attack withdrawing forces; foreign troops leave the region; the Security Council indicates a serious commitment to settle other major regional problems. Disputed border issues would be left for later consideration. The possibility was flatly rejected by Washington, and scarcely entered the media or public awareness. The U.S. and Britain maintained their commitment to force alone.

(6) On January 14, 1991, France also made a last-minute effort to avoid war by proposing that the U.N. Security Council call for "a rapid and massive withdrawal" from Kuwait along with a statement to Iraq that Council members would bring their "active contribution" to a settlement of other problems of the region, "in particular, of the Arab-Israeli conflict and in particular to the Palestinian problem by convening, at an appropriate moment, an international conference" to assure "the security, stability and development of this region of the world." The French proposal was supported by Belgium (at the moment one of the rotating Security Council members), and Germany, Spain, Italy, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and several non-aligned nations. The U.S. and Britain rejected it (along with the Soviet Union, irrelevantly). American U.N. Ambassador Thomas Pickering stated that the French proposal was unacceptable, because it went beyond previous U.N. Security Council resolutions on the Iraqi invasion. See Paul Lewis, "Confrontation in the Gulf: The U.N.; France and 3 Arab States Issue an Appeal to Hussein," New York Times, January 15, 1991, p. A12; Michael Kranish et al., "World waits on brink of war: Late effort at diplomacy in gulf fails," Boston Globe, January 16, 1991, p. 1; Ellen Nimmons, A.P., "Last-ditch pitches for peace; But U.S. claims Iraqis hold key," Houston Chronicle, January 15, 1991, p. 1.

Citing the examples of U.S. policies towards South Africa in Namibia and Israel in Lebanon, Chomsky remarks about the United States's summary rejection of the Iraqi withdrawal proposals (Deterring Democracy, New York: Hill and Wang, 1991, p. 209):

It is entirely reasonable to take the position that Iraq should have withdrawn from Kuwait forthwith, unconditionally, with no "linkage" to anything, and that it should pay reparations and even be subjected to war crimes trials; that is a tenable position for people who uphold the principles that yield these conclusions. But as a point of logic, principles cannot be selectively upheld.

89. For the New York Times correspondent's statement, see Thomas Friedman, "Confrontation in the Gulf: Behind Bush's Hard Line," New York Times, August 22, 1990, p. A1. An excerpt:

The Administration's rapid rejection of the Iraqi proposal for opening a diplomatic track grows out of Washington's concern that should it become involved in negotiations about the terms of an Iraqi withdrawal, America's Arab allies might feel under pressure to give the Iraqi President, Saddam Hussein, a few token gains in Kuwait to roll back his invasion and defuse the crisis.

90. For the Bush administration officials' statements that Iraqi proposals were "serious" and "negotiable," see Knut Royce, "Secret Offer: Iraq Sent Pullout Deal to U.S.," Newsday, August 29, 1990, p. 3; Knut Royce, "Iraq Offers Deal to Quit Kuwait," Newsday, January 3, 1991, p. 5 (city edition, p. 4).

91. For the Newsday article, see section (3) of footnote 88 of this chapter. For the New York Times's dismissal, see R.W. Apple, Jr., "Confrontation in the Gulf: Opec to Increase Oil Output to Offset Losses From Iraq; No U.S. Hostages Released," New York Times, August 30, 1990, p. A1. The reference to the Newsday story came near the end of the article (note that in the second paragraph quoted here, the Times acknowledges that it had information about a peace offer one week earlier):

Miss Tutwiler vigorously denied, and a ranking State Department official dismissed as "baloney," a report published in Newsday today that a former high-ranking United States official recently delivered a secret peace offer from Iraq to Brent Scowcroft, the President's national security adviser. The offer reportedly stipulated that Iraq would release all hostages and pull out of Kuwait if United Nations sanctions were lifted, Iraq were guaranteed access to the Persian Gulf and sole control of an oilfield that straddles the Iraq-Kuwaiti border was given to Baghdad.

Two White House officials said such a message, which they described as a feeler, had in fact been delivered. But both said it had not been taken seriously because Mr. Bush demands the unconditional withdrawal of Iraq from Kuwait. A well-connected Middle Eastern diplomat told The New York Times a week ago of a similar offer, but it, too, was dismissed by the Administration. It involved a long-term Iraqi lease on a Kuwaiti island at the mouth of the Shatt al Arab waterway and sizable payments to Iraq by other Arab countries. "We're aware of many initiatives that are being undertaken by various bodies," said Roman Popadiuk, the deputy White House press secretary.

92. On popular opposition to the war in the U.S. before the bombing began, see for example, Douglas Kellner, The Persian Gulf T.V. War, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1992, pp. 250-263; Richard Morin, "Poll: Americans Expect War But Back Peace Conference," Washington Post, January 11, 1991, p. A1. An excerpt:

[A]ccording to a new Washington Post-A.B.C. News poll . . . two-thirds of those questioned said the administration should be more flexible on the question of an international peace conference on the Middle East and support a meeting on Arab-Israeli issues if Iraqi troops are withdrawn from Kuwait. . . .

Nearly nine of 10 Americans believe war is inevitable, but large majorities also favor continued diplomatic talks up to and even beyond the Tuesday deadline the United Nations Security Council has set for the withdrawal of Iraqi troops from Kuwait, the Post-A.B.C. poll found. . . . According to the poll, eight out of 10 said the United States should hold additional talks with Iraq before Jan. 15, while 53 percent say the search for a diplomatic solution should continue after the deadline expires. Nearly nine of 10 said they support a meeting between U.N. Secretary General Javier Perez de Cuellar and Iraqi leaders.

American Political Network Inc., "Poll Update -- A.B.C./Post: 66% O.K. Linking Arab-Israeli Talks For Pullout," The Hotline, January 11, 1991 (available on Nexis database). The highly loaded question in this A.B.C./Washington Post poll, which nonetheless resulted in 66 percent of the American population supporting the diplomatic option, asked:

The Bush administration opposes making any concessions to Iraq to get it to withdraw from Kuwait, including an international conference on Arab-Israeli problems. Some people say such a conference would be a concession that would reward Iraqi aggression by linking the Arab-Israeli dispute with Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. Other people say such an agreement would be worth it if it got Iraq to withdraw from Kuwait without a war. Do you think the U.S. should agree to an Arab-Israeli conference if Iraq agreed to withdraw from Kuwait, or not?

American Political Network Inc., "Poll Update -- C.B.S./N.Y.T.: Majority Would O.K. Deal On Arab-Israeli Talks," The Hotline, January 15, 1991 (available on Nexis database). The even more loaded question in this C.B.S./New York Times poll -- it only mentioned Bush's view, without suggesting any other position -- nevertheless revealed that 59 percent of Americans stated that there should be further talks between Bush and Saddam, 56 percent approved an international conference as a solution to the Gulf Crisis, and 47 versus 37 percent believed that it would be an "acceptable solution" if Kuwait offered a piece of territory to Iraq in exchange for withdrawal. Furthermore, support for a war shifted radically depending on projected numbers of U.S. casualties, with only 37 percent saying that war would be worth it if U.S. casualties climbed into the thousands.

Chomsky adds that, had the actual existence of Iraq's peace proposals and the idea that negotiated withdrawal was possible received reasonable coverage by the U.S. media, the two-to-one popular approval rating for that way of addressing the Gulf Crisis surely would have been higher.

93. On pre-war depictions of Iraq as a mighty military power, see for example, John R. MacArthur, Second Front: Censorship and Propaganda in the Gulf War, New York: Hill and Wang, 1992. An excerpt (pp. 172-173):

The U.S. government claimed that by mid-September there were 250,000 Iraqi troops in Kuwait poised to invade Saudi Arabia. By early January, the number had allegedly grown to 540,000 in and around Kuwait, all formidably armed and eager to slaughter invading American troops. From Administration press releases one could imagine a sophisticated Iraqi Maginot Line [the elaborate defensive barrier set up along northeast France in the 1930s] on the southern border of Kuwait, backed by the always "elite" or "crack" Republican Guard. Although the precise strength of Iraqi troops in the war zone may never be known, the real number turned out to be far lower. . . . The focus by the government -- and the docile media -- on sheer numbers of Iraqi troops obscured the pathetic quality of the conscripted foot soldiers who made up the better part of the enemy forces. Chuck Akers of the 503 M.P. Company, Third Armored Division, told me that many of the enemy prisoners of war (E.P.W.s) taken in the first day of the ground invasion were ill-equipped, starving, and demoralized -- in short, poor specimens of fighting men. Among their number was an eleven-year-old boy, several soldiers with feet so swollen they had to have their boots cut off, and many who were carrying only blank ammunition.

As with the baby incubator story [i.e. a public relations fabrication in which a young girl, later discovered to be the Kuwaiti Ambassador's daughter, testified to Congress that she had seen the Iraqis kill Kuwaiti babies by taking them out of incubators], there was virtual unanimous acceptance by the media of the allegedly enormous manpower behind Saddam's territorial ambition. Only the St. Petersburg Times, a well-respected Florida daily under independent ownership, challenged the government line. In a top-of-front-page story published on Sunday, January 6, Washington bureau reporter Jean Heller reported that satellite photos of the border between southern Kuwait and Saudi Arabia taken on September 11 and 13, 1990, by a Soviet company revealed "no evidence of a massive Iraqi presence in Kuwait in September. . . ." "A number" of American news organizations had bought the same pictures and shown them to various experts, [satellite imagery expert Peter] Zimmerman said, and "all of us agreed that we couldn't see anything in the way of military activity in the pictures." But again cautiousness overcame curiosity among the media.

Reuters, "Bush: No Appeasement," Los Angeles Times, August 8, 1990, p. P1 (quoting President Bush's comparison of Saddam Hussein to "Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler before the onset of World War II," and his assertion that Saddam had "massed an enormous war machine on the Saudi border, capable of initiating hostilities with little or no additional preparation" including "surface-to-surface missiles").

For samples of the U.S. media's sudden demonization of Saddam Hussein, see Marjorie Williams, "Monster in the Making: Saddam Hussein -- From Unknown to Arch-Villain in a Matter of Days," Washington Post, August 9, 1990, p. D1.

On the long tradition of "exaggeration of American vulnerability" from the nineteenth century through World War II, see John Thompson, "The Exaggeration of American Vulnerability: The Anatomy of a Tradition," Diplomatic History, Winter 1992, pp. 23-43.

In reality, the Gulf War was simply a slaughter. For details on the carnage, see footnote 94 of this chapter.

94. On the Gulf Slaughter, see for example, Patrick J. Sloyan, "Buried Alive: U.S. Tanks Used Plows To Kill Thousands In Gulf War Trenches," Newsday (New York), September 12, 1991, p. 1. An excerpt:

The U.S. Army division that broke through Saddam Hussein's defensive frontline used plows mounted on tanks and combat earthmovers to bury thousands of Iraqi soldiers -- some still alive and firing their weapons -- in more than 70 miles of trenches, according to U.S. Army officials. . . . The unprecedented tactic has been hidden from public view. . . . Not a single American was killed during the attack that made an Iraqi body count impossible. . . .

Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Vulcan armored carriers straddled the trench lines and fired into the Iraqi soldiers as the tanks covered them with mounds of sand. "I came through right after the lead company," [Col. Anthony] Moreno said. "What you saw was a bunch of buried trenches with peoples' arms and things sticking out of them. . . ." [General Norman] Schwarzkopf's staff has privately estimated that, from air and ground attacks, between 50,000 and 75,000 Iraqis were killed in their trenches. . . . Only one Iraqi tank round was fired at the attackers, Moreno said.

Alexander Cockburn and Ken Silverstein, Washington Babylon, London: Verso, 1996. An excerpt (pp. 162-163):

[T]he Iraqi army enjoyed the largest mass desertions in history, with between 125,000 and 175,000 soldiers prudently departing the front before ground combat began. Saddam Hussein had stuffed the front with segregated units of Shi'ite and Kurd troops, so when it became clear that they were merely cannon fodder, most returned to their villages. Some 25,000 troops remained to confront 400,000 Allied soldiers when the ground war began. The U.S.-led force could have walked in with swords.

Ramsey Clark, The Fire This Time: U.S. War Crimes in the Gulf, New York: Thunder's Mouth, 1992 (an extensive and chilling review). An excerpt (pp. xvi, 31, 38, 40-42, 47-48, 51, 59, 61, 64, 70):

Before the assault was over U.S. planes flew more than 109,000 sorties, raining 88,000 tons of bombs, the equivalent of seven Hiroshimas. . . . The bulk of the Iraqi troops were draftees, ranging in age from 16 to 42, and with no deep-felt loyalty to the military. The percentage of its armed forces that were well trained and equipped was very low. . . . Iraq lost between 125,000 and 150,000 soldiers. The U.S. has said it lost 148 in combat, and of those, 37 were caused by friendly fire. . . . U.S. planes pounded troops in the Kuwaiti theater of operations and southern Iraq with carpet-bombing, fuel-air explosives, and other illegal weaponry. Iraq never mustered a single significant offensive strike or any effective defensive action. When the ground attack came, the surviving Iraqis were incapable even of self defense. In a news briefing on February 23, the eve of the ground war, General Thomas Kelly said, "There won't be many of them left." He believed most Iraqi troops were dead or had withdrawn. When U.S. tanks and armored vehicles finally did roll, the soldiers reported driving for miles without encountering live Iraqi forces. . . .

No aerial defense of the helpless country was ordered because Iraqi military officials knew that exposing its planes in the air would be suicidal. The Iraqi anti-aircraft display, shown regularly on C.N.N., created the impression that ground-to-air defenses were protecting Baghdad. However, this fire turned out to be essentially useless. . . . [T]he Pentagon reported that despite the 109,876 sorties flown during the entire war, only 38 aircraft were lost -- a rate lower than the normal accident rate in combat training. . . . The aerial assault continued until no targets remained that were worth the ordnance. Pilots reported a shortage of targets for days. . . .

Among the explosives that U.S. planes dropped on troops were napalm bombs, fuel-air explosives (F.A.E.s), and cluster bombs. . . . The Washington Post reported on February 18, 1991 that "wounded Iraqi soldiers were dying for lack of treatment amid conditions that recalled the American Civil War." If wounded soldiers were moved out of the lines, treatment was further impaired because U.S. planes bombed at least five Iraqi military hospitals. . . . [T]he following testimony came from Mike Erlich of the Military Counseling Network at the March-April 1991 European Parliament hearings on the Gulf War: "[H]undreds, possibly thousands, of Iraqi soldiers began walking toward the U.S. position unarmed, with their arms raised in an attempt to surrender. However, the orders for this unit were not to take any prisoners. . . . The commander of the unit began the firing by shooting an anti-tank missile through one of the Iraqi soldiers. This is a missile designed to destroy tanks, but it was used against one man. At that point, everybody in the unit began shooting. . . ." As one soldier said, it was like slaughtering animals in a pen. . . . Apache helicopters raked the Republican Guard Hammurabi Division with laser-guided Hellfire missiles. "Say hello to Allah," one American was recorded as saying moments before a Hellfire obliterated one of the 102 vehicles racked up by the Apaches. . . . "Yee-HAH," said one voice. . . .

The surgical strike myth was a cynical way to conceal the truth. The bombing was a deadly, calculated, and deeply immoral strategy to bring Iraq to its knees by destroying the essential facilities and support systems of the entire society. . . . The overall plan was described in the June 23, 1991, Washington Post. After interviews with several of the war's top planners and extensive research into how targets were determined, reporter Barton Gellman wrote: "Many of the targets were chosen only secondarily to contribute to the military defeat of [Iraq]. . . . Military planners hoped the bombing would amplify the economic and psychological impact of international sanctions on Iraqi society. . . . They deliberately did great harm to Iraq's ability to support itself as an industrial society. . . ." Compounded by sanctions, the damage to life-support systems in Iraq killed more after the war than direct attacks did during the war. . . .

Probably 1,500 civilians, mostly women and children, were killed when the Amariyah civilian bomb shelter was hit by two bombs in the early morning hours of February 13, 1991. . . . Neighborhood residents heard screams as people tried to get out of the shelter. They screamed for four minutes. Then the second bomb hit, killing almost everybody. The screaming ceased. The U.S. public saw sanitized, heavily edited footage of the bombed shelter. But the Columbia Journalism Review reported in its May/June 1991 issue that much more graphic images were shown on news reports in Jordan and Baghdad. . . . The Review obtained the footage via unedited C.N.N. feeds and Baghdad's W.T.N., and described it as follows: "This reporter viewed the unedited Baghdad feeds. . . . They showed scenes of incredible carnage. Nearly all the bodies were charred into blackness; in some cases the heat had been so great that entire limbs were burned off. Among the corpses were those of at least six babies and ten children, most of them so severely burned that their gender could not be determined. Rescue workers collapsed in grief."

On the U.S. attack on Iraq's civilian infrastructure, see for example, Eric Rouleau, "The View From France: America's Unyielding Policy toward Iraq," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 74, No. 1, January/February 1995, pp. 59f. An excerpt (pp. 61-62):

[T]he Iraqi people, who were not consulted about the invasion, have paid the price for their government's madness. . . . Iraqis understood the legitimacy of a military action to drive their army from Kuwait, but they have had difficulty comprehending the Allied rationale for using air power to systematically destroy or cripple Iraqi infrastructure and industry: electric power stations (92 percent of installed capacity destroyed), refineries (80 percent of production capacity), petrochemical complexes, telecommunications centers (including 135 telephone networks), bridges (more than 100), roads, highways, railroads, hundreds of locomotives and boxcars full of goods, radio and television broadcasting stations, cement plants, and factories producing aluminum, textiles, electric cables, and medical supplies. The losses were estimated by the Arab Monetary Fund to be $190 billion.

Chomsky remarks (Deterring Democracy, New York: Hill and Wang, 1991, p. 410):

[The] first component [of the U.S.-led attack on Iraq on January 16, 1991] targeted the civilian infrastructure, including power, sewage, and water systems; that is, a form of biological warfare, having little relation to driving Iraq from Kuwait -- rather, designed for long-term U.S. political ends. This too is not war, but state terrorism, on a colossal scale.

For the best general account of the Gulf conflict, see Dilip Hiro, Desert Shield to Desert Storm: the Second Gulf War, London: HarperCollins, 1992.

95. On the rebel Iraqi generals' rejected pleas, see for example, John Simpson, "Surviving In The Ruins," Spectator (U.K.), August 10, 1991, pp. 8-10. An excerpt:

Our programme [Panorama on England's B.B.C.-1] has found evidence that several Iraqi generals made contact with the United States to sound out the likely American response if they took the highly dangerous step of planning a coup against Saddam. But now Washington faltered. It had been alarmed by the scale of the uprisings [against Saddam Hussein] in the north and south. For several years the Americans had refused to have any contact with the Iraqi opposition groups, and assumed that revolution would lead to the break-up of Iraq as a unitary state. The Americans believed that the Shi'as wanted to secede to Iran and that the Kurds would want to join up with the Kurdish people of Turkey. No direct answer was returned to the Iraqi generals; but on 5 March, only four days after President Bush had spoken of the need for the Iraqi people to get rid of Saddam Hussein, the White House spokesman Marlin Fitzwater said, "We don't intend to get involved . . . in Iraq's internal affairs. . . ."

An Iraqi general who escaped to Saudi Arabia in the last days of the uprising in southern Iraq told us that he and his men had repeatedly asked the American forces for weapons, ammunition and food to help them carry on the fight against Saddam's forces. The Americans refused. As they fell back on the town of Nasiriyeh, close to the allied positions, the rebels approached the Americans again and requested access to an Iraqi arms dump behind the American lines at Tel al-Allahem. At first they were told they could pass through the lines. Then the permission was rescinded and, the general told us, the Americans blew up the arms dump. American troops disarmed the rebels.

Jim Drinkard, "Senate Report Says Lack of U.S. Help Derailed Possible Iraq Coup," A.P., May 2, 1991 (Westlaw database # 1991 WL 6184412). An excerpt:

Defections by senior officials in Saddam Hussein's army -- and possibly a coup attempt against Saddam -- were shelved in March because the United States failed to support the effort, according to a Senate Foreign Relations Committee staff report. . . . [T]he United States "continued to see the opposition in caricature," fearing that the Kurds sought a separate state and the Shi'as wanted an Iranian-style Islamic fundamentalist regime, the report concluded. . . .

"The public snub of Kurdish and other Iraqi opposition leaders was read as a clear indication the United States did not want the popular rebellion to succeed," the document stated. . . . The refusal to meet with the Iraqi opposition was accompanied by "background statements from administration officials that they were looking for a military, not a popular, alternative to Saddam Hussein," the committee staff report said. . . . The United States resisted not only the entreaties of opposition figures, but of Syria and Saudi Arabia, which favored aiding the Iraqi dissidents militarily, the report contended.

A.P., "Senior Iraqis offered to defect, report says," Boston Globe, May 3, 1991, p. 8; "Report: U.S. Stymied Defections," Newsday (New York), May 3, 1991, p. 15; Tony Horwitz, "Forgotten Rebels: After Heeding Calls To Turn on Saddam, Shiites Feel Betrayed," Wall Street Journal Europe, December 31, 1991, p. 1.

For more on the immediate decision by the U.S. to allow Saddam Hussein to massacre the rebelling Shiites and Kurds -- in part using attack helicopters, as expressly permitted by U.S. commanders -- at the conclusion of the Gulf War, see for example, Michael R. Gordon and General Bernard E. Trainor, The Generals' War: The Inside Story of the Conflict in the Gulf, Boston: Little Brown, 1995, pp. 446-456 (on Saudi Arabia's rejected plan to assist the Shiites who were trying to overthrow Saddam, see pp. 454-456).

96. For Friedman's article, see Thomas Friedman, "A Rising Sense That Iraq's Hussein Must Go," New York Times, July 7, 1991, section 4, p. 1. The full statement:

[T]he fact is that President Bush has been ambivalent about Mr. Hussein's fate since the day the war ended. Mr. Bush inadvertently acknowledged the source of that ambivalence last week when he was asked whether he was disappointed about the lack of democratization in Kuwait. "The war wasn't fought about democracy in Kuwait," Mr. Bush bluntly retorted.

The war was, instead, fought to restore the status quo. And, as every American policymaker knows, before Mr. Hussein invaded Kuwait he was a pillar of the gulf balance of power and status quo preferred by Washington. His iron fist simultaneously held Iraq together, much to the satisfaction of the American allies Turkey and Saudi Arabia, and it prevented Iranian Islamic fundamentalists from sweeping over the eastern Arab world. It was only when the Iraqi dictator decided to use his iron fist to dominate Kuwait and Saudi Arabia that he became a threat. But as soon as Mr. Hussein was forced back into his shell, Washington felt he had become useful again for maintaining the regional balance and preventing Iraq from disintegrating.

That was why Mr. Bush never supported the Kurdish and Shiite rebellions against Mr. Hussein, or for that matter any democracy movement in Iraq. . . . Sooner or later, Mr. Bush argued, sanctions would force Mr. Hussein's generals to bring him down, and then Washington would have the best of all worlds: an iron-fisted Iraqi junta without Saddam Hussein.

For a similar explanation of the rationale for maintaining Saddam Hussein in power, see Alan Cowell, "After The War: Kurds Assert Few Outside Iraq Wanted Them to Win," New York Times, April 11, 1991, p. A11. An excerpt:

It is, perhaps, one of the most savage realizations of the Persian Gulf crisis and the subsequent turmoil in both north and south Iraq that the allied campaign against President Hussein brought the United States and its Arab coalition partners to a strikingly unanimous view: whatever the sins of the Iraqi leader, he offered the West and the region a better hope for his country's stability than did those who have suffered his repression. . . .

At the same time, the United States matched its refusal to be drawn into the civil war with a refusal to talk to those involved in fighting it. When Secretary of States James A. Baker 3d arrives here on Thursday to discuss the Middle East with President Hafez el-Assad, he will find waiting for him a letter from the opposition groups requesting a meeting. "We hope that your Government will respond positively" to the request, the letter, delivered to the United States Embassy here, says. So far, Iraqi exiles say, there has been no reply to it and the embassy's doors remain closed to them.

Chomsky remarks about this system of "stability" and "regional balance" in the Middle East based upon the Arab client-states (Deterring Democracy, New York: Hill and Wang, 1992, p. 417):

[W]ho are these "Arab coalition partners"? Answer: six are family dictatorships, established by the Anglo-American settlement to manage Gulf oil riches in the interests of the foreign masters, what British imperial managers called an "Arab façade" for the real rulers. The seventh is Syria's Hafez el-Assad, a minority-based tyrant indistinguishable from Saddam Hussein. That these partners should share Washington's preference for Saddam Hussein's variety of "stability" is hardly a surprise. The last of the "coalition partners," Egypt, is the only one that could be called "a country." Though a tyranny, it has a degree of internal freedom.

For the British reference to the "Arab façade" -- a state "ruled and administered under British guidance and controlled by a native Mohammedan, and, as far as possible, by an Arab staff" (the words are those of Lord Curzon) -- see William Stivers, Supremacy and Oil: Iraq, Turkey, and the Anglo-American World Order, 1918-1930, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982, p. 28. Curzon further explained that "there should be no actual incorporation of conquered territory in the dominions of the conqueror, but that the absorption may be veiled by constitutional fictions as a protectorate, a sphere of influence, a buffer State, and so on" (p. 34). See also, William Stivers, America's Confrontation with Revolutionary Change in the Middle East, 1948-83, London: Macmillan, 1986 (on the U.S. policy of defending the conservative status quo in the Middle East since World War II).

97. On Iraqi children killed by the embargo, see for example, Anthony Arnove, ed., Iraq Under Siege: The Deadly Impact of Sanctions and War, Cambridge, MA: South End, 2000. An excerpt (pp. 60, 65):

[I]n 1995 the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization reported that the military devastation of Iraq and the Security Council embargo had been responsible for the deaths of more than 560,000 children. The World Health Organization confirmed this figure and so, inadvertently, did the U.S. Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, when she was asked on the C.B.S. program 60 Minutes if the death of more than half a million children was a price worth paying. "[W]e think the price is worth it," she replied. . . . Former U.N. humanitarian coordinator for Iraq Denis Halliday has remarked that the death toll is "probably closer now to 600,000 and that's over the period of 1990-1998. If you include adult, it's well over 1 million Iraqi people."

Merrill Goozner, "U.S. Seems To Be Sole Supporter Of Embargo Against Iraq; Allies Cite Desire For Business, Concern For Children In Seeking Ties," Chicago Tribune, September 5, 1996, p. 14. An excerpt:

The embargo -- a ban on all forms of international trade, including food and medicine -- is the most sweeping set of economic sanctions the U.N. has ever imposed on a nation. . . . Human rights groups, who are no fans of the brutal Iraqi regime, the U.N.'s World Food Program and UNICEF have reported the continuing impact of the embargo on Iraqi children: an estimated 500,000 deaths since 1991, primarily from intestinal disorders caused by drinking impure water in their weakened, malnourished state.

Kathryn Casa, "Embargo brings death to 500,000 children in Iraq," National Catholic Reporter, March 3, 1995, p. 9. An excerpt:

[If] the blockade continues, 1.5 million more children could eventually suffer malnutrition or a variety of unchecked illnesses because antibiotics and other standard medicines are scarce. . . . Among the five permanent members of the [U.N.] Security Council, only . . . the United States and Britain are opposed [to ending the embargo]. . . .

[A] two-day Athens conference featured grim photographs of Iraqi children, their bellies bloated from malnutrition, and of pitifully tiny infants, too weak to cry, their limbs as thin as sticks and their huge eyes reflecting a serenity that too often precedes death. . . . [T]here were hundreds of pages of material on the tragic effects of the embargo and on Iraq's contention that it has complied with all U.N. resolutions.

See also, Eric Hoskins, "Making the Desert Glow," Op-Ed, New York Times, January 21, 1993, p. A25 (a Harvard Study Team estimated that 50,000 children died in the first eight months of 1991 alone, many from the effects of radioactive artillery shells; about 40 tons of depleted uranium was dispersed in Iraq and Kuwait during the war).

On the U.S. and British insistence on maintaining the Iraq embargo, see for example, Eric Rouleau, "The View From France: America's Unyielding Policy toward Iraq," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 74, No. 1, January/February 1995, pp. 59f. An excerpt (pp. 66-67):

In November 1993, two years after Resolutions 706 and 712, Saddam Hussein decided in desperation to comply fully with the conditions set by the Security Council to lift the embargo. . . . A commission headed by the Swedish diplomat Rolf Ekeus recognized that the Iraqis had cooperated fully. . . . If the Security Council were to respect the commitment it had clearly made, the oil embargo would have been lifted immediately or, at most, after a probational period set by the Security Council. Then the United States, backed by the United Kingdom, decided to "change the rules," as a New York Times editorial of August 2, 1994, put it. The Clinton administration decided that sanctions would remain in place as long as Iraq did not implement all the U.N. resolutions, particularly those concerning respect for human rights and recognition of Kuwait's sovereignty and borders. These new demands, however justifiable, did not appear in the sole U.N. text referring explicitly to the lifting of the oil embargo. . . .

In November 1994, under pressure from Russia and France, Iraq recognized the sovereignty and frontiers of Kuwait. As expected, the measure, conceived as a political concession to the United States, was not judged sufficient by Washington. The prevailing sense in Paris was that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to change the mind of the Clinton administration, whose determination to follow its own policy had been clear in recent months.

98. For the Foreign Affairs article, see Eric Rouleau, "The View From France: America's Unyielding Policy toward Iraq," Foreign Affairs, Vol. 74, No. 1, January/February 1995, pp. 59f. An excerpt (p. 68):

It is widely agreed, even among the Iraqi opposition, that Saddam Hussein's regime is more secure today than it was four years ago. . . . Reliable sources in Baghdad now maintain that the Iraqi people, absorbed by the daily struggle to survive the embargo, have neither the desire nor the energy to rise up against their government, which they increasingly perceive as a victim of a superpower's agenda.

On the death toll, see footnotes 94 and 97 of this chapter.

99. On Bush's favorable attitude towards Saddam Hussein until the Kuwait invasion, see for example, Alan Friedman, Spider's Web: The Secret History of How the White House Illegally Armed Iraq, New York: Bantam Books, 1993 (a detailed and densely documented history of U.S. support for Saddam until months before the Gulf War); Douglas Frantz and Murray Waas, "U.S. Loans Indirectly Financed Iraq Military," Los Angeles Times, February 25, 1992, p. A1 ("Classified documents show that Bush, first as vice president and then as President, intervened repeatedly over a period of almost a decade to obtain special assistance for Saddam Hussein -- financial aid as well as access to high-tech equipment that was critical to Iraq's quest for nuclear and chemical arms"; this relationship continued "[u]ntil the eve of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait"). See also footnote 100 of this chapter.

100. On Bush's efforts into 1990 to continue loan guarantees for Saddam Hussein, see for example, Douglas Frantz and Murray Waas, "Bush Secret Effort Helped Iraq Build Its War Machine," Los Angeles Times, February 23, 1992, p. A1. An excerpt:

In the fall of 1989, at a time when Iraq's invasion of Kuwait was only nine months away and Saddam Hussein was desperate for money to buy arms, President Bush signed a top-secret National Security Decision directive ordering closer ties with Baghdad and opening the way for $1 billion in new aid, according to classified documents and interviews. . . . Getting new aid from Washington was critical for Iraq in the waning months of 1989 and the early months of 1990 because international bankers had cut off virtually all loans to Baghdad. . . .

In addition to clearing the way for new financial aid, senior Bush aides as late as the spring of 1990 overrode concern among other government officials and insisted that Hussein continue to be allowed to buy so-called "dual use" technology -- advanced equipment that could be used for both civilian and military purposes. The Iraqis were given continued access to such equipment, despite emerging evidence that they were working on nuclear arms and other weapons of mass destruction. "Iraq is not to be singled out," National Security Council official Richard Haas declared at a high-level meeting in April, 1990, according to participants' notes, when the Commerce Department proposed curbing Iraqi purchases of militarily sensitive technology. . . . And the pressure in 1989 and 1990 to give Hussein crucial financial assistance and maintain his access to sophisticated U.S. technology were not isolated incidents. Rather, classified documents obtained by The Times show, they reflected a long-secret pattern of personal efforts by Bush -- both as President and as vice president -- to support and placate the Iraqi dictator. . . .

[C]lassified records show that Bush's efforts on Hussein's behalf continued well beyond the end of the Iran-Iraq War and persisted in the face of increasingly widespread warnings from inside the American government that the overall policy had become misdirected. . . . [On April 19, 1990, the] White House National Security Council thwart[ed] efforts by [the] Commerce Department to stem the flow of U.S. technology to Iraq. . . . [A]s late as July 9, 1990, April Glaspie, the U.S. ambassador to Iraq, assured Iraqi officials that the Bush Administration was still trying to get the second $500 million [of the $1 billion in loan guarantees] released, according to a classified cable.

Alan Friedman, "U.S. backed Dollars 1bn Iraqi loan prior to invasion of Kuwait," Financial Times (London), May 3, 1991, section 1, p. 1. An excerpt:

The Bush Administration pushed through a Dollars 1bn (Pounds 568m) loan guarantee to Iraq for farm exports just 10 months before the invasion of Kuwait despite being presented with reports of widespread abuse of U.S. funds by Baghdad at the time. . . . The debate over the issue came to a climax at a White House meeting on November 8, 1989 when senior officials from the Federal Reserve, U.S. Treasury and Commerce Departments all objected to the Dollars 1bn guarantee to back U.S. farm exports to Iraq. The reasons cited, according to participants at the meeting, included the view that Iraq was no longer creditworthy. . . . Mr. Robert Kimmitt, the under-secretary of state, told the White House meeting that abruptly terminating the Dollars 1bn of loan guarantees for Iraq would be "contrary to the president's intentions."

For exposures of other such links, see for example, Douglas Frantz and Murray Waas, "Bush Had Long History Of Support For Iraq Aid," Los Angeles Times, February 24, 1992, p. A1 (providing further detailed evidence, in particular of Bush's personal interventions to obtain Export-Import Bank loan credits for Iraq); Paul Houston, "Panel To Probe Reports On Aid To Iraq," Los Angeles Times, February 25, 1992, p. A10; Leslie H. Gelb, "Bush's Iraqi Blunder," Op-Ed, New York Times, May 4, 1992, p. A17; Gary Milhollin, "Building Saddam Hussein's Bomb," New York Times Magazine, March 8, 1992, section 6, p. 30; Alan Friedman, "West's guilty role in arming Saddam: Revelations this week in London and Washington imply high-level cover ups of illegal weapon deals," Financial Times (London), November 14, 1992, p. I; Alan Friedman, "A paper trail of troubles: The Bush administration is coming under fire as Congress investigates alleged transfers of arms and money to Iraq," Financial Times (London), August 6, 1992, p. 14; Alan Friedman, Lionel Barber, Tom Flannery and Eric Reguly, "Arms For Iraq: Saddam's secret South African connection -- A steady flow of illegal missile technology was exported from the U.S. with full C.I.A. knowledge," Financial Times (London), May 24, 1991, p. 6; Lionel Barber and Alan Friedman, "Arms to Iraq; A fatal attraction -- Under the nose of the White House, kickbacks and illegal deals funded Saddam," Financial Times (London), May 3, 1991, section I, p. 2; Bruce Ingersoll, "G.A.O. Is Critical Of Export Credits Extended To Iraq," Wall Street Journal, November 21, 1990, p. A16. See also, Ralph Atkins, Emma Tucker and Alan Friedman, "U.K. allowed export to Iraq of mustard gas chemicals," Financial Times (London), July 29, 1991, p. 1; James Adams and Nick Rufford, "Britain sold 'mustard gas' to Saddam," Sunday Times (London), July 28, 1991, p. 1.

101. On U.S. tolerance of Saddam after the Gulf War, see footnotes 95 and 96 of this chapter.

102. On the twenty-year U.S. and Israeli campaign to reject Palestinian rights, see footnotes 104 and 111 of this chapter; chapter 4 of U.P. and its footnotes 48 and 49; and chapter 8 of U.P. and its footnote 83.

103. The connection between the Gulf War and a change in the Israeli/Palestinian conflict was commonly drawn by officials and commentators, both during and after the war. See for example, Henry A. Kissinger, "A Postwar Agenda," Newsweek, January 28, 1991, p. 44. An excerpt:

[T]he United States should move to implement a number of measures in the immediate aftermath of the war. . . . [P]erhaps most importantly, a new balance of power will revive prospects for progress on the Arab-Israeli conflict. . . . [W]ith Saddam defeated, moderate Arab leaders will gain in stature, America's credibility will be enhanced and Israel will have a breathing space. This new equation should be translated into a major diplomatic effort within a few months of victory. . . . I would much prefer a diplomatic process in which the United States, the moderate Arab countries and Israel are the principal participants. . . . The aftermath of an allied victory over Iraq will offer a perhaps never-to-recur opportunity.

Andrew Rosenthal, "Bush Vows to Tackle Middle East Issues," New York Times, January 29, 1991, p. A13 (quoting George Bush: "When this war is over, the United States, its credibility and its reliability restored, will have a key leadership role in helping to bring peace to the rest of the Middle East").

For Chomsky's article referred to in the text, see Noam Chomsky, "Aftermath: Voices From Below," Z Magazine, October 1991, pp. 19-28. An excerpt (pp. 25-26):

Decoding the rhetoric of political discourse, we see a picture that looks like this. The U.S. triumph in the Gulf has enabled it to establish the rejectionist position it has maintained in international isolation (apart from Israel). The peace process that the world has sought for many years, with surprising unanimity, can now be consigned to the ash heap of history. The U.S. can at last run its own conference, completely excluding its rivals Europe and Japan, always a major goal of U.S. diplomacy in the Middle East, as Kissinger observed. With the Soviet Union gone from the scene, Syria has accepted the fact that the U.S. rules the region alone and has abandoned what is called its "rejectionist stance" in U.S. rhetoric. In this case, the term refers to Syria's support for the international consensus calling for settlement on the internationally recognized (pre-June 1967) borders and full guarantees for all states in the region, including Israel and a new Palestinian state.

For a more in-depth discussion of the subject, see Noam Chomsky, "Middle East Diplomacy," Z Magazine, December 1991, pp. 29-41.

See also, R.W. Apple Jr., "The Middle East Talks: How Sweet A Victory?," New York Times, October 31, 1991, p. A16. An excerpt:

Many months after the event, George Bush and the United States today plucked the fruits of victory in the Persian Gulf war. . . . Critics have suggested that the United States achieved far too little in the war. . . . This morning it was clear that a very great deal had changed. . . .

It was not only the energy and the diplomatic skills of Secretary of State James A. Baker 3d that created the remarkable tableau [of the Madrid Peace Conference on the Middle East], with mortal enemies arranged around the same table, that Mr. Bush saw before him in the splendid Royal Palace this morning; all of his labors would have counted for very little without the seismic shifts in the global order of things. . . . The United States is the only credible outside power in the region. The gulf war also changed the internal military balance, not only by removing Iraq from the equation, at least for the moment, but also by demonstrating that high-tech American weapons, more available to Israel than to the Arabs, again at least for the moment, were the future of warfare.

104. The General Assembly resolutions calling for recognition of Palestinian rights can be found in the annual U.N. publication Resolutions and Decisions Adopted by the General Assembly, New York: United Nations.

See also, Cheryl A. Rubenberg, "The U.S.-P.L.O. Dialogue: Continuity or Change in American Policy?," Arab Studies Quarterly, Vol. 11, No. 4, Fall 1989, pp. 1-58, especially pp. 18-32; Nabeel Abraham, "The Conversion of Chairman Arafat," American-Arab Affairs, No. 31, Winter 1989-1990, pp. 53-69.

105. For George Bush's statement, see for example, Rick Atkinson, "Bush: Iraq Won't Decide Timing of Ground War," Washington Post, February 2, 1991, p. A1. His exact words:

When we win, and we will, we will have taught a dangerous dictator, and any tyrant tempted to follow in his footsteps, that the U.S. has a new credibility, and that what we say goes.

106. On the likelihood of India's population overtaking China's, see for example, Barbara Crossette, "Population Policy In Asia Is Faulted," New York Times, September 16, 1992, p. A9. An excerpt:

India, with a population of about 882 million that is growing 2.1 percent a year, is likely to overtake China as the most populous country by 2035. . . . India's population may reach 2 billion before leveling off. China, with about 1.165 billion people, is likely to stabilize at about 1.5 billion. . . . The world's population is estimated at 5.4 billion.

107. On U.S. leaders' dislike of Nehru and Indian independence, see for example, Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, pp. 62-64, 88-89, 222-225 (discussing high U.S. officials' dislike of Indian independence and quoting their remarks that Nehru was a "spoiled child," "vain and immature," "a hypersensitive egoist," motivated by "terrible resentment" of "domination by whites," "intellectually arrogant and of course at the same time suffering from an inferiority complex . . . schizophrenia," and that "Indians are notably prone to blame others for their problems, as the British know all too well," and Indian "ingratitude" is due to "a sense of Divine right" that is "a sort of natural attribute of Indians").

108. For declassified documents revealing U.S. planners' fear of China's developmental success, see for example, Department of Defense, United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-67, Draft revision of N.S.C. 5429/5, June 29, 1959, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1971, Book 10. An excerpt (pp. 1198, 1213, 1226, 1208):

A fundamental source of danger we face in the Far East derives from Communist China's rate of economic growth which will probably continue to outstrip that of free Asian countries, with the possible exception of Japan. In view of both the real and the psychological impact of Communist China's growth and the major effort of the Soviet Union to gain influence in the less developed countries with aid and promises of quick progress under Communism, increased emphasis must be placed upon economic growth of the free Far East countries. . . .

The dramatic economic improvements realized by Communist China over the past ten years impress the nations of the region greatly and offer a serious challenge to the Free World. . . . [The United States should do what it can] to avoid enhancing the prestige and power of Asian Communist regimes and . . . to retard, within the limits of our capabilities, the economic progress of these regimes.

Pentagon Papers: The Defense Department History of United States Decisionmaking on Vietnam, Senator Gravel Edition, Boston: Beacon, 1972, Vol. III, p. 218. An excerpt:

Chinese political and ideological aggressiveness . . . [are] a threat to the ability of these peoples [i.e. other Asian countries] to determine their own futures, and hence to develop along ways compatible with U.S. interests.

On the U.S. policy to support India as a counterbalance to China, see for example, National Security Council [N.S.C.] Memorandum 5701, "Statement of Policy On U.S. Policy Toward South Asia," January 10, 1957, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1955-1957, Vol. VIII ("South Asia"), Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1987, pp. 29-43. An excerpt (pp. 31, 35-36):

The outcome of the competition between Communist China and India as to which can best satisfy the aspirations of peoples for economic improvement, will have a profound effect throughout Asia and Africa. Similarly, the relative advantages to be derived from economic cooperation with the Soviet bloc or the West will be closely watched. . . . The political stake of the United States in the independence and integrity of the countries of South Asia, as well as in their stability and peaceful progress, is very large. If India or Pakistan came under Communist influence, chain reaction effects, going as far as Western Europe, would result. . . . A strong India would be a successful example of an alternative to Communism in an Asian context. . . . It is in our interest that India should substantially achieve the broad aims of the five-year [economic development] plan, in terms of increases in output and employment, and should continue to make an effective assault upon its development problems.

Dennis Merrill, Bread and the Ballot: The United States and India's Economic Development, 1947-1963, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992, especially chs. 6 and 7, pp. 139-140 (analysis of U.S. policy during the Eisenhower and Kennedy years, remarking that by the 1950s U.S. planners feared that China seemingly "had hit upon a formula for rapid development that might prove attractive throughout Asia, the Near East, and Africa"). An excerpt (pp. 146-147):

In the United States Senate, [Senator] John F. Kennedy . . . spoke with characteristic vigor of the race between India and China for economic progress and asserted: "A successful Indian program is important at least as much for the example it can set for the economic future of other underdeveloped countries as for its own sake. . . . India, like the United States, is engaged in a struggle of coexistence -- in its case with China, which is also pursuing a planning effort being put under consideration all over the world. . . ."

In terms almost identical to [Kennedy]'s, Vice-President Nixon also supported India aid: "In my own mind what happens in India, insofar as its economic progress is concerned in the next few years, could be as important or could be even more important in the long run, than what happens in the negotiations with regard to Berlin. . . . There are two great peoples in Asia. The peoples who live under the Communist government of China, and the people of India. . . . What happens in India will have a tremendous impact on the decisions made in other countries in Asia, in the Near East, in Africa and even in the Americas."

See also, Walt Rostow with Richard W. Hatch, An American Policy in Asia, New York: Technology Press/M.I.T. and John Wiley, 1955, pp. 6, 37, 51.

On the "threat of a good example" as a general theme of U.S. foreign policy, see especially footnote 32 of this chapter, and also its footnotes 7, 8 and 68; chapter 1 of U.P. and its footnote 20; and the text of chapter 2 of U.P. (on Sandinista Nicaragua).

109. On the debate over sending food aid to India during its famine, see for example, Dennis Merrill, Bread and the Ballot: The United States and India's Economic Development, 1947-1963, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992, pp. 61-74, 146-170 (reviewing the protracted discussions within the U.S. government concerning sending wheat to India during its 1950-1951 famine, ultimately carried out in June 1951 by means of a loan to India repayable in strategic materials). An excerpt (pp. 62, 65, 69-70, 73):

[W]ith hundreds of deaths due to starvation already documented, American officials generally acknowledged that India was experiencing the first stage of a very real famine. If the United States did not provide assistance, Indian officials estimated that ten to thirteen million of their countrymen would perish. The Truman administration was also aware that the United States Commodity Credit Corporation held approximately 319 million bushels of surplus wheat in reserve and that a 2-million-ton shipment to India would require only 75 million bushels. In short, India's need was well known, the crisis was extraordinarily urgent, and the United States was in a strong position to help. . . .

On the one hand, George McGhee's N.E.A. [Office of Near Eastern Affairs] eyed the political benefits to be reaped by a prompt and positive response. . . . On the other hand, the Department of the Treasury and the Bureau of the Budget voiced reservations over the cost of assisting India. . . . While Acheson [U.S. Secretary of State] and McGhee had not categorically made food aid contingent upon a reorientation of Indian policy, the linkages were obvious. . . . By early April 1951, five months had passed since the Indian government had first asked for assistance. No reliable statistics exist on how many additional, famine-related deaths occurred during this period. . . . During 1950 and 1951, as millions of Indians struggled each day to survive on as little as nine ounces of foodgrains, American policy makers sought to work India's distress to America's advantage.

110. For the New York Times's articles, see for example, J. Anthony Lukas, "Mrs. Gandhi and the Left: Criticism by Menon Reflects Her Drift to Pragmatism," New York Times, April 29, 1966, p. 6. An excerpt:

The Government [of India] has granted easy terms to private foreign investors in the fertilizer industry, is thinking about decontrolling several more industries and is ready to liberalize import policy if it gets sufficient foreign aid. . . . Much of what is happening now is a result of steady pressure from the United States and the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development. . . . The United States pressure, in particular, has been highly effective here because the United States provides by far the largest part of the foreign exchange needed to finance India's development and keep the wheels of industry turning.

Call them "strings," call them "conditions" or whatever one likes, India has little choice now but to agree to many of the terms that the United States, through the World Bank, is putting on its aid. For India simply has nowhere else to turn.

J. Anthony Lukas, "Mrs. Gandhi Denies She Is Shedding Socialism: Prime Minister Calls Charge of Yielding to West Absurd," New York Times, April 25, 1966, p. 8; J. Anthony Lukas, "India and U.S. Concern Sign Fertilizer Plant Pact," New York Times, May 15, 1966, section 1, p. 18.

See also, David K. Willis, "Indo-U.S. relations strained by political complexities," Christian Science Monitor, November 26, 1966, p. 5. An excerpt:

[T]he White House does not consider that New Delhi is doing nearly enough to attract foreign capital to build private chemical fertilizer plants -- the sine qua non of better food production. So the President is holding up approval of the two million tons of grain India says it must have by the end of the year. . . .

For their part, Indian officials here and in New Delhi do not hide their near-exasperation with Washington. "We have done everything we can to attract foreign capital for fertilizer plants," they say in effect. "But the American and other Western private companies know we are over a barrel, so they demand stringent terms. We just cannot meet them. Meanwhile, if the two million tons promised us months ago is not loaded soon, there will be a gap in the pipeline of food aid, and the consequences will be very bad indeed."

111. For Chomsky's friend's article in the Israeli press, see Tanya Reinhart, Ha'aretz (Israel), May 27, 1994.

On the Oslo Agreements and their background, see for example, Edward W. Said, "Arafat's Deal," Nation, September 20, 1993, p. 269 (immediate and perceptive interpretation); Edward W. Said, The End of the Peace Process: Oslo and After, New York: Pantheon, 2000; Nicholas Guyatt, The Absence of Peace: Understanding the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, London: Zed, 1998, especially chs. 2 to 6; Naseer Hasan Aruri, The Obstruction of Peace: the United States, Israel, and the Palestinians, Monroe, ME: Common Courage, 1995; Meron Benvenisti, Intimate Enemies: Jews and Arabs in a Shared Land, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995; Donald Neff, Fallen Pillars: U.S. Policy Towards Palestine and Israel Since 1945, Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1995; Sara M. Roy, The Gaza Strip: The Political Economy of De-Development, Washington: Institute for Palestine Studies, 1995; Edward W. Said, Peace and its Discontents: Gaza-Jericho 1993-1995, London: Vintage, 1995; Graham Usher, Palestine in Crisis: The Struggle for Peace and Political Independence After Oslo, London: Pluto, 1995; Norman G. Finkelstein, "Securing Occupation: The Real Meaning of the Wye River Memorandum," New Left Review, November/December 1998, pp. 128-139; Naseer H. Aruri, "The Wye Memorandum: Netanyahu's Oslo and Unreciprocal Reciprocity," Journal of Palestine Studies, Vol. 28, No. 2, Winter 1999, pp. 17-28.

Chomsky summarizes (World Orders Old and New, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, p. 249):

Throughout [the two decades until the Gulf War], there was general agreement (including the P.L.O. from the mid-70s) that a settlement should be based on U.N. 242 (and 338, which endorses 242). There were two basic points of contention: (1) Do we interpret the withdrawal clause of 242 in accord with the international consensus (including the United States, pre-1971), or in accord with the position of Israel and U.S policy from 1971? (2) Is the settlement based solely on U.N. 242, which offers nothing to the Palestinians, or 242 and other relevant U.N. resolutions, as the P.L.O. had long proposed in accord with the nonrejectionist international consensus? Thus, does the settlement incorporate the Palestinian right to national self-determination repeatedly endorsed by the U.N. (though blocked by Washington), or the right of refugees to return and compensation, as the U.N. has insisted since 1948 (with U.S. endorsement, long forgotten)? These are the crucial issues that stood in the way of a political settlement.

On both major issues under dispute, (1) and (2), the [Oslo] agreement explicitly and without equivocation adopts the U.S.-Israeli stand. Article I, outlining the "Aim of the Negotiations," specifies that "the negotiations on the permanent status will lead to the implementation of Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338"; nothing further is mentioned. Note that this refers to the permanent status, the long-term end to be achieved. Furthermore . . . U.N. 242 is to be understood in the terms unilaterally imposed by the United States (from 1971), entailing only partial withdrawal [from the Occupied Territories], as Washington determines. In fact, the agreement does not even preclude further Israeli settlement in the large areas of the West Bank it has taken over, or even new land takeovers. On such central matters as control of water, it refers only to "cooperation in the management of water resources in the West Bank and Gaza Strip" and "equitable utilization of joint water resources" in a manner to be determined by "experts from both sides. . . ." The outcome of cooperation between an elephant and a fly is not hard to predict.

112. On the United States blocking the Middle East Peace process for more than twenty years before the Oslo Agreement, see chapter 4 of U.P. and its footnotes 41, 47, 48, 49 and 56.

113. On Western European diplomatic support for Palestinian rights until the Gulf War, see footnote 104 of this chapter.

114. For Israeli commentary using the term "neocolonialism," see for example, Asher Davidi, Davar (Israel), February 17, 1993.

115. For blatant samples of the revival of imperialist outlook towards the Third World, see for example, Paul Johnson, "Colonialism's Back -- and Not a Moment Too Soon," New York Times Magazine, April 18, 1993, section 6, p. 22. An excerpt:

We are witnessing today a revival of colonialism, albeit in a new form. It is a trend that should be encouraged, it seems to me, on practical as well as moral grounds. . . . [A]t precisely the time when colonies were deriving the maximum benefit from European rule [in the 1960s], the decision was taken to liberate them forthwith. . . .

The trustees [which should be imposed to rule Third World countries] should not plan to withdraw until they are reasonably certain that the return to independence will be successful this time. So the mandate may last 50 years, or 100. . . . [S]ome states are not yet fit to govern themselves. Their continued existence, and the violence and human degradation they breed, is a threat to the stability of their neighbors as well as an affront to our consciences. There is a moral issue here: the civilized world has a mission to go out to these desperate places and govern. . . . [T]he already overburdened United States will have to take the major responsibility, though it can count on staunch support from Britain and, in this case, from France. Labor and expense will be needed, as well as brains, leadership and infinite patience. The only satisfaction will be the unspoken gratitude of millions of misgoverned or ungoverned people who will find in this altruistic revival of colonialism the only way out of their present intractable miseries.

Angelo Codevilla [Hoover Institute, Stanford University], "Counterpoint: The U.S. Leads Operation Wrong Target," Wall Street Journal, January 7, 1993, p. A15. An excerpt:

Our only realistic choice in Somalia and in all too many similar places is either to leave them to their misery or to re-establish something very much like colonialism. . . . Colonialism is an act of generosity and idealism of which only rising civilizations are capable. . . . [C]olonialism is about dictating political outcomes of which we can be proud.

Peregrine Worsthorne, "What kind of people?," Sunday Telegraph (London), September 17, 1990, p. 20. An excerpt:

Obviously we [i.e. Britain] can no longer be the world's policeman on our own as we were when we put down the slave trade. But that does not at all mean that we cannot give invaluable help to America in this role. What is more, the job would enable us to put to good use the skills and experience which history has bestowed upon us.

Critics rightly point out that we are no match for Germany and Japan when it comes to wealth creation; or even for France and Italy. But when it comes to shouldering world responsibilities we are more than a match. We are what we are. Other countries are what they are. No doubt Britain's gentlemanly high culture and its so-much-mocked and deplored anti-industrial education system have militated against our being top of the productivity league. But perhaps now that is just as well, since in the post-cold-war world there is a new job to be done that desperately needs a major European country with a rather different kind of genius. That job is to help build and sustain a new world order stable enough to allow the advanced economies of the world to function without constant interruption and threat from the Third World. Anybody who supposes that the United Nations, which is largely made up of the Third World, can be relied upon to sustain such a world order for long must be naive. . . .

Once lost, the habit and taste for the exercise of power are not so easily regained. Britain has lost that taste less than most. Or rather a significant section of it, among all classes, has not lost that taste. For a time it looked as if this might be a liability, rendering us ill-suited to fit comfortably into a world where the wealth creators were king. But it is not quite going to be that kind of world. It is going to be the kind of world where the wealth creators will be desperate for protection. Refusing to adapt, as Britain is accused of doing, can sometimes pay off, since the wheel of fashion comes full circle. Possibly Britain was in danger of clinging too long to outmoded imperial values. Thank God she did. For the civilised world will soon need them again as never before.

R.W. Apple Jr., "Mission To Haiti: In Perspective," New York Times, September 20, 1994, p. A12. An excerpt:

Like the French in the 19th century, like the Marines who occupied Haiti from 1915 to 1934, the American forces who are trying to impose a new order will confront a complex and violent society with no history of democracy. . . . For two centuries, political opponents in Haiti have routinely slaughtered each other. Backers of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide [sic], followers of General Cédras and the former Tontons Macoute retain their homicidal tendencies, to say nothing of their weapons. . . .

Whether Mr. Clinton's decision to use American troops in Haiti and President Carter's peacekeeping mission have opened the way for real change, or simply inaugurated another futile effort to reshape a society that has long resisted reform, may not be known for years.

Chomsky comments about Apple's account of the lessons of history in the previous article ("Democracy Restored?," Z Magazine, November 1994, pp. 49-61 at p. 58):

One takes for granted that the vicious terror and racism of the Wilson administration and its successors will be transmuted to sweet charity as it reaches the educated classes, but it is a novelty to see Napoleon's invasion, one of the most hideous crimes of an era not known for its gentleness, portrayed in the same light. We might understand this as another small contribution to the broader project of revising the history of Western colonialism so as to justify the next phase.

He adds (Rethinking Camelot: J.F.K., the Vietnam War, and U.S. Political Culture, Boston: South End, 1993, p. 45): "States are not moral agents; those who attribute to them ideals and principles merely mislead themselves and others."