The American Empire: Murder Inc.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_american_empire_murder_inc_20160103/
Posted on Jan 3, 2016
By Chris Hedges
As Indonesias former President Suharto lay ill in 2008, a supporter
displayed a portrait of him outside the Jakarta hospital where the military
dictator died two weeks later. It was in Suhartos brutal three-decade reign
that Indonesia invaded East Timor, where investigative journalist Allan
Nairn covered atrocities the generals troops committed. (Vincent Thian /
AP)
Terror, intimidation and violence are the glue that holds empire together.
Aerial bombardment, drone and missile attacks, artillery and mortar strikes,
targeted assassinations, massacres, the detention of tens of thousands,
death squad killings, torture, wholesale surveillance, extraordinary
renditions, curfews, propaganda, a loss of civil liberties and pliant
political puppets are the grist of our wars and proxy wars.
Countries we seek to dominate, from Indonesia and Guatemala to Iraq and
Afghanistan, are intimately familiar with these brutal mechanisms of
control. But the reality of empire rarely reaches the American public. The
few atrocities that come to light are dismissed as isolated aberrations. The
public is assured what has been uncovered will be investigated and will not
take place again. The goals of empire, we are told by a subservient media
and our ruling elites, are virtuous and noble. And the vast killing machine
grinds forward, feeding, as it has always done, the swollen bank accounts of
defense contractors and corporations that exploit natural resources and
cheap labor around the globe.
There are very few journalists who have covered empire with more courage,
tenacity and integrity than Allan Nairn. For more than three decades, he has
reported from Central America, East Timor, Palestine, South Africa, Haiti
and Indonesiawhere Indonesian soldiers fractured his skull and arrested
him. His reporting on the Indonesian government massacres in East Timor saw
him branded a threat to national security and officially banned from
occupied East Timor. Nairn returned clandestinely to East Timor on numerous
occasions. His dogged reporting of torture and killing of civilians by the
Indonesian military contributed to the U.S. Congress suspending military aid
to Jakarta in 1993. He exposed U.S. complicity with death squads and
paramilitary organizations carrying out murderous rampages in El Salvador,
Guatemala and Haiti. During the 2014 presidential elections in Indonesia,
where he spends much of his time, Nairn was threatened with arrest for
exposing presidential candidate Prabowo Subiantos role in atrocities.
Nairns reporting on army massacres was an important component in the trial
of former Guatemalan President Efrain Ríos Montt. Gen. Montt ordered the
killing of over 1,700 people in the Ixil region of the country in the early
1980s and was convicted in 2013 of genocide and crimes against humanity. He
was sentenced to 80 years in prison. The conviction was later overturned.
Nairn, whom I spoke with in New York, reaches back to the genocide carried
out against Native Americans, the institution of slavery and the murder of
hundreds of workers and labor union organizers in the 19th and early 20th
century to explain the roots of American imperial violence. He noted that,
although wholesale massacres have become taboo on American soil in recent
generations, the FBI was carrying out selective assassinations of black
radicals, including Fred Hampton, in the 1960s. And police show little
constraint in gunning down unarmed people of color in poor communities.
But overseas there are no restrictions. The indiscriminate slaughter of real
or imagined opponents is considered a prerogative of imperial power.
Violence is the primary language we use to speak to the rest of the world.
Equivalents of Wounded Knee and My Lai take place beyond our borders with an
unacknowledged frequency.
To this day, Nairn said, it is politically permissible for U.S. forces to
carry out or sponsor assassinations of civiliansstudents, journalists,
religious leaders, peasant organizers, whomever. In fact, in U.S. politics,
if presidents are reluctant, or seem reluctant to do this, they get
castigated. They get called a wimp. George Bush Sr. came under vicious
attack when he attempted through covert means to mount a coup in Panama
against [Manuel] Noriega and it failed. And there was a cover [of Newsweek,
with the headline Fighting the Wimp Factor ] where they were attacking
Bush Sr. for not being strong enough.
I think it was within a week after that he invaded Panama formally, an
invasion that included the burning of the neighborhood called El Chorrillo,
where hundreds were killed, a poor neighborhood. The New York Times then ran
a front-page analysis by R.W. Apple which said that Bush Sr. had completed
his presidential initiation rite by demonstrating his willingness to shed
blood, Nairn went on. Not his own blood, but the blood of foreigners,
including of foreign civilians.
Its basically a refusal on the part of American society to enforce the
murder laws when the killings are done by presidents or generals, and where
the victims are foreigners, he said. Now, all big powers do this. But in
the recent period, because the U.S. has been the dominant power, the U.S.
has the biggest death toll. If you added all the operations up it would go
into the several millions. Just to list the ones that Ive personally seen
and tried to expose and fight against: Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua,
Honduras, Haiti, South Africa, Palestine, East Timor, Indonesia, southern
Thailand. Im sure Im leaving out a few. The U.S. has used the Pentagon,
the CIA, occasionally the State Department to set up or back local forces,
help them gather intelligence on dissidents, and help them provide the means
to carry out systematic assassinations.
Assassinations and torture are often accompanied in these wars and proxy
wars by massacres by government troops that routinely wipe out whole
villages, Nairn said,
The Guatemalan military did that, especially during the early 80s when the
Reagan administration was backing them enthusiastically under the time of
the dictator Gen. Rios Montt, Nairn said. They would go into villages in
the Mayan highlands in the northwest. ... I was there, I spoke to the
soldiers as they were doing it, I spoke to survivors
[and] they would
decapitate people. They would crucify people. They would use the tactics
that ISIS today puts on video that are now shocking the world.
The powers have always been willing to use these tactics, he said. And
for centuries they were proud of it. All you have to do is look at the holy
texts of the major religionsthe Bible, the Quran, the Torah. Theyre full
of one massacre after another. People forget. The story of David and Goliath
is put forward as a great story. At the end of that story David decapitates
Goliath. He parades around holding up his head. For years and years the
powers were proud of these tactics. They advertised it.
As recently as the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, U.S. presidents were
still boasting about it, Nairn said. Go back and read [Roosevelts]
writings. Hes repeatedly
talking about the necessity to shed blood, the
necessity to kill. Otherwise a person could not be healthy, otherwise a
polity could not be healthy. This was Teddy Roosevelt. You cant do that in
todays U.S. You cant do that really in any major country today. The only
partial exception to that at the level of rhetoric is Israel. Israeli
generals and politicians still talk openly about the need to shed
Palestinian blood. But theyre really the only ones. Everywhere elseEurope,
Russia, China, the U.S.they have to hide their [activities].
I first met Nairn in 1984 while I was covering the war in El Salvador. In
that year he published an explosive investigative piece in The Progressive
magazine titled Behind the Death Squads. The article detailed U.S.
backing, training and arming of the death squads in El Salvador that were
murdering, and often torturing and mutilating, hundreds of people a month.
His article led to an investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
U.S. commanders in Iraq, attempting to quell the Sunni insurgency in 2004,
reached back to the terror tactics used in El Salvador. They formulated a
plan called The Salvador Option to train and arm Shiite paramilitary
units. Former U.S. Army Col. James Steele, who in the 1980s in El Salvador
headed the U.S. Military Group or MilGroup, which advised the Salvadoran
army during the war, was sent to Iraq by Donald Rumsfeld as a civilian
adviser. Steele, who had fought in Vietnam, was assigned to the Iraqi
paramilitary Special Police Commandos, a unit known as the Wolf Brigade.
U.N. officials, and an investigative team from The Guardian newspaper, later
accused these Shiite paramilitary units of widespread death-squad killings
and running a network of clandestine detention centers that carried out
torture while under Steeles supervision. The Shiite paramilitary units,
which were given money from a $2 billion fund controlled directly by Gen.
David Petraeus, terrorized and enraged the Sunni population. The abuse,
torture, assassinations and network of clandestine prisons fueled Iraqs
sectarian civil war and led to the creation of radical Sunni groups such as
Islamic State.
The Salvadoran death squad apparatus was created by the U.S., starting
during the Kennedy administration through mainly U.S. Special Forces and the
CIA, Nairn said. [They]
created this intelligence-gathering system which
linked Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua. They would have central files
organized for them with the help of the CIA. They would teach them [the
squads] how to go out and watch on a systematic basis the campuses, the
courts, the plantations [and] especially the factories, run by the local
oligarchs but also the American investors. They would compile files.
Nairn spent 13 hours interviewing former Salvadoran Gen. Jose Alberto
Medrano, the godfather of the Salvadoran death squads, who was assassinated
a year later, in 1985, by the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front
(FMLN) rebels.
He explained to me how Salvadoran priests, nuns, catechists [and] unionists
were all controlled by Moscow, Nairn said. He would draw these schematics
showing from Moscow to Havana to here to there. And he said they all became
targets; it was our mission to kill them. He described in great detail how
he did this while working on the payroll of the United States.
These were the death squads that produced actions like the rape and murder
of the nuns, Nairn said, referring to American lay missionary Jean Donovan
and three American nunsDorothy Kazel, Maura Clarke and Ita Fordwho were
killed by national guard soldiers in El Salvador in December 1980. Eight
months earlier, the death squads had carried out the assassination of
Archbishop Oscar Romero. More than 75,000 Salvadorans died in the conflict,
thousands at the hands of the death squads, which often disappeared their
victims.
The world is finally starting to understand whats involved with political
killing when they see the videos of ISIS, Nairn said.
In Salvador, not
only would they kill but they would cut off hands, they would cut off arms,
and they would display their handiwork on the road. Passersby would see it.
In the same periodI spent most of those years in Guatemala, which was even
worsethey were killing more than 100,000, perhaps more than 200,000 by some
estimates. One day in the library of the Polytechnica, the military academy
of Guatemala, I found the Spanish translation of a U.S. military
counterinsurgency document. It gave instructions on how to create terror;
this was the way they put it. And they described methods used in the
Philippines in the campaign against the Huks.
In the case of the Philippines they were talking about leaving the bodies
by the rivers, he said. So you mutilate the bodies, you cut them, you
amputate, and then you display the bodies on the riversides to stir terror
in the population. And of course thats exactly what ISIS is doing today.
The same tactics were used in Indonesia against ethnic Chinese, labor
organizers, artists, intellectuals, student leaders and members of the
Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) after the 1965 U.S.-backed anti-communist
purge that eventually ousted the independence leader President Sukarno.
Sukarno was replaced in a 1967 coup by Gen. Suharto, who brutally ran the
country for 31 years. During the army and paramilitary killings as many as a
million Indonesians were murdered. The bodies were often left floating in
rivers or on roadsides.
The CIA weighed in with a list of 5,000 targets for assassination, Nairn
said. The U.S. press was hailing it at the time. They were calling it a
gleam of light in Asia. Gen. Suharto was installed in power as a result of
this process. Suharto later, in the mid-70s, sought the permission of
President Ford and Henry Kissinger to invade the small neighboring country
of East Timor, which was then emerging into independence from having been a
Portuguese colony. They gave the green light. They just said do it quickly.
They went in [and] killed a third of the population.
In 91 they staged a massacre in front of a cemetery, which I happened to
survive, he said. I was there with Amy Goodman. They killed more than 200
people right before our eyes. They fractured my skull with their American
M-16 rifle butts.
This is standard procedure. Ive tried to go over to the countries where
the repression is most intense, and where the U.S. is backing it, and expose
it and stop it.
Its systematic, he went on. Its the exact same tactics in country after
country, with local adaptations, and often the officers are all trained at
the same U.S. military basesFort Bragg, Fort Benning, Leavenworth [and] at
the Inter-American Defense College, in the case of the Latin American
officers.
Its not unique to the U.S., Nairn said. This is standard for big powers.
If you wanted to have any kind of impact in politics you had to align
yourself with some kind of killer force, be it the Americans, NATO or the
Taliban, or some other armed faction capable of fast mass killing. Without
that you had no chance.
In Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, its reached the point of political and
social breakdown, Nairn said. Theres no stopping it. Its out of control.
There are not two sides. It [has fractured into] many sides. Its analogous
to what happened in Cambodia, with the massive U.S. bombing of Cambodia,
which paved the way for the rise of the Khmer Rouge. [It has destroyed] any
semblance of normal politics or even society. In that kind of environment
the most evil, the most violent, have a better chance to rise and prevail.
Ceaseless war and indiscriminant killing define the U.S. imperial power. But
this policy, he said, has backfired.
Unless you have enough of an enemy out there, unless you have enough
fighting going on, unless you have enough drama going on, a big powerful
state, one of whose pillars is war, like the United States, or like, say,
todays Israel[both of them examples] of Sparta-type statesthey cant
sustain themselves, he said. They need a high level of dramatic tension.
They have to constantly be provoking, constantly causing trouble here and
there.
Were now in a moment where these operations of willful murder on the part
of the U.S. and provocation have come back to bite [the United States], he
said. That doesnt usually happen. There was no consequence like that from
Central America. There was no consequence like that from Haiti, Palestine or
South Africa. But in this case it happened. Operations like the U.S. backing
of the mujahedeen to repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
the U.S.
backing of the various anti-Assad Islamist forces in Syria, have given birth
to first al-Qaida and then ISIS. That wasnt the U.S. intention. They didnt
want to create al-Qaida in the sense of the al-Qaida that attacks the U.S.
They didnt want to create an ISIS, which is now a political nightmare.
The Bible says they sow the wind, they shall reap the whirlwind, he said.
Well, usually that isnt true. Its not true most of the time. Its like
the other slogan: The people united will never be defeated. Not true. The
people united get defeated all the time. They get crushed. They get
massacred. They get thrown into mass graves. But sometimes you sow the wind
and you do reap the whirlwind. And thats whats happening now to the West
with ISIS.
http://www.truthdig.com/ http://www.truthdig.com/
The American Empire: Murder Inc.
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_american_empire_murder_inc_20160103/
Posted on Jan 3, 2016
By Chris Hedges
As Indonesias former President Suharto lay ill in 2008, a supporter
displayed a portrait of him outside the Jakarta hospital where the military
dictator died two weeks later. It was in Suhartos brutal three-decade reign
that Indonesia invaded East Timor, where investigative journalist Allan
Nairn covered atrocities the generals troops committed. (Vincent Thian /
AP)
Terror, intimidation and violence are the glue that holds empire together.
Aerial bombardment, drone and missile attacks, artillery and mortar strikes,
targeted assassinations, massacres, the detention of tens of thousands,
death squad killings, torture, wholesale surveillance, extraordinary
renditions, curfews, propaganda, a loss of civil liberties and pliant
political puppets are the grist of our wars and proxy wars.
Countries we seek to dominate, from Indonesia and Guatemala to Iraq and
Afghanistan, are intimately familiar with these brutal mechanisms of
control. But the reality of empire rarely reaches the American public. The
few atrocities that come to light are dismissed as isolated aberrations. The
public is assured what has been uncovered will be investigated and will not
take place again. The goals of empire, we are told by a subservient media
and our ruling elites, are virtuous and noble. And the vast killing machine
grinds forward, feeding, as it has always done, the swollen bank accounts of
defense contractors and corporations that exploit natural resources and
cheap labor around the globe.
There are very few journalists who have covered empire with more courage,
tenacity and integrity than Allan Nairn. For more than three decades, he has
reported from Central America, East Timor, Palestine, South Africa, Haiti
and Indonesiawhere Indonesian soldiers fractured his skull and arrested
him. His reporting on the Indonesian government massacres in East Timor saw
him branded a threat to national security and officially banned from
occupied East Timor. Nairn returned clandestinely to East Timor on numerous
occasions. His dogged reporting of torture and killing of civilians by the
Indonesian military contributed to the U.S. Congress suspending military aid
to Jakarta in 1993. He exposed U.S. complicity with death squads and
paramilitary organizations carrying out murderous rampages in El Salvador,
Guatemala and Haiti. During the 2014 presidential elections in Indonesia,
where he spends much of his time, Nairn was threatened with arrest for
exposing presidential candidate Prabowo Subiantos role in atrocities.
Nairns reporting on army massacres was an important component in the trial
of former Guatemalan President Efrain Ríos Montt. Gen. Montt ordered the
killing of over 1,700 people in the Ixil region of the country in the early
1980s and was convicted in 2013 of genocide and crimes against humanity. He
was sentenced to 80 years in prison. The conviction was later overturned.
Nairn, whom I spoke with in New York, reaches back to the genocide carried
out against Native Americans, the institution of slavery and the murder of
hundreds of workers and labor union organizers in the 19th and early 20th
century to explain the roots of American imperial violence. He noted that,
although wholesale massacres have become taboo on American soil in recent
generations, the FBI was carrying out selective assassinations of black
radicals, including Fred Hampton, in the 1960s. And police show little
constraint in gunning down unarmed people of color in poor communities.
But overseas there are no restrictions. The indiscriminate slaughter of real
or imagined opponents is considered a prerogative of imperial power.
Violence is the primary language we use to speak to the rest of the world.
Equivalents of Wounded Knee and My Lai take place beyond our borders with an
unacknowledged frequency.
To this day, Nairn said, it is politically permissible for U.S. forces to
carry out or sponsor assassinations of civiliansstudents, journalists,
religious leaders, peasant organizers, whomever. In fact, in U.S. politics,
if presidents are reluctant, or seem reluctant to do this, they get
castigated. They get called a wimp. George Bush Sr. came under vicious
attack when he attempted through covert means to mount a coup in Panama
against [Manuel] Noriega and it failed. And there was a cover [of Newsweek,
with the headline Fighting the Wimp Factor ] where they were attacking
Bush Sr. for not being strong enough.
I think it was within a week after that he invaded Panama formally, an
invasion that included the burning of the neighborhood called El Chorrillo,
where hundreds were killed, a poor neighborhood. The New York Times then ran
a front-page analysis by R.W. Apple which said that Bush Sr. had completed
his presidential initiation rite by demonstrating his willingness to shed
blood, Nairn went on. Not his own blood, but the blood of foreigners,
including of foreign civilians.
Its basically a refusal on the part of American society to enforce the
murder laws when the killings are done by presidents or generals, and where
the victims are foreigners, he said. Now, all big powers do this. But in
the recent period, because the U.S. has been the dominant power, the U.S.
has the biggest death toll. If you added all the operations up it would go
into the several millions. Just to list the ones that Ive personally seen
and tried to expose and fight against: Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua,
Honduras, Haiti, South Africa, Palestine, East Timor, Indonesia, southern
Thailand. Im sure Im leaving out a few. The U.S. has used the Pentagon,
the CIA, occasionally the State Department to set up or back local forces,
help them gather intelligence on dissidents, and help them provide the means
to carry out systematic assassinations.
Assassinations and torture are often accompanied in these wars and proxy
wars by massacres by government troops that routinely wipe out whole
villages, Nairn said,
The Guatemalan military did that, especially during the early 80s when the
Reagan administration was backing them enthusiastically under the time of
the dictator Gen. Rios Montt, Nairn said. They would go into villages in
the Mayan highlands in the northwest. ... I was there, I spoke to the
soldiers as they were doing it, I spoke to survivors
[and] they would
decapitate people. They would crucify people. They would use the tactics
that ISIS today puts on video that are now shocking the world.
The powers have always been willing to use these tactics, he said. And
for centuries they were proud of it. All you have to do is look at the holy
texts of the major religionsthe Bible, the Quran, the Torah. Theyre full
of one massacre after another. People forget. The story of David and Goliath
is put forward as a great story. At the end of that story David decapitates
Goliath. He parades around holding up his head. For years and years the
powers were proud of these tactics. They advertised it.
As recently as the presidency of Teddy Roosevelt, U.S. presidents were
still boasting about it, Nairn said. Go back and read [Roosevelts]
writings. Hes repeatedly
talking about the necessity to shed blood, the
necessity to kill. Otherwise a person could not be healthy, otherwise a
polity could not be healthy. This was Teddy Roosevelt. You cant do that in
todays U.S. You cant do that really in any major country today. The only
partial exception to that at the level of rhetoric is Israel. Israeli
generals and politicians still talk openly about the need to shed
Palestinian blood. But theyre really the only ones. Everywhere elseEurope,
Russia, China, the U.S.they have to hide their [activities].
I first met Nairn in 1984 while I was covering the war in El Salvador. In
that year he published an explosive investigative piece in The Progressive
magazine titled Behind the Death Squads. The article detailed U.S.
backing, training and arming of the death squads in El Salvador that were
murdering, and often torturing and mutilating, hundreds of people a month.
His article led to an investigation by the Senate Intelligence Committee.
U.S. commanders in Iraq, attempting to quell the Sunni insurgency in 2004,
reached back to the terror tactics used in El Salvador. They formulated a
plan called The Salvador Option to train and arm Shiite paramilitary
units. Former U.S. Army Col. James Steele, who in the 1980s in El Salvador
headed the U.S. Military Group or MilGroup, which advised the Salvadoran
army during the war, was sent to Iraq by Donald Rumsfeld as a civilian
adviser. Steele, who had fought in Vietnam, was assigned to the Iraqi
paramilitary Special Police Commandos, a unit known as the Wolf Brigade.
U.N. officials, and an investigative team from The Guardian newspaper, later
accused these Shiite paramilitary units of widespread death-squad killings
and running a network of clandestine detention centers that carried out
torture while under Steeles supervision. The Shiite paramilitary units,
which were given money from a $2 billion fund controlled directly by Gen.
David Petraeus, terrorized and enraged the Sunni population. The abuse,
torture, assassinations and network of clandestine prisons fueled Iraqs
sectarian civil war and led to the creation of radical Sunni groups such as
Islamic State.
The Salvadoran death squad apparatus was created by the U.S., starting
during the Kennedy administration through mainly U.S. Special Forces and the
CIA, Nairn said. [They]
created this intelligence-gathering system which
linked Salvador, Honduras, Nicaragua. They would have central files
organized for them with the help of the CIA. They would teach them [the
squads] how to go out and watch on a systematic basis the campuses, the
courts, the plantations [and] especially the factories, run by the local
oligarchs but also the American investors. They would compile files.
Nairn spent 13 hours interviewing former Salvadoran Gen. Jose Alberto
Medrano, the godfather of the Salvadoran death squads, who was assassinated
a year later, in 1985, by the Farabundo Marti National Liberation Front
(FMLN) rebels.
He explained to me how Salvadoran priests, nuns, catechists [and] unionists
were all controlled by Moscow, Nairn said. He would draw these schematics
showing from Moscow to Havana to here to there. And he said they all became
targets; it was our mission to kill them. He described in great detail how
he did this while working on the payroll of the United States.
These were the death squads that produced actions like the rape and murder
of the nuns, Nairn said, referring to American lay missionary Jean Donovan
and three American nunsDorothy Kazel, Maura Clarke and Ita Fordwho were
killed by national guard soldiers in El Salvador in December 1980. Eight
months earlier, the death squads had carried out the assassination of
Archbishop Oscar Romero. More than 75,000 Salvadorans died in the conflict,
thousands at the hands of the death squads, which often disappeared their
victims.
The world is finally starting to understand whats involved with political
killing when they see the videos of ISIS, Nairn said.
In Salvador, not
only would they kill but they would cut off hands, they would cut off arms,
and they would display their handiwork on the road. Passersby would see it.
In the same periodI spent most of those years in Guatemala, which was even
worsethey were killing more than 100,000, perhaps more than 200,000 by some
estimates. One day in the library of the Polytechnica, the military academy
of Guatemala, I found the Spanish translation of a U.S. military
counterinsurgency document. It gave instructions on how to create terror;
this was the way they put it. And they described methods used in the
Philippines in the campaign against the Huks.
In the case of the Philippines they were talking about leaving the bodies
by the rivers, he said. So you mutilate the bodies, you cut them, you
amputate, and then you display the bodies on the riversides to stir terror
in the population. And of course thats exactly what ISIS is doing today.
The same tactics were used in Indonesia against ethnic Chinese, labor
organizers, artists, intellectuals, student leaders and members of the
Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) after the 1965 U.S.-backed anti-communist
purge that eventually ousted the independence leader President Sukarno.
Sukarno was replaced in a 1967 coup by Gen. Suharto, who brutally ran the
country for 31 years. During the army and paramilitary killings as many as a
million Indonesians were murdered. The bodies were often left floating in
rivers or on roadsides.
The CIA weighed in with a list of 5,000 targets for assassination, Nairn
said. The U.S. press was hailing it at the time. They were calling it a
gleam of light in Asia. Gen. Suharto was installed in power as a result of
this process. Suharto later, in the mid-70s, sought the permission of
President Ford and Henry Kissinger to invade the small neighboring country
of East Timor, which was then emerging into independence from having been a
Portuguese colony. They gave the green light. They just said do it quickly.
They went in [and] killed a third of the population.
In 91 they staged a massacre in front of a cemetery, which I happened to
survive, he said. I was there with Amy Goodman. They killed more than 200
people right before our eyes. They fractured my skull with their American
M-16 rifle butts.
This is standard procedure. Ive tried to go over to the countries where
the repression is most intense, and where the U.S. is backing it, and expose
it and stop it.
Its systematic, he went on. Its the exact same tactics in country after
country, with local adaptations, and often the officers are all trained at
the same U.S. military basesFort Bragg, Fort Benning, Leavenworth [and] at
the Inter-American Defense College, in the case of the Latin American
officers.
Its not unique to the U.S., Nairn said. This is standard for big powers.
If you wanted to have any kind of impact in politics you had to align
yourself with some kind of killer force, be it the Americans, NATO or the
Taliban, or some other armed faction capable of fast mass killing. Without
that you had no chance.
In Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria, its reached the point of political and
social breakdown, Nairn said. Theres no stopping it. Its out of control.
There are not two sides. It [has fractured into] many sides. Its analogous
to what happened in Cambodia, with the massive U.S. bombing of Cambodia,
which paved the way for the rise of the Khmer Rouge. [It has destroyed] any
semblance of normal politics or even society. In that kind of environment
the most evil, the most violent, have a better chance to rise and prevail.
Ceaseless war and indiscriminant killing define the U.S. imperial power. But
this policy, he said, has backfired.
Unless you have enough of an enemy out there, unless you have enough
fighting going on, unless you have enough drama going on, a big powerful
state, one of whose pillars is war, like the United States, or like, say,
todays Israel[both of them examples] of Sparta-type statesthey cant
sustain themselves, he said. They need a high level of dramatic tension.
They have to constantly be provoking, constantly causing trouble here and
there.
Were now in a moment where these operations of willful murder on the part
of the U.S. and provocation have come back to bite [the United States], he
said. That doesnt usually happen. There was no consequence like that from
Central America. There was no consequence like that from Haiti, Palestine or
South Africa. But in this case it happened. Operations like the U.S. backing
of the mujahedeen to repel the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan
the U.S.
backing of the various anti-Assad Islamist forces in Syria, have given birth
to first al-Qaida and then ISIS. That wasnt the U.S. intention. They didnt
want to create al-Qaida in the sense of the al-Qaida that attacks the U.S.
They didnt want to create an ISIS, which is now a political nightmare.
The Bible says they sow the wind, they shall reap the whirlwind, he said.
Well, usually that isnt true. Its not true most of the time. Its like
the other slogan: The people united will never be defeated. Not true. The
people united get defeated all the time. They get crushed. They get
massacred. They get thrown into mass graves. But sometimes you sow the wind
and you do reap the whirlwind. And thats whats happening now to the West
with ISIS.
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/robert_reich_is_petitioning_the_
dnc_for_more_presidential_debates_20160104/
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/robert_reich_is_petitioning_the_
dnc_for_more_presidential_debates_20160104/
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/robert_reich_is_petitioning_the_
dnc_for_more_presidential_debates_20160104/
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/thinking_beyond_the_age_of_fire_20
160104/
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/thinking_beyond_the_age_of_fire_20
160104/
http://www.truthdig.com/arts_culture/item/thinking_beyond_the_age_of_fire_20
160104/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_question_isnt_of_saving_the_world_vi
a_renewables_20150104/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_question_isnt_of_saving_the_world_vi
a_renewables_20150104/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/the_question_isnt_of_saving_the_world_vi
a_renewables_20150104/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/top_7_middle_east_foreign_policy_challen
ges_in_2016_video_20160104/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/top_7_middle_east_foreign_policy_challen
ges_in_2016_video_20160104/
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/top_7_middle_east_foreign_policy_challen
ges_in_2016_video_20160104/ http://www.truthdig.com/
http://www.truthdig.com/
http://www.truthdig.com/about/http://www.truthdig.com/contact/http://www.tru
thdig.com/about/advertising/http://www.truthdig.com/user_agreement/http://ww
w.truthdig.com/privacy_policy/http://www.truthdig.com/about/comment_policy/
© 2016 Truthdig, LLC. All rights reserved.
http://www.hopstudios.com/
http://support.truthdig.com/signup_page/subscribe
http://support.truthdig.com/signup_page/subscribe
http://www.facebook.com/truthdig
http://www.facebook.com/truthdighttp://twitter.com/intent/follow?source=foll
owbutton&variant=1.0&screen_name=truthdig
http://twitter.com/intent/follow?source=followbutton&variant=1.0&screen_name
=truthdighttps://plus.google.com/+truthdighttps://plus.google.com/+truthdigh
ttp://www.linkedin.com/company/truthdighttp://www.linkedin.com/company/truth
dighttp://truthdig.tumblr.com/http://truthdig.tumblr.com/http://www.truthdig
.com/connecthttp://www.truthdig.com/connect
