NSA Data Driftnets: Domestic Surveillance & Repression on a Massive Scale

When Iran-Contra felon John Poindexter was kicked to the curb in 2003, his career at the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) may have been "terminated," but his domestic spying program, Total Information Awareness lives on under the rubric of the Bush regime's Terrorist Information Awareness.

Monday's Wall Street Journal carried an eye-opening piece rich with stunning revelations of a National Security Agency (NSA) program even more sinister than the one dreamed up by Ollie North's former boss.

As the Democratic-led House of Representatives prepares to vote on a bill that strips the American people of constitutional protections from warrantless wiretapping, the massive scale and intrusive character of these programs become alarmingly clear. The police state under construction by the Bush administration with the complicity of leading Democrats, is one where privacy is a thing of the past, a "quaint notion" like international law or prohibitions against torture.

While congressional and popular focus in the debate over FISA renewal revolves around the issue of retroactive immunity for telecom corporations, the more contentious question of NSA's role in analyzing mountains of data illegally collected by the communications giants for some dozen U.S. intelligence agencies is sorely lacking.

Siobhan Gorman writes,

According to current and former intelligence officials, the spy agency now monitors huge volumes of records of domestic emails and Internet searches as well as bank transfers, credit-card transactions, travel and telephone records. The NSA receives this so-called "transactional" data from other agencies or private companies, and its sophisticated software programs analyze the various transactions for suspicious patterns. Then they spit out leads to be explored by counterterrorism programs across the U.S. government, such as the NSA's own Terrorist Surveillance Program, formed to intercept phone calls and emails between the U.S. and overseas without a judge's approval when a link to al Qaeda is suspected.

The NSA's enterprise involves a cluster of powerful intelligence-gathering programs, all of which sparked civil-liberties complaints when they came to light. They include a Federal Bureau of Investigation program to track telecommunications data once known as Carnivore, now called the Digital Collection System, and a U.S. arrangement with the world's main international banking clearinghouse to track money movements.

The effort also ties into data from an ad-hoc collection of so-called "black programs" whose existence is undisclosed, the current and former officials say. ("NSA Domestic Spying Grows as Agency Sweeps Up Data," The Wall Street Journal, Monday, March 10, 2008, Page A1)

Last week, Brian Beutler at The Media Consortium reported that a new FISA whistleblower has stepped forward with information about a major wireless provider apparently granting the state unrestricted access to all of their customers' voice communications and electronic data via a so-called "Quantico Circuit." Quantico, Virginia is the site of major U.S. Marine, FBI and DEA installations. The brief report describes the sinister reach of these illegal surveillance operations. Babak Pasdar, a security consultant and CEO of Bat Blue Corporation, gave a signed affidavit to the Government Accountability Project. It is a very chilling read.

According to Beutler's summary, Pasdar describes how the FBI was allowed unfettered access to information about any mobile phone subscriber, including,

* listening in and recording all conversations en-mass;
* collecting and recording mobile phone data use en-mass;
* obtaining the data they accessed from their mobile phone (Internet access, e-mail, web);
* trending their calling patterns and other call behavior;
* identifying inbound and outbound callers;
* tracking all in and outbound calls;
* tracing the user's physical location

According to Gorman, the NSA gets access to data from telecommunications switches through the FBI:

It [NSA] also has a partnership with FBI's Digital Collection system, providing access to Internet providers and other companies. The existence of a shadow hub to copy information about AT&T Corp. telecommunications in San Francisco is alleged in a lawsuit against AT&T filed by the civil-liberties group Electronic Frontier Foundation, based on documents provided by a former AT&T official. In that lawsuit, a former technology adviser to the Federal Communications Commission says in a sworn declaration that there could be 15 to 20 such operations around the country. Current and former intelligence officials confirmed a domestic network of hubs, but didn't know the number. "As a matter of policy and law, we can not discuss matters that are classified," said FBI spokesman John Miller.

Ominously, when a "terrorist" suspect is believed to be in a U.S. city, Gorman uses Detroit as an example, "a community with a high concentration of Muslim Americans," the surveillance driftnet may be directed to "collect and analyze" all electronic communications into and out of the city.

This is nothing less than the architecture that enables an Orwellian police state to spy on millions of Americans and squelch dissent. While NSA shills and congressional hacks such as Senator Kit Bond (R-MI), portray NSA as directing its tentacles against "al-Qaeda," prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks, the Afghan-Arab database was given virtual free reign as they plotted mass murder in the United States.

According to Paul Thompson at the History Commons (formerly the Center for Cooperative Research) key members of the 9/11 plot were surveilled by NSA and yet, there was no concerted effort whatsoever to prevent bin Laden's "Martyrdom Battalion" from wrecking havoc. Thompson reports,

On March 20, 2000, either Khalid Almihdhar or Nawaf Alhazmi used a phone registered to Alhazmi to make a call from San Diego to an al-Qaeda communications hub in Sana'a, Yemen, run by Almihdhar's father-in-law. The call lasted 16 minutes. According to the 9/11 Congressional Inquiry, the call was intercepted by the NSA, which had been intercepting Alhazmi and Almihdhar's calls for over a year, but the FBI was not informed of the hijackers' presence in the US. The call is only briefly mentioned as a family phone call by the 9/11 Commission in a endnote, and it is not mentioned that the call was monitored.

In other words, NSA did "connect the dots," as did the CIA and FBI and choose instead to do nothing--if by "nothing" one means protecting "certain foreign interests" as Sibel Edmonds avers, say rich Saudi sheiks, subversive CIA/Pentagon operations in the Balkans, or destabilization operations against Russia in Chechnya.

But as Bill Van Auken writes,

Like the Republicans, the Democratic leadership fully accepts the legitimacy of the overall framework of "national security" and the "global war on terrorism" used to justify the illegal spying carried out against the American people.

Whatever concerns they have expressed about this program, none of the leading Democrats have pointed to the obvious danger--that the massive intelligence being collected by the administration will be used to prepare wholesale repression under conditions in which social polarization, economic crisis and mass opposition to war will create political upheavals. ("Massive NSA operation exposed as Congress prepares vote on domestic spying bill," World Socialist Web Site, 11 March 2008)

It's a small world and the political space for meaningful dissent is growing smaller by the day. Somewhere, John Poindexter must be smiling.

Uribe's "Dodgy Dossier IV: Crisis Averted, or Delayed?

With handshakes all around, Ecuador's president Rafael Correa declared Friday, "With the commitment of never attacking a brother country again and by asking forgiveness, we can consider this very serious incident resolved," the New York Times reports.

The apparent end to the crisis came during the annual Rio Group summit of Latin American nations in Santo Domingo. After a rocky start, with regional leaders trading charges and counter-charges sparked by last Saturday's cross-border raid into Ecuador by Colombia to kill FARC commander, Raúl Reyes and 23 others at the rebel camp, tensions and the threat of regional war seem, for now, to have been narrowly averted.

Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez, after sending 10 tank battalions to the border and threatening to nationalize Colombian assets said, "our government only wants peace." But does the United States?

Given short-shrift by Colombia's alarmist claims has been the actual U.S. role in Reyes' assassination. Bill Van Auken reports,

Colombian officials have openly acknowledged the role of US intelligence agencies in instigating and coordinating the March 1 targeted assassination. General Oscar Naranjo, commander of the national police told reporters it was no secret that the Colombian military-police apparatus maintained "a very strong alliance with federal agencies of the US."

The Colombian radio network, Radio Cadena Nacional (RCN), reported Wednesday that Reyes's location was pinpointed by US intelligence as a result of monitoring a satellite phone call between the FARC leader and Venezuelan President Chavez. The February 27 call--three days before the raid--came after the FARC released to Venezuelan authorities four former Colombian legislators--Gloria Polanco, Luis Eladio Perez, Orlando Beltran and Jorge Eduardo Gechem--who had been held hostage for nearly seven years.

Another Colombian station, Noticias Uno, cited intelligence sources as saying that they had received photographs from "foreign spy planes" pinpointing the location of Reyes's camp in Ecuador.

As for the air raid itself, Ecuador's Defense Minister Wellington Sandoval reported the attack included the use of five "smart bombs" of the type utilized by the US military. "It is a bomb that hits within a meter of where it is programmed, from high velocity airplanes," he said. He added that to target Reyes with such weapons, "they needed equipment that Latin American armed forces do not have." (Latin American Crisis Triggered by an Assassination 'Made in the USA,'" World Socialist Web Site, 7 March 2008)

Ecuador, promising to boot the U.S. from its Manta airbase when its lease expires in 2009, will continue to investigate the role that U.S. and Colombian forces based at Manta played in the attack. It seems likely the airbase was an intelligence staging ground for the operation. According to analyst John Lindsay-Poland, "The Manta base houses AWACS aircraft with a capability for detecting satellite phone calls. The location of the FARC guerrilla camp was reportedly determined by a satellite call..."

Increasingly isolated, Washington relies on Colombia as a platform for projecting U.S. power regionally. Lindsay-Poland comments,

Colombia harbors 1,400 U.S. soldiers and military contractors, as well as five radar sites, all operated by the ITT Corporation, and a "Forward Operating Site" in Apiay. Apiay is one of a handful of sites in Colombia where the U.S. Army 7th Special Forces Group trains thousands of Colombian soldiers every year. Washington has appropriated $5.5 billion in mostly military funds since 2000 as part of "Plan Colombia," a bi-partisan initiative purportedly aimed at "going to the source" of cocaine production by fumigating coca fields. In reality it has been a project that helps Colombia's military fight insurgents. Drug trafficking has continued apace since the plan's inception. ...

Colombia's militarization makes its neighbors nervous. The U.S. military base in Manta, Ecuador, set up with up to 500 US soldiers to run counter-drug flights when Panama threw out military bases in 1999, has become a controversial presence that a majority of Ecuadoreans want closed. The U.S. commander in Manta has also stated that the base is "very important" for Plan Colombia. U.S. officials defend the Manta base, asserting that drug traffic in Ecuador and the eastern Pacific has grown in recent years. But if drug traffic has grown since the base began operations in Manta in 2000, it suggests -- at the very least -- that it's ineffective. ("Yankees Head Home," Foreign Policy in Focus, March 6, 2008)

Will the United States take Correa's "no" for a final answer on Manta? It seems as doubtful as the assertion that the current crisis been "resolved" in any meaningful way. Nor will the demonization of leftist leaders by the U.S. media.

The Washington Post's Juan Forero, clearly serving as the Bush administration's Bogotá correspondent must not have gotten the message before filing his story Thursday night. Talking up assertions and wild charges lifted from Uribe's "dodgy dossier," Forero wrote,

A trove of correspondence recovered during a raid on a guerrilla camp is providing a rare window into how Colombia's largest rebel group has drawn closer to Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez in an effort to acquire money, arms and the political recognition the organization craves.

While the chief of Colombia's National Police, Brig. Gen. Óscar Naranjo "has asked a team from Interpol to examine the laptops and hardrives," the dodgy provenance of the computers render such an examination moot at this late date.

In terms of a black propaganda exercise however, particularly as it relates to the FARC's alleged interest in purchasing "uranium" on international nuclear black markets for building "dirty bombs," and Chávez's "$300 million dollars in aid" to the guerrilla group, Bogotá and Washington's disinformation campaign has been a huge "success."

But BBC investigative journalist Greg Palast is unequivocal in stating these documents are fake. Palast writes,

What the US press did not do is look at the evidence, the email in the magic laptop. "... With relation to the 300, which from now on we will call 'dossier,' efforts are now going forward at the instructions of the boss to the cojo [slang term for 'cripple'], which I will explain in a separate note. Let's call the boss Ángel, and the cripple Ernesto."

Indeed, the entire remainder of the email is all about the mechanism of the hostage exchange. Here's the next line:

"To receive the three freed ones, Chavez proposes three options: Plan A. Do it to via of a 'humanitarian caravan'; one that will involve Venezuela, France, the Vatican[?], Switzerland, European Union, democrats [civil society], Argentina, Red Cross, etc."

As to the 300, I must note that the FARC's previous prisoner exchange involved 300 prisoners. Is that what the '300' refers to? ¿Quien sabe? Unlike Uribe, Bush and the US press, I won't guess or make up a phantasmagoric story about Chavez spending money he doesn't even have.

To bolster their case, the Colombians claim, with no evidence whatsoever, that the mysterious "Angel" is the code name for Chavez. But in the memo, Chavez goes by the code name ... Chavez. ("$300 Million from Venezuela to Colombian Rebels a Fake," Venezuela Analysis, March 8, 2008)

It is no mystery that Chávez views Colombian president Álvaro Uribe as a cat's paw for the United States. Colombia, the recipient of a $5.5 billion dollar handout under the rubric of "Plan Colombia," an alleged counternarcotics program, has diverted these funds--with Washington's encouragement--into counterinsurgency operations against the FARC and Colombian social movements.

Yet official reaction in Washington, Uribe's chief benefactor and paymaster, has done much to exploit the crisis as a convenient instrument to extend the so-called Bush Doctrine to Latin America. The administration's formula for "preemptive war" claims that in the "global war on terror" quaint notions such as respect for sovereign borders and international law no longer apply. This will continue to be the case.

In previous reports on the crisis, I have argued that the raid on the FARC camp was a provocation by Bogotá and Washington to strengthen the far-right Uribe regime, sabotage hostage negotiations, slander regional leftist opponents such as Chávez and Correa, demonize them both by linking them to the FARC, hence to "terrorism," "drug trafficking" and alleged proliferation of "weapons of mass destruction." In this light, the "ebbing of tensions" brought about in Santo Domingo during the Rio Group summit is a fleeting interlude at best. Washington will redouble its efforts in the area. Signs of this are already occurring and it isn't pretty.

According to journalist Okke Ornstein, the situation in Panama, where FARC maintain bases in the nearly inaccessible Darién jungle province separating Panama from Colombia, is explosive to say the least, with U.S. offers of "military assistance" pouring in. Ornstein writes,

Not surprisingly, various measures have been announced to secure the border with Colombia. But, given the terrain, that is an impossible task to accomplish with manpower alone. The United States has now jumped in and is "studying" whether it will equip Panama with sophisticated military hardware to monitor the border. But logic dictates just the hardware will not be enough; high-tech radar systems need experts to operate then, and Panamanian police would have to be trained to use them. That would at the very least suggest US military advisers coming to Panama -- if they aren't already here. ("Panama Caught Up in FARC Crisis," The Narco News Bulletin, March 7, 2008)

Chávez and Correa are sincere, democratically-elected leaders attempting to peacefully ameliorate the region's horrendous economic and social conditions, brought about in large measure by Washington's economic "shock doctrine." As such, they are stand-ins for mobilized Latin American workers and peasants who have said adios to the U.S. model of political repression and resource extraction under the imperialist flag of "managed democracy."

Who then are the targets? The mass movements, trade unions, leftist political parties, students, intellectuals, health collectives, women's rights organizers, indigenous tribal organizations, peasant cooperatives and neighborhood committees in their tens of millions who have rejected the "Washington consensus" and are now focused in U.S. cross-hairs.

Like Chile's Salvador Allende, Hugo Chávez's Bolivarian socialist project remains a U.S. target for annihilation. Unlike Allende however, Chávez has taken some steps to create popular militias to defend the revolution against domestic sabotage and foreign attack, but these initiatives are tentative and may very well be a case of too little, too late.

This apparent "resolution" to the crisis is temporary and will neither curtail nor moderate America's wider strategic goal of orchestrating a "Pinochet option" as a means of extending its global reach through the construction of military bases across the region, thus facilitating U.S. corporate plunder and the continued political and economic domination of Latin America by Washington.

La luta continua...

Uribe's "Dodgy Dossier" III: The Crisis Escalates

Since the March 1 murder of FARC's second-in command and chief negotiator, Raúl Reyes, the death toll, and regional tensions, continue to mount.

According to the New York Times, some 24 rebels were killed in Colombia's bombardment and ground assault of Ecuador by the paramilitary-linked Uribe regime. Ecuadoran officials insist Colombian soldiers shot some of the rebels at close-quarters as they slept.

Despite yesterday's tepid OAS declaration scolding Bogotá for Saturday's incursion, the crisis appears to be escalating. On Thursday, Nicaragua's president Daniel Ortega, a past recipient of U.S.-style "democracy enhancement" in the form of massacres initiated by neofascist Contra warriors bankrolled by the United States and Colombian drug cartels, broke diplomatic relations with Colombia.

AFP reports that Ortega, speaking at a press conference in Managua after meeting with Ecuador's socialist president Rafael Correa said, "We are breaking with the terrorist policy being practiced by the government of (Colombian President) Álvaro Uribe."

Meanwhile, Bloomberg News reports that the FARC bombed the Transandino pipeline in Putumayo province, and that Venezuela's socialist president Hugo Chávez may move to seize assets and nationalize Colombian companies in the wake of Saturday's slaughter.

Chávez, during a Wednesday night news conference, asked his ministers to "draw up an inventory of Colombian assets in Venezuela," according to Bloomberg News. "Some of them could be nationalized," Chávez said. "We're not interested in Colombian investments here."

It would appear that Colombia's president Álvaro Uribe, a cat's paw for U.S regional interests, is increasingly isolated--at home and internationally--as the crisis threatens to spin out of control.

Ludicrously, Thomas Shannon, the assistant secretary of state for Interamerican affairs claims "that the seized hard drives contain documents that prove links between the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, and the government of Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez and Ecuadroean President Rafael Correa."

Shannon told a House committee yesterday, "that Colombia has promised soon to share the hard drives from the captured computers with the United States," according to the McClatchy Washington Bureau.

Ominously for the region, Colombia's attack on the FARC negotiators in neighboring Ecuador may very well have been the first round in a planned escalation by Colombia and its U.S. puppetmaster to reassert control over vital natural resources, particularly Venezuelan and Ecuadoran oil. Latin American analyst Forrest Hylton sets the stage:

Eerily, in a March 1 column, one of Colombia's most prescient political analysts, Alfredo Molano, predicted that a giant storm cloud was about to sweep across some portion of Colombia's borderlands. Molano described how President Álvaro Uribe had brought the war with the FARC to the Darien Gap joining Panama, the Catatumbo region of Northern Santander shared with Venezuela, and the frontiers of Pasto and Putumayo bordering Ecuador. In Molano's view, the fact that Uribe had been politically cornered at home and abroad made a widening war across national borders all but inevitable. As Justin Podur noted, domestic and foreign pressure for a negotiated peace--that is, a political solution to the armed conflict--has led to an escalation of the war by the stronger, more violent party, along Israeli lines. ("Colombia's Cornered President: High Stakes in the Andes," CounterPunch, March 6, 2008)

Since the April 2002 failed coup d'état against democratically-elected president, Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan oligarchy and Washington have been feverishly planning a new "zero hour," in the form of a Pinochet-style seizure of power by the far-right. It would appear, if Hylton's analysis is correct, that the paramilitary president of Colombia and its repressive military apparatus may be working with the Venezuelan "opposition" to topple both Chávez and Correa.

Uribe, reeling from a series of interlinked scandals at home would appear to be seeking to "rally the nation" around his corrupt administration through an escalating series of dangerous provocations. Hylton writes,

Since the end of 2006, Uribe has been beset by the parapolítica scandal, in which some 77 political figures, including 14 congresspersons, nearly all of them staunch allies of the president, are under investigation for ties to rightwing paramilitaries. The scandal reveals how the president and the Casa de Nariño (presidential palace) in Bogotá are tied to the country's regions, where power and authority are delegated, hence most directly exercised. Indeed, most of the para-politicos investigated are local office holders--governors, mayors, legislators, etc. The bedrock of the paramilitary-politico alliance was sealed in 2001 with the "Pacto de Ralito" in Córdoba province. The pact led to the first and second election of Uribe with solid--indeed fervent--paramilitary support in congress and the regional state bureaucracies.

Needless to say, the paramilitary gangsters to which Hylton refers are many of the bloodiest capos of Colombia's far-right narcotrafficking cartels. In the wake of the escalating scandal, politicians under investigation for their ties to death squads include Uribe's second cousin, "Senator Mario Uribe, who fell under suspicion after former paramilitary chieftain Salvatore Mancuso testified to meetings he had with the president's cousin to map electoral strategy in Antioquia and Córdoba provinces."

It wouldn't be the first time a hated politician unleashed the dogs of war to advance his position vis a vis domestic rivals. Consider the case of Uribe's closet ally and "dear friend," U.S. president George W. Bush...

This would also explain why investigations have stalled in Uribe's native Antioquia province. Hylton explains,

Under Uribe's watch, paramilitary activity--along with murders and disappearances of thousands of suspected guerrillas--skyrocketed to record levels through close coordination with the military and provincial government officials.

It would also explain why Uribe and the Colombian oligarchy would seek to slander Chávez and Correa with the most absurd, but serviceable, charges.

Accusing regional and ideological rivals with everything from narcotrafficking, bankrolling the FARC, to ominous allusions to "weapons of mass destruction" and "dirty bombs," Uribe, and his Pentagon masters waiting in the wings, could raise the flag of "international terrorism" as a convenient pretext for a massive "preemptive attack."

Absurd? Think again. McClatchy informs us,

"This guy is really an enemy of the United States," said Rep. Dan Burton (R-Ind.), adding that he hoped the administration had "some kind of plan to deal with this."

Not to be upstaged by his Indiana counterpart, Florida Republican Rep. Connie Mack demanded that the State Department declare Venezuela "a state sponsor of terrorism."

Uribe's "dodgy dossier" is a work in progress; cooler heads may yet prevail in Washington. But if historical precedent is any indication of where U.S. policy is heading we may soon be hearing Chávez demonized as America's new "new Hitler."

After that, all bets are off...

Uribe's "Dodgy Dossier" II

In the manic universe of George W. Bush the aggressor is the victim and the victim inevitably, the aggressor. It comes as no surprise that America's chief executive champions his blood-soaked counterpart, Colombia's death squad-linked president Álvaro Uribe.

Bush informed reporters Tuesday, "I told the president that America fully supports Colombia's democracy, and that we firmly oppose any acts of aggression that could destabilize the region." [emphasis added]

Excuse me? Wasn't it Colombia that launched a surprise attack into Ecuador? No matter. As journalist Ron Suskind reported a Bush aide told him,

"That’s not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to study what we do." ("Without a Doubt," New York Times Magazine, October 17, 2004)

The U.S. empire not trifling over something quite as insignificant as "facts," has other "realities" to create. Bush went on to link Senate passage of a Colombian trade deal with "national security." In a manner of speaking it is: if by "national security" you mean unimpeded massacres by well-connected drug lords seeking to expel querulous peasants from their land so that the "product" line can be expanded.

No laughing matter however, last Saturday's murder of FARC's second-in-command and chief negotiator, Raúl Reyes along with 16 other members of the rebel group, bore the unmistakable signs of a "targeted assassination."

After initially claiming Reyes and the other guerrillas were killed by Colombian troops in a running battle, a forensic investigation by Ecuadoran authorities established they were victims of an aerial bombardment launched while they slept and that some of the victims were then finished off by Colombian soldiers, execution-style.

It is for this reason, among many others, that Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez's branding of the Colombia government "the Israel of Latin America" resonates internationally.

Police and military officials in Bogotá have made no secret that the targeting was carried out by U.S. security forces. Colombian officials have said that American intelligence resources were used to track Reyes's movements via his satellite phone.

According to the Los Angeles Times,

A U.S. intelligence official in Washington said he could not confirm reports that American spies had tipped off the Colombian authorities that Reyes was using a satellite telephone that allowed him to be tracked.

The official acknowledged, however, that U.S. officials have such capabilities and that they share information with allies such as Colombia. (Chris Kraul and Patrick J. McDonnell, "Neighbors Take Aim at Colombia over Incursion," March 5, 2008)

While this is no surprise, Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa charged that the raid was an attempt by the far-right Uribe regime to scupper any further release of hostages held by the FARC.

According to Bill Van Auken,

Correa indicated in a televised address Monday that the attack was launched in the context of intense discussions involving the Ecuadoran government and Reyes over the release of nearly a dozen high-profile hostages held by the FARC, including the former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt and three captured US military contractors.

"I regret to inform you that the conversations were very advanced for the freeing in Ecuador of 12 hostages, among them Ingrid Betancourt," said Correa. "It was all frustrated by the militarist and authoritarian hands. We cannot discount that this was one of the motives of the [Colombian] incursion."

The French Foreign Ministry also revealed Tuesday that it had been in discussions with Reyes over the release of hostages--particularly Betancourt, who holds French citizenship--and that the Colombian government was informed of these contacts. ("US-backed border massacre brings South America to brink of war," World Socialist Web Site, Wednesday, 5 March, 2008)

Last December, Uribe and his henchmen--with full backing of the Bush administration--feverishly worked to sabotage the last round of hostage negotiations initiated by Hugo Chávez. This time around, terminated it was, in a deadly hail of bullets.

But what about those "dirty bombs" that FARC "terrorists" are planning to blow-up in your favorite neighborhood galleria? The American media, never one to miss a beat, echoed Bogotá's black propaganda with some new "information" of their own, perhaps gleaned from earlier Judy Miller reports. Accordingly, the New York Times brayed,

Material found on a laptop computer recovered in the raid into Ecuador provided the basis for [Colombian vice president] Mr. Santos's accusations about a dirty bomb, a weapon that combines highly radioactive material with conventional explosives to disperse deadly dust that people would inhale. (Simon Romero, "Colombia is Flashpoint in Chávez's Feud with U.S.," March 5, 2008)

And trotting out "documents" from Uribe's "dodgy dossier," the Miami Herald breathlessly avers,

The most stunning allegation involves the uranium, which can be used to make dirty bombs in which conventional explosives disperse radioactive materials.

"Another of the themes is the one on uranium," says a Feb. 16 note from a man identified as Edgar Tovar to Raúl -- likely Reyes.

"There's a man who supplies me with material for the explosive we prepare, and his name is Belisario and he lives in Bogotá," the note reads. "He sent me the samples and the specifications and they are proposing to sell each kilo for two and a half million dollars, and that they supply and we look for someone to sell to, and that the deal should be with a government that can buy a huge amount. They have 50 kilos ready and can sell much more."

In a statement Tuesday, Colombian Vice President Francisco Santos said the note proves the FARC was "negotiating to get radioactive material, the principal base for making dirty weapons of destruction and terrorism."

"This shows that these terrorist groups ... constitute a grave threat not just to our country but to the entire Andean region and Latin America," he added.

But wait, there's more! An ubiquitous "former State Department official ... now with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington" no less, puts in a cameo appearance,

The $2.5 million per kilo price "sounds about right," he said, but "the quantity sounds really suspicious" because accumulating 50 kilos would be difficult under very watchful eye of U.S. and other intelligence agencies. (Tyler Bridges and Jenny Carolina Gonzalez, "Documents show FARC ties to Venezuela and Ecuador," Wednesday, March 5, 2008)

Knocking down these spurious charges, analyst Garry Leech concludes,

But when the documents from Reyes's laptop were released to the media, they did not corroborate the vice-president’s allegations. In fact, the document related to the so-called dirty bomb was simply a communication from a lower-ranking FARC guerrilla to Reyes raising the possibility of purchasing 50 kilos of uranium and then selling it for a profit. There was absolutely no mention of using uranium to build a dirty bomb or any other sort of weapon. Meanwhile, mainstream media outlets, including the New York Times, have dutifully performed their role as propagandists for the US government by continuing to report that the FARC intends to build a "dirty bomb" even after the documents were made public. [emphasis added] ("The Upside-Down World of Bush and Uribe: Slandering Chávez and the FARC," Colombia Journal, Wednesday, March 5, 2008)

As reported here yesterday, the Bush administration and "democratic ally" Uribe, are cranking up the "Mighty Wurlitzer" as Washington prepares a new military adventure targeting the Latin American left and Venezuela's democratic socialist experiment.

Make no mistake, a Pinochet option is in the works.

Uribe's "Dodgy Dossier"

On Tuesday, Colombia's vice president Francisco Santos claimed during a U.N. disarmament meeting in Geneva that leftist rebels from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), "were trying to acquire radioactive material that could be used to make 'dirty bombs'," according to the Associated Press.

Sunday's invasion of Ecuador and subsequent murder of 18 members of the FARC, including the organization's chief spokesman and negotiator, Raúl Reyes, signals a dramatic escalation of the decades-long conflict by the far-right narco-regime of Colombian president Álvaro Uribe.

Based on allegations published Monday in the Bogotá daily El Tiempo, a right-wing scandal sheet which has long-standing ties to the Santos family, the vice president claimed that two computers "found" with the assassinated Reyes indicated FARC was "apparently negotiating" to acquire radioactive material, "the primary basis for generating dirty weapons of mass destruction and terrorism."

Who FARC leaders were allegedly "negotiating" with was not specified.

These spurious charges follow allegations in today's New York Times, also citing the El Tiempo report and additional claims made during a Monday press conference by Colombia's police chief, General Oscar Naranjo that the FARC "appeared interested in acquiring 110 pounds of uranium."

No proof beyond "photographs and documents [Naranjo] said were taken from Mr. Reyes's computer" were offered to back the dubious Colombian claims echoed by the New York Times.

Naranjo also alleged that FARC has been given "$300 million dollars" by Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez to continue the insurgency.

During the March 1 invasion of Ecuador by Colombian military forces, the New York-based Weekly News Update on the Americas reports,

Ecuadoran president Rafael Correa said his country's soldiers later found the ... FARC members' bodies "in underwear, pajamas." They were "massacred while they slept," according to Correa. The Ecuadoran soldiers also rescued three wounded guerrilleros.

The Ecuador invasion by Colombia markedly increased tensions with both Ecuador and Venezuela. Citing evidence that the guerrillas were in fact asleep and not killed during a "hot pursuit" across the Ecuadoran border as alleged by the Colombian government, Correa said Uribe "was deceived, or yet another time he has lied to the Ecuadoran government." ("Colombia: FARC Negotiator Killed," Issue #937, March 2, 2008)

While Ecuador has recalled its ambassador from Bogotá and increased its military capacity in the area, Venezuela has broken diplomatic relations with the Uribe regime and massed thousands of troops along the Colombian-Venezuelan border.

Chris Carlson reports that Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez charged that,

"The Colombian government has turned into the Israel of Latin America."

"Colombia is a terrorist state that is subject to the great terrorist, the government of the United States and their apparatus," he explained.

"Move ten battalions to the border with Colombian immediately," he said to his defense minister. "We don't want war, but we are not going to allow the North American empire, which is their master, and their puppy-dog President Uribe and the Colombian oligarchy to come divide us, to weaken us. We are not going to allow it." ("Chavez: 'Colombia is the Israel of Latin America,'" Venezuela Analysis, Monday, March 3, 2008)

Taking a page from Bush administration disinformation specialists, it is clear that as Uribe's narco-government grows increasingly isolated, it has decided to manufacture its own "dodgy dossier" as justification for its deadly incursion into Ecuador. Substituting "110 pounds of uranium," for "yellowcake from Niger," the Bush administration is clearly maneuvering to tie FARC to "weapons of mass destruction" with Chavez playing the role of Latin America's "Saddam Hussein," thus setting the stage for a potential U.S. attack.

According to analysts James J. Brittain and R. James Sacouman, the assassinations took place just days before a major international demonstration was scheduled to take place in Bogotá. They report,

Promoted by The National Movement of Victims of State-Sponsored Crimes (MOVICE), the International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC), and countless social justice-based organizations, March 6 has been set as an international day of protest against those tortured, murdered and disappeared by the Colombian state, their allies within the paramilitary United Self-Defence Forces of Colombia (AUC) and the newly-reformed Black Eagles. Recently, President Uribe's top political adviser, José Obdulio Gaviria, proclaimed that the protest and protesters should be criminalized. In addition, paramilitaries in the southwestern department of Nariño--not far from where the illegal incursions were carried out in Ecuador--have threatened to attack any organization or person associated with the protest activities.

It is believed that the Uribe and Santos administration is utilizing the slaughter of Commander Raúl Reyes and others as a method to deter activists and socially conscious peoples within and outside Colombia from participating in the March 6 events. Numerous state-controlled or connected media outlets, such as El Tiempo...have been parading photographs of the bullet-ridden and mutilated corpse of Raúl Reyes throughout the country's communications mediums. Such propaganda is clearly a tool to psychologically intimidate those preparing to demonstrate against the atrocities perpetrated by the state over the past seven years. ("Uribe's Colombia is Destabilizing Latin America," Colombia Journal, Monday, March 3, 2008)

Far from being the "terrorists" the Bush regime and their Colombian acolytes claim them to be, the FARC have a 40+ year history as a major revolutionary force in Colombian politics. Originally launched by the Colombian Communist Party and other left-wing currents during the 1960s in response to massive state repression, the FARC have managed to thrive, controlling huge swathes of territory. Not coincidentally, the organization's genesis coincided with another period of intense U.S. intervention in Colombian affairs when the "paramilitary option" and the state's alliance with far-right, politically-reliable narcotrafficking mafias was promoted by Pentagon counterinsurgency "specialists."

According to analyst Richard Gott,

After a ceasefire in 1984, the FARC was encouraged to establish a legal political party, the Patriotic Union, and to put forward candidates in the elections in 1985. The Patriotic Union was reasonably successful, securing six senators, 23 deputies, and several hundred local councillors. But the outcome was disastrous. After emerging into the open and putting their heads above the parapet, many of the UP supporters were singled out and killed. More than 4,000 left-wing activists and organisers were assassinated in the year after the elections. The guerrillas retired to their safe territories in the rural areas, and vowed not to make the same mistake again. Further negotiations took place between 1999 and 2002, but the government negotiators could not overcome this legacy of mistrust on the part of the FARC. When Uribe became president in 2002, he abandoned all such efforts and embarked on seeking an entirely military solution. ("Uribe's Illegal Cross-Border Raid: Colombian Deaths in Ecuador, CounterPunch, Monday, March 3, 2008)

Bush intensified the belligerent rhetoric as well as ratcheting up the threat level against the Colombian people -- and Venezuela. According to Reuters,

President George W. Bush backed Colombia on Tuesday in an escalating Andean crisis as Venezuela moved troops to its border and Colombia accused President Hugo Chavez of genocide for supporting rebels.

Bush weighed in on the crisis for the first time since Saturday's raid into Ecuador. While most Latin American governments condemned Colombia, he criticized Chavez's "regime" for "provocative maneuvers" and said the superpower opposed any act of aggression that could destabilize the region.

"Our country's message to President (Alvaro) Uribe and the people of Colombia is that we stand with our democratic ally," Bush said.

As Washington and Bogotá escalate regional tensions, a black propaganda media operation is clearly underway. By linking FARC--and by inference, the Venezuelan government--to an alleged pursuit of "weapons of mass destruction," the Bush/Uribe gang may very well be preparing their own "final solution" to the "Chavez problem."

Torture & Complicity: Meet the APA

As Congress prepares to investigate the role of their colleagues' torture of detainees at Guantánamo Bay and CIA "black sites," the American Psychological Association (APA) has refused to condemn participation by APA members in abusive interrogations.

Indeed, a secret APA task force concluded in 2006 that psychologists involved in these dubious programs provide "a valuable and ethical role to a system protecting our nation, other nations, and innocent civilians from harm." However, as Salon's Mark Benjamin learned, "six of the 10 psychologists that APA president Gerald Koocher helped select to draft the ethics report had close ties to the military, including four who'd been involved with the handling of detainees at Guantánamo or Abu Ghraib, or who'd served in Afghanistan."

This should come as no surprise since the APA according to David Goodman,

...aggressively lobbies on behalf of psychologists and research centers for funding from the military, the Department of Homeland Security, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, and the DOD Counterintelligence Field Activity. In FY 2003, DOD spending on behavioral, cognitive, and social science research stood at about $405 million. (Mother Jones, "The Enablers," March 1, 2008)

Money like this buys a lot of complicity--and silence. It also testifies to the strength of a seamless collusive web binding together academics, psychologists and the Pentagon: an unholy alliance that validate wider U.S. geopolitical goals as its wages aggressive wars worldwide.

While the military and the CIA place "boots on the ground" in foreign climes inhospitable to imperialist resource extractors, it falls to intelligence "specialists," say APA members, to "guide" interrogators towards "favorable outcomes:" smashing all resistance.

Historian Christopher Simpson analyzed the central role that CIA and Pentagon funding of communication research and psychological warfare played in the post-war period. It isn't a pretty picture. According to Simpson,

Research funding cannot by itself create a sustainable academic zeitgeist, of course. Sponsorship can, however, underwrite the articulation, elaboration, and development of a favored set of preconceptions, and in that way improve its competitive position in ongoing rivalries with alternative constructions of academic reality. ... U.S. military, propaganda, and intelligence agencies favored an approach to the early study of mass communication that offered both an explanation of what communication "is" (at least insofar as those agencies' missions were concerned) and a box of tools for examining it. Put most simply, they saw mass communication as an instrument for persuading or dominating targeted groups. (Science of Coercion, New York: Oxford University Press, 1994, pp. 5-6)

And therein lies the rub: for the CIA "a favored set of preconceptions" vis a vis "enhanced" interrogation (torture) is one that seeks to "break" the minds of their hapless victims in order to cough-up information viewed as "vital" by military and political bureaucracies fighting endless wars "to keep America safe."

Like all intellectual constructs that seek to defend the indefensible this is nothing new, nor is the APA's collaboration with the intelligence "community." Long before the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, the CIA had already devised a monstrous set of "metrics" to extract information from resistance fighters and innocent civilians in a score of Cold War battleground states.

With the 1997 partial declassification of the CIA's 1963 torture manual, KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation, we gain valuable insight into the role played by APA practitioners of "non-coercive" interrogation techniques at Guantánamo Bay and other "black sites." While the question of "reverse-engineering" the U.S. military's SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) program for captured American troops and Special Forces operatives behind enemy lines has gained notoriety, the broader issue of American psychology's earlier collaboration in designing KUBARK has been given short-shrift.

Indeed, SERE itself built upon and expanded KUBARK's brief: designing an optimal set of conditions to make people talk. In the case of SERE, it is a matter of preparing troops to talk in certain evasive ways, thereby bettering their chances for survival.

A "reverse-engineered" SERE is another matter entirely: these techniques in the hands of "skilled" practitioners become coercive methods for breaking captives. By shifting the locus from physical to psychological torture, the APA along with Bush regime criminals, attempt to dodge altogether the issue of psychological torture as torture. Setting the interrogation table so to speak, inquisitors draw from a psychometric "toolbox" designed to enhance the "subject's" sense of isolation as a means to induce fear, compliance and ultimately, capitulation. The KUBARK authors' theorize:

The term non-coercive is used above to denote methods of interrogation that are not based upon the coercion of an unwilling subject through the employment of superior force originating outside himself. However, the non-coercive interrogation is not conducted without pressure. On the contrary, the goal is to generate maximum pressure, or at least as much as is needed to induce compliance. The difference is that the pressure is generated inside the interrogatee. His resistance is sapped, his urge to yield is fortified, until in the end he defeats himself. [emphasis added]

In A Question of Torture, historian Alfred W. McCoy refers to this technique as "self-inflicted pain," and argues that the CIA, recognizing the futility of its earlier MKULTRA program that searched for a "magic bullet" that would render subjects susceptible to manipulation through drugs (LSD, mescaline, thorazine, etc.), Agency Mengele's sought instead to devise ever-more devilish methods to break the will, even if it meant destroying the mind. One such technique is prolonged isolation. KUBARK summarize their findings thusly:

1. The more completely the place of confinement eliminates sensory stimuli, the more rapidly and deeply will the interrogatee be affected. Results produced only after weeks or months of imprisonment in an ordinary cell can be duplicated in hours or days in a cell which has no light (or weak artificial light which never varies), which is sound-proofed, in which odors are eliminated, etc. An environment still more subject to control, such as water-tank or iron lung, is even more effective.

2. An early effect of such an environment is anxiety. How soon it appears and how strong it is depends upon the psychological characteristics of the individual.

3. The interrogator can benefit from the subject's anxiety. As the interrogator becomes linked in the subject's mind with the reward of lessened anxiety, human contact, and meaningful activity, and thus with providing relief for growing discomfort, the questioner assumes a benevolent role.

4. The deprivation of stimuli induces regression by depriving the subject's mind of contact with an outer world and thus forcing it in upon itself. At the same time, the calculated provision of stimuli during interrogation tends to make the regressed subject view the interrogator as a father-figure. The result, normally, is a strengthening of the subject's tendencies toward compliance.

Amongst the bibliographic contributors cited in KUBARK were a number of researchers and institutes identified by Simpson and others that were directly funded by the CIA and the Pentagon, these included: the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology; Public Opinion Quarterly; Bureau of Social Science Research Inc.; AMA Archives of Neurology and Psychiatry; Sociometry; the infamous Allan Memorial Institute of Dr. D. Ewen Cameron of "psychic-driving" infamy.

The isolation techniques cited above have been upgraded by newer "refinements" that play upon specific cultural anxieties and taboos of current Guantánamo and "black site" detainees and are features drawn from CIA/Pentagon contractors such as Spokane-based Mitchell Jessen & Associates soon themselves to be subjects of Congressional inquiry.

According Mark Benjamin,

Isolation in cramped cells is also a key tenet of SERE training, according to soldiers who have completed the training and described it in detail to Salon. The effects of isolation are a specialty of Jessen's, who taught a class on "coping with isolation in a hostage environment" at a Maui seminar in late 2003, according to a Washington Times article published then. (Defense Department documents from the late 1990s describe Jessen as the "lead psychologist" for the SERE program.) Mitchell also spoke at that conference, according to the article. It described both men as "contracted to Uncle Sam to fight terrorism."

Mitchell's name surfaced again many months later. His role in interrogations was referenced briefly in a July 2005 New Yorker article by Jane Mayer, which focused largely on the military's use of SERE-based tactics at Guantánamo. The article described Mitchell's participation in a CIA interrogation of a high-value prisoner in March 2002 at an undisclosed location elsewhere -- presumably a secret CIA prison known as a "black site" -- where Mitchell urged harsh techniques that would break down the prisoner's psychological defenses, creating a feeling of "helplessness." But the article did not confirm Mitchell was a CIA employee, and it explored no further the connection between Mitchell's background with SERE and interrogations being conducted by the CIA. (Salon, "The CIA's Torture Teachers, June 21, 2007)

But it may not be Congress alone that serves notice to the APA. The ACLU has warned the association, according to Mother Jones, that participation in "cruel, inhuman, and degrading interrogation of detainees is not only unethical but illegal, and may subject APA members to legal liability or even prosecution."

Let's hope so.

"Silence Is Health"

Argentina's neo-Nazi generals were shown the door in 1983, yet their crimes have largely gone unpunished. The legacy of these terrible years have been consigned to history's proverbial "memory hole;" and this is precisely where the perpetrators and their enablers--in Argentina and the United States--hope they will remain.

When former police commander Miguel Etchecolatz was sentenced to life in prison in May 2007, the man whose testimony was acknowledged as key to the prosecution's case, Jorge Julio Lopez, a 76-year-old bricklayer imprisoned and tortured three decades earlier, didn't hear the judge's stinging rebuke before this state terrorist was led away. Why?

Just days before sentence was passed Jorge Julio Lopez had been disappeared.

Etchecolatz was no ordinary killer. As the Commissioner General of Police for the province of Buenos Aires, he was the right hand man of Police Chief Ramón Camps. In his capacity as General Director of Investigations for the Buenos Aires Police, Etchecolatz was responsible for the more than 21 clandestine detention camps "hidden in plain sight" across Buenos Aires.

Before his conviction, Etchecolatz was a prolific author who wrote books defending the repression and was the vice president of ANIDAR (a fascist group formed by retired military men, ex-torturers and neo-nazis). In other words, a respectable citizen.

While Etchecolatz was one of the innumerable "little Eichmanns," a gray, insignificant bureaucrat who might just as easily have been a bank manager or personnel director in any medium-sized firm, what of his boss, the notorious Nazi and anti-Semite General Ramón Camps? A man who played a recording to the international press in which Jacobo Timerman, the publisher of the left-leaning Argentine daily La Opinión, was forced to confess to being a Jew while under torture? What kind of individual justified the theft of newborns from their imprisoned mothers shortly before having them murdered "because subversive parents will raise subversive children"?

As Buenos Aires Provincial Chief of Police, Camps once bragged he was responsible for 5000 disappearances. Before kicking the bucket in 1994, Camps wrote xenophobic and anti-Semitic articles for the far-right Catholic magazine Cabildo, but never spent a day in prison. He put things in their proper perspective, however, and gave the devil his due:

France and the United States were the great disseminators of antisubversive doctrine. They both, but particularly the United States, organized centers to instruct in the fight against subversion. They sent advisors, teachers. They distributed a huge amount of bibliography. ... It is important to clarify that the French optic was more correct than the North American; the former had a global concept; the latter were exclusively military. ... All that was fine until we "reached adulthood," and applied our own doctrine, which enabled us to triumph against subversion. [Marguerite Feitlowitz, A Lexicon of Terror, New York: Oxford University Press, 1998, pp. 11-12]

Torture and political genocide as a rite of passage.

As historian Michael McClintock reports, Camps' allusion to the distribution of "a huge amount of bibliography" by U.S. military advisors reflects the fact that American counterinsurgency and counterterrorism doctrines trace their genesis to the scorched earth practices of the Third Reich:

Even as revelations of German war crimes were coming out at trials at Nuremberg, American special warfare strategists were studying the tactics of German occupation forces during World War II. ... The premise here--that an iron-clad distinction can be drawn between "the people," who won't be harmed if they keep their noses clean, and the partisans/bandits, who are seen as aliens beyond the pale, meriting whatever fate befalls them--would eventually be incorporated into American counterinsurgency doctrine. (Instruments of Statecraft, New York: Pantheon Books, 1992, pp. 59, 63)

While sentiments such as those expressed by General Camps are shocking even today amidst the grisly revelations of Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, the perverse U.S. doctrine of "preemptive war," which is to say, naked aggression against largely defenseless societies such as Iraq and Afghanistan, considered ripe for plunder precisely because of their defenselessness are viewed as "normal" by American chattering classes. This penchant for state gangsterism by predatory elites does fit a discernible pattern, however, one wholly embraced by the "skinheads in nice suits," to borrow Günter Grass' apt description of those who rule the roost in the West.

Nearly three decades ago Danish journalist Henrik Krüger observed,

International Fascista was a crucial first step toward fulfilling the dream not only of [SS Col. Otto] Skorzeny, but also of his close friends in Madrid exile, José Lopez Rega, Juan Peron's grey eminence, and Prince Justo Valerio Borghese, the Italian Fascist money man who had been rescued from execution at the hands of the World War II Italian resistance by future CIA counterintelligence whiz James J. Angleton. They, and other Nazi and Fascist powers throughout Europe and Latin America, envisioned a new world order built on a Fascist Iron Circle linking Buenos Aires, Santiago, Lima, La Paz, Brasilia and Montevideo. [Henrik Krüger, The Great Heroin Coup: Drugs, Intelligence & International Fascism, Boston: South End Press, 1980, p. 210]

Krüger, describing the ideological glue binding together practitioners of "national security" in all its sterile guises, recognized that criminal networks and fascist hit men were not tangential players in the global struggle for power and geostrategic advantage over political-economic rivals, but central actors in a process one can only describe as the return of the (political) repressed: totalitarianism as the preferred discourse of the American deep state.

This had certain ramifications for future moves to consolidate state power and corporate profits, both in the United States and internationally. In the hands of a sociopathic ruling class, the "greater good" became an instrument of conquest, a mere accessory as unreal as the "fraternity" found in gated communities or shopping malls, global green zones, "secure" silent spaces beneath the ubiquitous gaze of CTV cameras monitored by privatized guardians of the new "order."

Many of the features of contemporary U.S. society--crony capitalism; corporate looting on a grand scale; surveillance as a normative value; the myriad mechanisms and flexible instruments favored by financial "insiders;" social dislocation; alienation; "private" pleasures apathetically consumed by atomized masses; reified celebrity "culture;" not to mention the intellectual bankruptcy of fundamentalist religions of all stripes--were rolled out in Latin America's Southern Cone during the 1970s, a new product line prefiguring 21st century American life. As Naomi Klein points out:

The imperative was reflected in the dominant metaphors used by the military regimes in Brazil, Chile, Uruguay and Argentina: those fascist standbys of cleaning, scrubbing, uprooting and curing. In Brazil, the junta's roundups of leftists were code-named Operação Limpeza, Operation Cleanup. On the fifth day of the coup, Pinochet referred to Allende and his cabinet as "that filth that was going to ruin the country." One month later he pledged to "extirpate the root of evil from Chile," to bring about a "moral cleansing" of the nation, "purified of vices"--an echo of the Third Reich author Alfred Rosenberg's call for "a merciless cleansing with an iron broom." (The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism, New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007, p. 104)

That the Argentine military claimed to act on behalf of "the highest interests of the nation" and was working to prevent "the dissolution of Argentine society...and the disappearance of the Fatherland as a state," found its echo in Milton Friedman's Chicago School "that has harnessed the full force of the U.S. military machine in the service of a corporate agenda," according to Klein's analysis.

For the military regime, dissent in all its forms but particularly anticapitalist alternatives to the "market," were a betrayal of "organic" belief systems that threatened the physical and spiritual survival of the nation.

"Subversion," according to the logic advanced here, posed an existential threat not merely to the plundering elites who had looted the Argentine national economy but to the "people" as a whole. The national security doctrine of the Generals was driven by a far-right Nationalist-Catholic corporatist ideology which held that all civil authority must be subordinated "to the natural order and to natural law." For the General Staff and their henchmen "subversion and revolution must not be allowed to undermine the natural moral order of society because they are undermining the order of Creation" itself.

Anticipating arguments advanced by neoconservative theoreticians decades later as the U.S. wages a new "war on terror," V Army Corps Commander General Acdel Vilas wrote,

In reality, the only total, integral warfare is cultural warfare. ... We do not confront an opponent who fights to defend a flag, a nation, or its borders. He who attacks us doesn't do any of that. He is, simply put, part of an army of ideologues whose headquarters could be in Europe, America or Asia. He lacks a national identity. He is the product of a counterculture with a well-defined objective: to destroy the foundations of Western civilization of which we Argentines naturally form part. ... What we create in the individual is his mind. ... The fight isn't one to conquer terrain, physically, but to conquer minds. Not to take advantageous physical positions but to mold mental structures in his favor. (Martin Edwin Andersen, Dossier Secreto: Argentina's Desaparecido's and the Myth of the "Dirty War," Boulder: Westview Press, 1993, p. 195)

For practitioners of "cultural warfare," "national security" morphed into a totalitarian world-view akin to the National Socialism of Hitler's Third Reich where all is permitted those who defend the "integrity" of the state's "natural order." This led Argentine Foreign Minister, Admiral Cesar Augosto Guzzetti to baldly declare:

There is no right-wing subversion or terrorism as such. The body of society is affected by a disease that corrodes the entrails and forms antibodies. These antibodies cannot be regarded in the same way as the microbe itself. The action of the antibody will disappear as the government controls and destroys the guerrillas. (Stella Calloni, "The Horror Archives of Operation Condor," Washington, D.C. CovertAction Quarterly, Number 50, Fall 1994, p. 10)

Or, as General Iberico St. Jean expressed more candidly in 1977 at the height of the slaughter, "First we will kill the subversives; then we will kill their collaborators; then their sympathizers; then those who are indifferent."

Are there echoes of this fascist mindset to be found in contemporary American life? Compare the ravings of the Admiral and the General to those of American Enterprise Institute "resident scholar," Michael Ledeen. According to the Boston Globe,

"To be an effective leader, the most prudent method is to ensure that your people are afraid of you," Ledeen wrote in "Machiavelli on Modern Leadership." "To instill that fear, you must demonstrate that those who attack you will not survive." ... In a 1999 article in the scholarly journal Society, he warned of dire consequences if Clinton were not impeached. "New leaders with an iron will are required to root out the corruption and either reestablish a virtuous state, or to institute a new one, ..." he wrote. "If we bask in false security and drop our guard, the rot spreads, corrupting the entire society. Once that happens, only violent and extremely unpleasant methods can bring us back to virtue." (Jeet Heer and David Wagner, "Man of the World: Michael Ledeen's adventures in history," October 10, 2004)

Is this not the paradigm employed by corporations and their lap dogs across the American landscape?

Argentine journalist Uki Goñi observed two years before the General's "dirty war" coup,

On the broad Nueve Julio Avenue that divides Buenos Aires in half -- 'the widest avenue in the world,' according to some Argentines -- stands a giant white obelisk that is the city's most conspicuous landmark. In 1974, the landmark lost its virginity in the strangest of ways. A revolving billboard was suspended around the Obelisco, snugly encircling the huge white phallus. Round and round the ring turned, inscribed with an Orwellian message in bold blue letters on a plain white background: 'Silence Is Health.' (The Real Odessa: Smuggling the Nazis to Perón's Argentina, London: Granta, 2002, p. xxvii)

Silence Is Health ... The watchwords of fascists everywhere.