militarizing USA

THE MILITARIZING OF AMERICA

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MISSION CREEP: THE MILITARIZING OF AMERICA

By Sam Smith

[From the March 1996 issue of the Progressive Review]

The nomination of General Barry McCaffrey as drug czar
symbolizes the nation's dramatic retreat from the principle of
separation of military and civilian power. It further demonstrates
the degree to which the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878 -- which
outlaws military involvement in civilian law enforcement -- is being
ignored and undermined by both the drug warriors and the Clinton
administration.

Disturbing as the McCaffrey appointment may be, however, it is
only an unusually visible sign of something that has been going on
quietly for a long time -- the military's steady intrusion upon, and
interference with, civilian America.

In order to avoid violation of the law, General McCaffrey has
retired from the military, but he will not retire from his military
contacts, philosophy, loyalty and access. He is, after all, a man
some thought in line to become the next chair of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff.

General McCaffrey headed the US Southern Command, which
provides military backup for American policy in Latin America -- a
policy long linked with support of dictatorships, suppression of
dissidents, human rights abuses, death squads as well as
chronically ineffective and corrupt management of drug smuggling.
The price of this policy has been heavy: for example, over 100,000
people have been killed since 1960 in Guatemala, many of them by
armed forces and police trained and supported by the US.

One former US ambassador to a Central American country says of
Southcom, "I wouldn't even let them in the country" because
Southcom would "inexorably militarize political problems." Today,
he added, "very few countries outside of Central America welcome
visits" from the commander of Southcom.

A Pentagon official describes Southcom's role as "military to
military diplomacy." Rather then functioning like an old-fashion
colonial army -- "they're not like the Bengal Lancers" -- they go in
and work quietly with the local military to make sure the right
elements are in charge and show them how to put down dissidents
and how to interrogate.

The embassy military attaches are the point men in these
operations. McCaffrey came into conflict with the State
Department in his attempts to gain authority over the attaches and
run his own foreign policy. Further, the Dallas Morning News
reports that a year ago McCaffrey circulated a classified plan under
which the military would assume direct control of the Latin
American drug fight. The idea "drew the wrath of civilian agencies
from the Drug Enforcement Administration to the CIA. It was a
brash plan to fuse power now spread among dozens of agencies
while raising the military from a limited support role. The proposal
quietly died."

The Dallas paper noted that "colleagues widely describe
[McCaffrey] as outspoken and strongwilled, a man whose self-
esteem shone brightly even amid the white light of four-star egos."

One drug enforcement official told US News & World Report that
under McCaffrey, Southcom's "idea of coordination was to brief
you after their plan was fait accompli."

In its announcement of McCaffrey's drug czar appointment, the
White House said:

He has spent his military career engaged in coordinated campaigns
that are directed toward solutions and winning. He will not tolerate
bureaucratic turf wars or grandstanding on this critical issue.

While his career may have been directed towards solutions, it was a
goal McCaffrey never reached at Southcom. Southcom has gone
through anti-smuggling strategies likes a Hollywood hooker
through designer drugs. As recently as two years ago, for example,
the military dumped its touted reliance on AWAC planes.
Meanwhile the military virtually gave up on interdiction efforts in
the Pacific. One source told the International Defense Review that
"the Pacific is just too big to monitor properly."

The IDR also reported a shift towards attempting to stop drugs
before they leave the source Latin American country: "The shift is
due to a variety of factors, including the relatively low volume of
drugs seized in transit; US budgetary restraints and a variety of
organizational and force structure changes. . ."

In other words, it didn't work and it cost too much money. But
there is no evidence that the source country approach is any better.
One study found that such strategies were, in fact, seven times as
costly as controlling demand through education and medication.

Furthermore, they do substantial damage to the stability and
democracy of the targeted country. Thirty religious, health, and
human rights activists wrote Secretary of State Warren Christopher
complaining about American trained and encouraged anti-narcotics
operations in Bolivia. The letter describes well the sort of drug
policy fostered by Southcom and other US agencies:

Since mid-January, the Bolivian anti-narcotics police have
undertaken massive sweeps in the Chapre, arbitrarily detaining over
three hundred people. Those detained are typically held several
days and released without charges; indeed, without even being
presented to a judge . . . Neither Bolivian law nor international
human rights standards permit these warrantless arrests of
individuals against whom there is no evidence of participation in
criminal conduct. The government is clearly using police powers to
stifle lawful political opposition . . . The Bolivian anti-narcotics
efforts also continue to rely on special judicial procedures that
violate fundamental due process considerations. Under Bolivia's
Law 10008, those who are formally charged with drug offenses --
no matter how minor -- are imprisoned without the possibility of
pretrial release and must, even if acquitted, remain in prison until
the trial court's decision is reviewed by the Supreme Court, a
process that takes years. The US government provided funding for
the salaries and expenses of special prosecutors for the anti-
narcotics courts.

As the military zig and zags in its Latin American anti-drug tactics,
these operations retain one common attribute: failure. Between
1994 and 1995, for example, coca leaf production rose seven
percent in Bolivia, Colombia and Peru. The drug trade continues so
merrily along that the radio stations on the Mexican border are even
mocking counter-drug efforts with ballads celebrating famed
traffickers.

The model of a modern major general

Rather than pointing out such facts, press reaction to the
McCaffrey appointment has been overwhelmingly favorable. This is
perhaps not surprising. The media is increasingly composed of
journalists who have had no military experience and who see war as
just another movie script, even if the battle is on our borders or in
our own cities.

These new journalistic romanticists are easy prey for Pentagon
flacks and the drug warriors. Their understanding of such matters
comes not from experience and history, but from Stalone and
Schwarzenegger. So badly was the Iraqi War covered, for example,
that Americans still don't know how many of the enemy were
killed. Or that the UN Food & Agriculture Organization found that
over a half million Iraqi children may have died as a consequence of
the economic sanctions we imposed after the conflict.

Meanwhile, in dangerous counterpoint, the American officer corps
is increasingly composed of those who have had no democratic
experience. With the end of the draft and the professionalization of
the services, the leavening effect of reserve and national guard
troops has greatly diminished. Further, officers like Colin Powell
and Barry McCaffrey earned their spurs and their medals almost
entirely in the defense of non-democratic regimes -- from
troglodytic sheiks in the Gulf to corrupt generals in Vietnam to
drug-pushers in Latin America.

The untold truth is that the post-WW2 American military hasn't
that much to be proud of. It fought to a draw in Korea, was
humiliated in Vietnam, removed a drug dealer from Panama but left
all his peers and all the drugs, slunk off from Somalia and was
careful not to hang around too long in Haiti. As for the Gulf -- well,
Bush and Thatcher were ousted from office in its wake, but not,
unfortunately, the intended target.

The one place where the modern American military has been
successful is right here in the US, where it has long occupied much
of the budget and captured many of the politicians. The sanctity of
defense spending is so taken for granted that cutting it was hardly
mentioned in the recent budget debates.

Like any good army, the troops have secured their own base first,
moving quietly into key civilian posts at the Pentagon. Says one
official, "They want to fill the DOD jobs with industry people but
the pay isn't high enough, so they get military. The military is
willing to whore for industry." The latter, in turn, gladly hires them
upon retirement.

Many of these officers are part of an over-staffed brass brigade that
developed in the wake of the Cold War and which helped to gobble
up the "peace dividend." With their seepage into civilian billets, an
important protection against a military takeover -- direct civilian
control of the military -- is quietly and steadily being eroded.

Perhaps all this isn't so surprising when one examines the real
m'tier of a modern major general. It is not, after all, fighting wars --
for there doesn't exist an enemy capable of challenging us. The US
defense budget is 120 times the combined strength of the nine next
biggest military spenders, and 1,600 times that of six adversarial
favorites: Cuba, Syria, Iran, Iraq, North Korea and Libya. In truth,
the modern major general's trade consists of occupying, managing
and manipulating weak and disorganized small countries, not
infrequently primarily for domestic political reasons.

This is the trade for which Powell and McCaffrey were trained and
helps explains why each feels comfortable in domestic politics.
Where easier to practice the civil and psychological operations they
mastered than right here at home? After all, what is the war on
drugs but "low intensity" or "non-conventional" warfare? If a
Pentagon memo can label Israel a "non-traditional adversary," then
why not our own inner cities as well? We're all Northern Ireland
now.

The quiet creep

The McCaffrey nomination also follows a dramatic increase in the
use of the military and its resources, especially the National Guard,
in domestic law enforcement -- from Waco to Ruby Ridge to the
inner city. It also follows greater intrusion of the military into high
schools, the use of troops on the Mexican border for the first time
in modern history and sporadic proposals to involve the Army in
everything from inner city works projects to concentration camps
for first time drug offenders.

Bill Clinton, who has rarely seen a civil liberty worth standing up
for, even submitted legislation last year that would have virtually
overturned the Posse Comitatus Act. His bill would have allowed
the military to provide "technical assistance" to civilian law
enforcement, a term Clinton himself defined as including
"conducting searches, taking evidence, and disarming and disabling
individuals." So awful was this measure that even Casper
Weinberger and Sam Nunn objected. As the director of the Florida
ACLU, Robbyn E. Blumner, wrote in the St Petersburg Times:

Throughout history and around the world, involvement by the
armed forces in civilian law enforcement is one of the trademarks of
a repressive regime. Yet the administration's proposals would chip
away at the wall that separates the two and, by that action, greatly
enhance the power of the presidency. In the wrong hands, the
results could be devastating to freedom.

Much of the military's intrusion has been accomplished without
public notice. For example, the Pentagon has greatly expanded
JROTC programs. Last year, the American Friends Service
Committee found retired military personnel teaching approximately
310,000 students, ages 14 and up, in about 2200 high schools (with
another 700 on the docket). As the AFSC pointed out:

Public schooling strives to promote respect for other cultures,
critical thinking and basic academic skills in a safe environment. In
contrast, JROTC introduces guns into the schools, promotes
authoritarian values, uses rote learning methods, and consigns
much student time to learning drill, military history and protocol,
which have little relevance outside the military.

It pays off, though, for the Pentagon. Although the JROTC denies
it is engaged in recruiting, 45% of all cadets completing the
program sign up, mostly as enlisted personnel. AFSC also found
that JROTC programs are more often found in schools with a high
proportion of non-white students -- now providing 54% of all
cadets -- and in non-affluent schools.

And what are these cadets being taught? Says the report:

A comparison of the JROTC curriculum and two widely used
civilian high school civics and history textbooks demonstrates that
the JROTC curriculum falls well below accepted pedagogical
standards. Units on citizenship and history are strikingly different
from standard civil texts on these subjects.

For example, . . . the JROTC text portrays citizenship as being
primarily achieved through military service, provides only a short
discussion of civil rights; and downplays the importance of civilian
control of the military. . . .

In comparison to the civilian history text, historical events in the
JROTC curriculum are distorted . . History is described as a linear
series of accomplishments by soldiers, while the progress
engendered by regular citizens is marginalized. America's wars are
treated as having been inevitable.

While it claims to provide leadership training with broad relevance,
in fact the JROTC curriculum defines leadership as respect for
constituted authority and the chain of command, rather than as
critical thinking and democratic consensus-building . . . Finally, the
text encourages the reader to rely uncritically on the military as a
source of self-esteem and guidance.

Further, at a time that schools are trying desperately to discourage
violence, the JROTC is teaching students how to kill more
effectively. It is also teaching them -- in a text that addresses the
"Indian menace" that "Fortunately the government policy of pushing
the Indians farther West, then wiping them out, was carried out
successfully. "

Colin Powell's army

And just where did the idea come from for the expansion of
military indoctrination in our high schools? From none other than
that very media model of a major modern general -- Colin Powell .

Following the LA uprising in 1992, writes Steven Stycos in the
Providence Phoenix, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
"proposed a massive expansion of the program. Powell urged the
new units be targeted to inner-city youth as an alternative to drug
use and gang membership." In New England the number of students
involved nearly tripled.

Was Powell seeking citizen officers to balance the academy-trained
military? Absolutely not. The JROTC students are grunt-fodder.
Besides, while referring to ROTC as "vital to democracy," Powell
closed 62 college-based ROTC units during this same period. The
inevitable result was that the proportion of academy-trained officers
rose and the role of the citizen-officer diminished.

You may recall that Powell was the man whom the media pushed
for president, depicting him as in the mold of Dwight Eisenhower.
The media forgot to tell us that while Eisenhower warned of a
growing military-industrial complex, Powell has been one of its
biggest beneficiaries and boosters. While Eisenhower fought to
restore democracy, Powell fought to preserve sheikdoms. While the
Eisenhower-era military followed the wartime orders of strong
civilian leaders like Churchill and Roosevelt, the Powell-era
military won't even follow Bill Clinton's orders in peacetime. While
Eisenhower was part of a unique military demobilization after the
Second World War, Powell was among those who prevented
demobilization after the Cold War. On top of which he wants kids
to know that the Indians were a menace.

Taking charge of the drug war

One might further ask just when it became the business of the chair
of the Joint Chiefs of Staff to set policy on drugs and urban gangs,
but in today's Washington the question won't produce more than a
shrug. Thus when, upon McCaffrey's appointment, Clinton
transferred $250 million from the Pentagon to the drug czar's office,
no one took notice. The accounts are already heavily commingled.

Browsing DOD literature makes this clear. For example, there is
the Manual for Civil Emergencies that says it applies not only to
the various branches of the military services but serves as a
reference for other Federal, State and local agencies on how the
Department of Defense supports civil authorities and DOD assets
can be used to support civilian leadership priorities in returning
their communities to a state of "normalcy."

Those are DOD's quote marks around the last word -- a reminder
that what may be normal to a general may not seem normal to an
ordinary citizen. You have to watch the language carefully. For
example, the manual defines hazards as "natural or man caused
events, including, without limitation, civil disturbances, that may
result in major disasters or emergencies."

And what are civil disturbances?: "Riots, acts of violence,
insurrections, unlawful obstructions or assemblages, group acts of
violence and disorder prejudicial to public law and order. . ."

In short, words are so broadly defined as to mean almost anything
the Pentagon wants them to mean -- right down to a noisy crowd at
the street corner. As Mort Sahl once pointed out, a federal
conspiracy is now defined as "whenever two or three are gathered
together."

Another unnerving manual is the resource guide for the 1994
Counterdrug Managers' Course at the National Interagency
Counterdrug Institute at Camp San Luis Obispo CA. In it we learn
that among the problems ordinary cops may face is that "the vast
DOD bureaucracy will overwhelm the requesting law enforcement
agency."

The manual adds reassuringly, "To date such fears have proven to
be unfounded. DOD has not become a law enforcement agency . .
There is, however, much that DOD can do without usurping a
police role."

A few pages on, however, the manual lists what some of these
things are:

In appropriate cases, armed forces personnel and equipment will be
detailed directly to law enforcement agencies to assist in the fight.

The Department of Defense will be prepared to assist the
Department of Justice with its responsibilities for incarceration and
rehabilitation of drug criminals, through means such as training
federal, state, and local personnel in the conduct of rehabilitation-
oriented training camps for first-offense drug abuses and providing
overflow facilities for incarceration of those convicted of drug
crimes.

[DOD will] arrange for assigning military personal to federal drug
law enforcement agencies and the ONDCP [the office of the drug
czar] to perform liaison, training, and planning functions as
appropriate to assist in implementation of the National Drug
Control Strategy and the DOD guidance for implementation of that
strategy.

[DOD will] review the potential for DOD to provide temporary
overflow facilities, upon the request of appropriate federal, state, or
local authorities, for incarceration of individuals convicted of drug
crimes.

Verbal shell games are being played here. On the one hand, the
Defense Department is declared not to be a law enforcement
agency; on the other, its personnel and equipment "will be detailed
directly to law enforcement agencies to assist in the fight."

Such postmodern linguistic mush is a key part of the camouflage
used to conceal the military's mission creep. For example, the Navy
is prohibited by the Posse Comitatus Act from engaging in
domestic law enforcement, so the Coast Guard gets around this by
hoisting a Coast Guard flag on any naval vessel it wants to use. The
ship thereupon becomes a Coast Guard vessel -- for the sole
purpose of circumventing the law.

Of particular concern to anyone wishing to retain a democracy in
the US are the oblique references to concentration camps for drug
offenders. To be sure, the manual prefers Maoist phraseology --
"rehabilitation-oriented training camps" -- but it means the same
thing. This idea may have been launched some years back by a
former high US drug official named Robert Dupont, who proposed
in the Washington Post that there be mandatory drugs tests for
those attending school or getting a driver's license. Those who
failed drug tests repeatedly would be incarcerated in "large
temporary health shelters." There would be some invasion of
privacy and civil rights, the doctor admitted, but "this is a price we
would need to pay for life in a modern, interdependent community."

The concentration camps, the manual notes, could also be used to
provide "temporary overflow facilities . . . for incarceration of those
convicted of drug crimes" at the request of "appropriate" officials.

Both Dupont and the manual use the word temporary. Does this
refer to the quality of the gulags' construction or to the transitory
nature of their need? And if the latter, then what precisely are the
conditions under which temporary overflow facilities would be
required? One thing history teaches us is that drug use rises and
falls in a stately fashion; there are no sudden mass LSD binges or
waves of ecstasy parties that sweep the nation. On the other hand,
what can change rather rapidly is the government's desire and
willingness to lock persons up --such as under martial law.

Finally, the manual indicates that not only are military personnel
assigned to the drug czar but that the nation's domestic drug
strategy is subject to "DOD guidance for implementation of that
strategy." In other words, under McCaffrey our drug program will
be run by a general, aided by military personnel, funded by military
dollars and guided by military policy. In short, it is not unlike the
sort of arrangement McCaffrey's Southcom has worked out for
places like Bolivia and Colombia. Our cities have become just
another third world country to keep under the military's control.

The handwriting has been on the wall for a long time. The Review
has previously reported that in speaking before the 1991 National
Guard Association Conference, Lt. General John B. Conaway,
Chief of the National Guard Bureau, said:

Our commander in chief has declared war on drugs. Our mission as
America's National Guard in this war is clear: make America drug-
free in as short a time as possible using any means necessary no
matter what the cost.

So between January and August of the following year, the National
Guard made nearly 20,000 arrests, searched 120,000 cars and
searched over 1200 buildings. Said one National Guard official,
"The National Guard is America's legally feasible attitude-change
agent."

The regular Army, however, was anxious to get in the act as well.
Lt. Gen. J. H. Bindford Peay III, the chief of staff for operations
and plans, asserted in an Army publication a few years back that
military forces are required for such purposes as internal
peacekeeping, anti-drug operations and support of civil authorities
to maintain stability in a rapidly changing America. Said Peay:

We can look forward to the day when our Congress repeals the
Posse Comitatus Act and allows the Army to lend its full strength
towards making America drug-free.

And Inside the Pentagon quoted the commander-in-chief of the US
Special Operations Command saying in a speech:

[Drugs are] the greatest threat that is out there . . . We've got to get
our stuff together. The battle is not going to be won in the source
countries or in the transit countries. The battle is going to be won
here in the United States and we better start doing something about
it.

Major General Barry McCaffrey reporting for duty, Sir.

Such dreams have been partly realized without even bothering to
repeal the troublesome Posse Comitatus Act. Thus we now find
Army reservists working with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation
in anti-pot forays. Said one Army official:

We want the public to become more aware of what we're doing.
This is an ongoing war on our soil. We want people to see the
Army involved in a war right here -- a war against drugs . . . We're
fighting a war in our own hometowns -- a war we'll fight every day
until, finally, we win.

Over-flights and litterbugs

Considerable benefits accrue to those civilian law enforcement
agencies that kowtow to the military. For example, AP has reported
that the Pentagon intends to give police departments 2,000 of its
helicopters over the next few years. On the other hand, when
Arizona Governor Fyfe Symington spoke of using the state national
guard to keep the Grand Canyon open during the recent budget
crisis, the Pentagon went on alert and prepared to federalized the
Arizona militia if necessary to prevent any such residual display of
states rights.

Of course, bringing the might of the Pentagon to bear on
recalcitrant pot planters is not quite as heroic as defeating the Evil
Empire. And it can have some peculiar results. For example,
citizens in Monterey County CA have been complaining about a
US Marine invasion of the Los Padres National Forest and nearby
private lands. These incursions are part of Operation Alliance run
by a intergovernmental "coordination center" that handles military-
civilian actions in California, New Mexico, Arizona and Texas.
The operation is under the control of Joint Task Force 6 in El Paso,
which according to a Forest Service memo, "is now scheduled to
handle all military drug raids done thru local law enforcement in
the lower 48 states and Puerto Rico. The Forest Service gets
military support by going through Operation Alliance." (All
military drug raids? Apparently no one has told the Forest Service
that the Pentagon is not a law enforcement agency.)

For example, Mission JT-105-96 carried out "approximately
October 5 through October 31, 1995" included:

Military over-flights and photography of National Forest Service
land

Aerial reconnaissance about 500' from the ground, but allowing
aircraft as low as 100' for "confirmation" and as low as 75' for
"inserting and extracting military personnel via rappel, fast-rope
and spy operation."

"Listening/observation posts on National Forest and National
Forest Wilderness areas" and "overnight bivouac."

Landing aircraft in the wilderness area in emergencies.

A situation report from one of the Marine teams described finding a
"garden" and then tracing the waterlines to it. Later that afternoon a
jogger wandered into their midst. They gave him a drink of water
and lied to him about their purpose, claiming that they were
training.

On October 15th Team Two was discovered by a woman on
horseback who was clearly not pleased to find them. They repeated
their lie about training. She said she feared for her daughter's safety
and that they had trespassed and broken a water main. She also
blew the whistle on the operation when she got back to safety.
Soon thereafter both Congressman Sam Farr and the Monterey
Herald called and the "mission was compromised."

There were other complaints. An investigative report cited
allegations made by concerned residents that this patrol had
established a campfire, littered, defecated and left soiled toilet
paper in an exposed condition in the watershed that supplies water
to several homes.

The investigator found the allegations were true but happily had not
occurred on private property.

The Civil Liberties Monitoring Project, formed by local citizens
twelve years ago when the first assaults began, counted 100
complaints of invasions of privacy and illegal searches in 1995.
There was also "a surprising amount of damage from helicopters."

According to CLMP:

Helicopters overflights are often conducted at or near tree-top level
(say 150' from the ground) despite an agreement by law
enforcement to maintain a 500' height except when actually landing
or taking off. The noise from these low flights is incredibly loud,
causing much disturbance to wildlife, domestic animals and of
course, human beings. A sudden loud noise from above triggers
fight or flight response in most birds and animals. Much of the
injury to animals is impossible to document in a largely forested
rural area like the Mateel, but we have documented the deadly
injury to a horse, death of a deer and its fawns, stampeding of cattle
and destruction of eggs and young birds in the nest at several
commercial aviaries. This latest effect is especially disturbing as we
have several endangered species of birds in our forests including
the spotted owl.

Adults can generally handle the effects of overflights. They get
angry, call their congressperson, call the local sheriff, and make
complaints. They document their grievances with us. This reduces
the long-term effects upon them, if you don't count a deep and
abiding distrust of law enforcement and government in general.
Two groups cannot handle the psychological effects well, however.
They are children and Vietnam vets with flashback problems. We
have documented cases of children becoming fearful of going
outside, where they had previously enjoyed gardening with their
parents; of nightmares about helicopters, and similar effects . . .

Vietnam vets flashbacks are well known, and we are seeing them
here. In the worst case the vet was simply advised by his doctor to
abandon his home and leave the area until the raids ended.

Military lurkers

One of the ways the military conducts its domestic version of
psychological and civil operations is to spy on American citizens.
As far back the early 40s, for example, Army intelligence kept tabs
on the likes of organizer Saul Alinsky. The practice blossomed
with the civil rights and peace movements, possibly even, in the
view of some investigators, including direct involvement of Army
agents in the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

Today, the practice continues albeit in modern garb. According to
the Computer Fraud and Security Bulletin, the National Security
Agency is already spying on the Internet by "sniffing" data at key
router and gateways hosts. NSA is also said to have made deals
with Microsoft, Lotus and Netscape to prevent anonymous e-mail
or encryption systems on the Net.

And last July, Charles Swett, who works for the Pentagon office
handling "special operations and low intensity conflict" wrote an
internal memo titled: Strategic Assessment: The Internet. The
report, uncovered by the Federation of American Scientists,
provides an overview of the Internet, particularly its usefulness for
spying on both Americans and foreigners and for spreading
disinformation during psychological operations.

Of course, Swett didn't use those words, so to be absolutely fair
let's quote the man:

The Internet could also be used offensively as an additional
medium in psychological operations campaigns and to help achieve
unconventional warfare objectives. Used creatively as an integral
asset, the Internet can facilitate many DOD operations and
activities. . .

The Internet is a potentially lucrative source of intelligence useful
to DOD. The intelligence can include . . . information about the
plans and operations of politically active groups.

Networks of human sources with access to the Internet could be
developed in areas of security concern to the US, and these sources
could be oriented to seek specific needed information. If contracted
and managed correctly, such a system could be much more
responsive and efficient than the current complex, unwieldy,
intelligence tasking and collection processes we must use.

If it became widely known that DOD were monitoring Internet
traffic for intelligence or counterintelligence purposes, individuals
with personal agendas or political purposes in mind, or who enjoy
playing pranks, would deliberately enter false or misleading
messages. Our analysis function would need to account for this. A
great deal of "brain power" exists on the Internet, and if it could be
harnessed and channeled for productive purposes, it might be a
useful addition to DOD's informational and political assets. Any
such use, of course, would have to be protected by appropriate
security measures.

It would be possible to employ the Internet as an additional
medium for Psychological Operations (Psyops) campaigns. E-mail
conveying the US perspective on issues and events could be
efficiently and rapidly disseminated to a very wide audience. DOD
intelligence agencies should investigate the role of the Internet in
helping coordinate the operations of political activists and
paramilitary groups in regions of interest.

The Internet should be incorporated in our Psyops planning as an
additional medium.

Means of employing the Internet offensively in support of our
unconventional warfare objectives should be employed.

While the talents of civ ops and pys ops could be clearly quickly
turned from third world lands to our own, Swett specifically
declares that his recommendations "should be carried out only in
full compliance with the letter and the spirit of the law, and without
violating the privacy of American citizens."

Yet Swett himself sets a poor example. After all, he has already
been spying on us. And his report gives a strong sense of what the
forthcoming dossiers of the Pentagon's Internet strategic assessment
office will look like.

For example, he sees as "startling" the use of the Internet to
organize against the Contract with America with its charges that it,
in effect is encouraging "class war, race war, gender war, and
generational war."

He lumps as fringe groups the white supremacist National Alliance,
the Michigan Militia, National Organization for the Reform of
Marijuana Laws, Earth First, and People for Ethical Treatment of
Animals.

He quotes from the Wall Street Journal:

Fringe groups are increasingly going on-line, gathering converts
and seeking validation on the Internet. The network's far-flung links
and low-cost communications are a boon to backwater groups that
can't afford to use direct mail to make their pitches . . . The more a
group is shut out of the mainstream, the more likely it is to go on-
line.

Swett takes particular interest in the Institute for Global
Communications and the Association for Progressive
Communications, which he describes as "largest and most active
international political groups using the Internet." He calls IGC/APC
(used by the Review among tens of thousands of others in the US
and elsewhere) as "clearly a left-wing political organization." And
he informs his Pentagon colleagues that its conferences addresse
subjects such as:

Lists of companies and/or products to be considered for a boycott .
. . State security activities, surveillance, tapping The Left List Aid
in the planning and execution of campaigns to end the nuclear
weapons era.

Information relevant to the campaign opposing US military bases in
Australia and the Asian-Pacific region. News, announcements and
information from War Resisters International, on all aspects of
anti-militarist and nonviolent action worldwide. Information and
discussion regarding the anarchist and anti-authoritarian movement
and non-hierarchical organizing.

Alarmed by all this, Swett shows the spook's unique perspective on
matters political, lumping anti-authoritarian movements and non-
hierarchical organizing as among the threats the Pentagon should
keep its eye on. He also notes that "groups of conspiracy theorists
exchange e-mail explaining their often bizarre theories about
conspiracies conducted by the US government in general and DOD
in particular."

If this all sounds a tad familiar; it is. Only the source material back
then was hard copy and it was deposited not on hard disk at the
Pentagon but in the files of J. Edgar Hoover.

Roots

The military's extraordinary role in contemporary civilian life can
be traced back at least to the Carter administration. In a July 1983
series in the San Francisco Examiner, two-time Pulitzer Prize
winner Knut Royce reported that a presidential directive had been
drafted by a few Carter administration personnel in 1979 to allow
the military to take control of the government for 90 days in the
event of an emergency. A caveat on page one of the directive said,
"Keeping the government functioning after a nuclear war is a secret,
costly project that detractors claim jeopardizes US traditions and
saves a privileged few." According to Royce there was a heated
debate within the Carter administration as to just what constituted
an "emergency."

The issue arose again during the Iran-Contra affair, but even in the
wake of all the copy on that scandal, the public got little sense of
how far some America's soldiers of fortune were willing to go to
achieve their ends. When the Iran-Contra hearings came close to
the matter, chair Senator Inouye backed swiftly away. Here is an
excerpt from those hearings. Oliver North is at the witness table:

REP BROOKS: Colonel North, in your work at the NSC, were you
not assigned, at one time, to work on plans for the continuity of
government in the event of a major disaster?

BRENDAN SULLIVAN: Mr. Chairman?

SEN INOUYE: I believe that question touches upon a highly
sensitive and classified area so may I request that you not touch on
that.

REP BROOKS: I was particularly concerned, Mr. Chairman,
because I read in Miami papers, and several others, that there had
been a plan developed by that same agency, a contingency plan in
the event of emergency, that would suspend the American
constitution. And I was deeply concerned about it and wondered if
that was the area in which he had worked. I believe that it was and I
wanted to get his confirmation.

SEN INOUYE; May I most respectfully request that that matter not
be touched upon at this stage. If we wish to get into this, I'm certain
arrangements can be made for an executive session

With few exceptions, the media ignored what well could be the
most startling revelation to have come out of the Iran/Contra affair,
namely that high officials of the US government were planning a
possible military/civilian coup. First among the exceptions was the
Miami Herald, which on July 5, 1987, ran the story to which Jack
Brooks referred. The article, by Alfonzo Chardy, revealed Oliver
North's involvement in plans for the Federal Emergency
Management Agency to take over federal, state and local functions
during an ill-defined national emergency.

The Constitution & national emergencies

The Constitution does not directly address the question of what
should happen in the midst of a major national catastrophe. But
neither does it give the slightest support to notions of turning
matters over to non-elected civilian or military officials with
plenary powers. The best guide is to be found in Amendment Ten
which states that the powers of the federal government are those
delegated to it by the states and the people. The states and the
people have not delegated the power of martial law. Thus in a true
crisis (such as a nuclear attack) the answer seems quite plain: the
country would be run as a loose confederation of fifty states until a
legitimate federal government could be re-established. In the
interim, the highest officials in the land would be the governors.

According to Chardy, the plan called for 'suspension of the
Constitution, turning control of the government over to the Federal
Management Agency, emergency appointment of military
commanders to run state and local governments and declaration of
martial law.' The proposal appears to have forgotten that Congress,
legislatures and the judiciary even existed.

In a November 18, 1991 story, the New York Times elaborated:

Acting outside the Constitution in the early 1980s, a secret federal
agency established a line of succession to the presidency to assure
continued government in the event of a devastating nuclear attack,
current and former United States officials said today.

The program was called "Continuity of Government." In the words
of a recent report by the Fund for Constitutional Government,1
"succession or succession-by-designation would be implemented by
unknown and perhaps un-elected persons who would pick three
potential successor presidents in advance of an emergency. These
potential successors to the Oval Office may not be elected, and they
are not confirmed by Congress.

According to CNN, the list eventually grew to 17 names and
included Howard Baker, Richard Helms, Jeanne Kirkpatrick James
Schlesinger, Richard Thornberg, Edwin Meese, Tip O'Neil, and
Richard Chaney.

The plan was not even limited to a nuclear attack but included any
"national security emergency" which was defined as:

Any occurrence, including natural disaster, military attack,
technological or other emergency, that seriously degrades or
seriously threatens the national security of the United States.

This bizarre scheme was dismissed in many Washington quarters as
further evidence of the loony quality of the whole Iran/contra affair.
One FEMA official called it a lot of crap while a representative for
Attorney General Meese described it as 'bullshit."

The problem is that there is a long history of compatibility between
madness and totalitarian takeovers, Adolph Hitler being a prime but
far from lone example. Further, there is plenty of evidence in this
case that the planning was far more than simply an off-the-wall
brainstorm. At least one report found that the US Army had even
gone so far as to draft a legal document providing justifications for
martial law.

Nor was the planning limited to crises involving the total
breakdown of society as in the aftermath of a nuclear attack.
Among the justifiable uses of martial law were "national opposition
to a US military invasion abroad" and widespread internal. dissent.

At least one high government official took the plan seriously
enough to vigorously oppose it. In a August 1984 letter to NSC
chair Robert McFarlane, Attorney General William French Smith
wrote:

I believe that the role assigned to the Federal Emergency
Management Agency in the revised Executive Order exceeds its
proper function as a coordinating agency for emergency
preparedness . . . This department and others have repeatedly raised
serious policy and legal objections to the creation of an 'emergency
czar' role for FEMA.

FEMA was clearly out of control. Another memo, written in 1982
to then FEMA director Louis Giuffrida and given only tightly
restricted circulation even within the agency, made this astonishing
assertion:

Over the long term, the peacetime action programs of FEMA and
other departments and agencies have the effect of making the
conceivable need for military takeover less and less as time goes by.
A fully implemented civil defense program may not now be
regarded as a substitute for martial law, nor could it be so
marketed, but if successful in its execution it could have that effect.

The memo essentially proposed that the American people would
rather be taken over by FEMA than by the millitary. When those
are the options on the table, you know you're in trouble.

The head of FEMA until 1985, General Louis Giuffrida, also once
wrote a paper on the Legal Aspects of Managing Disorders. Here is
some of what he said:

No constitution, no statute or ordinance can authorize Martial
Rule. [It commences] upon a determination (not a declaration) by
the senior military commander that the civil government must be
replaced because it is no longer functioning anyway . . . The
significance of Martial Rule in civil disorders is that it shifts
control from civilians and to the military completely and without
the necessity of a declaration, proclamation or other form of public
manifestation . . . As stated above, Martial Rule is limited only by
the principle of necessary force.

Those words come from a time when Giuffrida was the head of
then-Governor Reagan's California Specialized Training Institute, a
National Guard school. It was not, for Giuffrida, a new thought. In
1970 he had written a paper for the Army War College in which he
called for martial law in case of a national uprising by black
militants. Among his ideas were "assembly centers or relocation
camps" for at least 21 million "American Negroes."

During 1968 and 1972, Reagan ran a series of war games in
California called Cable Splicer, which involved the Guard, state
and local police, and the US Sixth Army. Details of this operation
were reported in 1975 in a story by Ron Ridenour of the New
Times, an Arizona alternative paper, and later exhumed by Dave
Lindorff in the Village Voice.

Cable Splicer, it turned out, was a training exercise for martial law.
The man in charge was none other than Edwin Meese, then
Reagan's executive secretary. At one point, Meese told the Cable
Splicer combatants:

This is an operation, this is an exercise, this is an objective which
is going forward because in the long run . . . it is the only way that
will be able to prevail [against anti-war protests.]

Addressing the kickoff of Cable Splicer, Governor Reagan told
some 500 military and police officers:

You know, there are people in the state who, if they could see this
gathering right now and my presence here, would decide their worst
fears and convictions had been realized -- I was planning a military
takeover.

The Reaganites were not, however, the only ones with such
thoughts. Consider this from a NSC directive written by Frank
Carlucci in 1981:

Normally a state of martial law will be proclaimed by the President.
However, in the absence of such action by the President, a senior
military commander may impose martial law in an area of his
command where there had been a complete breakdown in the
exercise of government functions by local civilian authorities.

The military coup of 2012

To those who would dismiss all the foregoing as the fantasies of a
paranoid conspiracy theorist, I fully understand. Such are our
times, such is the propaganda in which our minds swim, that the
real can frequently, almost inevitably, seem but a mirage.

But how about this? In the winter 1992 issue of Parameters, the
quarterly of the US Army College, there appeared an article by Lt.
Col. Charles J. Dunlap Jr. USAF Dunlap was a graduate of St.
Joseph's University, Villanova School of Law, the Armed Forces
Staff College, and a distinguished graduate of the National War
College. In 1992 he was named by the Judge Advocates
Association as the USAF's outstanding career armed services
attorney. In short, not your average paranoid conspiracy theorist.

Dunlap's article was called The Origins of the American Military
Coup of 2012. In it, he pretends to be writing to a fellow military
colleague in 2012, explaining how the coup had occurred. With
eerie precision he described America's current state:

America became exasperated with democracy. We were
disillusioned with the apparent inability of elected government to
solve the nation's dilemmas. We were looking for someone or
something that could produce workable answers. The one
institution of government in which the people retained faith was the
military.2 Buoyed by the military's obvious competence in the First
Gulf War, the public increasingly turned to it for solutions to the
country's problems. Americans called for an acceleration of trends
begun in the 1980s: tasking the military with a variety of new, non-
traditional missions, and vastly escalating its commitment to
formerly ancillary duties.

Though not obvious at the time, the cumulative effect of these new
responsibilities was to incorporate the military into the political
process to an unprecedented degree.

Dunlap quoted one of Washington's journalistic cherubs, James
Fallows, in a 1991 article:

I am beginning to think that the only way the national government
can do anything worthwhile is to invent a security threat and turn
the job over to the military . . . The military, strangely, is the one
government institution that has been assigned legitimacy to act on
its notion of the collective good.

Dunlap recounted the slow attrition of civilian independence from
the military:

In 1981 Congress passed a bill, the Military Cooperation with
Civilian Law Enforcement Agencies Act "specifically intended to
force reluctant military commanders to actively collaborate in
police work. By 1992, combating drugs had been declared a "high
national security mission."

By this same time, the military had become deeply involved in
environmental cleanup, and would regularly show up in uniform in
high crime areas.

The balance of power between the various services was being
undermined by an emphasis on "jointness," thus weakening an
internal check on the military.

Dunlap then imagined what might happen next:

Other problems were transformed into "national security" issues. As
more commercial airlines went bankrupt and unprofitable air routes
were dropped, the military was called upon to provide "essential"
air transport to the affected regions. In the name of national
defense, the military next found itself in the sealift business. . .
.The nations' crumbling infrastructure was also declared a "national
security threat." As was proposed back in 1991, troops rehabilitated
pubic housing, rebuilt bridges and roads, and constructed new
government buildings . . . . Voices in both Congress and the
military had reached a crescendo calling for military involvement
across a broad spectrum of heretofore civilian activities. Soon, it
became common in practically every community to see crews of
soldiers working on local projects. Military attire drew no stares.

Not so long ago, Stephen Rosenfeld of the Washington Post wrote
a bizarre and scary column praising one of the Army's advocates of
Dunlap's bad dream. Rosenfeld described US Army Major Ralph
Peters this way:

At home, use of the military appears inevitable to him -- though not
yet to an American consensus -- "at least on our borders and in
some urban environments" . . . He deplores our military's reluctance
to join the war on drugs, which he attributes to a fear of failure. He
would dutifully prepare for the traditionally 'military' missions, plus
the new one of missile defense. But he would be ready to engage
with drugs and crime, terrorism, peacekeeping, illegal immigration,
disease control, resource protection, evacuation of endangered
citizens . . .

What Dunlap was described and Peters advocated was not a bold
military stroke against the civilian government, but simply a coup
by attrition. Wrote Dunlap:

By the year 2000 the armed forces had penetrated many vital
aspects of American society. More and more military officers
sought the kind of autonomy in these civilian affairs that they
would expect from their military superiors in the execution of
traditional combat operations . . . They convinced themselves that
they could more productively serve the nation in carrying out their
new assignments if they accrued to themselves unfettered power to
implement their programs.

By 2012, it was all over.

Col. Dunlap's calculations are that we have about 16 years to come
up with an alternative approach.

And he may be a bit optimistic.

1 The author is on the board of the Fund for Constitutional
Government but did not work on this report.

2 This remains true. A recent poll showed that 47% of Americans
have a great deal of confidence in the military. The Supreme Court,
colleges and medicine were lumped at about 30% and every other
major institution lagged far behind. Only 15% have high
confidence in the white House and only 10% in Congress.

US Senate + Congress E-mail Addresses

New York Times documents military role
in theft of 2000 election

By Barry Grey
19 July 2001

In an extensive report published July 15, the New York Times shed new light on the methods employed by the Bush campaign to hijack the 2000 presidential election. The report, entitled “How Bush Took Florida: Mining the Overseas Absentee Vote,” was the product of a six-month investigation by the Times into Florida officials’ handling of ballots mailed from outside the US. These overseas votes became a focal point in the struggle between Bush and Democratic candidate Al Gore over the disputed Florida election.

The Times described how the Bush campaign waged a combined legal and propaganda offensive to pressure canvassing boards in Republican strongholds to accept overseas ballots that, under Florida election laws, were illegal and should have been rejected. At the same time, Bush lawyers pressed canvassing boards in Democratic counties to reject overseas ballots with identical flaws.

This effort to illegally increase Bush’s vote centered on hundreds of ballots from military personnel stationed overseas. The Republicans enlisted the aid of the military brass to increase the number of military ballots. They also pressed local election boards to validate military ballots that lacked postmarks, bore postmarks later than the November 7 Election Day, or failed to meet other legal requirements.

As a result, 680 of the 2,490 overseas ballots that were counted as legal votes after Election Day—more than one out of every four such ballots—were defective. Of these, 288 were ballots that canvassing boards initially rejected on November 17, the deadline for receiving overseas ballots, but subsequently accepted under pressure from the Bush campaign, the military and the media.

Bush’s official margin of victory in Florida was 537 votes. Citing the Florida Department of State’s web site, the Times reports that without the overseas ballots counted after election day, Gore would have won Florida, and thus the White House, by 202 votes.

The Bush campaign and Florida officials, headed by Governor Jeb Bush, the brother of the Republican candidate, engineered this systematic violation of Florida election laws at the same time that they were declaring any delay in the statutory date for certifying the Florida vote to be impermissible, on the grounds that election laws had to be strictly enforced.

The flagrantly unequal treatment of overseas ballots flew in the face of the other major contention of the Republicans, namely, that the lack of specific and uniform criteria for judging disputed ballots in different counties violated the equal protection clause of the US Constitution. This novel idea, if consistently applied, would invalidate elections at every level in the United States, where election laws differ from state to state and rules and procedures vary from county to county across the country. Nevertheless, it was ultimately seized on by the right-wing Republican majority on the US Supreme Court, which based its 5-4 ruling halting manual recounts and handing the presidency to Bush on this supposed violation of the equal protection principle.

Even as the Times presented its account of fraud and criminality on a massive scale, it sought to lend a veneer of legitimacy to the election. The article stated, without explanation, that the Times found “no evidence of vote fraud by either party.” It went on to say that its investigation “found no support for the suspicions of Democrats that the Bush campaign had organized an effort to solicit late votes.” At a later point the article declared, “There is no evidence that the Pentagon knowingly delivered ballots cast illegally after Election Day.”

The authors further cited an authority on voting patterns who estimated that Bush would have retained a margin of 245 votes even if the flawed overseas ballots had been discarded.

But the facts presented by the Times’ account contradict these conclusions. For example, the article noted that 17 percent of military overseas ballots from Florida voters arrived without postmarks, despite military regulations that require all mail to be postmarked. This extraordinary rate of unmarked mail stood in sharp contrast to the rest of the country, where less than 1 percent of all overseas military mail arrived without a postmark during the election period.

The Times reported that Pentagon officials it interviewed “could not fully explain why so many ballots were arriving without postmarks.” One obvious explanation, however, is that there was a concerted effort to solicit late votes from military personnel and ship them without postmarks so as to conceal the fact that they were illegal.

Two political issues emerge most starkly from the Times’ report. The first is the role played by the military in fixing the election.

The involvement of the military brass in the Florida impasse assumed a public form after Friday, November 17. On that day two critical events occurred. County canvassing boards in Florida rejected nearly a third of the overseas ballots received after Election Day, including hundreds of ballots from military personnel. Even though the certified total of overseas ballots increased Bush’s official margin by hundreds of votes, it failed to give the Bush campaign the cushion it deemed necessary to overcome the additional votes expected to go to the Gore camp if Republican attempts to halt hand recounts in south Florida failed.

Even more ominous for the Republicans, the Florida Supreme Court enjoined Secretary of State Harris from carrying out her plan to preempt the manual recounts and certify Bush the winner in Florida on Saturday, November 18.

The response of the Bush campaign was to launch a witch-hunting attack on Gore, portraying the efforts of the Democrats to weed out illegal military ballots as an anti-American attack on the armed forces. Montana Governor Marc Racicot, a leading spokesman for the Republican campaign, called a press conference on November 18 and declared, “...the vice president’s lawyers have gone to war, in my judgment, against the men and women who serve in the armed forces.”

Retired General Norman Schwarzkopf, the commander of US forces in the Persian Gulf War and a public supporter of Bush, was brought forward to denounce Gore for denying servicemen their right to vote. Schwarzkopf made a point of reminding military personnel that if Gore won in Florida, he would be their new commander in chief—a statement that could only be read as a thinly veiled incitement to insubordination.

In the ensuing days the Bush campaign conducted a two-pronged drive to force local election officials to validate military ballots they had rejected on November 17. On the legal front, they filed suit against 14 canvassing boards in Republican counties, charging individual canvassing board members with violating federal law by rejecting military ballots without postmarks or other legal requirements. These suits had no merit, and were all eventually dismissed. But they had the desired effect of intimidating recalcitrant canvassing boards.

On the propaganda front, Republicans at both the national and state level obtained, through the good graces of the military brass, the names and e-mail addresses of military personnel stationed abroad whose ballots had been rejected. They solicited statements from sailors and Navy pilots denouncing Gore and the Democrats, which were then fed to a compliant media. At the height of the furor, to cite one example, Katie Couric of the NBC “Today” program interviewed the wife of a Navy pilot who protested the disqualification of her husband’s ballot.

The second critical issue highlighted by the Times articles is the impotence and cowardice of the Democratic Party, and, above all, its prostration before the military. Even with the presidency on the line, both the presidential and vice presidential candidates of the Democratic Party collapsed in the face of opposition from the military brass.

The Times provides an account of the appearance of the vice presidential candidate, Senator Joseph Lieberman, on NBC’s “Meet the Press” program on Sunday, November 19, one day after the Republicans launched their witch-hunt over the military ballots. Even Democratic officials in Florida were shocked by Lieberman’s capitulation before the Republicans and the Pentagon.

Lieberman refused to defend Democratic officials who were opposing the inclusion of illegal ballots. Instead he said he would give “the benefit of the doubt” to military ballots, and called on Florida election officials to “go back and take another look” at ballots that had been rejected two days before.

Presidential candidate Gore was no less prostrate before the military. He rejected the advice of campaign strategists who urged him to challenge the illegal ballots. The Times quotes Joe Sandler, who was the Democratic National Committee’s general counsel, recalling how Gore explained his position:

“I can give you his exact words. ‘If I won this thing by a handful of military ballots, I would be hounded by Republicans and the press every day of my presidency and it wouldn’t be worth having.’”

Another Gore aide is quoting as saying, “Gore got very stuck on the notion that if he became president it was not in the national interest that he have a relationship characterized by his mistrust of the military.”

These are extraordinary statements. They amount to the acceptance of a military veto over the outcome of a national election and the occupant of the White House.

The subordination of the military to civilian rule is a cardinal principle of the US Constitution. The fact that this cornerstone of democracy has become so eroded is a stark indication of the decay of bourgeois democratic institutions in the US.

The Times report confirms the analysis of the 2000 election made by the World Socialist Web Site: it was a watershed event, marking a decisive break with the traditional forms of rule of American capitalism. The details revealed in the Times exposé underscore the enormous dangers facing the working class. Its basic rights are threatened by a political system moving inexorably in the direction of authoritarian rule.

The absence of any serious opposition within the political establishment to the right-wing attack on democratic rights is reflected in the media response to the Times’ report. Consistent with their complicity in both the impeachment conspiracy and the theft of the 2000 election, the major networks have given virtually no coverage to the Times articles and the issues they raise.

The Democrats have remained similarly silent. The last thing they want is a public airing of the criminality that underlies the Bush administration.

Nevertheless, the very fact that this story has appeared in a leading publication of the establishment has far-reaching objective significance. The Times report is only one example of a growing genre of political post mortems on the stolen election of 2000. In recent weeks numerous reports have appeared documenting the widespread disenfranchisement of working class and minority voters in Florida. Books have begun to appear indicting the Supreme Court for its role in flouting democratic rights and handing the election to Bush.

These publications reflect a deep-going crisis of political rule in the US, a crisis that has been exacerbated by the installation of a government by anti-democratic means. Seven months after Bush’s inauguration, the political establishment is unable to put to rest questions about the legitimacy of his administration. Within the ruling elite there is a gnawing fear that the breach with democratic methods is discrediting the entire political system and paving the way for the radicalization of broad layers of the working population.

Bioweapons: The Silent Assassins

by Scott G. Ewan

<http://news.bmn.com/hmsbeagle/107/notes/feature1>

Posted July 20, 2001 · Issue 107

Abstract

In terms of their destructive potential, biological weapons have the edge over conventional and chemical weapons. In this article, the author examines why these "silent assassins" may no longer be restricted to the latest box-office blockbuster.

Picture the scene . . .

We've seen the same scene over and over in the movies. The evil megalomaniac has trapped our agent in the island fortress. The camera pans to the ventilation system as greenish fumes begin to billow into his cell. We know that without an ingenious plan, our hero will certainly succumb to the noxious vapors and suffer an agonizing last few moments. Amazingly, he always escapes.

Real life is a bit different from this fictitious scene. But nerve gases and other chemical weapons, in reality, have been used to terrifying effect in all of the world's major conflicts from this century. Such agents have proved to be available to extreme factions and have been used in terrorist attacks - exemplified by the attack by the Aum Shinrikyo cult on the Tokyo subway. These products, from the best researchers in chemistry of the twentieth century, have gained for their creators the same notoriety that Albert Einstein earned for the atomic bomb.

Recent years, however, have seen the focus shift from the physical, tangible world of chemical warfare to a far more insidious and lethal form of aggression. Now it's biologists whose talents have been exploited for their destructive potential.

Historical Hysteria

Biological weapons, curiously, are nothing new. Examples have been cited from before biblical times of water being poisoned with herbs. And history tells us that plague victims were thrown over the walls of besieged Kaffa in Crimea in an attempt to force the inhabitants out. The novelty of late-20th- century biological agents is in their directed development, potency, and deployment.

Mother Nature's Edge

Biological weapons have the edge over conventional and chemical weapons in a number of ways. A biological attack could be difficult to prove. Biological agents, by their very nature, are difficult to recognize as illicit, as they are derived from endogenous flora and fauna. So if a positive identification were obtained, the agent conceivably could have originated from quite an innocent source. Also, it can take days, even weeks, for these agents to take effect, by which time the aggressors would have had plenty of opportunity to flee and cover their tracks.

A biological attack, then, could appear to be nothing more than an isolated natural outbreak, perhaps at worst caused by carelessness rather than deliberate subterfuge.

Name Them - Shame Them

So what exactly are we talking about? What are biological weapons? When talking about biological agents, we generally are referring to bacteria, viruses, and toxins extracted or derived from biological sources such as bacteria, plants, and marine animals.

Biological toxins may be up to 100,000 times stronger than chemical agents.

Toxins have been grouped, in the past, with chemical weapons, but they are now recognized as a distinct grouping. For example, toxins are natural, difficult to make (even on a small scale), and relatively toxic; they are odorless and tasteless; and they actually have legitimate medical uses. All of these properties are in stark contrast to modern chemical weapons.

In claiming a relatively high toxicity, the "top" biological toxin - botulinum toxin - boasts an LD50 (in mice) of 0.001 mg/kg, compared with the chemical warfare agents sarin and soman, which can only claim 100 and 64 mg/kg. Indeed, the most potent chemical weapons still can't get their LD50s below the mg/kg range.

Toxins, like chemical weapons, effect their lethal results immediately. Unlike chemical weapons, though, toxins are difficult to disseminate. Due to their complicated production, they are available in only small quantities. Although effective as tools for close-quarter assassinations, they are not an efficient choice as tools of mass destruction.

Latent, still relatively potent, and available in larger quantities are the far more frightening agents - those that might be used in a real war or terrorist attack. These silent assassins are the bacteria and viruses.

Dead Before You Know It

It's too late once the symptoms appear.

Viral and bacterial infections take time to show their presence. Often, by the time they do, it's too late.

For example, the virus that causes Ebola is a particularly nasty one. It kills more than 90 percent of those infected - in a quite horrific manner. It liquefies the internal organs and connective tissues, and blood seeps from every orifice. The victim's death is painful, with violent convulsions. Currently there is no cure for Ebola, nor is there any effective treatment. It is not even very well understood how the disease is spread - possibly through contaminated blood, possibly just from breathing the same air. Linking back to the Aum Shinrikyo attack on the Tokyo subway, 40 devotees traveled to Zaire ostensibly with the intention of securing a supply of the virus, potentially for use in a similar attack.

Ebola, anthrax, plague, smallpox - any of these could be used as a weapon.

Thankfully, not all of these weapons are quite so virulent. Examples of agents that can be used as biological weapons include the bacteria that cause anthrax (Bacillus anthracis), plague, tularemia, and brucellosis. Common viral agents cause Q fever, smallpox, encephalitis, and hemorrhagic fever.

Anthrax spores, when inhaled, initially produce symptoms common in less severe infections, such as headache, sore throat, and coughing. But in less than a week, respiratory failure has resulted in death.

And this is where the "beauty" of biological warfare comes to the fore.

Only a few kilos would be required.

A possible scenario could include an anthrax attack on a small- to medium-size city. A few kilograms is all that would be required, released downwind by aerosol dispersion.

A matter of days after the initial attack, unwitting victims are incubating the disease. Believing they are suffering from nothing more than a cold, they seek no further treatment until the more severe symptoms appear, by which time it may be too late. Even if they seek medical help in time, there may already be many thousands more suffering from the same symptoms. With hospitals soon filled to the bursting point, intensive care is impossible to maintain, and many thousands ultimately die as a result of the attack.

The perpetrators have the advantage.

The perpetrators, though, have given themselves a lot of breathing room. By ensuring that their deployment would take a number of days to be recognized, they could have left the country with little, if anything, linking them to the attack. And there is one other benefit to the aggressor in this scenario. Biological weapons do exist naturally in our environment. It is feasible that no evidence will remain to fix conclusively the outbreak as deliberate.

Defense

Defense against a biological attack could present further concerns for a group or nation under threat. Chemical and conventional weapons - even nuclear warfare - have relatively predictable effects. Biological weapons, on the other hand, have widely varying effects. Prevention by vaccination, for example, is therefore very difficult to manage. Many armed forces often vaccinate their troops against common agents such as anthrax prior to, or during, conflicts. Clearly, though, this approach only addresses one disease at a time. To attempt to vaccinate against all biological agents would be impractical, as well as futile. The development of novel biological weapons will always outstrip the development of preventative programs.

Economic Effects

People are not the only targets.

People are not the only targets for biological agents, as they usually are with chemical weapons. The direct destruction of life is not the only choice for a terrorist. Looking to the longer term, an effective alternative to attacks on people is one that has a devastating effect on the economy of the unwary victims. For example, a would-be attacker could hire a crop sprayer to spray wheat stem rust fungus over a few fields in the American Midwest. The effect might not be obvious immediately, but certainly by harvest time most of the country - and the world - would be aware that a considerable portion of America's grains were spoiled. The long- term effect would be disastrous. Not only would America's wheat sales be lost for that particular harvest, but the spores produced during infection would cause a domino effect that could have an impact on farming across states for many years to come.

Today and Tomorrow

Unfortunately, biological weapons have a bright future ahead of them. Although banned by innumerable treaties and protocols, the proliferation of these agents is sure to continue as long as there are individuals, groups, or nations willing to consider their use. Indeed, it is likely that more biological weapons will be developed. The expansion of genetic technologies permits an increase in the effectiveness and potency of novel biological agents. Alas, it is legitimate laboratories that do the hard work. The knowledge gleaned from them is used, lacking the discipline it took to achieve it, by those bent on destruction. New biological weapons could, even now, be under development. Weapons with increased effectiveness and ease of manufacture, decreased visibility, and with enhanced dissemination properties could soon hold the world for ransom. This is no film fantasy - the potential is already here.

Please click here for references.

Scott G. Ewan is a biochemist working for a multinational health-care firm in a support role in pharmaceutical manufacture.

Susan Wolsborn is Web designer of HMS Beagle.

Endlinks

Strengthening the Biological Weapons Convention and Implications on the Pharmaceutical and Biotechnology Industry - a review of global efforts to eliminate biological weapons. From Current Opinion in Biotechnology, 1998, 9:312-318. Full text available from BioMedNet.

Facing the Global Challenges Posed by Biological Weapons - examines the threat posed by biological weapons, historical attempts to control them, and emerging policy. From Microbes and Infection, 1999, 1:12:1059-1066.

The Threat of Smallpox and Bioterrorism - argues for the destruction of smallpox stocks. From Trends in Microbiology, 2001, 9:1:15-18. Full text available from BioMedNet.

Nuclear Biological and Chemical Medical - a source of medical documentation, training material, audio and video clips, and current news about biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons.

Chemical and Biological Weapons Nonproliferation Project - offers a collection of articles from the Henry L. Stimson Center.

Chemical and Biological Terrorism: Research and Development to Improve Civilian Medical Response - a 1999 National Academies report.

Chemical and Biological Weapons Resource Page - provides extensive news and information related to chemical and biological weapons. From the Center for Nonproliferation Studies at the Monterey Institute of International Studies.

Cal Poly CBW Page - offers an overview of the history of chemical and biological weapons and the efforts to eliminate them.

Center for Civilian Biodefense Studies - an informative site with online publications, news, and meeting information.

Related HMS Beagle articles:

A New Strategy for Fighting Biological Terrorism - Donald A. Henderson argues that the United States is ill-prepared to fight biological terrorism.

Reprieve for a Killer: Saving Smallpox - examines why the United States opted not to destroy its store of smallpox virus.

Biohazard: The Chilling True Story of the Largest Covert Biological Weapons Program in the World by the Man Who Ran It - a review of the book by Ken Alibek with Stephen Handelman.

Chemical and Biological Warfare Online - a review of online resources.

__________________________________________________________________

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Biological Weapons and Warfare

Robert Sterling Editor,

The Konformist http://www.konformist.com

http://www.wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=23838

Worldnet Daily 7/29/2001 ----------

Q&A Viruses as global population control?

Geoff Metcalf interviews bio-terrorism expert Dr. Len Horowitz

Editor's note: In recent years, allegations have surfaced in the press suggesting that the U.S. government has had a hand in suppressing information about such matters as disease-tainted blood, pathogenic contamination of vaccines and Gulf War Syndrome. One example: A growing number of medical researchers reportedly are worried that a monkey virus which contaminated polio vaccines given to tens of millions of Americans in the 1950s and '60s may now be causing rare human cancers.

Are such allegations true? And, if true, why would anyone want to cover up such important information?

Today, WorldNetDaily staff writer and talk-show host Geoff Metcalf talks with acclaimed author, health-rights activist and bio-terrorism expert Dr. Len Horowitz and asks him hard questions about these and other related matters.

Metcalf's daily streaming radio show can be heard on TalkNetDaily weekdays from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. Eastern time.

Question: Len, for four decades, government officials have insisted that there is no evidence the simian virus called SV40 is harmful to humans. However, I remember a decade ago you telling me about the dangers of vaccines tainted with simian virus. Now, apparently, in recent years, dozens of scientific studies have found the virus in a steadily increasing number of rare brain, bone and lung-related tumors – the same malignant cancer SV40 causes in lab animals.

Answer: You know what they are telling you is actually a suppressed version of the truth. The Bible says a half-truth is a whole lie. That's what this is. Essentially what they are saying is that they have discovered that polio vaccines up to about 1965, or there about, had been infected with a monkey cancer virus known as SV40 – and that all the other polio vaccines are safe.

Q: Not true?

A: That is hogwash. In fact up through the 1990s, all the polio vaccines – the Sabin oral polio vaccines, the little sugar cubes that we all took – essentially contained as many as 100 of these simian monkey cancer contaminates per dose. In fact, the Food and Drug administration that we think is protecting our children's health and safety, and our own, has actually had to turn a blind eye to this because their hands were tied.

Q: How so?

A: By proprietary laws and non-disclosure agreements forced upon them by the pharmaceutical industry.

Q: There was an amazingly revolting sidebar to the long story I referenced earlier. Apparently they wanted to follow up with the oral vaccine so they did a study and they didn't tell the participants what they were doing, and they selected low-income blacks. I was shocked. Hell-o? This is Tuskegee all over again.

A: You might be referring to the Kaiser Permanente easy measles vaccine given to about 1,200 black children – it blew out all their immune systems, left several of them dead and, ultimately, the rest of them suffering for the rest of their lives.

Q: No, it was Cleveland General Hospital – early '60s.

A: Well, we had actually about a year or two ago the same type of thing happen to black children in California at Kaiser Permanente – which is the nation's leading vaccine laboratory – for human experimentation. They did the same thing to black children. And what the CDC director said in defense after the horrible truth got out was, "Sorry. Sometimes these things just fall through the cracks."

Q: Bullfeathers! They specifically chose low-income black families with doses ranging up to 100 times the dose recommended for adults. They did it because these people aren't going to scream about it. You get into this more in your new book, "Death in the Air" – when is it coming out?

A: It's coming out officially August 1st. However, WorldNetDaily already has it.

Q: I'm anxious to read the book and see the documentation. Meanwhile, in your previous work about AIDS, Ebola and all these emerging viruses – you are of the opinion that these things aren't happening spontaneously – they are not accidental and, in fact, they are man made. Right?

A: Exactly right. That's what the book "Emerging Viruses: AIDS and Ebola" does best. It's the definitive expose on who made these types of viruses, when they made them, how they made them, and why they made them.

Q: So it wasn't an accident with some rhesus monkey biting somebody and one guy starting the nightmare?

A: Exactly. However, yes, AIDS came from African monkeys. But what they don't tell you – and what we show in "Emerging Viruses" – is what they did to those monkeys.

Q: What did they do to the monkeys?

A: They simply took the monkey viruses – including the one you were talking about earlier, the SV40, the 40th monkey virus ever discovered. It was already known in 1961 to cause cancer in virtually every animal it was injected into – and therefore it was in fact predicted by the top official at the FDA (the Bureau of Biologics at the time) that we could expect epidemics of cancer unlike the world has ever seen within 20 years of the polio vaccine. Her name is Bernice Eddy and she said that in front of Congress in 1972. It took almost a decade before she got to Congress and told the legislators that is what they could expect if they allowed the continued contaminated vaccines, the polio vaccines particularly, to go out. What the vast majority of incriminating evidence in "Emerging Viruses" relays is the fact that the Army's sixth top biological- weapons developer, Litton Bionetics – that had the contract to supply the monkeys for the vaccine manufacturers – essentially also had the contract to develop numerous AIDS-like and Ebola-like viruses during a largely funded and mostly secret "special virus-cancer program" that ran from February 12, 1962 to the mid 1970s.

Q: There are a lot of different theories about this, but the obvious question that always comes up is, if in fact this was done as you claim, how do you control the genie once you let it out of the bottle? Obviously if folks are involved in a nefarious covert operation like this, they want to protect themselves and their families – how do they avoid getting infected by it?

A: That's a very good question. Let me say this first: The fact is that this genie is largely, perhaps not entirely, but largely under control. The controlling agencies – and heavily implicated are people linked to Litton, the Rockefeller complex – are also the directors of the population councils that call for a 50 percent United States population reduction. There are the population controllers all over the world.

Q: That has been a U.N. objective for at least 30 years, to reduce world population by 50 percent.

A: Yes. So that if you get government documents that I have in my library and I reference in "Emerging Viruses" – which were actually given to me by a Pentagon official – you see that in the projections of what AIDS will do even if it kills off 30 to 35 percent of the population, this government report states that is simply not enough. They want somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 percent population reduction. So when I look at AIDS, there are sure some "untargeted' victims – what might be considered casualties of war.

Q: Collateral damage?

A: Yes. But I think that having just returned from Africa and seeing the devastation there – and I'm still recovering emotionally – this is what was called for, not only Henry Kissinger's 1971 publication, National Security Memorandum 200 that we draw on largely in the book "Emerging Viruses" to lay out the whole center of the book which deals with the targeting of black people and third world nations for depopulation – and by Kissinger who, according to two CIA directors, oversaw all the CIA's biological weapons development programs as well as virtually ordered the development of these types of viruses.

Q: Let's get back to my original question. How do they prevent their families, their loved ones, themselves from becoming collateral damage?

A: OK, good. The answer is that the therapies that have been effective have been suppressed. Essentially, what we are looking at is standard Machiavellian theory and practice.

Q: You mean they have an antidote?

A: Yes. There are. In fact, when you go through the research, you see that when Dr. Robert Gallo was overseeing Litton Bionetics and the National Cancer Institutes project in developing these types of unique, bizarre, immune-suppressive leukemia, lymphoma, sarcoma cancer viruses, they were developing antidotes every step along the way. We proved that. We showed the documentation. There is no question about that. But what is more interesting to me is that therapies such as oxygenation and bioelectric therapies which can blow out the viruses – because you know the AIDS virus cannot live in oxygen.

Q: No. I didn't know that.

A: And essentially that has been heavily suppressed by the Rockefellers and the blood bankers who would prefer, instead of cleaning up the blood that they could through oxygenation technologies, that they simply allowed these contaminated blood supplies and vaccinations to go out. What that creates is an economic boom for the pharmaceutical companies – which they also control.

Q: In other words, they create the problem before they offer a solution to the problem?

A: Standard Machiavellian theory and practice.

Q: What do you mean when you say "the techtronic era" is here?

A: That is in regard to the most advanced methods of killing populations. First coercing them, enslaving them, as well as killing them. That is essentially what the book "Death in the Air" deals with. Brzezinski made the quote famous – the term techtronic – that was in his book. We draw on that somewhat but actually go in way beyond that in dealing with the military think-tanks of United States and NATO and begin to look at how what is called "non-lethal" warfare is conducted.

What we have been talking about is in fact non-lethal warfare. Where you don't kill populations like in a bomb or a gunshot but you make them sick. You then make them dependent on pharmaceuticals which are actually a military-pharmaceutical complex run by the same players – the global elite – and then ultimately these populations become enslaved to the pharmaceuticals and economically debilitated along with their nation states.

Q: I recently saw a piece which dovetails with what we are talking about. The headline was "U.S. will refuse to sign germ-weapons treaty." It said, "America was heading for a new confrontation with its allies yesterday after it emerged that the Bush administration will refuse to accept an arms-control deal to enforce a ban on biological weapons." Hey, connect the dots.

A: Well, they are using and deploying biological weapons all over the place. Take for example, this upper-respiratory infection that won't quit; that about half the United States population currently has, where multiple antibiotics and physician visits simply can't treat this hard-to-diagnose illness; that doctors say is a "flu-like" illness. But it's not a virus, so it's not a flu. What it is, is a mycoplasma agent that we discussed earlier in last year's book.

Q: Is that the same thing that the feds released over San Francisco in the '50s?

A: No, that's a different one – and a couple of other agents too that they were using that also wreaked havoc with people's immune systems, as well as caused respiratory problems. But, no, this is a real, targeted weapon. It is a cross between a bacteria and a virus. It's called mycoplasma. I previously reprinted the patent – the United States government patent by Dr. Lothsome of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology for the development of this agent that he discusses at length in scientific literature.

Q: How do you hold these bastards accountable for what you claim they are doing?

A: I don't think we can. I've struck out on Capitol Hill. The only thing that we can do is wake people up to what is going on and then, because the primary risks are contaminated blood and contaminated vaccine. It just came out that more people are dying – about 200,000 people are dying from physician-induced illnesses and misappropriation of drugs versus about 15,000 are dying from gunshot wounds.

Q: How can they call it "non-lethal" biological and chemical weapons and warfare applications when people are dying?

A: That's exactly the point. Just the name of it – they named it that so that they could allow more people to say, "Well, it's not really killing people." But it is. It's killing people slowly, and in the process they are making vast fortunes off of humanity's suffering.

Q: Do you have any advocates in congress at all?

A: We don't have anyone brave enough to really stand up. I'll give you an example: Dan Burton. Burton's congressional investigating committee began to investigate exactly what we are talking about – the links between contaminated vaccination and biological weapons contractors and military operations …

Q: Wait a minute: A while back, Senator Riegle did something – over 10 years ago, didn't he?

A: He investigated Gulf War Syndrome and he came up with a tremendous amount of very valuable information – and then he got hell for it. More recently, around last October, Dan Burton's committee actually called me – because the word got out from all the books I've published on the issues and the documentation that backs it – they called me, the hearings administrator called me, and said, "Dr. Horowitz can you please send us your documentation?"

Q: And?

A: I was pleased to, on my dime, send everything overnight and a copy of the book "Emerging Viruses." I got a call about two weeks later and I was invited – they said, "Dr. Horowitz, we would like to have you attend, if you care to." I said that's wonderful. I'll make my plane reservations right away. And I said, I'll prepare a testimony, is that right? She said, "Oh no. You misunderstand me. We're just inviting you to the hearings. We're not going to ask you to testify." So I told them I didn't want to come under those conditions.

Q: Wait a minute. They wanted all your documentation but didn't want to hear from you?

A: I heard a couple of days later that they simply didn't want to hear me testify because, "your material is like throwing boulders on the top of legislators heads. At this point, we prefer to just wake them up a little bit by throwing a few pebbles."

Q: Meanwhile people are dying.

A: That's exactly what I said, Geoff. I said, that's very nice. It wouldn't bother me, if there weren't millions of people dying whose blood is on your hands.

Q: What, if any, regulatory, oversight, investigative group is there? I recently saw an article noting the CDC can't even admit that condoms don't work as well as they want. You can't count on them.

A: There are none. Allegedly, we have the Center for Disease Control as well as the Food and Drug Administration protecting our health and safety. In fact, the book "Death in the Air" does a slam-dunk on these people to show the documents that prove that public health is misnamed. Today we are going to get vaccinated full of contaminated vaccines that deliver monkey cancer viruses and a hideous array of other things for the [purpose of]: "public health" for "infection prevention." There are no regulating agencies. Those regulating agencies that we think are supporting us and our children's health and safety are actually puppets of these literally international chemical-pharmaceutical cartel elitists.

Q: One of the more distressing clams is that the agencies we anticipate to provide some kind of oversight and protection either don't exist or are not doing their job. However, somebody has got to manage this effort?

A: I believe that is definitely the case. Again, I would say who is at the hub of the wheel is the Rockefeller family. Everything from the spraying of malathion produced by Chevron, a Rockefeller company, to the creation of West Nile virus outbreaks – or alleged outbreaks – along the eastern seaboard; this again was managed entirely by all the organizations that fall under the thumb of the Rockefeller complex. You're looking at the international bankers. You're looking at the global elite. What some people call oligarchy, some people call illuminati. In essence there are about 13 families that have virtually all the financial control that run the world economies. And these people also are committing genocide. That's simply defined as the mass killing of people for economic, political and/or ideological reasons. That's what's going on. You've got global genocide.

Q: That is a harsh charge. Why?

A: You've got people that are being taken out because the people who run the economies have a desire to reduce half of the world population simply because smaller populations are easier to control. And they have all the money they need – it's not about making money anymore in this New World Order thing.

Q: It's about control.

A: Absolutely.

Q: Is there any gadfly that can help. Riegle did a magnificent job in his hearings. I have hard copies of them, although you can't order them anymore. If not a Dan Burton, is there a Bob Barr or Ron Paul or someone? Ron Paul is a doctor! Is there someone who is willing to even look at your material?

A: I'm very disappointed in Ron Paul, who supposedly represents our entire bent on these issues. I personally went into Ron Paul's office. Unfortunately, at that time, he was running for re-election and he didn't have any time for me. All they are concerned about is getting re-elected and raising funds to do that. And that's the problem.

Q: So where does that leave "we the people"?

A: It leaves us with having to gain knowledge in round about ways. For example, WorldNetDaily is a fantastic resource for this sort of thing. We have to find alternative venues for the information. And, secondly, what to do? Like Jesus once said, "My people die of lack of applied knowledge." Now that we have the knowledge, what does it mean? Turn to alternatives. Alternative therapies. The five steps for preparing your temple of God to defend itself against these current and coming plagues: Creating detox strategies, acidification to make the viruses and bacteria and yeast and cancer cells disappear out of your body, boosting immunity every way possible. Again, steps four and five have been heavily suppressed by these same people who bring on the diseases. Oxygenation is miraculous, and bioelectric technologies. Stuff based on Nicola Tesla's work – all of these are fantastic and have been heavily suppressed.

Q: Len, this stuff has been going on since at least the '50s that we know of. Are we going to have more of these ubiquitous viruses coming out eventually?

A: Yes. That's exactly what is going on. And you are right, exactly, dating it too.

Q: I'm sorry, we're crunched on time, but after I read your new book "Death in the Air," we'll do this again soon.

A: Geoff, we are publishing the illuminati code. We have their code now and wait until you see what they are! SPECIAL OFFERS! Hot new book! "Death in the Air" Is public seeded with biological time bombs in vaccines, chemtrails? The truth about vaccines and viruses Are AIDS, Ebola tools of New World Order?

Geoff Metcalf is a talk-show host for TalkNetDaily.

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Roads End

from: http://www.ecologynews.com/cuenews31.html

U.S. Air Force Linked to Electronic Warfare Attack in Tennessee
By Alfred Webre, EcoNews Service (Vancouver, BC)

HARTSVILLE, TENN - Newly released documentary and eyewitness evidence now links an apparent July 6, 2001 electronic warfare attack on a radio station and weekly newspaper in Hartsville, Tennessee to a nearby unacknowledged secret access project (USAP). This secret project, eyewitnesses say, includes the U.S. Air Force as paymaster, U.S. government aircraft as transportation and security craft; military troops in black uniforms; and black unmarked triangular aircraft. The project may also include a secret electronic warfare unit capable of disabling nearby media outlets with destructive electromagnetic energy.

It has now known that an official U.S. Air Force cheque was used to pay for the clandestine installation of massive telephone switching equipment at a defunct Tennessee Valley Authority nuclear power plant about five miles from the target media outlets. The private contractor who installed the unusually large switching system at a former nuclear power plant that is still officially defunct reported this to the WJKM investigators on condition of anonymity.

Historically, the U.S Air Force has pioneered in the development and use of electronic warfare against civilian targets and populations, notably in the NATO war in Yugoslavia.

Speaking to a live radio audience on July 21, WJKM general manager Ted Randall for the first time publicly released the results on his station's official on-going investigation of the attack. Dan Fluehe and Matt Aaron of WJKM, host Clyde Lewis along with this reporter, Alfred Webre, participated in the radio program.

WJKM's investigation has eliminated other possible causes of the electromagnetic blast, such as power transformer malfunction caused by birds or internal mechanical problems. Centrexnews reporter Joel Skousen, who initially reported that birds caused the electronic attack, declined to participate in the radio program.

Although the nuclear facility has been officially closed for some time, eyewitnesses now testify to clandestine activities going on at the site. These include sightings of tractor-trailer trucks entering and leaving the former nuclear power plant at 2 or 3 AM; sightings of C-130 military aircraft flying over the facility as if to land; sightings of unmarked black helicopters monitoring the area; sightings of military troops in unmarked black uniforms; and - yes - multiple witness reports of black triangular craft hovering over the former power plant. Civilians venturing near the site have also reported being aggressively ejected by a private police force of about 30 plain-clothes men.

Randall presented live and audiotaped eyewitness testimony of the destructive effects of the electronic attack, including a tell-tale flashing blue pulse that accompanied the destruction, and usually accompanies the discharge of electromagnetic pulse weapons. He also presented audio recordings of the audible electronic hum that accompanied the alleged attack, a clear electronic signature of an electromagnetic weapon attack.

The accompanying surges during the event fit the pattern of an electronic attack. According to WJKM, " These surges are not just coming into the power lines. They are also entering the radio station through phone lines and the antenna system. This is evident in blown telephone equipment. Sometimes the equipment is not

destroyed but the program settings are scrambled or wiped out."

On the air, Randall described photographs of dead, electronically- fried birds that littered a mile-square area around the radio station, now posted on the station's Internet website at http://www.1090wjkm.com/

Randall stated that local residents are experiencing adverse health effects. Randall said, "It is also interesting that according listeners have called in, there has apparently been an increase in what they are calling fibromyalgia. This is a disease name appointed to the unexplainable severe and disabling pain throughout the entire body over recent years, as well as, an increase in headaches mimicking migraines that are not actual migraines."

Randall documented the 2.4 Richter underground seismic earthquake that struck the area on July 7, the day after the electronic attack, from 10-10:30 PM.

Randall also posted the HAARP magnetometer readings on the WJKM website for the two days - July 6 and July 7. Both the electronic attack and the unusual earthquake were accompanied by massive, anomalous bursts of electromagnetic pulse energy from HAARP, the U.S. Navy's electromagnetic pulse military facility and possible environmental weapons system in Gakona, Alaska. Coincidentally (and perhaps causally) HAARP's magnetometer showed massive spikes of electromagnetic energy for both days.

According to Randall, " At about 10:45 AM Friday [July 6], radio station WJKM and CMR (Country Music Radio), with studios in Hartsville, Tennessee was knocked off the air by a very powerful strange energy blast! There was a crystal clear blue sky, no clouds or rain. It was not lightning"

According to WJKM, in the attack, "All the radio station's lines were knocked out.

Several power transformers were blown several blocks away from the studios (smoke seen billowing out of one). All phone lines at the newspaper (The Hartsville Vidette), the local farm co-op and all other phones in this small radius were knocked out! Radio station transmitter lost all MOSFETS and the output - tuning network. All computers at WJKM lost motherboards, network cards etc. ISDN was knocked out. Most all the equipment Zephyr codec and EAS all knocked out."

These effects on radio transmission systems closely resemble the effects on urban radio, television, power transmission and generation facilities attacked by U.S. Air Force electronic bombing in electronic warfare missions in recent military operations worldwide, including Yugoslavia and Iraq.

How and why was electronic warfare carried out in rural Tennessee? From the known profile of electronic weaponry, the electronic attack upon WJKM appears to have been caused by a tactical electromagnetic weapon, emitting a directed electromagnetic plasma, beam, pulse, etc. at the target. Electronic weapons with this capability are known, and can be land mounted in a facility like the former power plant, mounted in portable facilities like vans, trucks, helicopters or airplanes.

Electronic weapons may even be space-based, on satellite platforms. This reporter has personally met with an Assistant Secretary of Defense at the Pentagon who confirmed the existence of such secret space-based weapons as early as 1977.

An alternative electronic warfare delivery system may involve newly constructed relays for the HAARP installation in Alaska. The potential tactical electronic warfare applications of HAARP are under investigation. Serious public interest researchers maintain that HAARP's electromagnetic energy may cause effects such as earthquakes, such as occurred on July 7 in Hartsville. Electromagnetic weapons have been used in tectonic warfare, intentionally causing earthquakes. Electromagnetic pulse energy accompanies most earthquakes. Research shows that ultra low frequencies emitted by the HAARP installation may affect the human limbic system, and be used for mood management and mind control.

The close resemblance of the Hartsville attack to other U.S. Air Force electronic warfare led to speculation that radio station WJKM may have been chosen as a test target for a clandestine electronic warfare unit located within the power facility, or to which the power facility serves as electronic relay point. The likelihood that the electronic attack was accidental, rather than an intentional military test, is low, given that the targets were media outlets.

One purpose of such test could be to evaluate the physical impact of electronic warfare on U.S. domestic radio installations, a well as the impact of intimidating the local community, as well as the U.S. media reporting of such attacks. The U.S. military has a long history of secretly testing weapons on its unsuspecting civilian population, a practice that is illegal.

Another clue to the motive behind the disinformation attacks may lie in eyewitness accounts of military troops in black uniforms, wearing light blue patches, and military vehicles bearing license plates with the letters "UN" on them. This scenario would be consistent with a disinformation mission, in which United States government troops would be disguised with mock United Nations insignia in order to spread propaganda rumours regarding the actual source of this state terror. In fact, it would appear that U.S. paramilitary troops are carrying out military attacks on the U.S. civilian population. This modus operandi has been characteristic of Central Intelligence Agency sponsored warfare in developing countries, notably Guatemala.

Randall, Dan Fluehe, Clyde Lewis, and this reporter, Alfred Webre, all noted that the electronic attacks targeted two media offices directly - a radio station and a newspaper - both protected entities under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution.

Randall indicated that station WJKM and its parent corporation are pursuing an official investigation of the electronic attack, including surveillance of activities at the former TVA power plant. The U.S. Congress has legislative oversight over the many federal agencies that may be involved in this secret project, including the U.S. Air Force, the Tennessee Valley Authority, and other defense "black budget" agencies.

Asked if his company intended to contact its members of Congress to seek a congressional investigation, Randall responded that WJKM is taking this attack and its investigation most seriously. WJKM's Congressperson is Bart Gordon, Dean of the Tennessee Delegation, and currently serving his ninth term in Congress, representing the Sixth District, which includes 15 Middle Tennessee counties.

KEY LINKS: WJKM's Report on the Electronic Attack http://www.1090wjkm.com/

Real Audio archive of GROUND ZERO radio programs, Clyde Lewis host http://www.clydelewis.com/

Environmental War Desk: Electronic warfare http://www.ecologynews.com/cuenewsdesk.html

Was the Seattle-Vancouver earthquake triggered by environmental (electronic) war? http://www.ecologynews.com/cuenews12.html

U.S. Air Force Linked to Electronic Warfare Attack in Tennessee http://www.ecologynews.com/cuenews31.html

Alfred Webre, JD, MEd, was a member of the Governor's Emergency Taskforce for Earthquake Preparedness for the State of California, 1981-82.

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CENTER FOR RESPONSIVE POLITICS MONEY IN POLITICS ALERT Vol. 6, #29 October 26, 2001 tel: 202-857-0044, fax: 202-857-7809 email: info@crp.org, web: www.opensecrets.org http://www.opensecrets.org/alerts/v6/alertv6_29.asp

The Joint Strike Fighter:
A Look at the Lobbying over the Richest Defense Contract in History

By Holly Bailey

In the shadow of the most devastating terrorist attack in history, the Pentagon today announced its most lucrative contract ever: a $200 billion deal with Lockheed Martin to build the Joint Strike Fighter, a next-generation combat jet that ultimately will replace aircraft used by the Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps.

Awarded on a "winner takes all" basis, the contract calls for construction of 3,000 JSFs and was considered so momentous that Lockheed Martin and Boeing--the only two companies who competed for the contract--spent hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars on advertising and other lobbying efforts in an attempt to sway federal officials in their favor.

During the calendar year 2000, Lockheed Martin spent more than $9.8 million lobbying members of Congress and the Clinton administration, more than double the $4.2 million the company spent during 1999. Among the company's newest lobbyists: Haley Barbour, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee.

Boeing, meanwhile, reported $7.8 million in lobbying expenditures during 2000--about $400,000 less than its spending during the calendar year 1999. In July, Boeing hired Rudy de Leon, a former deputy secretary of defense under President Clinton, as its top Washington lobbyist--a move that angered some key Republicans, including Rep. J.C. Watts (R-Okla.) who called the hiring "a slap in the face" to the GOP.

In terms of campaign spending, it was a battle of giant vs. giant. During the 1999-2000 election cycle, Lockheed Martin contributed just over $2.7 million in soft money, PAC and individual contributions to federal candidates and parties. More than two-thirds of that money went to Republicans. On the other hand, Boeing gave $1.9 million to federal parties and candidates, split almost equally between Democrats and Republicans. That doesn't include Lockheed Martin's $225,000 in checks written to the Bush-Cheney Inaugural Fund or Boeing's $100,000 contribution to the same committee.

Just months into the 2001-02 election cycle, contributions from the two companies have been far more even. Through June 30th of this year, Boeing had contributed just under $468,000 to federal parties and candidates, 58 percent to Republicans. Lockheed Martin, meanwhile, had contributed $550,875, more than two-thirds to the GOP.

With all that money, it's not surprising that the backroom politics over the deal got testy in recent weeks. Boeing, for example, accused Lockheed Martin of deliberately playing up its Texas ties in pressing for the JSF contract, hoping to score points with the Bush White House. (Lockheed Martin plans to build the planes at its plant in Fort Worth.)

Meanwhile, Boeing elicited support from some of the most influential leaders on Capitol Hill, including House Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.), House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt (D-Mo.) and nearly every member of the Washington state congressional delegation. Gephardt last month sent a letter to the Pentagon urging it to award the JSF program to Boeing, which had planned to build the aircraft in St. Louis. Boeing was the No. 6 contributor to Gephardt's 2000 re-election campaign, contributing $13,500.

Click here for the web version of this report:

http://www.opensecrets.org/alerts/v6/alertv6_29.asp

(This is from the transcript of <The Fourth Reich in America Conference> which was held in SF in '88)

PROPAGANDA AND SOCIAL CONTROL A Panel Discussion featuring:

John Judge, Lori Bradford, Steve Hassna.

Brett McCabe: I'd like to introduce our first panel,

(snip)

Steve Hassna is a former Staff Sergeant, US Army and a Vietnam Veteran. He lives in Berkeley and is an activist for Veterans rights and against war. A poet and public speaker, he is also part of the Vietnam Speaker's Alliance and the National Committee Against Registration and the Draft.

(snip)

Steve Hassna: I'm going to talk about the military as far as an apparatus for controlling people. One of the jobs I had when I returned from Vietnam was I was issued this hat. Army Drill Sergeant. I was trained, by the US Army, in various tactics of psychological control to get 40 people at a time to do what they're told without them thinking about it.

I'm going to talk about the military as far as it's control and how it's used to manipulate people and get them to do things they normally wouldn't do. I left Vietnam, I was with the 101st Airborne division, as an Infantry Paratrooper, pointman, squad leader, tunnel rat. I was there in 1967-'68, I went through the Tet Offensive, returned here, and was issued this hat [Army Drill Sergeant] OK? The United States Army has what is called it's Drill Sergeant School. It's a 6 week course . . . [piercing sound from PA system] . . . Ow!

Lori Bradford: [half in jest] It's mind control.

Steve Hassna: OK . . . Drill Sergeant school is a six week course where you are trained to give instruction for basic training. Now, mentioned here today, has been an historical process of, if you don't know the historical process of what happened before, you have a

tendency of repeating it over and over again. I did not know the historical process that got us into the Vietnam conflict and consequently enlisted in the United States Army in l966. Later, when I got out of the army and started looking at what I had gone through and how I had been manipulated as a trainee and then controlled as a soldier in the field in Vietnam and then came back and was put through a school to then train people to go and do exactly what I had done a year prior.

I did not know when I went into the army that we had trained and financed Ho Chi Minh's forces during WWII to fight the common enemy, the Japanese. And one of the tactics we had trained Ho Chi Minh's people in was Col. Robert Rogers Rules of Order which is the basic Army Ranger tactics that were developed by Col. Robert Rogers during the French and Indian Wars in the 1700's here in the United States. These tactics were taught to Ho Chi Minh's people, aside from what they already knew about fighting in their own country.

I did not know this. I did not know or read the books, or study (because I was a child growing up, in the 50's), the different manipulative factors that we did as far as Southeast Asia to control the economy, the political atmosphere, the military atmosphere, and everything else.

And consequently I participated in that war, and then, like I said, trained 1200 young men to go and do exactly what I did.

And what did I train them in? I trained them in patriotism, in love of country, in amplifying the feeling of worth for your country by serving your country as it's a noble cause. And I also trained them

in very . . . um . . . it's embarrassing to me, it . . . it's shameful, but . . . tactics of hating the Vietnamese. I'll just use the Vietnamese as an example. But an American soldier was supposed to be in Vietnam to help the Vietnamese decide their own political destiny, as an ally. And yet in training, the Vietnamese were referred to as "gooks" and "slopes" and "dinks" and "zipperheads" and everything else that you could thing of to make the Vietnamese look subhuman and less than intelligent. So that when you killed them, you really weren't killing a human being, you were killing this subhuman creature.

And that was my job.

Even though that was not why I went into the military to serve my country. But that was the job that I did. And today, 20 years later, I still have a hard time sleeping at night.

Now, why would a country that is supposedly based on the foundations of freedom, democracy and equality for people, train their soldiers in such tactics? Because if you're gonna employ your troops in such an inhuman fashion, you have to have them operate against people and not look at them as being human.

We would have silhouette targets. Little pop-up silhouette targets at the rifle range. You'd shoot at them, the bullet would hit it and they'd fall down and then come back up. Electronically controlled. Human shaped. In the close range combat courses these silhouette targets were actual, you know, with a . . . a life-like figure was painted onto the silhouette target. And usually it was of a Viet Cong. The typical Viet Cong: the conical hat, the slant eyes, you know, and this glaring face at you. With like, maybe a red star on the hat. That you were then to develop an attitude towards the Vietnamese people that they were really not worth saving. That we were just there because . . . you know, we had to . . . you know . . ."save the world." But we weren't really gonna save this part of the world. We were gonna save the world, but the Vietnamese were . . . expendable.

On top of everything else, I also learned the astonishing fact that all military personnel are expendable. OK? No matter what your job in the military, you are infantry. The Marine Corps is honest, alright? The Marine Corps, you go into the Marine Corps, they tell you, "Whatever your job is, you're infantry." The Army says you're a "combat engineer," you're a "medic," you're a "this," you're a

"that," but when push comes to shove, you have a rifle in your hand and you will kill to survive because now you're in an absurd situation.

Alright, the military is a killing machine. The reason they have combat engineers is to build roads to the front lines. It's not there for some humanitarian aid like to build a bridge to help a village. It's to build a bridge to get across the river to blow the village up, OK? So? You understand this? These are little things that I did not realize at 19 when I went into the army. I thought that I was going to save the world because we were going to get overrun by these barbarians called Communists, OK?

The United States Army (I'll use that cause that's what I was in) is a very interesting mechanism. Everybody has a job. And all the jobs are interlocked, but at the same time, your job is better than the other person's job. So its constantly a competitive attitude. The thing about this is, is that in the military enlistment document they have a small clause that negates all your jobs. Section 5, paragraph B states, " . . . laws and regulations that govern military personnel may change without notice to me. These changes may affect my pay, allowances, benefits and responsibilities as a member of the armed forces, regardless of the provisions of this enlistment/re-enlistment document."

You are infantry, OK? It does not make any difference.

Now, many people go into the military for hundreds of different reasons: to get out of town, to leave, to go away, to find a career, to become a computer specialist, because you want to be macho and jump out of airplanes. I made the weirdest decision in my life, that I was tired of being controlled in school and having my folks tell me what to do, so I joined the United States Army. [laughter and applause]

One thing is, that the military will use these different things to get people to join, and even if they don't go along wholeheartedly with the military apparatus, they're at least good for a year. They've got you for at least a year. By the time a year is over, you're either so thoroughly disgusted . . . or . . . you're there forever. I was going to do 20 years when I went in. I had purposely designed myself to do 20 years in the United States Army. By the time my tour of duty was over in Vietnam, and the subsequent year as a Drill Sergeant, I was so disillusioned, upset, pissed off and downright bothered, that I couldn't wait to get out of the military as fast as I could. I left Fort Campbell Kentucky at 12:00 o'clock in the afternoon on a Thursday; I did not stop until I got to St. Louis. I wanted to get as far away from that place as I possibly could.

Because the military is a lie. And that lie becomes prevalent as you realize what you're doing over and over and over again.

You've read about the Holocaust, and you've seen the movies, and all the other stuff in WWII. You've heard about the Panzer divisions and the SS going across the Ukraine and Poland and Czechoslovakia and France and all the other places that they ran around and stomped on people. Well folks, the First Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division in l967 that went through Vietnam was NO DIFFERENT! ! ! We did NO DIFFERENT tactics; we burned everything in our wake and we killed it if it got in our way. Period.

That was a contradiction to what I was raised spiritually, morally, and politically, to conduct myself. And yet that is how the US Army operated in Vietnam.

And yet they turn around and they act like the Russians are being weird in Afghanistan because they use chemical/biological warfare. We defoliated five million acres of land that will not grow anything for almost one hundred and fifty years, and on top of that we killed Americans by having an additive in the defoliant Agent Orange called Dioxin. Lori mentioned that asbestos was known in 1918 and now they're just getting around to cleaning it up. Dioxin was known to Dow Chemical and different manufacturers of that herbicide in 1951. They knew it was lethal in l951. They did not remove dioxin from the herbicide because it is a by-product. It has nothing to do with the function of the herbicide. But, when you mix chemicals together, you get a by-product. They did not remove dioxin from that chemical because it would have increased production cost. So they said nothing. Now, you have "hysterical veterans" all over this country. That's what the VA calls us. We're "hysterical veterans," because we're wondering why we're dying, and we're being "hysterical" about the whole thing. I went to a conference on Agent Orange and a chemical company person said that, and I said: "You're goddam right I'm hysterical. You're trying to kill me; why shouldn't I be hysterical?"

They knew.

Now, the military is a function of the large corporations of this country. That's another little historical fact that I did not know about when I went to Vietnam at 20 years old. But, my job was to protect the political, economic, and military/strategic interest of the US corporate and government heads in this country, while carrying a rifle around Vietnam. Chase Manhattan Bank, Colt/Armalite, Northrup. You know the list of the Fortune 500.

Well, they couldn't tell me, they couldn't say, "Steve, you're going to Vietnam and you're going to kill as many Vietnamese as you can, so that Colt/Armalite and Chase Manhattan Bank make a profit." They couldn't do that because then I might have said: "Well, I don't really think that's what I want to do." But they used the thing of: "If we don't stop them there, they're going to take Burbank." OK? At 41 years old, if they want Burbank, they can have it. I've been there. There's nothing there. But at 19 that was a definite threat to me.

So after serving a year in combat and seeing . . . seeing and then not seeing . . . because in combat you become a person that you're watching something happen daily to a point where you don't see it happen anymore. The destruction becomes a blur. The bodies are like over there, out of your peripheral vision, and you really don't see them. Because if you focus on them, you go insane. Even though you are already insane . . . from being there. You go totally mad if you really focus on what you're doing, so you just act like it's not happening.

Now, when I got back and I was assigned to Drill Sergeant school, I was then trained in how to manipulate people to get them to go do what I had just done. And become just as numb. The US Army is not really a fancy, sophisticated entity in the psychological mind control like has been already talked about here today: the ultra-fancy CIA and everything else. They're real low key. They just teach you how to manipulate 40 people without them knowing it. Which is a pretty good trick. One of the things I was taught was that you go into a barracks in the morning, and you tell the people in the barracks: "We're having an inspection Saturday morning, and this inspection is a very important inspection. All inspections are important. We have to pass this inspection. But, we don't have enough mops and brooms and rakes, you know, in our platoon area, and we can't get them through the supply area because they've already got their requisitions in. But, C company across the street has got lots of mops and rakes and stuff like that." And then in the afternoon, you leave. And in the middle of the night, one of the squads from the platoon gets together and they go out and they get these mops and rakes and they bring them back, and then you pass the inspection.

OK, now, these people think they were getting mops and rakes so that they wouldn't get yelled at by their drill sergeant to pass the inspection; not realizing that they had actually made a military mission, accomplished that mission, and got back with as few causalities as possible, by "requisitioning" these mops and rakes.

They didn't realize that two weeks before, these ten people that were total strangers, from several different parts of the country, probably could not walk down the street together without tripping over each other, now snuck out and "requisitioned" these mops and rakes. And accomplished a military mission. They don't even . . . it doesn't dawn on them . . . that that was what was happening. That was what I was trained to do.

When I was going through basic training, I thought that drill sergeants were just people they just picked. "You, over there, here's a hat, go for it." I didn't realize till I got to this school that they were purposely taught these different mind controlling things. I would do things like, walk into the barracks at 4 o'clock in the morning and drop a heavy steel garbage can down a flight of stairs and then start yelling and screaming, and tell people to empty the building, and get out of the building, now. And they'd all be standing out in front in their skivvies and everything, shivering and all that sort of stuff, and then I'd tell them, "The reason we're having this exercise is because this wood frame building that was built in l941 can burn down in 3 minutes. So, I'm getting you ready to be able to evacuate the building at a moment's notice." And they believed that.

They did not realize until 8 weeks later that every time I said, "formation," these 40 people dropped what they were doing, ran to a designated area, got into a numerical order, and stood there and waited for the next command. And sometimes I would say, "OK, good, dismissed." And they'd get halfway away doing something else and I'd yell, "formation," to the point where they would instantaneously react to my voice.

And then I sent them to their advanced individual training.

That's what the military does. That's the end result of all this stuff. And it's very, very low . . . it's not even sophisticated . . . I mean these people aren't even imaginative. You know, I mean, what John and Lori are talking about is like these people are really sitting down and thinking how we can do this stuff. "We'll get some fancy drugs, implants, and everything else." The US military just hasn't got time for that. "We'll just traumatize them to hell and they'll do anything we tell them, just so we won't yell at them anymore." And that's the truth. I had trainees that would respond simply so I would not raise my voice at them. That they would do so so I would not pick them out of a crowd.

And a lot of times, we were trained in Drill Sergeant school to individually pick people out. As you're going through the training cycle, systematically go through and put everybody at least once or twice on the block. Do not let anyone in your platoon get out of the cycle without having had his ass chewed out. Period. So it was not like, these people thought they were just getting yelled at on the spur of the moment, where I would actually know, "Tomorrow, I'm taking this one out, the next day I'm taking these two . . . " And I would have a list as to just who I was going to go after, and when I was going to go after them, and why I was going to go after them. And I was trained to do that.

An interesting thing also, is that the military is a contradiction itself. I went through basic training. I graduated from basic training. I went into my Advanced Individual Training. I'm an infantry paratrooper. At AIT I was told; "Whatever you learned in basic training, forget, except, you know, how to shine your boots, make your bed, who to salute, how to salute and when to salute, and if in doubt, salute." OK? Clear. "Oh, OK, so I'm going to learn to be a paratrooper."

So I went and I learned to be an infantry paratrooper. Then I went to Vietnam. And I got there and they put me in a week's training. Preparatory training. You learn ambush tactics, booby traps, and all this other stuff. And the first thing I was told there was; "Whatever you learned in AIT, forget. This is Vietnam, and this is how it's done. You know how to shine your boots and make your bed, and you know who to salute and how to salute and when to salute, and if in doubt, salute." OK. I thought, "Alright, that's a little strange, but I can go along with that."

I got to my unit in the field. The first thing my platoon sergeant said was; "Whatever you learned up until this point, forget. This is Vietnam. You ain't got no bed, your boots are dirty, don't salute nobody." And I'm here for a year . . .

So, actually, what they could have done, in all intent and purpose, was and saved them a year's training, and price several thousand dollars, was take me from 1515 Clay, in Oakland, when I enlisted (I am from this area, so I went to Oakland for my induction) put me on a plane, give me a rifle, and send me directly to Vietnam. Because, when I got to my unit in Vietnam, they said, "Forget whatever you learned before, because it doesn't apply here."

And then when I got back, they made me a Drill Sergeant. And by the time I was done, I was ready to, well . . . shoot my officers. You know, I mean, just simply shoot somebody, because just of just the frustration, and the whole thing.

Now, what I'm trying to lead into is that the military apparatus is the end result of all the things that have been talked about on this panel today. That that is the stark reality. You have the CIA experimentation, you have the plots, you have the psychiatric control and everything else, but the military is the final result. And it hasn't changed much since I got out of the army in l969. I've kept abreast of it since l969, because I'm trying to figure out what happened to me.

And it hasn't really changed that much. They have changed names and numbers, job descriptions, but the fiasco that came down in Grenada was no different than the fiascoes that I went through in Vietnam. As far as bad intelligence, these guys didn't have maps, they gave them tourist maps. One guy had to call on the telephone to get an airstrike. You know, I mean, the Beirut fiasco where you take 250 Marines and put them completely out of their job description, because they're not designed to do this particular type of "hold a fortified position forever," and then you wonder why they get blown up. It's the same as Khe San when the Marines were put into Khe San which was totally out of their job description. The Marine Corps Commandant argued with Westmoreland because the Marines are not designed to do that. They take the beach, they hold it, they get reinforced, and they pull out; you know, that type of thing. Marines are not designed to hold anything for very long.

That's what the military does. And, that's because " . . . laws and regulations governing military personnel may change without notice to me . . . "

I've been writing poetry. I'd like to close with a poem because I feel that the governments of the world, not just the United States, but the governments, the main governments of the world, they're all working in cahoots with each other. OK, you know, the United States points at the Russians, the Russians point at us, and, "We're so bad," and "This is bad," and "They're bad," and they're working together, folks. Because it's easier to keep your population of people thinking the other side is so bad so that they'll fight for your country. I've been writing poetry since I got out of Vietnam and I've got one volume published and I'm doing my second volume now. it's almost finished. This is entitled: On Irony. Some of you may even have seen this particular newscast. And this also goes along with the manipulation, the mass mind manipulation of all people.

Today I got a shot of irony Right between the eyes New item, CBS news. Dan Rather Diary of a young Russian troop 19 Killed in Afghanistan 1987 Seems he was killed And possessions he carried recovered By those who took his life Afghan, one each issue attitude Diary and photos Of a soldier's life In a hostile, foreign land The irony? I was a foreign soldier In a hostile land Vietnam '67 -'68

The diary words: "Silently we board the helicopters So many of my friends Dead Move foreword and kill Why Why am I here Damn Afghanistan Only three of us left" Afghanistan '87.

LZ coming in Get ready Ready to kill and Die Vietnam '67 The photos: Young men, this time with AK 47s RPGs and Guitars smiling in groups,

Young Wounded Dead Brains never to be the same Afghanistan '87 Vietnam '67.

You have all seen the pictures On TV, in books, et cetera. Young men smiling carrying M16s M60s, guitars Wounded Dead Sent by those who do not go To do what the young should never have to do. Afghanistan '87 Vietnam '67.

His last words: Damn Afghanistan! Why am I here

And that's what these governments are doing to us and our children. Both of them. All of 'em. And they're going to continue to do it as long as we let them.

Thank you.

[thunderous, sustained applause]

http://www.angelfire.com/mi/smilinks/thirdeye.html http://www.earthchangestv.com/warroom/beginning.htm

http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Exhibits/Track16/fuck_draft.html

http://lists.village.virginia.edu/sixties/HTML_docs/Exhibits/Track16/i_want_out.html

This article is from The Chronicle of Higher Education ( http://chronicle.com )

from the issue dated October 20, 2000:

The Antiwar Movement We Are Supposed to Forget

By H. BRUCE FRANKLIN

Visualize the movement against the Vietnam War. What do you see? Hippies with daisies in their long, unwashed hair yelling "Baby killers!" as they spit on clean-cut, bemedaled veterans just back from Vietnam? College students in tattered jeans (their pockets bulging with credit cards) staging a sit-in to avoid the draft? A mob of chanting demonstrators burning an American flag (maybe with a bra or two thrown in)? That's what we're supposed to see, and that's what Americans today probably do see -- if they visualize the antiwar movement at all.

We are thus depriving ourselves -- or being deprived -- of one legitimate source of great national pride about American culture and behavior during the war. In most wars, a nation dehumanizes and demonizes the people on the other side. Almost the opposite happened during the Vietnam War. Countless Americans came to see the people of Vietnam fighting against U.S. forces as anything but an enemy to be feared and hated. Tens of millions sympathized with their suffering, many came to identify with their 2,000-year struggle for independence, and some even found them an inspiration for their own lives.

But in the decades since the war's official conclusion, American consciousness of the Vietnamese people, with all its potential for healing and redemption, has been deliberately and systematically obliterated. During the first few years after the war, while the White House and Congress were reneging on aid promised to Vietnam, they were not expressing the feelings of most Americans. For example, a New York Times/CBS News poll, published in July 1977, asked this question: "Suppose the President recommended giving assistance to Vietnam. Would you want your Congressman to approve giving Vietnam food or medicine?" Sixty-six percent said yes, 29 percent said no. Ironically, it was only after the war was over that demonization of the Vietnamese began to succeed. And soon those tens of millions of Americans who had fought against the war themselves became, as a corollary, a truly hateful enemy as envisioned by the dominant American culture.

The antiwar movement has been so thoroughly discredited that many of the people who were the movement now feel embarrassed or ashamed of their participation -- even such prudent and peripheral participants as William Jefferson Clinton. One would never be able to guess from public discourse that for every American veteran of combat in Vietnam, there must be 20 veterans of the antiwar movement. And there seems to be almost total amnesia about the crucial role that many of those combat veterans played in the movement to stop the war.

When did Americans actually begin to oppose U.S. warfare against Vietnam? As soon as the first U.S. act of war was committed. And when was that? In 1965, when President Johnson ordered the Marines to land at Da Nang and began the nonstop bombing of North Vietnam? In 1964, when Johnson launched "retaliatory" bombing of North Vietnam after a series of covert U.S. air, sea, and land attacks? In 1963, when 19,000 U.S. combat troops were participating in the conflict and Washington arranged the overthrow of the puppet ruler it had installed in Saigon in 1954? In 1961, when President Kennedy began Operation Hades, a large-scale campaign of chemical warfare? In 1954, when U.S. combat teams organized covert warfare to support the man Washington had selected to rule South Vietnam? Americans did oppose all of those acts of war, but the first American opposition came as soon as Washington began warfare against the Vietnamese people by equipping and transporting a foreign army to invade their country -- in 1945.

Those Americans who knew anything about Vietnam during World War II knew that the United States had been allied with the Viet Minh, the Vietnamese liberation movement led by Ho Chi Minh, and had actually provided some arms to their guerrilla forces, commanded by Vo Nguyen Giap. American fliers rescued by Giap's guerrillas testified to the rural population's enthusiasm for both the Viet Minh and the United States, which they saw as the champion of democracy, antifascism, and anti-imperialism. American officials and officers who had contact with Ho and the Viet Minh were virtually unanimous in their support and admiration. The admiration was mutual. In September 1945 the Viet Minh issued the Vietnamese Declaration of Independence, which began with a long quotation from the U.S. Declaration of Independence, proclaiming the establishment of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. The regional leaders of the O.S.S. (predecessor of the C.I.A.) and U.S. military forces joined in the celebration, with General Philip Gallagher, chief of the U.S. Military Advisory and Assistance Group, singing the Viet Minh's national anthem on Hanoi radio.

But in the following two months, the United States committed its first act of warfare against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. At least 8 and possibly 12 U.S. troopships were diverted from their task of bringing American troops home from World War II and instead began transporting U.S.-armed French troops and Foreign Legionnaires from France to recolonize Vietnam. The enlisted crewmen of these ships, all members of the U.S. Merchant Marine, immediately began organized protests. On arriving in Vietnam, for example, the entire crews of four troopships met together in Saigon and drew up a resolution condemning the U.S. government for using American ships to transport troops "to subjugate the native population" of Vietnam.

The full-scale invasion of Vietnam by French forces, once again equipped and ferried by the United States, began in 1946. An American movement against the war started to coalesce as soon as significant numbers of Americans realized that Washington was supporting France's war against the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.

The years when the United States was steadily escalating its military presence and combat role in Vietnam -- 1954 to 1963 -- were also years when fundamental critiques of U.S. foreign policy had become marginalized. Outspoken domestic opposition to cold-war assumptions had been eviscerated by the purges, witch-hunts, and everyday repression (misleadingly labeled "McCarthyism") conducted under the Truman and Eisenhower administrations. The main targets of that repression had been carefully selected to include anyone in a position to communicate radically dissenting ideas to a large audience: teachers, union leaders, screenwriters, movie directors, radio and print journalists. So by the early 1960's, the aftershocks of that earlier political hammering, combined with the stifling of foreign-policy debate by "bipartisanship" between the two ruling political parties and the supersaturation of cold-war culture, had stripped the American people of any dissenting political consciousness or even a vocabulary capable of accurately describing the global political reality.

As the antiwar movement was becoming a mass movement, in 1965, it was fundamentally aimed at achieving peace through education, and it was based on what now seem incredibly naive assumptions about the causes and purposes of the war. We tend to forget that this phase of the antiwar movement began as an attempt to educate the government and the nation. Most of us opposed to the war in those relatively early days believed -- and this is embarrassing to confess -- that the government had somehow blundered into the war, maybe because our leaders were simply ignorant about Vietnamese history. Perhaps they didn't remember the events of 1940 to 1954. Maybe they hadn't read the Geneva Agreements. So if we had teach-ins and wrote letters to editors and Congress and the president, the government would say, "Gosh! We didn't realize that Vietnam was a single nation. Did the Geneva Agreements really say that? And we had told Ho Chi Minh we'd probably support his claims for Vietnamese independence? Golly gee, we had better put a stop to this foolish war."

Experience was the great teacher for those who were trying to teach, a lesson lost in the miasma of so-called theory that helped to paralyze activism in the 1990's. Teaching the Vietnam War during the 1960's and early 1970's meant giving speeches at teach-ins and rallies; getting on talk shows; writing pamphlets, articles, and books; painting banners, picket signs, and graffiti; circulating petitions and leaflets; coining slogans; marching; sitting in; demonstrating at army bases; lobbying Congress; testifying before war-crimes hearings and Congressional investigations; researching corporate and university complicity; harboring deserters; organizing strikes; heckling generals and politicians; blocking induction centers and napalm plants; and going to prison for defying the draft. It is hard to convey the emotions that inspired those actions. Probably the most widely shared was outrage, a feeling that many came to consider outdated in the cool 1990's.

While the repression of the late 1940's and 1950's helped create the embarrassing naivete and innocence of the early 1960's, these very qualities fueled the movement's fervor. People believed that the government would respond to them because they believed in American democracy and rectitude. Then, when the government did respond -- with disinformation and new waves of repression -- the fervor turned to rage.

Back in December 1964, an obscure little organization called Students for a Democratic Society issued a call for people to go to Washington on April 17, 1965, to march against the war. Only a few thousand were expected. But when the march took place, it turned out to be the largest antiwar demonstration in Washington's history so far -- 25,000 people, most neatly dressed in jackets and ties or skirts and dresses.

What seemed at the time very large demonstrations continued throughout 1965, with 15,000 marching in Berkeley on October 15, 20,000 marching in Manhattan the same day, and 25,000 marching again in Washington on November 27. Those early crowds would have been imperceptible amid such later protests as the April 1967 demonstration of 300,000 to 500,000 people in New York, or the half-million or more who converged on Washington in November 1969 and again in the spring of 1971. In the nationwide Moratorium, of October 15, 1969, millions of Americans -- at least 10 times the half-million then stationed in Indochina -- demonstrated against the war.

Demonstrations were one form of the attempt to go beyond mere words. Other forms appeared as early as 1965. Many of the activists were veterans of the civil-rights movement, who now began to apply its use of civil disobedience and moral witness. That summer, the Vietnam Day Committee in northern California attempted to block munitions trains by lying on the tracks; hundreds of people were arrested for civil disobedience in Washington; and public burnings of draft cards began. Moral witness was taken to its ultimate by Norman Morrison, a 32-year-old Quaker who drenched himself with gasoline and set himself on fire outside the Pentagon; the pacifist Roger La Porte, who immolated himself at the United Nations; and 82-year-old Alice Herz, who burned herself to death in Detroit to protest against the war. By 1971, civil disobedience was so widespread that the number arrested in that spring's demonstration in Washington -- 14,000 -- would have been considered a good-size march in 1965.

Whether the majority of Americans at any point supported the government's policies in Vietnam (or even knew what they were) is a matter of debate. Certainly most Americans never supported the war strongly enough to agree to pay for it with increased taxes, or even to demonstrate for it in significant numbers, much less to go willingly to fight in it. Nor were they ever willing to vote for any national candidate who pledged to fight until "victory." In fact, except for Barry Goldwater in 1964, every nominee for president of both major parties after the 1960 elections through the end of the war ran as some kind of self-professed peace candidate.

Who opposed the war? Contrary to the impression promulgated by the media then, and overwhelmingly prevalent today, opposition to the war was not concentrated among affluent college students. In fact, opposition to the war was inversely proportional to both wealth and education. Blue-collar workers generally considered themselves "doves" and tended to favor withdrawal from Vietnam, while those who considered themselves "hawks" and supported participation in the war were concentrated among the college-educated, high-income strata.

For example, a Gallup poll in January 1971 showed that 60 percent of those with a college education favored withdrawal of U.S. troops from Vietnam, 75 percent of those with a high-school education favored withdrawal, and 80 percent of those with only a grade-school education favored withdrawal. In Lies My Teacher Told Me, James Loewen reports a revealing experiment he conducted repeatedly in the 1990's. When he asked audiences to estimate the educational level of those who favored U.S. withdrawal back in 1971, by an almost 10-to-1 margin they believed that college-educated people were the most antiwar. In fact, they estimated that 90 percent of those with a college education favored withdrawal, scaling down to 60 percent of those with a grade-school education.

Opposition to the war was especially intense among people of color, though they tended not to participate heavily in the demonstrations called by student and pacifist organizations. One reason for their caution was that people of color often had to pay a heavy price for protesting the war. For speaking out in 1966 against drafting black men to fight in Vietnam, Julian Bond was denied his seat in the Georgia legislature. Muhammad Ali was stripped of his title as heavyweight boxing champion and was criminally prosecuted for draft resistance. When 25,000 Mexican-Americans staged the Chicano Moratorium, the largest antiwar demonstration held in Los Angeles, police officers attacked not just with clubs but with guns, killing three people, including the popular television news director and Los Angeles Times reporter Ruben Salazar.

Certainly the campus antiwar movement was spectacular. The teach-ins in the spring of 1965 swept hundreds of campuses and involved probably hundreds of thousands of students. By the late 1960's, millions of students were intermittently involved in antiwar activities, ranging from petitions and candlelight marches to burning down R.O.T.C. buildings and going to prison for draft resistance. In May 1970, the invasion of Cambodia was met by the largest student-protest movement in American history, a strike that led to the shutdown of hundreds of campuses and the gunning down of students by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in Ohio (where 4 were killed and 9 wounded) and by state troopers at Jackson State College in Mississippi (where 2 were killed and at least 12 wounded).

There are three principal misconceptions about the college antiwar movement. First, it was not motivated by students' selfish desire to avoid the draft, which was relatively easy for most college men to do and automatic for women. In fact, one of the earliest militant activities on campus was physical disruption of the Selective Service tests that were the basis of draft deferments for college students; the student demonstrators thus jeopardized their own deferments in protesting against them as privileges that were unfair to young men unable to attend college. (The demonstrators also risked punishment by the college authorities and, sometimes, physical attacks by men taking the tests.) Second, most college students were not affluent (indeed, most came from the working class), and some of the largest and most militant demonstrations were at public universities that could hardly be labeled sanctuaries of the rich, like Kent State, San Francisco State, and the state universities of Michigan, Maryland, and Wisconsin. Third, although college antiwar activism did hamper those in Washington who were trying to conduct the war without hindrance, the most decisive opposition to the war came ultimately not from the campuses but from within the cities and the Army itself.

To understand the antiwar movement, one must perceive its relationship with that other powerful mass movement hamstringing the Pentagon: the uprising of the African-American people.

The African-American movement had been helping to energize the antiwar movement since at least 1965, when a number of leading black activists and organizations condemned the war as an assault on another people of color while articulating an anti-imperialist consciousness that would not be common in the broader antiwar movement until 1968. In January 1965, the month before he was assassinated, Malcolm X denounced the Vietnam War, placed Africans and African-Americans on the same side as "those little rice farmers" who had defeated French colonialism, and predicted a similar defeat for "Sam." That July, the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party called on African-Americans not to participate in the Vietnam War and implied that their war was closer to home: "No one has a right to ask us to risk our lives and kill other Colored People in Santo Domingo and Vietnam, so that the White American can get richer. We will be looked upon as traitors by all the Colored People of the world if the Negro people continue to fight and die without a cause." In January 1966, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee explained why it was taking a stand against the Vietnam War: "We believe the United States government has been deceptive in claims of concern for the freedom of the Vietnamese people, just as the government has been deceptive in claiming concern for the freedom of the colored people in such other countries as the Dominican Republic, the Congo, South Africa, Rhodesia, and in the United States itself." Stokely Carmichael was the main speaker at the first rally against napalm, in 1966. In 1968, dozens of black soldiers, many of them Vietnam veterans, were arrested and court-martialed for refusing to mobilize against antiwar demonstrators outside the Chicago Amphitheatre during the Democratic National Convention. What made the convergence of the black and antiwar movements explosively dangerous for those trying to maintain order and sustain the war was the disintegrating and volatile situation within the armed forces, as pointed out by an alarming article published in the January 1970 Naval War College Review.

Very little awareness of resistance to the war inside the military survives today. But without this awareness, it is impossible to understand not just the antiwar movement but also the military history of the war from 1968 to 1973, not to mention the end of the draft and the creation of a permanent "volunteer" army to fight America's subsequent wars.To begin to get some sense of the relative scale and effects of civilian and active-duty war resistance, compare the widely publicized activity of draft avoidance with some little-known facts about desertion (a serious military crime, defined by being away without leave for more than 30 days and having the intention never to return). Although draft evasion and refusal certainly posed problems for the war effort, desertion was much more common and far more threatening.

The number of draft evaders and resisters was dwarfed by the number of deserters from the active-duty armed forces. During the 1971 fiscal year alone, 98,324 servicemen deserted, an astonishing rate of 142.2 for every 1,000 men on duty. Revealing statistics flashed to light briefly as President Ford was pondering the amnesty he declared in September 1974 (at the same time he also pardoned ex-President Nixon for all federal crimes he may have committed while in office). According to the Department of Defense, there were 503,926 "incidents of desertion" between July 1, 1966, and December 31, 1973. From 1963 through 1973 (a period almost half again as long), only 13,518 men were prosecuted for draft evasion or resistance. The admitted total of deserters still officially "at large" at the time was 28,661 -- six and a half times the 4,400 draft evaders or resisters still "at large." These numbers only begin to tell the story.

Thousands of veterans who had fought in Vietnam moved to the forefront of the antiwar movement after they returned to the United States, and they -- together with thousands of active-duty G.I.'s -- soon began to play a crucial role in the domestic movement. Dozens of teach-ins on college campuses were led by Vietnam veterans, who spoke at hundreds of rallies. More and more demonstrations were led by large contingents of veterans and active-duty servicepeople, who often participated under risk of grave punishment. The vanguard of that Washington demonstration by half a million people in the spring of 1971 was a contingent of a thousand Vietnam veterans, many in wheelchairs and on crutches, who then conducted "a limited incursion into the country of Congress," which they called Dewey Canyon III (Dewey Canyon I was a 1969 covert "incursion" into Laos; Dewey Canyon II was the disastrous February 1971 invasion of Laos). About 800 marched up to a barricade hastily erected to keep them away from the Capitol and hurled back their Purple Hearts, Bronze Stars, Silver Stars, and campaign ribbons at the government that had bestowed them.

The antiwar movement initiated back in 1945 by those hundreds of merchant seamen protesting U.S. participation in the French attempt to reconquer Vietnam was thus consummated in a movement of tens of millions of ordinary American citizens spearheaded by soldiers, sailors, fliers, and veterans, which finally ended the war with a recognition that Vietnam could be neither divided nor conquered by the United States.

No, it was not Vietnam but the United States that ended up divided by America's war. And the division cut even deeper than the armed forces, biting down into the core of the secret government itself. When members of the intelligence establishment joined the antiwar movement, they had the potential to inflict even greater damage than mutinous soldiers and sailors. The perfidy of the Central Intelligence Agency in Vietnam was revealed by one of its highest-level agents in South Vietnam, Ralph McGehee, author of Deadly Deceits: My Twenty-Five Years in the C.I.A. Philip Agee decided in 1971 to publish what eventually became Inside the Company: CIA Diary because of "the continuation of the Vietnam war and the Vietnamization programme," writing, "Now more than ever exposure of C.I.A. methods could help American people understand how we got into Vietnam and how our other Vietnams are germinating wherever the C.I.A. is at work." In that same year, two of the authors of the Pentagon's own supersecret history of the war, Anthony Russo and Daniel Ellsberg, exposed it to the American people and the world.

Interviewed three years after the release of the Pentagon Papers, Ellsberg outlined the history of the Vietnam War by tracing the "lies" told by Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon. "The American public was lied to month by month by each of these five administrations," he declared. And then he added, "It's a tribute to the American public that their leaders perceived they had to be lied to."

The end of the war did not end the lies. Since then, both the war and the antiwar movement have been falsified so grossly that we risk forfeiting the most valuable knowledge we gained at such great cost to the peoples of Southeast Asia and to ourselves. Nor can we understand what America is becoming if we fail to comprehend how the same nation and its culture could have produced an abomination as shameful as the Vietnam War and a campaign as admirable as the 30-year movement that helped defeat it. -----------

H. Bruce Franklin is a professor of English and American studies at Rutgers University at Newark. This essay is adapted from Vietnam & Other American Fantasies, published by the University of Massachusetts Press.

New York Times documents military role in theft of 2000 election

By Barry Grey 19 July 2001

New York Times documents military role
in theft of 2000 election

By Barry Grey
19 July 2001