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The Keys to Hell and Death - Part II By Richard Edmondson

When John Paul II was shot in St. Peter's Square

Turkish spy scandals shed new light on papal murder attempt

The Top Ten Censored Stories of 2000: Exposing the News that Didn't Make the News

The newsletter of San Francisco Liberation Radio

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U.S. Army reserve Lieutenant Colonel Michael Aquino, a Defense

Department expert on psychological warfare, was named as a suspect in a

child molestation case in San Francisco in 1987. However, formal charges

against Aquino were never filed in the case, known as the “Presidio

child molestation case,” in which more than 50 children were reported to

have been molested who attended a day care center on a U.S. Army base.

Aquino is founder of the Temple of Set, a satanic church based in San

Francisco, and he figures prominently in the book, “TRANCE-Formation of

America,” by Mark Phillips and Cathy O’Brien. Yesterday we brought you

part one of this report. Today we continue with part two.

The U.S. government’s fascination for covert use of the occult has its

Both Hitler and Heinrich Himmler, Nazi SS chief, were heavily immersed

in the occult, Hitler having come into contact with Jorg Lanz von

Liebenfels and his Order of the New Templars as early as 1909.

Hitler became an avid reader of Lanz’s magazine, “Ostara,” a publication

which “combined the erotic with the occult,” while also producing racist

rantings which were “remarkably similar to Hitler’s later utterances,”

according to Dusty Sklar in her book, “Gods and Beasts: The Nazis and

the Occult.” (Thomas Y. Crowell Company, New York, 1977).

Another occultist who was influential in Nazi circles was the professor,

Karl Hauschofer, who is said to have virtually dictated chapter 16 of

For Haushofer, a love affair with the Orient began in 1908 when he was

sent to Tokyo as an advisor to the Japanese Army.

He studied Sanskrit and translated several Hindu and Buddist texts,

eventually ending up in “the esoteric stream of Satanism, through which

he sought to raise Germany to the pinnacle of world power.” (Sklar, p.

(Haushofer wound up being paid tribute by San Francisco Satanist Anton

LeVey, in whose book, The Satanic Bible, published in 1969, can be found

a dedication: “To Karl Haushofer, a teacher without a classroom.”).

As for Lanz, he ended up joining the Germanen Orden (in 1912), which in

turn eventually merged with the Thule Society, whose membership, by

“This powerful occult circle included adepts, judges, lawyers,

professors, leading industrialists, surgeons, scientists, and even

former members of the royal entourage of the Wittelsbach kings. The

Bavarian minister of justice, Franz Gurtner; the police president of

Munich, Ernst Pohner; and the assistant police chief, Wilhelm Frick,

Couching their rhetoric in rabid anti-Semitism, Thule members prophesied

the coming of a German messiah “who would do away with hated democracy,

the handmaiden of the weak,” says Sklar.

There was also a great deal of rhetoric about the “divine self” and the

powers which would accrue to those who followed the true path.

The latter especially is not dissimilar from the sort of mystic

psychobabble which can be found on Temple of Set web sites today.

“Temple of Set seeks above all to honor and enshrine consciousness…”

says the church’s official Web site. “The Left-Hand Path is a process

for creating an individual, powerful essence that exists above and

Other celebrated personages drawn to the German occult scene included

According to Sklar, “Melon’s interest in the occult resulted in a huge

collection of books on the subject, stretching back to antiquity, which

Yale, it should be noted, is the home of the notorious Skull and Bones

Society, out of which sprang George H.W. Bush and other American

political figures. (SFLR DJ Scott Thompson has provided research on ties

to Nazi Germany between the Bush family, as well as leading American

industrialists. See previous issues of the SFLR News at the following

So how serious were top level Nazi strategists about the occult, and did

they really feel that use of the “black arts” would help them win the

“The most incredible research of all was set up in 1939 in Berlin. An

astrologer, Wilhelm Wulff, who was made prisoner of the SS and coerced

into working for it, described the Berlin Institute’s scientific

research center as being used ‘to harness, not only natural, but also

supernatural forces. All intellectual, natural, and supernatural sources

of power--from modern technology to medieval black magic, and from the

teachings of Pythagoras, to the Faustian pentagram incantation--were to

be exploited in the interests of final victory.’”

These paranormal investigations by the Berlin Institute are perhaps not

so very different from the CIA’s own research into “remote viewing.”

Practitioners of this art, to which the U.S. government has devoted

untold sums of money, are said not only to be able to “see” events

taking place on the other side of the globe, but also to gain glimpses

Self-espoused remote-viewers such as former U.S. Army Major Ed Dames, a

frequent guest on the late night Art Bell radio show, claim to have

penetrated enemy defenses and obtained vital intelligence data in such a

Dames further claims to have “remote viewed Satan.”

Such watery notions might easily be dismissed as the meandering of a

charlatan, however, their psychological value, disseminated as they are

via a nightly talk show reaching millions, cannot be denied.

If after all the CIA employs, as Dames asserts, a secret cabal of remote

viewers, what possible hope could there be for resistance against the

U.S. government--either internally or from abroad?

Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels similarly exploited occultic fare and

belief, pointing to the quatrains of 16th century French prophet

Nostradamus as affirmation of the “inevitability” of German world

The end result of all this was a nation traumatized, not so terribly

unlike O’Brien herself was traumatized. Such traumatization had a

powerful impact on the thinking of individual German citizens--even

among those inclined toward opposition to Nazi policies.

Sklar tells the story of a young teacher, the daughter of a liberal

college professor, who joined the party under pressure.

“At first I just made myself do it. The Nazi accounts were so

fantastic--plots of world-Jewry, etc.--that I could hardly keep from

laughing as I read them; but of course I had to be careful. It was

somewhat of a shock to find how readily the children accepted these Nazi

fabrications. But the most amazing thing of all was, that after a few

years of going through the routine, I began to believe the stories

myself and could no longer distinguish in my own mind between propaganda

The connections between Fascism and Satanism are at least sufficiently

pronounced that one Temple of Set Web site, in the interests of public

relations, has even gone so far as to post disclaimers, containing

numerous attempts at “debunking” the “myth” of any fascist/Nazi

sympathies on the part of Aquino or other members.

"I have always deplored its (Naziism's) premises, policies, and

activities which resulted in savagery and misery to a great many

people," Aquino is quoted on one Temple Web site.

However, if the U.S. government, or at least certain components of it,

has covertly embraced the “black art” of satanic worship, how deep does

the affiliation go, and what are the consequences?

Does it, for instance, leave certain murderers and ritual serial killers

above the law in the same manner as the Nazi scientists who were

According to Mark Phillips, who co-authored TRANCE-Formation along with

O’Brien, the CIA began studying occult groups after World War II,

observing especially the impact of occult activity upon the children of

Phillips, who rescued O’Brien from the Project Monarch program, was

employed for many years in the defense industry, particularly with the

Ampex Corporation. As such he was engaged in numerous projects for the

Phillips also worked for Capital International Airways, a CIA-affiliated

charter airline service which flew in a lot of the Project Paperclip

“The Paperclip scientists were supposed to have been propulsion

scientists, but in fact the vast majority of them were not,” Phillips

said last month in an interview with San Francisco Liberation Radio.

“These were mind-sciences people--people who had been involved in the

The very same people, says Philips, who had done the pioneering research

into the field of trauma-based mind control--a field the CIA was eager

Multi-generationally-abused children of Northern European families

involved in the occult sciences were the Nazi test subjects, he said.

“This research provided them with extraordinary results,” says Phillips.

“They were seeing children who had photographic memories, who had 44

times the visual acuity of an average individual. In other words they

could practically see out of the backs of their heads.”

The heightened senses and acute memories were coping mechanisms

The CIA, says Phillips, picked up the research where the Nazis left off,

zeroing in on satanic groups in the United States--not for purposes of

halting criminal child abuse, but for studying its effects further.

“What they were interested in doing was introducing trauma into some of

these normally benign rituals that these (occult) groups have or sponsor

at certain times of the year. This trauma was involving blood trauma and

that sort of thing, animal sacrifice. And human sacrifice--as rare as it

might sound and as difficult as it is to prove, there have been many

instances over the past few decades that have been proven,” said

“But the CIA was interested only in observing and recording the effects

on the ONLOOKERS of these rituals, rather than the participants per se,”

The families--rather than being broken up and their adult members

prosecuted--were instead studied and tracked over generations. Whatever

crimes were committed along the way, whether child molestation or even

murder, were apparently deemed something akin to a necessary evil.

“Like my father and Cox, Aquino remains above the law.”

Indeed, the “black art” of remaining immune from criminal prosecution

seems to have been one of Aquino’s specialties, used perhaps with

The children at the Presidio most likely were NOT undergoing

But just exactly WAS going on at the Presidio remains puzzling, mainly

due to the fact that there never was a trial.

So how did Aquino, a highly decorated Vietnam veteran and former Green

Beret, end up as a suspect in a child molestation case?

“In a police report filed in August, a 3-year-old girl who attended the

Presidio day care center alleges that she was molested at Aquino’s

Russian Hill home by Aquino and Gary Hambright. Hambright, a Baptist

minister, has been formally charged with molesting 10 other children at

“Aquino has strongly denied involvement in the girl’s molestation,

saying he was 3,000 miles away from San Francisco, attending classes at

the National Defense University in Washington at the time.” (San

Francisco Chronicle, Nov. 3, 1987, p. A7).

Certainly it would have been easy for a 3-year-old child to become

confused. But apparently she recalled enough to name “Mr. Gary” and

Aquino as her abusers, and to identify Aquino’s house at 2430

Leavenworth St. as the place where the molestation occurred.

Other details were recalled as well, according to the Chronicle:

“The child told investigators that, at the home, she was filmed while

bathing in a room that had black walls and a cross painted on the

ceiling.” (San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 30, 1987, p. A1).

The girl also recalled that the tub in which she bathed was a “plastic

During the August 14 raid, police found “a dark-walled room” plus

“paraphernalia related to Satanism,” reported the Chronicle. (Oct. 31,

The molestations were said to have occurred in September or October of

1986; the girl (who was 3 years old at the time incidents occurred, but

had turned 4 by the time she gave her statements to police), also

alleged that Aquino’s wife, Lilith, was present at the time, according

The victim’s father, also in the Army, said that “four or five times”

during the Sept.-Oct. time period he dropped his daughter off at the

child care center, and that at times he noticed something peculiar.

“The father reported that on two occasions when he picked up the victim

at the end of the day , he was informed by (Hambright) that the victim

had wet her pants…(and the father) was provided with the soiled

“But the girl had not wet her pants in a year, the father said. At about

that time, the girl began having nightmares.

“In January 1987, the father learned of an investigation into child

abuse at the center, and he contacted investigators. By February this

year, the child had visited an Army therapist several times, and had

‘disclosed being molested.’ She blamed the molestations on ‘Mikey’ and

“Events in the following months are not detailed in the report. But in

August, the report says, the girl and her father were shopping in the

Presido PX and the girl suddenly became afraid.

“’The victim ran to (her father) and in a frightened way clutched his

leg. (The father) looked up and saw a man whom he knew to be Michael

Aquino,’ the report says. When she was asked whether she knew Aquino,’

“A few minutes later, she told her father that a woman with Aquino was

“In further interviews, the girl reported that ‘Mr. Gary’ had driven her

to a home off the Army base. There, she said, two men dressed as women

performed sexual acts on her and photographed her.

“The girl indicated that a woman, who dressed as a man, was in the house

but was not clear whether she was directly involved in the

molestations.” (San Francisco Chronicle, Oct. 30, 1987, p. A1).

The Chronicle published a photo of Aquino and his wife, Lilith, on Oct.

31--Halloween day--1987, following what was apparently a press

conference by the couple in St. Louis, where Aquino, according to

At that time Aquino said he was a student at the National Defense

University at Fort McNear in Washington D.C. during the time the

episodes with the girl were alleged to have occurred. Aquino said that

participating in the molestation “would have required me to commute

In the photo Aquino is dressed in a suit, gesturing to reporters, while

his wife, garbed in dark clothing, looks on with round, staring eyes

The release by police of court records only days before Halloween may

have been something of a psychological warfare tactic of their own.

In the wake of the exposures, Aquino filed a $1 million claim against

the city San Francisco, naming Glen Pamfiloff, an inspector with the

SFPD’s juvenile division, and Officer Sandra Gallent, as participants in

While the young girl who identified Aquino in the Presidio PX seems to

have been particularly helpful to police, many other children, along

“One Presidio mother close to the probe…said that young children have

reported molestations in bizarre settings that suggest ritual sexual

“From what I’ve heard, there is a fair number of children who describe

being abused in a place other than the child care center,” said the

“’There have been children stuck with needles in various parts of their

bodies, and they have reported people in costumes and robes. It all

sounds very ritualized.’” (Chronicle, Oct. 31, 1987, p. A1).

Temple members, or “Setians,” profess themselves to be followers of the

ancient Egyptian god Set, which they view as “the oldest known form of

the Prince of Darkness,” and whose worship they trace back to

“Set is a more complex, less stereotypical metaphysical image than that

of the Judaeo/Christian Satan. Satan, the archetype of rebellion against

cosmic order and stasis, may be the symbol for many people's initial

commitment to initiation, but this symbol is too tied to conventional

religions and their moral codes to be an effective representation of the

richness, subtlety, and complexity of the Left-Hand Path.”

At one point during the Presidio investigation, the Chronicle obtained a

copy of a 1980 resume of Aquino’s, showing the career reservist to be

the holder of a doctoral degree in political science from the University

The resume also states (factually or not) that Aquino has served as a

liaison officer in NATO countries, and that in his civilian life he has

been a licensed securities dealer, registered with the New York Stock

Exchange, and a former employee of Merrill Lynch. The resume, according

to the Chronicle, also states he has written three science fiction

On Temple of Set Web sites today, where Aquino is referred to reverently

as “Dr. Aquino,” can be found lengthy explanations of church philosophy,

“Followers of the Left-Hand Path practice what, in a very

specially-defined sense, we term ‘Black Magic.’ Black Magic focuses on

self-determined goals. Its formula is ‘my will be done,’ as opposed to

the White Magic of the Right-Hand Path, whose formula is ‘thy will be

done.’ Black Magic is shunned and feared because to do Black Magic is to

take full responsibility for one's actions, evolution, and

effectiveness,” according to the official site.

During the Presidio scandal, Aquino, in statements to reporters, frankly

admitted to being the temple’s founder--even as it was coming out in the

* The Presidio investigation had uncovered a satanic link to the case

* Children were reporting ritual ceremonies with adults dressed in

* The temple’s post office box was located on the base

* That one of the victims had identified Aquino in the Presidio PX, and

that additional children had reportedly identified him after seeing him

So how did the man at the center of all this controversy escape

prosecution? And how was it that more than 50 children could be molested

on a military base in a major American city without a single conviction

ever being won in the case (the case against Hambright “collapsed” while

Aquino and his wife, Lilith, were never charged)?

Almost immediately from the day the story broke, the Army took the

position that Aquino’s satanic practices were protected by his First

“The question is whether he is trustworthy or can do the job,” said

Major Greg Rixon, Army public affairs officer in Washington. “There is

nothing that would indicate, in this case, that there is any problem we

It was interesting that the Army would take this position with regard to

the top-secret security clearance of a practicing Satanist, while

continuing to exclude gays from even its lowest rank and file positions.

“Aquino, a psychological warfare officer who has worked in military

intelligence, holds a top-secret security clearance that allows him to

handle information whose release would ‘gravely’ damage U.S. security,

according to Defense Department regulations.

“He maintains the clearance even though he has performed Nazi occult

rites and has described himself as the ‘Anti-Christ,’ in literature

published by the Temple of Set.” (Chronicle, Nov. 3, 1987, p. A7).

Nonetheless, Major Rixon believed Aquino’s freedom of religion was an

“To the best of my knowledge,” he said, “there is no part of the liturgy

of his church that causes any (security) problem.”

This new-found reverence for the constitutional rights of religious

groups was in stark contrast to the government’s dealings with the MOVE

organization in Philadelphia just two years previous, and with the

treatment which would be meted out to the Branch Davidians in Waco,

Nonetheless, the Chronicle would be able to report just over a year

“Investigators have thus far been frustrated in their efforts to

prosecute the molesters.” (Chronicle, Dec. 24, 1988, p. A2).

Hambright was indicted twice on federal charges, “but each time the

prosecution collapsed because the children were so young and the

evidence often so vague,” said the Chronicle.

The U.S. Attorney in San Francisco at the time was Joseph P.

Russoniello--who would later be mentioned in the “Dark Alliance” series

on Contra cocaine smuggling. That series was produced by reporter Gary

Webb in the San Jose Mercury News in 1996.

In the series Webb reports of a 1988 Senate subcommittee investigation

which ran into a “wall of secrecy at the Justice Department.”

In that case, says Webb, Senate investigators were trying to determine

why Russoniello “had given $36,000 back to a Nicaraguan cocaine dealer

In the child molestation case, Presidio parents were reported, by August

of 1987, to be “edgy and upset by the reluctance of the Army, FBI, and

(Russoniello’s) office in San Francisco” to discuss details of the case.

One woman told the Chronicle that FBI agents never interviewed her--even

after a doctor confirmed that her son had been molested.

A federal judge (who was not named in the report) ruled that “key

testimony was hearsay and could not be used as evidence,” said the

Two arson fires destroyed a building adjacent to the day care

center--one on Sept. 22, 1987, and the other on Oct. 13.

And on November 20, the center was formally closed.

U.S. Rep. Barbara Boxer called the school closing “a blessing.”

The San Francisco District Attorney’s office apparently didn’t make any

more headway in the case than did the U.S. attorney, saying there was

“District Attorney Arlo Smith’s decision to close the book on off-base

molestation ends the criminal case,” the Chronicle reported (Aug. 2,

A bid by Aquino to have court martial charges pressed against the 3 year

old girl’s father--for making “false allegations” against him--was

Aquino nonetheless vowed to press ahead with his case--“all the way to

When John Paul II was shot in St. Peter's Square

Turkish spy scandals shed new light on papal murder attempt

Twenty years ago, on the afternoon of May 13, 1981, Pope John Paul II

struck by three bullets while being driven in a slow-moving

through St. Peter's Square, where 20,000 people had gathered to see

pontiff. Rushed to a hospital, the pope barely survived a six-hour

operation. Two bystanders were also injured in the attack.

The would-be assassin, 23-year-old Turkish terrorist Mehmet Ali Agca,

immediately apprehended at the scene of the crime. The police found

pocket several notes scribbled in Turkish, one of which read: "I am

the pope as a protest against the imperialism of the Soviet Union and

United States and against the genocide that is being carried out in El

Agca's handwritten statement reflected the fanatical "third position"

ideology of the Grey Wolves, a violent, neofascist organization that

denounced both superpowers while engaging in bloody street battles

Agca was a member of the Grey Wolves, but he claimed that he acted

when he tried to kill the pope. In July 1981 he was found guilty of

attempted murder and sentenced to life in prison. The court failed to

reports from several eyewitnesses who said they had seen another dark-

gunman fleeing from St. Peter's Square moments after the shooting.

A year later, while Agca languished in an Italian jail, stories

circulate in the Western press alleging that the plot to assassinate

Paul II was hatched by the Soviet KGB and carried out by the Bulgarian

secret service. The Soviets, according to this theory, viewed the

Polish-born pope as a threat to Communist hegemony in Eastern Europe

Playing off these news accounts, which were based largely on U.S.

intelligence sources, Agca began to weave an elaborate,

that seemingly endorsed the idea of a "Bulgarian connection" to the

shooting. Italian magistrates launched an investigation that

the arrest and trial of three Bulgarians and four Turks. But they

released "for lack of evidence" in 1986 after Agca repeatedly

himself in a Roman courtroom and claimed at one point that he was

The so-called Bulgarian connection was further debunked by the

ex-CIA analyst Melvin A. Goodman, who told the Senate Intelligence

in 1990 that his CIA colleagues, under pressure from agency higher-

skewed their reports to try to lend credence to the notion of a

to murder the pope. "The CIA had no evidence linking the KGB to the

Although it was never substantiated, the much-publicized Bulgarian

connection proved to be one of the more efficacious Reagan-era

disinformation schemes, reinforcing the idea of the Soviet Union as

empire while deflecting attention from potentially embarrassing ties

U.S. intelligence and right-wing extremists in Turkey.

In the late 1970s, armed bands of Grey Wolves launched a wave of bomb

attacks and shootings that killed hundreds of people, including public

officials, journalists, lawyers, human rights activists, students,

unionists. During this period, the Grey Wolves operated with the

encouragement and protection of the Counter-Guerrilla Organization, a

section of the Turkish Army's Special Warfare Department.

the U.S. Military Aid Mission building in Ankara, the Special Warfare

Department received funds and training from U.S. advisors to establish

paramilitary units that were supposed to engage in acts of sabotage

resistance in the event of a Soviet invasion.

But instead of preparing for foreign enemies, these shadowy

specialists set their sights on domestic targets, according to retired

Turkish army commander Talat Turhan, who has authored three books

Turkish secret service and police ties to right-wing extremists and

mafia-style gangs. The Counter-Guerrilla Organization, according to

supplied weapons to the Grey Wolves, who were responsible for much of

political violence that set the stage for the 1980 coup by the Turkish

Agca was part of a network of neofascist gunmen who had close links to

Turkish police commanders, intelligence officers, and far-right

Evidence of this sordid sub-rosa alliance came to the fore in dramatic

fashion in 1996 when one of Agca's closest associates, Grey Wolf

Abdullah Catli (pronounced "chutley"), died in a car crash on a remote

highway near Susurluk, a hundred miles southwest of Istanbul.

A convicted fugitive wanted for murder and heroin trafficking, Catli

accompanied by his gangster girlfriend and a high-ranking police

who also died in the car accident. A Kurdish warlord who teamed up

Turkish security forces was the sole survivor of the crash. Questions

what they were all doing together in the same car led to a

inquiry and a series of stunning revelations about "the deep state"

For twenty years, according to a 1998 parliamentary report, Turkish

agencies backed ultra-right-wing death squads and narco-criminal

were involved in bombings, kidnappings, and other terrorist attacks.

Confirming what human rights activists had long suspected, the report

concluded that members of the Grey Wolves had participated in a

state-sponsored "dirty war" against ethnic Kurds and Turkish

This terror campaign was responsible for many of Turkey's 14,000

murders and disappearances in recent years.

Much of the parliamentary report focused on the ignominious career of

Abdullah Catli, Agca's Grey Wolf mentor. A young thug who looked like

Turkey's answer to Elvis Presley, Catli graduated from street gang

to become a brutal enforcer for the Grey Wolves. By 1978 he had

second-in-command of the group. The following year, Catli helped Ali

escape from a Turkish jail, where he was serving time for the murder

Catli proceeded to safe-house Agca and direct his movements through

European countries in the months leading up to the papal shooting.

provided him with a passport and other fake ID. Most significantly,

Catli who gave Agca the pistol that nearly killed the pontiff. Catli

admitted supplying the gun to Agca when he testified in September

witness at the trial in Rome of three Bulgarians and four Turks who

charged with complicity in the papal death plot. He also testified

oath that the West German BND spy agency had offered him money if he

implicate the Soviet Union and Bulgaria in the attack on the pope.

But Catli said nothing about his role as an undercover agent for the

government. As it turns out, he had been collaborating with the

secret service since the military coup in 1980, despite his status as

fugitive from justice, according to the parliamentary report on the

crash. In other words, Catli was in cahoots with Turkish intelligence

time he supplied Agca with the gun used in the papal shooting.

Imagine if the Bulgarian government had released a report showing

person who gave Ali Agca the papal assassination weapon was then on

payroll of the Bulgarian secret service. The U.S. news media would

have been all over the story, touting it as proof of a sinister

connection. Substitute Turkey, a staunch U.S. ally, for Bulgaria and

In all likelihood, the plot to kill the pope was not backed by a

government. Rather, it appears to have been the work of renegade

extremists who operated under the protective umbrella of Turkey's

service but did not always take their marching orders from Ankara. In

American spy talk, it's called "blowback" - the unintended

covert activity kept secret from the public. Seen from this

shooting of Pope John Paul II is a yet another example of the blowback

Last year, in accordance with the wishes of the pope, Agca was

the Italian government and sent back to his native Turkey. He is

in jail, serving out the remaining nine years of his sentence for

Ipeki, the journalist who had been probing government links to Turkish

Some people had hoped Agca's return would lead to further disclosures

criminal activity in Turkey, but parliamentary investigators complain

the military and other security agencies have blocked their inquiry

prevented them from following many important leads. Meanwhile,

and security officials implicated in death squad killings and drug-

Most of the far-right terrorists who stalked Turkey during the past

two-and-a-half decades have escaped punishment for their crimes. They

ample reason to cheer the electoral success of the Grey Wolves' parent

organization, the National Action Party (known by its Turkish

MHP), which recently joined Turkey's national governing coalition.

Grey Wolves now hold key positions in the party and are serving as MHP

representatives from various Turkish cities. A man privately

U.S. drug enforcement officials as a "well-known heroin chemist" was

elected to parliament in 1999, when the MHP emerged as the second-

Devlet Bahceli, the MHP's current leader and Turkey's deputy prime

says his party has renounced violence. But many of its members

espouse a virulent ethnic nationalist ideology summed up by the

Turkish race above all others." Within these circles, Agca and Catli

revered as great patriots who sought to cleanse Turkey of communist

Martin A. Lee (martin@sfbg.com) is the author of Acid Dreams and The

Reawakens, a book on neofascism. His column, Reality Bites, appears

If you are interested in a free subscription to The

Tate Hausman and Don Hazen and Tamara Straus and Karynn M. Fish,
AlterNet
April 9, 2001

Have you read the one about corporations planning to charge you
hundreds of dollars a month for your tap water? Or the one about
military "psychological operations" specialists manipulating viewers
of CNN? What about the highly skilled programmers in Silicon Valley
who, because they are immigrants, are laboring under sweatshop-like
conditions?

If none of these stories rings a bell, it's not because you've missed
the latest e-mail hoax. It's because these very real tales -- and
many others like them -- weren't reported in the mainstream media.

Instead, they were among this year's "Top Ten Censored Stories,"
according to Project Censored, a veteran media watchdog group. Every
year for the past 25, Project Censored has tracked important stories
that are underreported or blacked out by the mainstream press. The
articles are honored with an award and then compiled in a book
published by Seven Stories Press.

The consistent theme exposed by these articles is that our government
routinely fails to protect our rights, health and safety, especially
if there's corporate money at stake. While Americans often bad-
mouth "big government," we overwhelmingly favor health and
environmental regulations, and trust that they keep us safe.
Unfortunately, as these stories show, our trust may be misplaced.

The yearly release of the Project's Top Ten list (and 15 runner-ups)
is often accompanied by controversy and a pinch of confusion, mostly
because of the Project's complicated definition of censorship. Few
mainstream news organizations experience overt, top-down censorship --
for example, an editor killing a controversial story or firing a
reporter who has dug too deep.

The reality of censorship in American newsrooms is far more subtle
and, arguably, far more pervasive. As mainstream media outlets are
increasingly dominated by large corporate conglomerates, they become
ever more beholden to the bottom line. Stories that don't make money -
- either because they don't capture a large audience, are too
expensive to research or might offend advertisers and investors --
often end up on the newsroom floor.

Reporters and editors quickly learn to play by the narrow rules of
the game, and to keep their stories within a certain range of ideas
and topics. On top of this self-censorship, the relentless pace of
mainstream news outlets rarely allows for anything more than
simplified treatments of complex subjects.

Fortunately, as Project Censored points out year after year, there
are other media outlets that do investigate and report on
controversial, complicated stories -- the independent press. Ranging
from established national magazines (In These Times, The Progressive,
Washington Monthly) to web outlets (MotherJones.com, AlterNet.org) to
alternative newsweeklies, these publications, as the Project puts it,
report "the news that doesn't make the news."

Unfortunately, because their reach is small compared to the massive
media giants that dominate print, radio, television and online news,
stories in these indy publications often don't get the attention they
deserve. That's where Project Censored believes it can help. By
honoring the Top Ten Censored Stories, the Project hopes both to
provoke mainstream media to cover these issues and to strengthen the
independent press.

"We must redevelop news and information systems from the bottom up,"
writes Peter Phillips, Project Censored's director and a journalism
professor at Sonoma State University. "Thousands of alternative news
organizations already exist. We just need to connect and put their
news on the breakfast tables of millions of working people."

Executing that vision is easier said than done, of course. And while
highlighting the top ten underreported stories every year will hardly
cause a media revolution, it will keep more people informed about the
pressing issues that passed quietly by last year. So without further
ado, the Top Ten Censored Stories of 2000 are ...

1. World Bank and Multinational Companies Seek to Privatize Water

Awards to: Jim Shultz, In These Times and This, Maude Barlow,
International Forum on Globalization, Vandana Shiva, Canadian
Dimension, Daniel Zoll and Pratap Chatterjee, the San Francisco Bay
Guardian

The authors of this year's first-place award all started with the
same premise: that global water consumption is doubling every 20
years and that by 2025 the demand for fresh water is expected to rise
to 56 percent more than the amount of water currently available.

This frightens environmentalists. But for officials at international
lending institutions and multinational companies, it's a business
opportunity. "Water is the last infrastructure frontier for private
investors," declared one banking official. Monsanto corporation
certainly agrees; it plans to earn revenues of $420 million and a net
income of $63 million by 2008 from its water business in India and
Mexico.

The Bechtel corporation is also on the case, but has botched its
scramble for blue gold. While attempting to privatize the local water
system of Cochamba, Bolivia, not only did they provoke mass strikes
that injured hundreds and shut down the city of 600,000 for a week,
but they sought to pin the blame for the uprising on narcotics
traffickers. Nevertheless, this bad PR has not stopped Bechtel -- the
company appears to be positioning itself to privatize San Francisco's
water system.

2. OSHA Can't -- or Won't -- Help Powerless Workers

Award to: Christopher Cook, The Progressive

Though focused on one particularly egregious scandal, Project
Censored's second-place winner is more a broad indictment of OSHA,
the Occupational Safety and Health Administration. As author
Christopher Cook points out, OSHA has only 2,300 inspectors to cover
102 million workers in 6.7 million workplaces. That's one inspector
for every 44,348 workers. It would take OSHA 110 years to inspect
each workplace under its jurisdiction just once.

Even when OSHA does inspect workplaces that are violating safety
rules, the fines they force employers to pay are a joke. In one case
at Titan International, the manufacturing company profiled in Cook's
article, OSHA only imposed a paltry $10,000 fine after Titan's
illegal equipment, which lacked crucial safety features, killed a
worker. For a company raking in hundreds of millions a year, a couple
grand is laughable.

The net effect is that employers like Titan pay no attention to rules
and regulations designed to keep their workers safe. While it would
cost them plenty of short-term dollars to install safety guards and
properly train workers, it will only cost them relatively small
amounts in fines over a long period if they do not. Their workers, of
course, are caught in the middle.

3. Army Propaganda Team Worked at CNN

Award to: Alexander Cockburn, Counterpunch

The corporate media has long relied on government spinmeisters to
produce news during times of war. The army has entire units of men,
called "psychological operations" groups, devoted in part to
spreading information and propaganda to news organizations. From
them, media outlets get insider, official information without having
to do much reporting.

But the military took the principle way too far when it actually
placed army psy-ops personnel at CNN's TV, radio and satellite
bureaus during the Kosovo war.

Through a program called "Training With Industry," the army stationed
five psy-ops soldiers as interns at CNN's Southeast bureau. Later, in
a closed-door army symposium, a psy-ops Commander said the
cooperation with CNN was a textbook example of the kind of ties the
American army wants to have with the media.

"The U.S. Army ... confirmed to me that military personnel have been
involved in news production at CNN's newsdesks," said Abe De Vried,
who first broke the story in a respected Dutch newspaper. "I found it
simply astonishing. These kind of close ties with the army are, in my
view, completely unacceptable for any serious news organization."

As award-winner Alexander Cockburn speculated, "It could be that CNN
was the target of a psy-ops penetration and is still too naive to
figure out what was going on."

4. Did the U.S. Deliberately Bomb the Chinese Embassy in Belgrade?

Awards to: Joel Bleifuss and Seth Ackerman, In These Times, Yoichi
Shimatsu, Pacific News Service

On May 7, 1999, U.S. figher pilots bombed the Chinese embassy in
Belgrade, killing three people. The Clinton administration apologized
and called it a "tragic mistake" resulting from an outdated map.
Chinese authorities rejected both the explanation and the apology and
insisted the bombing was deliberate.

Five months later, reports in the Observer of London and Copenhagen's
Politiken alleged that the CIA had coordinated the attack in order to
destroy a Yugoslavian army rebroadcast center housed in the embassy.
Secretary of State Madeline Albright dismissed the allegations
as "balderdash," and both stories were ignored by mainstream news
outlets in the U.S.

In response to a campaign by media critic group Fairness and Accuracy
in Reporting, the Times finally ran an investigative story in April
of last year, claiming it found no conclusive evidence of a
deliberate attack -- though the reporter, Times Pentagon
correspondent Steven Lee Myers, seemed to have his doubts. But the
real issue was the reluctance of the U.S. media to confront a story
that was receiving serious attention abroad.

5. U.S. Taxes Underwrite Nuke Plants Overseas

Award to: Ken Silverstein and Ian Urbina, The Progressive

"Here's a story you probably won't see on CBS." So begins Silverstein
and Urbina's expose of the U.S. Export-Import Bank's foreign nuclear
power plant deals. The writers start smugly for good reason:
Westinghouse, which built unsafe and overpriced Ex-Im-backed nuclear
power plants, owns the CBS network. And sure enough CBS did not cover
the story.

The U.S. Export-Import Bank is a government agency that underwrites
exports through tax-payer backed loans. As the writers document,
between 1959 and 1993, it spent $7.7 billion to help sell American-
made reactors overseas. The reason for this "help," however, was not
altruistic. U.S. nuclear contractors like Westinghouse, Bechtel and
General Electric have watched their home markets shrink, as nuclear
power has become riddled with risks and uncertainties. Thus they have
searched for clients abroad. Since most countries can't afford to buy
nuclear power facilities, the contractors often provide financing
backed by Ex-Im and you.

Often, contractors make windfall profits from such loans. In 1985,
Westinghouse built the Bataan nuclear power facility in the
Philippines at a cost of $1.2 billion, 150 percent above projections.
The plant was situated near an active volcano and never generated a
single watt of energy. Nevertheless, the Philippines pays $300,000 a
day in interest on the loan that funded the project. Of course, none
of this should be a huge surprise -- the leader of the council
overseeing Ex-Im loans is also the head honcho at Westinghouse.

6. Our Role in the Genocide in Rwanda

Awards to: David Corn, AlterNet.org; Ellen Ray, Covert Action
Quarterly

In censored story #6, AlterNet.org columnist David Corn examines a
low point of Bill Clinton's foreign policy: the alleged U.S.
collusion in the genocide of more than half a million Tutsi people by
the Hutus in Rwanda.

Corn noticed a modest news story in the New York Times which said
that the Organization for African Unity had issued a report critical
of United States -- especially of Secretary of State Madeleine
Albright -- for handling the Rwandan genocide so poorly. "But the
story did not go into details," Corn wrote, "[even though] the report
demolished the Clinton assertion that he had not been fully aware of
the genocide when it had been under way." Ellen Ray's lengthy article
about the Congo in Covert Action Quarterly echoed this condemning
assertion.

Other mass killings have occurred during Rwanda's brutal history.
However, under the 1948 UN Genocide Convention, once a genocide is
recognized, the nations of the world are obligated to prevent the
killings and to punish the murderers. A story that strongly suggests
that our government knew about this horrible rampage and might have
been prevented it deserves significant media follow-up.

7. Biotech Industry Censors Critics of Genetically Engineered Food

Awards to: Joel Bleifuss, In These Times; Karen Charman, Extra!; Ben
Lilliston, Multinational Monitor

In 1998, Scottish researcher Arpad Pusztai found that genetically
engineered (GE) potatoes seemed to be causing sickness and poor brain
development in rats. When he went to the press with his preliminary
findings, the biotech industry -- poised to make billions from GE
foods -- came down on him like a ton of bricks.

Pusztai was quickly fired by his employer, the Rowett Research
Institute, while his research team was disbanded and his data seized.
It later came out that Rowett had received a $224,000 grant from
biotech giant Monsanto prior to Pusztai's firing.

Pusztai pushed his case in the media, creating a firestorm of
controversy in the British press. His main point: Why not continue
the experiments he had started to determine the health risks of GE
potatoes? Eventually, he found an ally in Prince Charles, who wrote a
widely publicized article in the Daily Mail questioning the lack of
safety testing on GE foods. In a highly unusual move, British Prime
Minister Tony Blair -- a biotech advocate -- called Charles to advise
him to withdraw his opinion and refrain from any further public
comments. Just another startling illustration of how effectively
industry, in collusion with industry-friendly government officials,
can squash opinions or evidence that might threaten profit margins.

8. Drug Companies Influence Doctors and Health Organizations to Push
Meds

Awards to: Stephen Pomper, Washington Monthly; Ken Silverstein,
MotherJones.com; David Oaks, Dendron; Jacqueline Sparks Miller,
Family Therapy Networker

Advertising would seem an effective enough marketing tool for drugs,
since research shows that most patients who ask for a drug they saw
on TV get the prescription they want. But pharmaceutical companies
are hedging their bets, spending billions each year to influence
doctors and even bankrolling "patients" groups to advocate on their
behalf.

In "Drug Rush," Stephen Pomper describes how an accelerated FDA drug
approval process, combined with too few experts to monitor reports of
problems with drugs already on the market, leaves patients
vulnerable. The risk to public health increases when pharmaceutical
companies ply doctors with incentives to turn them into salesmen for
the latest medications.

Meanwhile, Ken Silverstein's research for Mother Jones revealed that
the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill (NAMI), a non-profit
advocacy group that calls itself "a grassroots organization for
individuals with brain disorders, and their family members," received
millions from pharmaceutical companies, including a large chunk from
Prozac manufacturer Eli Lilly.

"Mother Jones cracked the shell," David Oaks concluded in a follow up
story for Dendron that connects the dots between the drug companies'
largess and a coercive medication monitoring program sponsored by
NAMI. "It's up to the grassroots to finish the job."

9. EPA Planned to Dump Toxic Waste into Denver Sewers

Award to: Will Fantle, The Progressive

A year ago, the city of Denver planned to "clean" the nearby Lowry
Superfund site by pumping radioactive waste through the city's sewer
system and selling the sludge to commercial agribusiness concerns for
use as fertilizer on crops grown for human consumption.

The local EPA office said there's no credible evidence of dangerous
levels of radioactive waste at the site, but a group headed by local
law professor Adrienne Anderson said the plan stinks a mile high.
Anderson's research convinced 7,000 citizens to sign a petition that
prompted the EPA's inspector general to call for an investigation of
the proposed cleanup methods. Since this story was published in The
Progressive, the city of Denver started, then stopped accepting
liquid waste from Lowry, but the program is slated to resume.

What do the local papers, the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News
(which merged this year) have to say about it? Not much, the story
reports -- maybe because for many years, their companies contributed
their own toxic waste to Lowry.

10. Silicon Valley Sweatshops

Award to: David Bacon, Labor Notes and the Washington Free Press

There is a silver lining for employers who hire immigrant workers on
H1-B visas. They are brought to the U.S. on individual contracts, and
therefore, unlike U.S. workers, do not have the legal protection to
organize, sue for unfair treatment or even demand the salaries they
are promised.

This is particularly true for high-tech workers from India and
Pakistan employed by Silicon Valley tech firms. Kim Singh, for
example, received an H1-B visa for a software engineer job. Upon
arriving from India, he worked for one company that withheld 25
percent of his and other immigrant workers' salaries. At his second
Silicon Valley job, he worked seven days a week with no overtime
compensation, and discovered only H1-B workers were required to work
weekends. His third employer rented him and three other H1-B workers
an apartment, charging each $1,450 a month, while holding onto their
passports. Complaints about this kind of treatment were met by
firings and exportation.

Such abuses have far-ranging effects. Silicon Valley tech companies
have lobbied Congress to increase the yearly number of H1-B workers
to 300,000 as well as to lift the cap entirely, potentially
increasing abuses. And high-tech jobs that have gone to foreigners
have prevented firms from training American workers, whom they would
have to pay higher wages. "Contract labor boosts corporate bottom
lines," David Bacon reported, "but it has a devastating impact on
workers."

The following stories were selected as the Censored Stories 11 to 25.

11. United Nations Corporate Partnerships -- A Human Rights Peril
Kenny Bruno, Dollars and Sense; Danielle Knight, Multinational
Monitor

12. Cuba Leads the World in Organic Farming
Hugh Warwick, Third World Resurgence; Alison Auld, Sustainable Times;
Stephen Zunes, Designer/Builder

13. The World Trade Organization is an Illegal Institution
Michel Chossudovsky, Covert Action Quarterly

14. Europe Holds Companies Environmentally Responsible, Despite U.S.
Opposition
Joel Bleifuss, In These Times

15. Gerber Uses the WTO to Suppress Laws that Promote Breastfeeding
Peter Montague, Rachel's Environment and Health Weekly; Robert
Weissman, Multinational Monitor

16. Human Genome Project Opens the Door to Ethnically Specific
Bioweapens
Roy Blake, Washington Free Press; Greg Bishop, Konformist; Robert
Lederman, North Coast Xpress

17. IMF and World Bank Staff Tightly Connected to New Yugoslav
Government
Michel Chossudovsky and Jared Israel, Emperor's New Clothes;
Christian Parenti, San Francisco Bay Guardian

18. Indigenous People Challenge Private Ownership and Patenting of
Life
Kimberly Wilson, GeneWatch

19. U.S. Using Dangerous Fungus to Eradicate Coca Plants in Colombia
Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, CounterPunch; Ed Vulliamy,
London Observer

20. Disabled Most Likely to be Victims of Serious Crime
Dan Sorensen, Tash Newsletter

21. U.S Military Bombing Range Destroys Korean Village Life
Karen Talbot, Freespeech.org

22. U.S. Government Repressed Marijuana-Tumor Research
Raymond Cushing, AlterNet.org

23. Very Small Levels of Chemical Exposures Can be Dangerous
Stephen Lester, Everyone's Backyard; Frances Cerra Whittelsey, In
These Times

24. Pentagon Seeks Mega-Mergers Between International Arms
Corporations
Federation of American Scientists, Arms Sales Monitor

25. Community Activists Outsit McDonalds
McLibel Support Campaign, A-Infos New Service

CENSORED 2001: THE TOP 25 CENSORED STORIES OF 2000

--------------------------------
Project Censored
http://www.projectcensored.org/
--------------------------------

CENSORED 2001: THE TOP 25 CENSORED STORIES OF 2000
http://www.projectcensored.org/cyearbook.htm

Project Censored's top 25 Censored stories from Censored 2001: 25
Years of
Censored News and the Top Censored Stories of the Year are now
available
for viewing here at Project Censored.org.

Censored 2001 can currently be ordered from in the Project Censored
Bookstore. In addition to 2000's top 25 Censored Stories, this 25th
anniversary addition of Censored also features an Introduction by Noam
Chomsky; a look back at a quarter century of censored news; an
interview
with Walter Cronkite; Laura Conaway and James Ridgeway's "Democracy in
Chains," about the discrimination against black voters in Florida; a
chapter on the history of Junk Food News by Project Censored founder
Carl
Jensen; and original essays by Eric Galatas, Robert A. Hackett,
Edward S.
Herman, Marrianne Manilov, and Norman Solomon. (update 11:30pst)

Peter Phillips Ph.D.
Sociology Department/Project Censored
Sonoma State University
1801 East Cotati Ave.
Rohnert Park, CA 94928
707-664-2588
--------------------------------
Project Censored
http://www.projectcensored.org/

Robert Sterling
Editor, The Konformist
http://www.konformist.com

INFAMY SPEECH WRITTEN BEFORE PEARL HARBOR ATTACK !!!

Inside the Beltway
John McCaslin
THE WASHINGTON TIMES

Published 6/1/01

Dredging Pearl Harbor

     Exactly two years ago, Sen. John W. Warner, Virginia Republican
and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, joined the
debate on whether to posthumously promote Army Maj. Gen. Walter Short
and Navy Rear Adm. Husband Kimmel, both commanders of Pearl Harbor at
the time of the Japanese attack.

     A series of official inquiries between 1941 to 1946 blamed both
officers for lack of readiness, and though neither was ever
officially charged with wrongdoing, both were relieved of their
commands and ultimately retired at the lower ranks of major general
and rear admiral.

     The question now is whether government and military leaders were
too quick to render judgment. Were the two officers made scapegoats?
Were there failures at higher levels of the chain of command in
Washington?

     Mr. Warner told colleagues: "There's no new evidence. . . . Why
should we now at this late date in history make a different finding?"

     Well, contemporary researchers who accepted Mr. Warner's
challenge now answer his question. Not only has new evidence
surrounding the attack on Pearl Harbor been uncovered, but historian
and author Daryl S. Borgquist, a Justice Department official in
Washington, believes the U.S. Navy and others are keeping crucial
documents "under wraps."

     Inside the Beltway has learned that, in a lengthy paper being
presented today at a World War II conference at New York's Siena
College, Mr. Borgquist will offer new findings about Pearl Harbor.
He'll say the verdict on Pearl Harbor was reached too soon (upon
conclusion of the 1940s investigations), well before crucial
documents were declassified and other materials uncovered.

     Of note, Mr. Borgquist draws attention to a "major historical
error" based on the typed text of the first draft of President
Franklin D. Roosevelt's "Day of Infamy" speech.

      Mr. Borgquist says the text was drafted by a State Department
team led by former Assistant Secretary of State Adolph Berle between
8:30 p.m. and 12:30 a.m. -- after the first 13 parts of the 14-part
Japanese reply to the American ultimatum had been intercepted,
decoded, and delivered on Saturday night, Dec. 6, 1941.

     The attack came on Dec. 7.

     That supports Mr. Borgquist's earlier argument, published in
1999 by Naval History Magazine,

see: http://www.usni.org/navalhistory/Articles99/NHborgquist.htm

that the attack on Pearl Harbor was no surprise at all. He wrote that
Helen E. Hamman, the daughter of Don C. Smith, who directed the War
Service for the Red Cross before World War II, wrote a letter to
President Clinton revealing a conversation she had with her dad:

     "Shortly before the attack in 1941, President Roosevelt called
him to the White House for a meeting concerning a top-secret matter.
At this meeting, the president advised my father that his
intelligence staff had informed him of a pending attack on Pearl
Harbor, by the Japanese.

     "He anticipated many casualties and much loss; he instructed my
father to send workers and supplies to a holding area. When he
protested to the president, President Roosevelt told him that the
American people would never agree to enter the war in Europe unless
they were attack[ed] within their own borders. . . .

     "He followed the orders of his president and spent many years
contemplating this action, which he considered ethically and morally
wrong."

     We'll wait and see if the Bush White House talks to Mr.
Borgquist and fellow Pearl Harbor presenters at today's conference
before making the decision on whether to elevate Gen. Short and Adm.
Kimmel, as their families have requested and Congress proposed in the
fiscal year 2001 defense authorization bill.

To: David Horowitz

THE FBI MURDERED 28 BLACK PANTHERS and the Bureau set others up for
arrest on false homicide charges, etc. Your explanation for moving to
the fascist right is a smug deception. I challenge you to an open
debate in the forum of your choosing. All I ask is that you select a
venue where your CIA sponsors (leery of Scaife) have no pull. A tit-
for-tat to be posted on the Internet is fine by me. I have published
five books on fascism, so there is no need to condescend. Take me up
on this challenge, you insufferable, hairy stinkbug, because I will
write about you anyway, with or without your input.

Alex Constantine
6-22-00

Horowitz responds: You are such an ignoramus I have to refer you to
an article written thirty years ago by Edward J. Epstein in the New
Yorker which investigated the self-serving Panther claims and found
them empty. Also, watch your language. This is a family publication.
D.H.

Dear Fat Mole:
You constantly play on the assumption that those of us 'out here'
listening to your Ultra disinformation are 'ignoramuses.' You seem
convinced that you can get away with any old lie, pass it off as
fact, and the Boobocracy will never know the difference.

Directing your readers to an article by Edward J. Epstein only
reinforces the point I made concerning your ties to the CIA, because
Epstein has long been on cozy terms with the 'Company.' Your
reference, then, is an 'inside job.'

Here are a few cites for you, too, David:

Robin Ramsey, the editor of Lobster, a magazine about intelligence
operations published in the UK, writes: 'Edward J. Epstein published
a series of articles that later, in 1978, were the basis for his
book, Legend: The Secret World of Lee Harvey Oswald. The articles,
and especially the book, publicized for the first time clashes that
had occurred within the Agency between the Counterintelligence (CI)
Staff and the Soviet Division over the bona fides of a KGB defector
named Yuriy Nosenko. Because Epstein's writings contained so much
information about sensitive CIA and FBI operations, it was generally
assumed he had a willing and knowledgeable source, either a serving
officer (considered doubtful) or a retired senior person with wide
knowledge of anti-Soviet operations overseas and in the United
States. Neither the articles nor the book was annotated, however.
Epstein stated that he had spoken occasionally with James Angleton,
the retired chief of CIA's CI Staff, but did not acknowledge that he
was the source.' Further, there is a passage concerning 'the massive
Anglo-American media attention devoted to Edward J. Epstein's book
Legend in 1973. In that Epstein sought to re-establish the Warren
Commission's verdict that Lee Harvey Oswald alone did the dirty deed;
but adding to it the suggestion that he had been got at by the KGB.
Oswald was still a 'lone nut' but somehow the KGB's 'lone nut'. In
fact, despite spending a great deal of Readers Digest research money,
Epstein found no evidence that Oswald was KGB, and his rehash of the
Warren Commission's version of the shooting in Dallas was as inept as
its progenitor. Why did he do it? Epstein was by then the spokesman
for James Jesus Angleton, the paranoid former head of CIA Counter
Intelligence who had been sacked in 1974.'

In The Last Investigation, Gaeton Fonzi puts a finer point on it. He
notes that although Epstein's Inquest was 'one of the first books
critical of the Warren Commission, Epstein's contacts with the CIA
were considered suspicious by many of his fellow critics. In
addition, it was known that Epstein was then working under a
lucrative contract from Reader's Digest, a publication that had done
cooperative projects with the Agency, to write a book that would
suggest that Lee Harvey Oswald was an agent of Russia's intelligence
service, the KGB.'

If these sources don't suit you, I will be glad to expand on Epstein
and explain to you why he is not a reputable source. You are also a
CIA propagandist, albeit a fat and exceptionally hypocritical one,
and that's why your 'work,' destroying liberalism, appears in Human
Events, National Review and other 'conservative' magazines subsidized
by the Agency. This is not so unusual. The Church Committee, as you
must know, found 400 reporters on the CIA payroll. Disinformation
<sometimes parading as 'conservative thought,' as your 'work' also
does> was their game. There are, to this day, scores of media figures
who 'play ball' with the Agency. One of the most generous funding
pools for these morally-crippled conservative pukes is Richard Mellon
Scaife, who was recruited by the CIA for 'Operation Mockingbird,' the
systematic infiltration of the media, in the 1950s (I documented all
of this in 'And Now a Word from Our Sponsor ... the CIA,' Virtual
Government, Feral House,1997). The fact that you are funded by R.M.
Scaife, a domestic CIA propagandist, this alone, qualifies you as a
media 'Mockingbird.' The fact that you publish almost exclusively in
Agency-funded propaganda outlets, eg. National Review, fleshes out a
portrait of David Horowitz, a propagandist funded by the tax-payer to
promote fascism. I repeat: 28 Black Panthers were murdered. Tupac
Shakur makes 29 because the leading suspect in his killing, according
to the Los Angeles Times, is a cop entangled in the Ramparts scandal.
BTW, I'm anxious to discuss your claims concerning Betty Van Patten
and the Panthers. Ready when you are, stinkbug.

Alex Constantine

French judge Alain Le Loire attempted last week to serve Henry Kissinger with a subpoena.

The incident occurred during what was officially described as a “private” visit to Paris, though at the time of the attempt to bring him to justice he was addressing a ‘seminar’ behind closed doors in a hotel. The summons concerned Kissinger’s role in the Chilean coup d’etat which replaced elected left President Salvador Allende with the dictator Pinochet, and more particularly its aftermath.

A number of the people who ‘disappeared’ following the putsch were French citizens. Kissinger was also, of course, responsible for the bombardment of Cambodia, during which he famously promised to bomb the country “back to the stone age.” The attacks led to the coming to power of Pol Pot, whose contempt for human life rivalled Kissinger’s own.

Following the incident the U.S. Embassy told Judge Le Loire that it does not want him to question Kissinger, pleading that he had recently had a heart attack. The embassy told Le Loire in a letter that Kissinger had “other obligations” and that the information requested by the judge was confidential. The letter, signed by an embassy official, suggested that Le Loire should address an official request for information to the US government, and admitted that the former Secretary of State had slipped out of the country and was in Italy.

The judge, who has named a number of Kissinger’s victims including Georges Klein, a former adviser to President Allende, has been on the alleged serial killer’s trail since issuing an arrest warrant three years ago. William Bourdon, a lawyer representing the families of the French ‘disappeared’, said there was no doubt of US complicity in the coup, and that “the American administration watched very closely what was going on in Chile and especially the plight of foreigners, including French, who disappeared.”

French Euro-MP Roseline Vachetta, who represents the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, commented that she found the move “significant, a recognition by the French state, by a national institution, of US involvement in the Chilean coup. This is a new development, and one which I would like to see go further. As with the arrest of Pinochet himself, it represents another breach in the impunity of dictators and those, including agents of rich western countries such as the US and, indeed, France, who help to bring them to power and keep them there.”

5.11 a.m. ET (9: 11 GMT) June 5, 1999 By Wendy Nakamura, Associated Press WASHINGTON DC (AP)

For almost fourteen years, he lived in a world of hatred, bigotry, and violence. He attended Klan rallies and meetings of buttoned-down intellectual racists in business suits in the most upmarket hotels. He met and hosted Holocaust deniers like German- Canadian Ernst Zundel and British author David Irving. He was there at cross-burnings and street marches, waving a picket sign or a Confederate battle flag and always shouting the loudest of any among his White supremacist cohorts. He drank beer with Skinhead gangs, swapped jokes with them about African-Americans, Hispanics, and Jews, and heard them plot hate crimes and racial assaults. He cruised the Internet, posting racist messages to computer bulletin boards and newsgroups, making contacts with neo-Nazis and nationalist extremists the world over. He infiltrated the inner councils of almost every top hate group in the United States and even in Europe. He even filed a libel suit against another White supremacist who claimed he was an FBI informant.

But he was. Last month FBI Special Agent James R. Finchley, a decorated Vietnam veteran and "one of the best and bravest men ever to graduate out of Quantico" according to a former instructor at the world-famous FBI academy who knew him and trained him, came in from the cold at last, after successfully carrying out the longest-running deep-cover infiltration of any criminal or terrorist underworld in the history of American law enforcement.

Finchley's fourteen years in the White racist underground produced only a handful of actual prosecutions, but "that wasn't his primary mission," according to the former director of the FBI's Behavioral Science Unit at Quantico, Kenneth M. Lanning. "He was there to listen and learn, and the wealth of information he obtained for us is beyond price." "It is not too much to say that we now know virtually everything there is to know about organized race hatred in this country. These guys [White supremacist activists and leaders] couldn't go to the can without us knowing about it," Lanning said.

FBI Director Louis Freeh was not available for comment, but U. S. Attorney General Janet Reno told a reporter, "We usually do not make any public statement on covert operations of this nature until all criminal cases associated with an investigation have been brought to a conclusion, but I will say that Special Agent Finchley displayed uncommon courage, resourcefulness, and initiative in a very complex and often dangerous situation."

Finchley's cover was so deep he is reported to have actually married one woman who was involved in a White supremacist group he wanted to penetrate. On that occasion he went to St. Petersburg, Russia to meet and bring to America a Russian woman who was to be the "mail order bride" of a nationally known White supremacist leader who was banned from entering the country because of his views. Finchley was so taken with the woman that he persuaded her to marry him instead, allegedly in order to keep her out of the clutches of the racist leader.

Soon afterwards he and his Russian wife amicably divorced and Agent Finchley arranged for her to get a green card and relocate to Florida. Justice Department sources are close-mouthed about many of the details of Finchley's fourteen-year odyssey into the murky underworld of racism and hate. "There are still some loose ends to be tied up, and once this gets out there are going to be some very angry White supremacists out there," said a spokesman for the Department. The source refused to say whether Agent Finchley had been moved into the Witness Protection Program or what measures were being taken to prevent retaliation by Finchley's former comrades in the racist movement.

Possibly the most bizarre event of Finchley's long- running undercover operation was when he was accused of having been involved in the Oklahoma City bombing as "John Doe Number Two" by the editor of a racist newsletter who had long suspected Finchley of being a Federal agent.

Finchley took an absolutely unprecedented step: he sued the editor for libel and obtained a 110,000 default judgment when the defendant didn't show up in court to try the case.

"I don't know if he's been successful in collecting any of the money the judge awarded him," said Lanning.

Falsification and unreality
Pearl Harbor, directed by Michael Bay, written by Randall Wallace

By David Walsh
11 June 2001

"After my evacuation from Okinawa, I had the enormous pleasure of
seeing [John] Wayne humiliated in person at Aiea Heights Naval
Hospital in Hawaii. Only the most gravely wounded, the litter cases,
were sent there.... Each evening Navy corpsmen would carry litters
down to the hospital theater so the men could watch a movie. One
night they had a surprise for us. Before the film the curtains parted
and out stepped John Wayne, wearing a cowboy outfit—and 10-gallon
hat, bandanna, checkered shirt, two pistols, chaps, boots and spurs.
He grinned his aw-shucks grin, passed a hand over his face and
said, `Hi ya, guys!' He was greeted by a stony silence. Then somebody
booed. Suddenly everyone was booing.

"This man was a symbol of the fake machismo we had come to hate, and
we weren't going to listen to him. He tried and tried to make himself
heard, but we drowned him out, and eventually he quit and left."

—Historian William Manchester in the New York Times Magazine, June
14, 1987

"Advertisements for a string of recent movies from Columbia Pictures
have included gushingly positive comments from a critic who does not
exist, Newsweek magazine reported in its edition that goes on sale on
Monday.... Susan Tick, a spokeswoman for Columbia's parent Sony
Pictures Entertainment, could not be reached for comment, but was
quoted by Newsweek as confirming the reviews were concocted, which
she called `an incredibly foolish decision.'"

—Reuters, June 2, 2001

Pearl Harbor is a dreadful work from nearly every point of view. The
film—which builds up to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor in
December 1941 through a love story involving two American pilots and
a nurse—is miserably written, acted and directed. Moreover, it
distorts the history of the World War II era and glorifies the US
military past and present in a manner that, inadvertently or not,
serves reactionary political aims.

Rafe McCawley (Ben Affleck) and Danny Walker (Josh Hartnett) belong
to the US Army Air Corps on the eve of American intervention in World
War II in 1941. Rafe meets Evelyn Johnson (Kate Beckinsale), the navy
nurse, and they fall in love. He soon leaves for England, having
volunteered to join a squadron of foreign pilots fighting with the
British Royal Air Force.

Danny and Evelyn subsequently find themselves at Pearl Harbor in
Hawaii, where for the moment life is idyllic. Rafe is shot down
during the Battle of Britain and presumed dead. After a few months,
Danny and Evelyn begin an affair. Rafe, however, turns up out of the
blue. He and Danny clash, then reconcile.

Meanwhile the Japanese, driven to desperate measures by an American
oil embargo, are preparing a massive strike on Pearl Harbor. US
military intelligence attempts to figure out what the Japanese are
planning. Franklin D. Roosevelt presides over the US like a proud,
benevolent father.

A healthy portion of the film is taken up by a reenactment of the
raid on Pearl Harbor. In the bombing, more than 2,000 are killed and
a large number of US ships and planes destroyed. A black sailor, who
has been consigned to kitchen duty, gets an opportunity to man an
anti-aircraft gun and makes the most of it. Rafe and Danny do get
into the sky and shoot down several Japanese planes.

In the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, the American military plans a
retaliatory attack, in the form of a bombing raid on Tokyo. Rafe and
Danny are to take part. Before they leave, Evelyn confronts Rafe,
informing him that she is pregnant by Danny and plans to stick with
him, although she loves Rafe. In the ensuing mission, only one of the
two pilots will return to claim her affection.

Although Pearl Harbor as a rule navigates unpleasantly between
vulgarity and sentimentality, sometimes it is both vulgar and
sentimental. One watches incredulously the courtship scenes of Rafe
and Evelyn, which include crude and unamusing physical antics
involving hypodermic needles and a badly injured nose. And then Rafe
on the night before he departs, after drooling over Evelyn and
aggressively pursuing her, suggests—entirely out of character—that
they not sleep together as to make it all the more special when they
meet again! (This is simply, of course, an obvious plot requirement;
Evelyn has to be certain later on that Danny is the father of her
baby.) This early sequence, without a trace of dignity or
sensitivity, sets the tone for the entire film. It also establishes
that there will be no genuine chemistry between Affleck and
Beckinsale; the performers are too self-involved and their efforts
too strained for that.

Pearl Harbor is not so much a film as an advertising campaign. One is
constantly being sold something—whether it is "love," the beauties of
Hawaii, the genius of Roosevelt or the glory of the US armed forces.
There is nothing measured or textured about the film, there is no
dramatic argument being made. The filmmakers, on behalf of the Disney
corporation, present the spectator with a series of finished
products, whose positive qualities are absurdly exaggerated in order
that these products may be purchased and consumed with the least
amount of resistance. The actors are treated in the same manner, as
items packaged as pleasingly as possible. (The director, Michael Bay
[ The Rock, Armageddon], used to film advertisements for Nike,
Reebok, Coca Cola, Budweiser and Miller Lite. In 1995 the Directors
Guild of America named him Commercial Director of the Year.)

In an attempt to liven up a hackneyed and sophomoric script, which
has no authentic inner momentum, Bay has his cameras swoop in on
objects and people from odd angles. For example, we seem constantly
to come upon Beckinsale from the side or below, for no apparent
reason. The pyrotechnics are meant at every point to conceal Pearl
Harbor's emotional and moral poverty.

The essential hollowness of the project and the lack of intelligence
and artistic skill, however, strongly make themselves felt. Every
side of the film—dialogue, performances, sets, lighting, music—is
overdone to the point that it simply produces unease and even
revulsion. A crude and obvious meal is being shoved in the viewer's
face.

There is nothing honest about Pearl Harbor. The filmmakers are
pretending to care about the drama, pretending to care about history,
pretending to care about the casualties of war—and, in fact, their
thinking is focused almost exclusively on whether the film will be
able to make back its $135 million budget and what success or failure
might mean for their respective careers.

While the ostensible guiding principle of Pearl Harbor is the
nobility and loftiness of America's war aims, the self-centeredness
and smallness of the film's creators cannot help but manifest
themselves. This is perhaps most perfectly (and ludicrously)
illustrated in the scene in which Evelyn tracks Rafe down before his
bombing raid on Tokyo. She attempts to justify her actions,
explaining that she and Danny had thought he was dead, and so forth.
Beckinsale reaches a certain point in her narrative and, wrinkling up
her nose and spreading out her arms, exclaims with indignation, "Then
all this happened"—i.e., the bombing of Pearl Harbor and US entry
into World War II!—sounding every bit like a middle class young lady
whose plans for a two-week skiing holiday have been disrupted by some
irritating family drama.

Absence of historical sense

Although it is less than a zero in artistic and intellectual terms,
Pearl Harbor nonetheless points toward a number of significant issues.

One of the chief defects of contemporary American studio films is the
almost complete absence of any historical sense. One feels sometimes
that it has been surgically removed. Film writers and directors,
lacking any serious knowledge about (and perhaps intuitively
threatened by) history and the historical process, simply transport
their own philistine selves back in time. Infinitely pleased with
themselves and their lives, unable to imagine human beings acting
from motives other than their own petty and self-absorbed ones, they
create self-portraits (fantasized at that) and set them down at the
appropriate times and places, whether it be, for example, ancient
Rome, thirteenth century Scotland or colonial America. Characters—in
fact, cliched types—resemble one another in films that appear to have
been made with a cookie cutter.

Ignorance in this case is mixed in with the belief, derived
ultimately from modern subjectivist ideology, that any truthful
accounting of history is impossible in any event and the past is more
or less "what you make of it." With the political establishment
lurching to the right and the liberal-intellectual milieu incapable
of mounting any opposition, empty-headed screenwriters and film
director—whose employers, the large studios, hold a virtual monopoly
of the world's movie screens—have grown to feel that anything goes.
Who is going to call them to order? Pearl Harbor is an almost
inevitable consequence of this sordid process. There is no point in
waxing indignant about it. Critics who shake their heads at the
film's stupidities or heap insults upon its creators without calling
into question the process that produced such a work are merely
deceiving themselves and the general public.

In terms of its falsifications, there is the issue, in the first
place, of whether the raid on Pearl Harbor caught the US military so
unprepared. A good deal of evidence suggests that the British and
American intelligence services were aware that an attack of some sort
was imminent. Certainly Washington was hoping that a provocation or
confrontation with the Japanese could be organized in order to
justify US entry into the war, a step made more difficult by the fact
that Roosevelt had run as a peace candidate in 1940. As the film
itself points out, the US had virtually issued an ultimatum to Japan
with its oil embargo.

The Japanese were obliged to be the aggressors because they were late
in the game, the US having already gobbled up some of the prize
possessions in the region (the Philippines, Hawaii, Guam) around the
time of its first imperialist adventure, the Spanish-American War.

A recent article on the WSWS noted: "Stripped of its ideological
masks, the Pacific War between the US and Japan was a struggle
between two predatory states seeking to replace the previously
dominant European powers in the region and in China in particular.
Being the weaker power, Japan was compelled to resort to adventurist
methods—the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, then China as a whole in
1937. For its part, the US, while claiming to stand for democracy,
had no qualms about firebombing Japanese cities and dropping atomic
bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to ensure the complete submission of
its rival." (The film of course makes no mention either of the fact
that in February 1942 120,000 Japanese-Americans were rounded up and
placed in internment camps, an event that took place before the
Doolittle raid.)

The calculated cynicism of the film's creators and producers, as well
as their instinctive reverence for authority, knows almost no bounds.
The film is designed to stoke up anti-Japanese sentiment with US
audiences, while some of the most insulting epithets have been
removed for the potentially lucrative Japanese market. Moreover,
Pearl Harbor pays homage to that country's military and political
leaders, making no mention of their barbarous policies in Asia.

The falsification of the geopolitical picture, part of the mythology
that American capitalism only goes to war for freedom and democracy,
is more than matched by the falsification of its portrait of the US
in 1941 as an innocent and unified nation.

US intervention in the war came after and indeed put an end to 12
years of economic depression, which had deeply shaken American
society. Enormous class battles, often with left-wing elements in the
leadership, exploded in the middle of the 1930s. Roosevelt had come
to power conscious of the need to steer a course, often against the
wishes of elements from his own class, that would save the US from
social revolution. Life-and-death issues were at stake in the events
of the time.

Despite the increasingly subservient character of the newly-formed
CIO's leadership and the betrayals of the Stalinist Communist Party,
bitter strikes continued up to the eve of Pearl Harbor. Two
protracted struggles took place in 1941—a 75-day strike Allis-
Chalmers in Wisconsin early in the year and a strike at North
American Aviation in June. In both cases the Roosevelt administration
acted directly as a strike-breaker, in the latter conflict sending
out 3,500 federal troops against the strikers in Inglewood,
California. Workers shouted "Heil Roosevelt!" as they were driven
back on the picket lines at bayonet point. In 1941 there were 4,288
strikes, involving 2.4 million workers, compared to 4,740 strikes and
1.9 million strikers in 1937, the year of the great sit-down strikes.

The war brought this strike wave to an end, as union leaders
obediently fell into line with the Roosevelt administration, but the
broader question that concerns us here is the character of the men
and women who went off to war and the extraordinary events that had
shaped them. None of the tension of the time, its explosiveness and
complexity, is even hinted at in Pearl Harbor. Nor the degree of
distrust and discontent which, even under wartime conditions (as the
Manchester quote at the top of this article suggests), was never very
far from the surface.

American war filmmakers of the past, in their own particular way, did
have to respond to some of these social questions. They were obliged
to make an appeal to the working class. So films, for example,
portrayed a submarine crew or infantry unit with its requisite
Italian or Jew from Brooklyn, a farm-boy from the Midwest or the
South, occasionally a steelworker of eastern European extraction, and
in later films, a black serviceman. Hollywood films depicted the war
in Europe in particular as a struggle against fascist tyranny fought
by soldiers and sailors imbued with democratic sensibilities. There
is barely a tip of the hat to such sentiment in Pearl Harbor.

Had it been produced in virtually any other country, Pearl Harbor
would be termed by US commentators a "propaganda film." The
filmmakers received the full cooperation of the American military,
whose efforts they uncritically celebrate. The sanitizing and
falsifying of history (a process also going on in Japan at present)
objectively serves contemporary political purposes, in this instance,
preparing the population for new wars.

More than anything else, this wretched film has about it an intense
air of unreality. For all their patriotic zeal, directors like John
Ford ( They Were Expendable), William Wyler ( The Best Years of Our
Lives), Howard Hawks ( Air Force), even Allan Dwan ( Sands of Iwo
Jima), and others, felt secure enough to treat certain troubling
aspects of war and its consequences realistically. The decline in
skills and intelligence in the film industry is bound up, in the
final analysis and in a complex fashion, with the weakened position
of American capitalism and its increasingly gloomy prospects. While
Pearl Harbor's creators may imagine they can manhandle history and
human beings however they like without consequences, marketing the US
role in World War II as one would a roll-on deodorant or a new brand
of breakfast cereal is not, at a more profound level, an indication
of extraordinary self-confidence.

Copyright 1998-2001
World Socialist Web Site
All rights reserved

Apologetics Research Resources on Religious Cults, Sects, Movements, Doctrines, Etc.

> 2280+ pages of apologetics and countercult
> information about cults, sects, and
> alternative religious movements.

ANTIFA INFO-BULLETIN

News * Analysis * Research * Action
Volume 1, Number 5 ***** March 7, 1996

Communism as the ultimate evil has always been the specter
haunting property owners, as it threatens the very root of their class
position and superior status. The Soviet, Chinese, and Cuban
revolutions were traumas to Western elites, and the on-going
conflicts and the well-publicized abuses of Communist states have
contributed to elevating opposition to communism to a first
principle of Western ideology and politics. This ideology helps
mobilize the populace against an enemy, and because the concept is
fuzzy it can be used against anybody advocating policies that
threaten property interests or support accommodation with
Communist states or radicalism. It therefore helps fragment the left
and labor movements and serves as a political- control mechanism.
If the triumph of communism is the worst imaginable result, the
support of fascism abroad is justified as a lesser evil.
-- Edward S. Herman & Noam Chomsky

A Small Circle of Friends:

Larry Pratt,
the Council for Inter-American Security
and International Fascist Networks

by Tom Burghardt
Bay Area Coalition for Our Reproductive Rights

The Council for Inter-American Security
CIS and WACL: A Marriage Made in Hell
Larry Pratt,
Council for Inter-American Security and the War Against Immigrants
Conclusion
Appendix
Notes and sources

Introduction

Recent allegations of anti-Semitism and racism levelled against
Larry Pratt, a national co-chairman of the Buchanan for President
campaign committee, is an intriguing example of media obfuscation
and "truth" on the half-shell. That Pratt addressed the 1992
"Christian Men's Meeting," organized by notorious Christian
Identity racist, Pete Peters, is an established fact. That Pratt shared
the platform with Aryan Nations fuhrer , Richard Butler and
"former" Klan "Grand Dragon," Louis Beam, the neo-Nazi architect
of "leaderless resistance," is incontestable. That he gave a speech at
the 1993 Jubilation Conference in Sacramento, California, an
annual gathering of far-rightists' sponsored by the anti-Semitic
publisher of Jubilee, the flagship tabloid of the Christian Identity
movement, is true and has been accurately reported by the
bourgeois press.

What should be of equal concern to the media is information about
Mr. Pratt which is far more damaging -- his close collaboration over
a 20 year period with an international network of war criminals,
neo-Nazi terrorists, and the organizers of Asian, European and
Latin American death squads. But because such activities advanced
the geopolitical and military goals of the United States, Pratt's
actual record is passed over in silence ; a facet of media self-
censorship that has been well- documented elsewhere.[1]

At the outset of this report I will emphasize, Pratt is a reactionary
whose political orientation can aptly be described as clerical-
fascist. On numerous occasions, he has expressed disdain for
democracy and the economic, political and social rights of the
oppressed. His ideological and personal links to the theocratic wing
of the Christian Right, the anti-abortion movement and "Patriot"
militias, though of interest, will be explored in another report
currently in preparation.

This edition of AFIB however, will explore at some length, the
dimensions of Larry Pratt's ties to the national security state. I will
demonstrate that Pratt, Buchanan and a host of other "respectable
conservatives," far from being "outsiders" or "populists" are active
agents and apologists for the global crimes of U.S. imperialism.

The Council for Inter-American Security:
Intellectuals in the Service of Global Terror

The Council for Inter-American Security (CIS) is a rightist outfit
that played a pivotal role formulating Washington's program for
counter-revolutionary war and mass murder in Central America
during the 1980s. Larry Pratt, was a central figure within the CIS
hierarchy as was Patrick Buchanan; Pratt was secretary to the group
while Buchanan functioned as an organizational director (see
Appendix for complete list of board members and principle
players).

But CIS was more than a New Right think-tank researching and
formulating foreign policy for the Reagan administration. The
group functioned in a dual-capacity; as an alarmist "public policy
institute" and as a domestic spy ring, a "privatized" version of the
FBI's infamous COINTELPRO operations. Having staked-out Latin
America as their geopolitical niche, CIS targeted Central America
solidarity activists, progressive clergy, and the Salvadoran exile
community. The group gathered intelligence and disseminated
disinformation, funneling data on foreign policy opponents to the
FBI and the intelligence service of the Salvadoran death squad
state.

The domestic side to illegal CIA-Contra operations were aided by a
broad spectrum of domestic and international reactionaries. Many
of the state-sanctioned criminals who sought to subvert democratic
processes in the U.S. and overseas were connected to a network
which included, among others: the John Birch Society (JBS); the
World Anti-Communist League (WACL); Christian fundamentalist
and Catholic theocrats; anti-Castro terrorists grouped in Alpha
66/Brigade 2506; the LaRouche organization and the Unification
Movement of South Korean fascist, Rev. Sun Myung Moon.[2]

While such groups operated secretly, they did so with the
knowledge, financial backing and encouragement of powerful
American corporate and political interests. According to journalist
Ross Gelbspan:

A...private group which flourished during the Reagan era was the
Washington-based Council for Inter-American Security. The group
disseminated reams of material during the 1980s purporting to
prove linkages between a Soviet-inspired global terror network and
liberal and left-wing American groups opposed to US foreign
policies. CIS also expended considerable effort to improve the
public image of the reputed Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto
D'Aubuisson. When the FBI's CISPES files were pried open in
1988 by a lawsuit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights
they were found to contain several reports written by J. Michael
Waller, a researcher whose work has been sponsored by the
nongovernmental Council for Inter-American Security. But Waller's
work to connect American political dissenters to an international
communist-terrorist plot was part of a public- private
partnership.[3]

By 1984, FBI "active measures" against CISPES and the Sanctuary
Movement were in full-swing. Fifteen Bureau field offices, dozens
of agents and hundreds of "private" right-wing intelligence "assets"
were involved in these illegal operations. More than 200 incidents
of harassment and intimidation against activists were documented.
Many incidents involved church and office break-ins, theft of files
and the infiltration of local CISPES chapters by Bureau
informants. Peaceful public rallies and demonstrations were
disrupted by goons affiliated with Rev. Moon's Collegiate
Association for the Research of Principles (CARP).

One case that had particularly ominous implications was that of
Yanira Corea, a 24 year old Salvadoran exile active in the Los
Angeles CISPES chapter. In June 1987, the young woman was
kidnapped, sexually assaulted, tortured and threatened with death if
her "subversive" activities didn't stop. Corea's brother was a union
activist in El Salvador. Prior to her abduction she received a
threatening letter containing dried flower petals a photo of her three
year old son and the notation -- "Flowers in the desert die," a
traditional warning of the death squads.[4]

Though Bureau informants could not produce a shred of evidence
linking these groups to "terrorism," the FBI actually increased the
level of their attacks. According to the logic of Bureau red hunters,
the lack of criminal activity in and of itself was demonstrable
evidence of a broad "conspiracy" hatched by shrewd agents linked
to the KGB. This was an illusion that the Council for Inter-
American Security helped to create.

Throughout the period, the FBI were fed reports alleging that
CISPES was a "terrorist" organization. Waller, a research director
and editor of the CIS journal, West Watch ,wrote a text with the
fanciful title, "CISPES: A Terrorist Propaganda Network," that was
given wide play by the media.[5] However, because Mr. Waller's
services produced the desired propaganda effect intended by his
handlers, he secured several generous grants from the State
Department's Latin American Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD).[6]
Recent American history is replete with examples of the
profitability of lying in order to advance State interests; Elliot
Abrams and Oliver North are but the tip of the iceberg in this
regard.

Prior to Reagan's 1980 election, CIS was the principle organization
leading the charge for an "activist" foreign policy to "defeat
communism" in Central America. In 1980, they published the
influential, A New Inter-American Policy for the Eighties ,
generally known as the "Santa Fe Document."

Lewis Tambs, "Sante Fe's" principle editor, would be appointed by
Reagan as ambassador, first to Columbia and then to Costa Rica,
the launching pad for Contra attacks into Nicaragua along the
"Southern front."[7] Other Committee of Sante Fe members
included Roger Fontaine, a National Security Council (NSC)
adviser on Latin American affairs; retired Lt. General Gordon
Sumner, who became a special assistant to the Secretary of State
for Latin American affairs; and Lynn Francis Bouchey, an active
organizer for the Unification Church's CAUSA operations in
Central and South America.[8]

Bouchey, the co-author of The Strategy of Terror (written with
Stefan Possony), was a former member of the Young Americans for
Freedom employed by the American-Chilean Council, a front for
the murderous Pinochet regime.[9] Possony, a Senior Fellow at the
Hoover Institute, long-time WACL operative and board member of
Lyndon LaRouche's, Fusion Energy Foundation, was a founding
member of the Council, as was Dr. Anthony Bouscaren, a right-
wing operative who had worked for the racist Pioneer Fund (see
below).[10]

The Committee of Sante Fe alleged among other things, that the
U.S. "must seize the initiative or perish. World War III is almost
over." CIS viewed the Soviet Union as an "aggressor" that was
"strangling the Western industrialized nations."[11]

Central America was described as "the soft underbelly of the
United States." The authors called for the "restoration" of the
Monroe Doctrine as the linchpin of U.S. regional strategy. In other
words, the United States was free to pursue its regional interests
unhindered. Bluntly, this meant that the internal politics of the
Central American states were subject to "review" by the U.S.:
"correctives" -- dictated from Washington -- would be applied as
needed.

As a practical necessity, such "correctives" included the destruction
of the Cuban, Grenadian and Nicaraguan Revolutions and the
maintenance of "the fundamental order of things" in Guatemala,
Honduras and El Salvador. The Committee wrote:

America is everywhere in retreat. The impending loss of the
petroleum of the Middle East and potential interdiction of sea
routes spanning the Indian Ocean, along with the Soviet
satellization of the mineral zone of Southern Africa, foreshadow
the Findlandization of Western Europe and the alienation of Japan.

Even the Caribbean, America's maritime crossroad and petroleum
refining center is becoming a Marxist-Leninist lake. Never before
has the Republic been in such jeopardy from its exposed southern
flank. Never before has American foreign policy abused, abandoned
and betrayed its allies to the south in Latin America.

...It is time to sound a clarion call for freedom, dignity and national
self-interest which will echo the spirit of the American people.
Either a Pax Sovietica or a world-wide counter-projection of
American power is in the offing. The hour of decision can no
longer be postponed.[12]

Though the authors freely employed alarmist rhetoric with little
regard to the actual history of U.S. regional domination, "Sante Fe"
was not the production of marginal right-wing "kooks" obsessed by
the "red menace." According to the Interhemispheric Resource
Center,

"In the early years of the Reagan administration, the organization
was one of the more influential think tanks of the New Right,
providing both policy and policymakers to the new administration.
In the heyday of its influence, one observer noted, top officials of
CIS "shuttle[d] to and from key policy-making and advisory roles
in the administration...." Among those tapped for administration
positions were Patrick Buchanan, who became President Reagan's
communications director..."[13]

Today, Buchanan markets himself as an "outsider" standing up for
the "workin' man," against a godless, secular humanist cabal of
multinational corporations, abortionists, feminists, homosexuals,
immigrants and socialistic "one-worlders" intent on imposing a
New World Order on the American people. His project has been
assisted by the media who have tossed his actual record down the
Orwellian memory-hole.

As noted above, CIS was engaged in a covert war against U.S.
leftists, progressive clergy and the Salvadoran exile community,
channeling information gleaned by its operatives, to the FBI and
the Salvadoran national security apparatus. This too, has a long
history in the United States.[14]

Col. Samuel Dickens, a former intelligence officer and CIS board
member, was the executive director for inter-hemispheric affairs for
the American Security Council (ASC), an outfit founded by ex-FBI
agents. ASC was an instrumental group which targeted leftists
during the 1950s, the period of the McCarthyite witch-hunts.
Founded in 1955, ASC funding has been provided by Motorola,
Lockheed, Boeing and General Dynamics, among others.[15] The
information they collected, much of it bogus, was then sold to
ASC's dues-paying corporate members. At the height of their
domestic operations ASC red hunters, including the sinister Roy
Cohn, Senator McCarthy's chief inquisitor, were gathering the
names of alleged "subversives" at the staggering rate of 20,000 per
month. [16] One analyst has said that the ASC is "not just the
representative of the military-industrial complex, it is the
personification of the military-industrial complex."[17]

Another significant source of support for the Council and a host of
other "conservative" organizations, was Rev. Moon's Unification
Church. Bouchey helped organize two conferences for CAUSA, led
by another retired general, E. David Woellner.[18] He was also a
board member of the United States Global Strategy Council,
identified by researchers, Louis Wolf and Frederick Clarkson as
"another CAUSA operation."[19] In 1981, Bouchey was "specially
commissioned" by Moon's World Media Institute to prepare and
present a "content analysis" of media coverage of U.S. policy in El
Salvador.[20]

Active chapters of Moon's organization existed throughout the
region; the largest affiliates were centered in Argentina, Bolivia,
Brazil and Paraguay. In Brazil, the director of CAUSA said, "we
are forming the future base for a large political party, though at
present we are still apolitical...we want to form a movement like Le
Pen's in France." Needless to say, French fascist, Jean Le Pen, has
done just that with the National Front, with significant financial
backing from the Moon network.[21]

But Moon's extensive Latin American operations had a dual-
purpose: the construction of an anti-communist "armed church" and
as a "unofficial" link among CIA intelligence assets and the leaders
of the death-squad states.

In Bolivia, Thomas Ward was a liaison between the CIA, Nazi war
criminal Klaus Barbie, Barbie's organization, the "Fiances of
Death" and the regime of "cocaine general" Luiz Garcia Meza, prior
to Bolivia's bloody 1980 putsch. Ward and Barbie "were often seen
together;" the introspective Ward was described as an individual
"who always seemed to be absorbed in prayer." According to Col.
Bo Hi Pak, Moon's chief lieutenant: "God has chosen the Bolivian
people in the heart of South America as theones to conquer
communism." This during a period when Bolivian narco-operations
were greatly expanding -- with the knowledge of the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency.[22]

Other CIS board members or advisors who have had close ties to
the Moon organization:

Roger Fontaine: a former member of the National Security Council.
After leaving the NSC, Fontaine became a reporter and political
analyst for the Washington Times , a newspaper owned by a
subsidiary of the Moon network. Salvadoran death-squad leader,
Roberto D'Aubuisson bragged of his ties to the Reagan
administration, particularly Roger Fontaine, to the New York
Times during a 1981 interview.[23]

Lt. General Gordon Sumner: a CIS director and advisor; Sumner
was also a board member of the International Security Council
(ISC), described by Herman and O'Sullivan as the "main U.S.
agency of the Moon system in the field of terrorism propaganda."
An international conference organized by ISC and CAUSA was
held in January 1986 in Tel Aviv; speakers included Bo Hi Pak and
Arnaud de Borchgrave, the publisher of the Washington Times.
[24]

These were neither incidental nor marginal connections. CIS served
both as an intelligence conduit from "private" sources such as the
American Security Council and CAUSA, and as an informal
employment agency which provided analysts to the Reagan
administration at the inception of Washington's murderous counter-
insurgency wars in Central America.

As CIS secretary, Larry Pratt was a well-placed "asset" in his own
right, serving as a link between the public policy/research arms of
the organization, the interventionist wing of the theocratic
Christian Right and as an "informal" public relations spokesperson
for Washington's Central American agenda via Gun Owners of
America and the CIS-affiliated, North-South Institute.

But in order to fully appreciate the sinister nature of the Council
for Inter-American Security, Pratt's involvement and his broader
links to international fascist networks, there is another
organization, also little explored by "mainstream" media, which
deserves our attention, the World Anti-Communist League.

CIS and WACL: A Marriage Made in Hell

The World Anti-Communist League was founded in 1966 by two
close Asian allies of the United States, Taiwan and South Korea,
and a third organization, the Nazi-dominated, Anti-Bolshevik
Block of Nations (ABN), led by the Ukrainian war criminal
Yaroslav Stetsko.[25] As we have seen above with CIS, Rev.
Moon's Unification network was an instrumental force operating
behind the scenes. Moon assets were closely linked to the Korean
Central Intelligence Agency and Japanese yakuza crime
syndicates, many of whose leaders were convicted war criminals let
off the hook by U.S. occupation forces at the war's end.

ABN was a organizational bridge linking Eastern and Western
European fascists to the intelligence services of Britain and the
United States. Indeed, ABN was formed with U.S. funds and was a
model frequently employed by future anti-communist emigre
groups. Washington's unflagging commitment to the destruction of
the Soviet Union was a continuation of the Third Reich's
"Operation Barbarossa" -- by other means. Christopher Simpson's
description of the group provides a chilling glimpse into the modus
operandi of "containment:"

The ABN was dominated by Ukrainian nationalist veterans of the
OUN/UPA (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists/Ukrainian
Insurgent Army), and it included a half dozen open Nazi
collaborators on its executive board. Its newspaper, ABN
Correspondence , published praises of wartime genocidalists such
as Ustachi _Fuhrer_ Ante Pavelic and Slovakian quisling Premier
Monsignor Jozef Tiso. Alfreds Berzins, whom the U.S. government
once termed a "fanatic Nazi" responsible for sending innocent
people to concentration camps, was the president of the ABN
"People's Council." Berzins was simultaneously a Latvian leader of
the Assembly of Captive European Nations. His vice- president at
the ABN was the Belorussian quisling Radislaw Ostrowsky.[26]

If such anti-communist "patriots" were serviceable as "democrats"
abroad, why not at home? In the United States, WACL's first
chairman was Roger Pearson, a white supremacist, eugenicist and
neo-Nazi. Pearson was the editor of Willis Carto's anti-Semitic rag,
Western Destiny , the forerunner of the Liberty Lobby's Spotlight
tabloid. By the mid 1970s, Pearson served on the editorial boards
of both the Heritage Foundation and the American Security
Council.[27]

Last Fall, Mr. Pratt addressed a Liberty Lobby testimonial banquet
in honor of the 20th anniversary of Spotlight . Though Larry Pratt
has stated publicly he "loathes" groups such as Aryan Nations and
other Nazis, it would appear his oft-quoted protestations of
"innocence" are less than credible given Mr. Carto's documented
history of bigotry and racism.

Pearson, who has described himself as a "mainstream conservative,"
boasted to an associate about his alleged role in hiding Nazi doctor
Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death" who directed Nazi "medical
experiments" at the Auschwitz extermination camp. With degrees in
anthropology and economics, Pearson is the author several books
on eugenics. His most "popular" are Eugenics and Race and Race
and Civilization . He credits Professor Hans F. K. Gunther, a Nazi
racial theoretician, as the inspiration behind the latter volume.[28]

Under Pearson's tutelage, WACL added Western European chapters
that were drawn from the ranks of Nazi war criminals, Third Reich
collaborators, neo-Nazis and right-wing terrorists. Western
European affiliates included the racist British League of Rights and
Italy's Italian Social Movement (MSI). Pino Rauti, the founder of
the outlawed group, Ordine Nuovo was a key WACL Western
European contact.[29] Rauti and countless other Italian fascists
including the war criminal, June Valerio "Black Prince" Borghese,
and key members of the Italian general staff, were "rehabilitated"
Nazi collaborators recruited by the CIA into NATO's "stay behind"
anti-communist terror network, also known as "Gladio."[30]

An off-shoot of Ordine Nuovo was the terrorist group, the Armed
Revolutionary Nuclei (ARN), responsible for the 1980 bombing of
the Bologna train station which killed 85 people. The notorious
neo-fascist killer, Stefano delle Chiaie, the ARN architect of the
Bologna massacre, attended the pivotal 1980 conference of the
WACL-affiliated, Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation
(CAL), held in Buenos Aires at the height of the "dirty war" against
the Argentine left.[31]

CAL was the organizational expression of a little-known group of
Mexican neo-Nazis, the Tecos or "owls," centered at the
Autonomous University of Guadalajara. Founded by Third Reich
collaborator, Carlos Cuesta Gallardo, the Tecos have created
several anti-communist front groups which include the Mexican
Anti-Communist Federation (FEMACO) and the Inter-American
Confederation of Continental Defense (IACCD). These "men of
action" were drawn from the ranks of the Mexican secret police,
military officers, wealthy landowners and industrialists.[32]

Tecos leader, Raimundo Guerrero, was recruited into the
organization by Gallardo. According to Anderson and Anderson,
the Tecos have close links with the remnants of the Romanian Iron
Guard fascists of Horia Sima in Spain. The group publishes the
anti-Semitic magazine, Replica . Serving as a liaison among right-
wing death squads throughout Latin America, the Tecos joined
WACL in 1972. But the Tecos are more than a collection of aging
Nazis; investigative journalist Manuel Buendia, was assassinated in
Mexico City after publishing a three-part series exposing "Los
Tecos" in 1984.[33]

The 1980 CAL conclave was hosted by members of the military
junta and the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance (AAA) death
squad. Delle Chiaie journeyed to Buenos Aires from Bolivia where
he had forged a murder-for-hire and cocaine smuggling partnership
with CIA asset, Klaus Barbie.[34]

Others who attended the CAL conference included, John Carbaugh,
an aide to North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms and Mario Sandoval
Alarcon, the "godfather" of the Guatemalan death squads. Sandoval
brought along a protege to Buenos Aires, the cashiered Salvadoran
army major, Roberto D'Aubuisson. In 1981, Sandoval was an
invited guest at the Reagan inaugural ball.[35]

Another individual who was an honored guest at the Reagan fete
was Adolpho Cuellar, the chairman of WACL's branch in El
Salvador; that is, until he was permanently "removed from service"
by the FMLN. According to Holly Sklar, "Cuellar is remembered
by former Salvadoran army officers 'as a man who used to appear at
interrogation centers and beg permission to torture the
prisoners.'"[36]

Shortly after the CAL conference, 50 Argentine "military advisors"
and unconventional warfare "specialists" arrived in El Salvador and
began training the military junta in advanced counter-insurgency
"techniques," much as their Israeli counterparts were doing in
Guatemala and Honduras.[37] They were joining CIA and U.S.
Army Special Forces operatives already in place. Massacres and
"disappearances" escalated at an alarming rate.[38]

Such developments were greeted with enthusiasm by CIS and their
fellow-travellers. Board member, Andy Messing, a close personal
friend of Lt. Col. North and the president of the National Defense
Council said at the time, "going to war is [my] favorite
pastime."[39]

When Pearson became too hot to handle he was forced to resign in
1980, temporarily replaced as WACL's North American chairman
by Elmer D. Greaves, an organizer of the segregationist Citizens
Council.[40] But did Pearson leave in disgrace, discredited as a
fascist, a racist and an apologist for the Nazi Holocaust? Hardly.
Hanging on the wall of Pearson's Washington, D.C. office is a
letter from then President, Ronald Reagan:

You are performing a valuable service in bringing to a wide
audience the work of leading scholars who are supportive of a free
enterprise economy, a firm and consistent foreign policy and a
strong national defense.

Your substantial contributions to promoting and upholding those
ideals and principles that we value at home and abroad are greatly
appreciated.[41]

With Pearson's departure, WACL was in crisis and in danger of
disbanding. It is during this period, that John K. Singlaub came to
the rescue, reorganizing WACL's American chapter.

Retired U.S. Army General and CIS board member, John K.
Singlaub, has a long, bloody history of involvement with the
formulation and execution of U.S. counter-insurgency strategy and
covert operations around the world. A member of the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS) at the end of World War II, Singlaub
moved up the ladder, becoming CIA desk officer for China in 1949
and deputy station chief in Korea during the war. During the
Vietnam war he commanded the Special Operations Group, which
implemented the CIA's Phoenix Operation, responsible for the
cold-blooded murder of some 40,000 Vietnamese and the
imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of other Vietnamese in
"strategic hamlets." Singlaub was appointed head of the U.S
command in South Korea in 1976, but was removed in 1978 when
he publicly disagreed with President Carter's plans to withdraw
U.S. troops.[42]

A significant figure, within the national security apparatus and the
far-right, Singlaub was well-placed to serve as a contact who could
network neo-fascist killers, drug peddlers and state- sanctioned
terrorist "assets" employed by the national security state itself.
Herman and O'Sullivan write:

Singlaub was...close to the Reagan White House. From April 1983
until October 1984 he chaired an official Pentagon panel
established to design U.S. policies toward developing countries.
The panel also included Brigadier General Heine Anderholt, a
contributing editor to _Soldier of Fortune_, and another half dozen
extreme right-wing military officers and academicians. In April
1984, Singlaub met with President Reagan and National Security
Advisor Robert McFarlane and was named "the chief fund-raising
contact" to the contra army in Central America. With this choice,
the president plucked from the world of the paramilitary/neo- Nazi
fringe a man who had spent six years since his forced retirement
from the army in some of the most powerful and dangerous
organizations on the U.S. and international extreme right, where his
associates included former Nazis, Nazi collaborators, anti-Semites,
leaders of death squads, and a motley crew of mercenaries. Reagan
honored these with a warm greeting to WACL at its 1984 gathering,
asserting that the organization was playing a "leadership role" in
the "gallant struggle being waged by the true freedom fighters of
our day." Within a year at Bitburg, Reagan would pay his respects
to the Waffen-SS.[43]

It is within this context as well, that Patrick Buchanan, then
Reagan's communications director, echoed calls issued by the Nazi-
linked, Captive Nations Committee (CNC), to abolish the Justice
Department's Office for Special Investigations (OSI), responsible
for prosecuting war criminals still at large. This should not come as
a shock to anyone, since many members of CNC held dual
membership in WACL.

Andy Messing, as well as Howard Phillips, chairman of The
Conservative Caucus and current leader of the United States
Taxpayers Party (USTP), were key figures within WACL's
American branch. Larry Pratt shares Phillips' ideological
commitment to the clerical-fascist doctrine of Christian
Reconstructionism; indeed, Pratt is a national committee member
of Phillips' USTP.

Phillips and other American far-rightists, including Black "pro-life"
Republican Party presidential candidate, Alan Keyes, were
members of the South Africa lobby. The International Freedom
Foundation (IFF), an organization founded by "conservative"
activist, Jack Abramhoff, was recently exposed by senior South
African military personnel as a cut-out of the South African
military and Special Branch. IFF functioned as a propaganda arm
for South African STRATCOM (strategic communications)
counter-insurgency operations directed against the African National
Congress and the trade union confederation.[44]

These are some of the individuals found within Mr. Pratt's small
circle of friends, but for "reasons of state," the bourgeois media has
tended to "forget" the invaluable services rendered to imperialism
by such "extremist" representatives of the "radical religious right."

Larry Pratt, the Council for Inter-American Security and the War
Against Immigrants

Fighting communism at home and abroad were not the only
missions undertaken by the Council for Inter-American Security
and their stalwart secretary, Larry Pratt. With the collapse of the
degenerated workers' states in the USSR and Eastern Europe,
crowned by the annexation of the German Democratic Republic by
West German Capital, new "enemies" appeared on the horizon --
both in Europe and the United States.

By 1990, the "Culture Wars," the assault on the basic rights of
people of color, the organized proletariat, immigrants, women,
queers and the left had come to replace the mythological
significance of the "Red Menace" for the far-right. Mr. Pratt, this
time in the guise of "defender" of "traditional family values," and
"America's Godly heritage," was equal to the task, "protecting"
white Christians from a "flood" of "illegal" immigrants. Pratt would
use his skills as a propagandist and his position as president of
Gun Owners of America, to launch a new campaign -- to make
English the official language of the United States.

Under the auspices of CIS, Pratt was the president of a racist, anti-
immigration outfit, English First. Officers of Pratt's group are also
leaders of the alarmist, United States Border Control (USBC). The
Denver-based, North-South Institute (NSI) is a non-profit arm of
the Council for Inter-American Security. NSI vice president and
director, Lt. General Gordon Sumner, also a CIS director as we
have seen, is an officer of USBC and NSI.[45]

A close ally of Pratt's in this enterprise is Anthony Bouscaren. A
CIS advisor along with Singlaub and Sumner, Bouscaren was a
board member of WACL's American branch. During the l960s,
Bouscaren worked for Wycliffe Draper's Pioneer Fund, a racist
organization which has bankrolled pseudoscientific "research"
which allegedly proves that blacks are genetically inferior to
whites. The Pioneer Fund has been an instrumental force behind
the scenes, funding neo-eugenicist research such as that of Phillipe
Rushton, as well as many anti-immigration groups, including the
"mainstream" Federation for American Immigration Reform, whose
oxymoronic acronym is "FAIR."[46]

During the 1970s, Bouscaren was a board member of the American-
Chilean Council, a group which served as a public relations arm of
the Pinochet death squad state. There Bouscaren worked with
Ronald Docksai, the founder of the Council for Inter- American
Security and L. Francis Bouchey, who would lead the organization
during the 1980s.[47]

Well after his stint with the Pioneer Fund, Bouscaren published
numerous articles in Roger Pearson's Journal for Social, Political
and Economic Studies -- that is, after Pearson had been exposed
as a Nazi by the Washington Post. [48]

Bouscaren signed the "Declaration of San Salvador," as a proxy for
John Singlaub. The declaration was the result of a right-wing
conference held in San Salvador in 1985; it included many WACL
members and focused on ways to involve civilians in anti-
communist efforts. The document announced the formation of the
Central American Anti-Communist Defense Accord, intended to
create a combat group known as the Central American Civilian
Military Alliance (CACMA).[49]

But CACMA was more than a WACL propaganda project. Drawing
on the experiences of Guatemala's notorious "Program of
Assistance to Areas in Conflict" (PAAC), inspired by the CIA's
Phoenix Operation in Vietnam, PAAC's "civic action" program
included forced relocation of Mayan peasants into "model villages"
and the creation of hated "civilian self-defense patrols." WACL,
CACMA and their CIA handlers viewed these operations as a
means of generalizing and standardizing the "Guatemalan
experience" throughout the region. In this near- genocidal
enterprise against the Mayan people, the death squad regime was
offered much assistance by Israeli as well as domestic "assets"
within the U.S. Christian Right, especially from the clerical-fascist
Reconstructionist wing of the movement.[50]

The counter-insurgency doctrine of "low-intensity conflict" (LIC),
became a significant factor on the home front. Beginning in the
early 1990s, veterans of CIA-Contra operations and their
intellectual architects, began propagandizing for a systematic
application of LIC methodology within the imperialist heartland
itself. The "war on drugs" and the Immigration and Naturalization
Service's brutal border sweeps, detention and deportation of so-
called "illegals," many of whom are political refugees, are but the
tip of the iceberg in this regard.

Echoing the xenophobic campaign already in full-swing within the
reunified Germany, CIS and English First issued a paper, Creating
a Hispanic America: Nation Within a Nation? This racist diatribe
virtually equates bilingual education with "terrorism." "Bilingual
education has national security implications," its authors inform us.
Given CIS's role in support of the CIA-Contra wars, their equation
-- Latino = Terrorist -- certainly comes as no surprise. According to
anti- racist researcher and activist, Michael Novick:

The paper compares the U.S. southwest to French-speaking
Quebec, with its potential for separatism. It sees the Chicano and
Spanish-speaking population as in themselves a threat to U.S.
national security and unity.

The paper also indulges in more blatant racism. It describes the
Indian ancestors of Latinos as "uncivilized barbaric squatters" with
"a penchant for grotesque human sacrifices, cannibalism, and
kidnapping women." This is the ideology that guides English First
leader Pratt in his fund- raising appeals for the English Only cause.
In one letter soliciting potential donors, Pratt claimed, "many
immigrants these days are encouraged not to learn English. They
remain stuck in a linguistic...ghetto, living off welfare and costing
working Americans billions of tax dollars."[51]

Larry Pratt is a key leader of the reactionary U.S. Taxpayers Party
(USTP). As touched upon briefly, Pratt is a national committee
member of Howard Phillips' outfit, as well as a national co-
chairman of Patrick Buchanan's campaign committee. A central
plank of the USTP's platform is the requirement that English
become the "official" language of the United States. The USTP is
opposed both to bilingual education and the use of multilingual
ballots for U.S. elections.

But buried within the USTP's 1992 platform is the bland phrase:
the USTP "reject[s] the practice of bestowing U.S. citizenship on
children born to illegal alien parents while in this country." This is
an attack on the 13th and 14th amendments to the U.S.
Constitution. The 13th amendment abolished slavery, while the
14th amendment granted full citizenship rights to former slaves as
well as to the children of non-citizen immigrants born in the U.S.,
legal or otherwise. In fact, Pratt and his cohorts within the "Patriot"
movement seek to repeal these amendments as part of their drive to
create a "Christian Republic."

The origins of "Patriot" thinking regarding constitutional
"revisions" of citizenship rights, is the little known but virulently
racist, League of Pace Amendment Advocates. Daniel Johnson, the
author of the so-called Pace Amendment is a far- rightist with close
ties to many neo-Nazis, including Richard Barrett's Mississippi-
based Nationalist Movement and the Populist Party, founded by
arch anti-Semite, Willis Carto, the leader of the Liberty Lobby.[52]

Mr. Pratt and his cohorts within the Council for Inter- American
Security have much to answer for in their service to U.S.
imperialism. Their role as active agents for murderous policies
designed to bring the Central American people "in line" with the
"rule of law" and the "civilized norms of the Western democracies,"
have had very grave consequences indeed.

Their close collaboration with the FBI and the Salvadoran
intelligence service unquestionably resulted in the deaths of
hundreds of refugees after their forced deportation to El Salvador.
According to the Political Asylum Project of the American Civil
Liberties Union, out of 154 refugees deported in 1983 and 1984, 42
returnees were killed, seven were arrested, five were jailed, 47 were
"disappeared" and an additional 43 others "disappeared" under
violent circumstances. Certainly an admirable record Mr. Pratt and
his "Patriot" companions can reminisce over during Bible study,
perhaps.[53]

Conclusion

Far from being an innocent wrongly accused of anti-Semitism and
racism, Larry Pratt is an individual committed to a world- view
which begins and ends with global economic-political- cultural-
military domination by U.S. imperialism; this is the context and
ideology behind Patrick Buchanan's allegiance to xenophobic
"America First" nationalism.

Mr. Pratt's 1990 book, Armed People Victorious, touted by the
bourgeois press as a "passionate defense" of gun rights and the
militia movement, is a volume inspired by the anti-communist death
squads which operated so "efficiently" in Guatemala and the
Philippines.

Pratt's close working relationship with the Council for Inter-
American Security and the World Anti-Communist League
provided him both with the theoretical and practical knowledge
necessary to forge effective links among a host of individuals and
organizations who actively sympathized with U.S.-sponsored terror
and mass murder in Central America.

It should come as no surprise, least of all to a mendacious press
that remained silent while imperialism implemented a policy of
extermination , that fascists such as Pratt would recommend the
creation of the domestic equivalent of Central American death
squads in the United States to deal with troublesome enemies of
today's "Culture Wars."

What is significant is not that individuals such as Mr. Pratt are
"extremists" or the "enemies" of a supposedly "pluralist
democracy." Of far greater significance is that this "public-private
partnership" among a host of reactionary organizations and the
national security state, is the norm ; an enduring legacy of settler-
colonialism grounded in white supremacist ideologies -- and
ideologues -- who are hell-bent on maintaining imperialism's global
domination by any means necessary .

Appendix

Principle directors, associates and research analysts involved with
the Council for Inter-American Security. Compiled by the
Interhemispheric Resource Center, Group Watch Reports, Box
4506, Albuquerque, NM 87196-4506. On PeaceNet, IRC's Group
Watch archive can be found on cdp:pra.reactionary; this excellent
archive is maintained by Political Research Associates.

L. Francis Bouchey, president;
Lt. Gen. Gordon Sumner, Jr. (USA-Ret.), chairman;
Larry D. Pratt, secretary;
Richard W. Powell,treasurer;
Michael Connelly, general counsel.

Directors: Robert W. Searby
(Deputy Undersecretary for International Affairs, Department of Labor),
Patrick J. Buchanan (former communications director for President Reagan);
Michael Carricarte (Carricarte Corp);
Col. Samuel T. Dickens (American Security Council);
Ronald F. Docksai (president emeritus);
Francis P. Graves (Republican National Committee);
Lewis A. Tambs (U.S. Ambassador to Colombia, Costa Rica);
Andy Messing (National Defense Council);
Robert Emmet Moffit (frm. senior Legislative Assistant for Foreign Affairs).
David Hirschmann, research director;
Max Primorac, research fellow;
Clemens Michel, research fellow;
David Spencer, research fellow;
Michael Caputo;
John Lenczowski, consultant.
James Whelan, president of the Inter-Security Educational Institute,
co-publisher of West Watch.
Michael Waller, West Watch editor and former research director.
General John K. Singlaub (USA, Ret.); advisory board.
Members of the first Committee of Santa Fe:
L. Francis Bouchey,
Roger W. Fontaine,
David C. Jordan,
Gordon Sumner,
Lewis Tambs editor.

Members of the second Committee of Santa Fe:
L. Francis Bouchey,
Roger Fontaine,
David C. Jordan,
Gordon Sumner.

Inter-American Security Educational Institute:
Fr. Enrique T. Rueda,
project director.

Notes and sources

[1] see in particular: Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky,
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass
Media , New York, Pantheon Books, 1988; Noam Chomsky,
Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies ,
Boston, South End Press, 1989; Martin A. Lee and Norman
Solomon, Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in the
Media , New York, Lyle Stuart, 1990; see, in particular, chapters
10-12

[2] Ross Gelbspan, Break-ins, Death Threats and the FBI: The
Covert War Against the Central America Movement , Boston,
South End Press, 1991; for background on COINTELPRO see:
Ward Churchill and Jim Vander Wall, Agents of Repression: The
FBI's Secret Wars Against the Black Panther Party and the
American Indian Movement , Boston, South End Press, 1990

[3] Gelbspan, op. cit., pp. 76-77. Currently J. Michael Waller is a
leading spokesperson for the Washington, D.C.-based, American
Foreign Policy Council; a rightist think-tank.

[4] ibid., pp. 32-34

[5] cited in Chip Berlet, The FBI and Right-Wing Spy Networks ,
New York, Center for Constitutional Rights, 1991, p. 4

[6] Gelbspan, op. cit., pp. 124-125

[7] Holly Sklar, Washington's War On Nicaragua , Boston, South
End Press, 1988, p. 58

[8] Frederick Clarkson, "'Privatizing' the War," Covert Action
Information Bulletin , Washington, D.C., Number 22 (Fall 1984),
p. 33

[9] Alan Crawford, Thunder On The Right: The "New Right" and
the Politics of Resentment , New York, Pantheon Books, 1980, p.
197

[10] Sara Diamond, Roads to Dominion: Right-Wing Movements
and Political Power in the United States , New York, The Guilford
Press, 1995, pp. 348-349 Marvin Liebman, a reactionary leader of
the "China Lobby" organized the American-Chilean Council with
funds supplied by "private Chilean contributions which were
transmitted to us by the Consejo Chileno Norteamericano."
According to Dr. Diamond, ACC founders included: Professor
James D. Atkinson, Murray Baron, Professor A.T. Bouscaren,
Ralph de Toledano, Lev Dobriansky, Ronald Docksai, Walter Judd,
David Keene, Anthony Kubeck, Eugene Lyons, Stefan Possony,
David Rowe. Ronald Docksai was the founder and first president
of CIS.

[11] Sklar, op. cit., p. 58

[12] ibid.

[13] Interhemispheric Resource Center, _Group Watch Project:
Council for Inter-American Security_, Albuquerque, 1991

[14] Nelson Blackstock, COINTELPRO: The FBI's War On
Political Freedom , New York, Pathfinder Press, 1988; Frank
Donner, Protectors of Privilege: Red Squads and Police Repression
in America , Berkeley, University of California Press, 1990

[15] Edward S. Herman and Gerry O'Sullivan, The "Terrorism"
Industry: The Experts and Institutions That Shape Our View of
Terror , New York, Pantheon Books, 1989, p. 100

[16] Diamond, op. cit., p. 46

[17] Herman and O'Sullivan, op. cit., p. 100

[18] Clarkson, op. cit., p. 33; Herman & O'Sullivan, op. cit., p. 93

[19] Louis Wolf and Frederick Clarkson, "Arnaud de Borchgrave
Board's Moon's Ship," Covert Action Information Bulletin ,
Washington, D.C., Number 24, Summer 1985, p. 35

[20] Clarkson, op. cit., p. 33

[21] Frederick Clarkson, "Moon's Law: God Is Phasing Out
Democracy," Covert Action Information Bulletin , Washington,
D.C., Number 27, Spring 1987, p. 40

[22] Kai Hermann, "Klaus Barbie: A Killer's Career," Covert Action
Information Bulletin , Washington, D.C., Number 25, Winter 1986,
p. 19

[23] Stewart Klepper, "The United States in El Salvador," Covert
Action Information Bulletin , Washington, D.C., Number 12, April
1981, p. 9

[24] Herman and O'Sullivan, op. cit., p. 96

[25] Scott Anderson and Jon Lee Anderson, Inside the League: The
Shocking Expose of How Terrorists, Nazis and Latin American
Death Squads Have Infiltrated the World Anti-Communist League ,
New York, Dodd, Mead & Co., 1986, p. 13

[26] Christopher Simpson, Blowback: The First Full Account of
America's Recruitment of Nazis, and Its Disastrous Effect On Our
Domestic and Foreign Policy , New York, Weidenfeld & Nicolson,
1988, p. 269

[27] Diamond, op. cit., p. 157

[28] Anderson & Anderson, op. cit., p. 93

[29] ibid., p. 98

[30] for background on "Gladio" and NATO's "stay behind"
network, see: Arthur E. Rowse, "Gladio: The Secret U.S. War to
Subvert Italian Democracy," Covert Action Quarterly , Washington,
D.C., Number 49, Summer 1994 and, Anti-Fascist Action (AFA),
"Staying Behind: NATO's Terror Network," Fighting Talk ,
London, Issue 11, May 1995

[31] Anderson & Anderson, op. cit., pp. 98-99 and Stuart Christie,
Stefano Delle Chiaie, Portrait of a Black Terrorist , London,
Anarchy Magazine/Refract Publications, 1984

[32] Anderson & Anderson, op. cit., pp. 71-81

[33] ibid., p. 138

[34] ibid., p. 147

[35] ibid., p. 177

[36] Sklar, op. cit., p. 83

[37] ibid., pp. 84-86; for Israel's role in Central America see, Jane
Hunter, Israeli Foreign Policy: South Africa and Central America ,
Boston, South End Press, 1987, pp. 95-181

[38] Ellen Ray, "Argentina Activates International Death Squads,"
Covert Action Information Bulletin , Washington, D.C., Number
16, March 1982, pp. 14-16 and, same issue, "Salvadoran Deserter
Discloses Green Beret Torture Role," pp. 17-18

[39] Sklar, op. cit., pp. 238-239

[40] Anderson & Anderson, op. cit., p. 102

[41] ibid., p. 92

[42] ibid. pp. 150-155

[43] Herman & O'Sullivan, op. cit., p. 69 Supporting counter-
revolutionary terror was a very profitable enterprise indeed.
GeoMilitech, founded by Singlaub and his partner, Barbara
Studley, procured $5.3 million in weapons which were transferred
to Contra leader, Adolfo Calero, in June 1985; a cozy relationship
all around.

[44] Dele Olojede, "D.C. think tank was an apartheid tool," San
Francisco Examiner , Sunday, July 16, 1995, p. C-7; for
background on the International Freedom Foundation see, David
Ivon, "Touting for South Africa: International Freedom
Foundation," Covert Action Information Bulletin , Washington,
D.C., Number 31, Winter 1989, pp. 62-64

[45] Russ Bellant, The Coors Connection: How Coors Family
Philanthropy Undermines Democratic Pluralism , Cambridge, MA,
Political Research Associates, 1990, p. 65

[46] Ruth Conniff, "The War on Aliens: The Right calls the shots,"
The Progressive , Madison, WI, October 1993, p. 24

[47] Diamond, op. cit., p. 348

[48] Anderson & Anderson, op. cit., p. 153

[49] ibid., p. 273

[50] Hunter, op. cit., pp. 118-127 and, Sara Diamond, Spiritual
Warfare: The Politics of the Christian Right , Boston, South End
Press, 1989, pp. 164-168

[51] Michael Novick, White Lies, White Power: The Fight Against
White Supremacy and Reactionary Violence , Monroe, Maine,
Common Courage Press, 1995, pp. 188-189

[52] ibid., p. 267

[53] Gelbspan, op. cit., p. 219

Yesterday we were treated to an account of one man's extraordinary personal attempt to confront Henry Kissinger with questions about his culpability for crimes against humanity. Kim Scipes in Chicago managed to call out his accusatory questions for all to hear, and even got written up in the pages of the Chicago Sun-Times. What a stunning contrast to the story related below! ("Censorship at the National Press Club") -- which I had read just hours before I saw Kim's story. Henry the K has a long history of escaping -- one way or another -- from the sort of "unpleasant" situations that are bound to crop up when he goes on book tours to sell his latest compilations of wisdom and insight. Two years ago, when he was peddling his previous book, "Years of Renewal", he suffered a lapse in judgement and agreed to appear on a BBC talk program, where he would not be protected by the coterie of sycophantic friends whom he's cultivated among the US press corps over the years. Not being bound by the code of silence that prevails in the mainstream US news media, host Jeremy Paxman had the nerve -- the sheer, brazen impudence <g> -- to open a discussion of the Vietnam War by noting that Kissinger had shared the Nobel Peace Prize for his role in the peace agreement, and then inquired, "Was there any part of you that felt a fraud in accepting it?" The questioning continued in a similar vein, and before long Kissinger excused himself and left the studio. (Not surprisingly, both the BBC and Kissinger's publisher dismissed the notion that he left the show due to the strenuous interrogation.) Last February Kissinger was scheduled to give a speech at the Univ. of Texas, in Austin. But local activists, led by journalism professor Robert Jensen, mounted a spirited campaign to protest Kissinger's appearance. Kissinger got wind of the greeting that was in store for him, and just days before the event he cancelled his speech, with the university citing fears that the protest would "pose a threat to public safety." Just 3 weeks ago Kissinger left Paris very suddenly after receiving a summons from a French magistrate asking for his testimony about Operation Condor, the secret assassination program which targetted South American dissidents during the 1970's. I've just learned the the good doctor suddenly cancelled out of an appearance in Cambridge, MA that had been scheduled for next Tuesday. The explanation? Supposedly a "scheduling conflict"... The same problem that seems to afflict so many public figures when they are being called to account for their actions. (Like former Pacifica Board Chair Mary Frances Berry, who gave the same excuse when she ducked out of her scheduled appearance in Santa Cruz last January.) So many incompetent schedulers out there! Something should be done about it. Frankly, I don't see what the problem is. I mean what does the man have to apologize for? He's *really* one of US -- just look at what he says in his latest book (Does America Need a Foreign Policy?): "...the growing concern with human rights is one of the achievements of our age and is certainly a testament to progress toward a more humane international order." What more could we ask?? Craig Gingold Midpines CA [Note: the new book has had two separate, generally favorable reviews in the New York Times, by columnists Richard Bernstein and Thomas Friedman -- neither of whom bothered to raise any disturbing questions about Henry the K's possible prosecution for war crimes. To its credit, the Los Angeles Times paired it with Christopher Hitchen's new book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, and assigned the review to a history professor who was perfectly happy to deal with those issues at great length.] ------- Forwarded Message Follows ------- From: Robert Weissman <rob@milan.essential.org> Subject: [corp-focus] Censorship at the National Press Club Date sent: Fri, 22 Jun 2001 10:55:25 -0400 (EDT)

Henry Kissinger came to the National Press Club here in Washington, D.C. last night to give a talk, sell his latest book, Does America Need a Foreign Policy? and take questions from an audience of about 300 people. We weren't as interested in the talk or the book as much as the question period. We figured, correctly as it turned out, that Henry hadn't change over the years -- his unspoken theory of foreign policy was still the same: the corporate state -- including his client corporations -- should dictate the country's foreign policy. As usual, his words barely masked that reality. But scattered throughout the ballroom at the Press Club were little white note cards for questions, and it appeared that perhaps 100 questions were scribbled and sent up to the moderator, Richard Koonce, a member of the Press Club's book and author committee. It was Koonce's job to sift through the questions, pick out some interesting ones, and ask Henry some probing questions. This system seemed to work well at luncheon talks, where the past three presidents of the Press Club -- Doug Harbrecht of Business Week, John Cushman of the New York Times and Dick Ryan of the Detroit News -- would ask speakers some pretty tough and newsworthy questions. We never got the sense that Press Club moderators were pulling punches. Last night, things changed. Earlier this year, Harper's magazine published a two-part series of articles by British journalist Christopher Hitchens, "The Case Against Henry Kissinger that has since been published as a book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (Verso). Hitchens has drawn up an indictment, charged Kissinger with war crimes, and is begging some government to go after the former Secretary of State under Richard Nixon for the killings of innocents in Laos, Cambodia, South America, East Timor and elsewhere. Magistrates in three countries -- Chile, Argentina, and France -- have responded and summoned Kissinger to answer questions. Le Monde reported earlier this month that when French Judge Roger Le Loire had a summons served on Kissinger on May 31 at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, Kissinger promptly left the hotel, and then left town. The judge wanted to ask Kissinger about his knowledge of Operation Condor, an effort by the dictators of South America to kill or "disappear" dissidents. The fact that Kissinger was being sought for questioning didn't make the mainstream media here in the United States, until yesterday's New York Times reported that the Chilean judge wanted Kissinger to "testify about the disappearance of an American in Chile when the dictator Augusto Pinochet seized power in the 1970s." Kissinger began lashing back at Hitchens last week, not by answering the substance of Hitchen's argument, but by smearing the journalist. Kissinger told Detroit radio talk show host Mitch Albom that Hitchens had "denied the Holocaust ever took place." In response, Hitchens, who says both and he his wife are Jewish, told the New York Post: "Mr. Kissinger will be hearing from my attorney, who will tell him two things he already knows -- what he said is false, malicious and defamatory, and if he says it again, we will proceed against him in court." So, you can imagine that the Press Club audience had questions. And so did we. We wrote down six questions -- about the report in the Times, Kissinger's interview with Albom, the incident at the Ritz Hotel in Paris, Hitchen's articles in Harper's, about the three magistrates and simply this one: "If you are indicted for war crimes, will you defend yourself in court?" We met a friend there who told us that in the 1970s, when Kissinger was asked about the bombing of Laos and Cambodia, he responded this way: "sometimes we have to operate outside the law." Her question to Kissinger: "How do you square that with our Constitutional values?" Koonce had other ideas. He lofted six or seven puff balls about Kissinger in China, about Kissinger on Nixon, about his generic views of foreign policy. Nothing about war crimes, nothing about operating outside the law, nothing about Hitchens. After the event, we sought out Koonce. "Was there an agreement with Dr. Kissinger not to ask questions related to Christopher Hitchens and allegations of war crimes?" To our surprise, Koonce did not deny it. "There was a definite sensitivity to that," Koonce said. "He [Kissinger] was afraid that if we got into a discussion of that, for the vast majority of people that, it would take so much time to explain all of the context, that you know, he preferred to avoid that, and so . . ." And so Kissinger's wishes were accommodated and the questions were avoided. We asked Koonce how many written questions dealt with Hitchens or war crimes? Two or three, Koonce said. We knew this not to be true. We handed up six ourselves. And we suspect that there were many more. (Only Kissinger knows for sure, since it's Press Club policy to deliver the written questions to the guest after the event.) According to Press Club standards, these book events must be held in accordance with the Club's "Code of Ethics." So, we want to know -- how can it be ethical to agree secretly with an author before hand not to ask a certain set of questions? We're tracking down the Code of Ethics. Stay tuned. _____________________________________________________________ Russell Mokhiber is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Corporate Crime Reporter. Robert Weissman is editor of the Washington, D.C.-based Multinational Monitor. They are co-authors of Corporate Predators: The Hunt for MegaProfits and the Attack on Democracy (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage Press, 1999). (c) Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman _____________________________________________________________ Focus on the Corporation is a weekly column written by Russell Mokhiber and Robert Weissman. Please feel free to forward the column to friends or repost the column on other lists. If you would like to post the column on a web site or publish it in print format, we ask that you first contact us (russell@essential.org or rob@essential.org). Focus on the Corporation is distributed to individuals on the listserve corp-focus@lists.essential.org. To subscribe to corp-focus, send an e-mail message to corp-focus-request@lists.essential.org with the text: subscribe Focus on the Corporation columns are posted at <http://www.corporatepredators.org>.