VLVL Reagan/Bush Cold/Hot Wars & Homeland Security

[pynchonoid]

I suggest reading this one together with Pynchon's
intro to _1984_...


[...] "The implication or latent threat of terror was
sufficient to insure that the people would comply."
--William Colby, creator of the CIA's Phoenix Program,
which targeted Vietnamese leaders for assassination
during the Vietnam War

[...] Homeland Security is a euphemism for internal
security, but that phrase has the nasty ring of
McCarthyism to it, and the anti-Communist witch-hunts
of the 1950s, led by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and
racist Senator James Eastland's Internal Security
Subcommittee. Before the neo-cons got hooked on
terror, America's hawks were obsessed with Godless
Communism. Hoover devoted his life to destroying every
Communist in America, while the Dulles brothers (CIA
Director Allen and Secretary of State John) harnessed
the mania and used it as a convenient pretext for Cold
War foreign intervention, and laid the foundation
stones for the American empire after World War II.

[...] Bush [...]  is creating this police state
through terror. [...]  The underlying principle of
homeland security (and the war on terror) is that
terror is an organizing principle of society. This
includes every type of terror, from the shock and awe
bombs that liberated Baghdad, to the collective
punishments Israel used to crush the Palestinian soul.
It's armed propaganda in the form of National
Guardsmen eye-balling us at airports, and it's the
greatest psywar campaign ever waged, in the form of
red white and blue color-coded warnings of terror
attacks that never occur, and unsubstantiated reports
brought to you by government stenographers at network
news.

[...] 

"Personal violence is for the amateur in dominance,"
Judge notes, quoting two-time Nobel Prize winner Johan
Galtung, but "structural violence is the tool of the
professional. The amateur who wants to dominate uses
guns; the professional uses social structure. The
legal criminality of the social system and its
institutions, of government, and of individuals at the
interpersonal level is tacit violence. Structural
violence is a structure of exploitation and social
injustice."  [sounds like Pynchon in his _Stone
Junction_ intro]

[...]  Administrative detention was first used by the
CIA in the Vietnam War through the notorious Phoenix
"assassination" Program, and was applied against
Communists, Nationalists, and anyone else opposing the
puppet US puppet regime, just as CIA death squads are
operating now in Afghanistan and Iraq. Sympathizing
with the Communists was a crime of status, as was
advocating peace.

Administrative detention is structural violence for
the professionals. At the personal level, the terror
as an organizing principle of society relies on
selective terror, which means destroying one's
political opposition through acts of terror directed
at individuals. It derives from the Eye of God
technique, which plays on primitive fears of an
all-seeing cosmic Eye of God that sees into your mind.
It was used in World War One by morale officers who
sent pilots in small aircraft to fly over enemy camps
to call out the names of individual soldiers. CIA
psywar expert Ed Lansdale, Graham Greene's model for
Alden Pyle in The Quiet American, used this technique
in the Philippines in the early 1950s. At night a
psywar team would creep into town and paint an eye
(like the one that appears atop the pyramid in the
Great Seal of the United States) on the wall of a
house facing a suspected Communist or Communist
sympathizer.

In South Vietnam the Eye of God trick took a ghastly
twist. CIA officer Pat McGarvey recalled to Seymour
Hersh that "some psychological warfare [psywar] guy in
Washington thought of a way to scare the hell out of
villagers. When we killed the VC there, they wanted us
to spread eagle the guy, put out his eye, cut a hole
in the back [of his head] and put his eye in there.
The idea was that fear was a good weapon." Likewise,
ears were cut off corpses and nail to houses to let
the people know that big brother was listening as
well. When Viet Cong leaders were found, Phoenix teams
murdered and mutilated them along with their families
and neighbors as a means of terrorizing the
neighboring population into a state of submission.
Such horrendous acts were, for propaganda purposes,
often made to look as if they had been committed by
the enemy. To spread the word that everyone was a
potential victim, CIA psywar posters pictured a
Phoenix with a blacklist trailing from its beak and a
snake (i.e. a Communist) grasped in one of its talons.
The message was that the omnipotent CIA selectively
snatches its prey, in the most hideous way.

The Bush Regime is locked into this method of
selective terror. [...] Just remember what happened to
Uday Hussein and his brother Qusay, and all the other
Iraqis featured on the CIA's popular death cards [...]

The modern manifestation of selective terror is the
computerized blacklist - the greatest blackmail scheme
ever invented: if you don't do what Bush and his
clique want, your name pops up and you're suppressed.
Be forewarned, the Bush Regime's blacklists include
the INS/State Department's TIPOFF; CAPPS II, which
uses credit information and secret databases to assess
a person's security risk level each time he or she
flies; the "No-Fly" blacklist of peace activists,
distributed to airlines by the FBI and the
Transportation Security Administration; and local
blacklists like the one kept by the Denver police
department. You know about these lists. You just don't
know about the secret ones, the Bush Regime's enemies
list of its most powerful domestic political
opponents.

[...] This is how it happens: on the basis of a false
accusation made by an anonymous homeland informant,
counter terror teams will arrest a terrorist
surrogate, detain the person indefinitely under
administrative detention laws in an interrogation
center until he or she dies or defects, or is sent to
a military tribunal for disposition. Disposition means
permanent detention in some perverse torture chambers
like the ones in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Ultimately, the
Domestic Security Enhancement Act will allow Ashcroft
to secretly incarcerate and deport U.S. citizens
without any thought of ensuring them due process of
law. Check out what happened to Jose Padilla.

[...]  Information management is key in creating the
"new people" who will organize the new criminal
homeland social structure, and make it appear legal,
moral and most importantly, popular. The first step in
manufacturing these robots is through motivational
indoctrination, which is based on the principle that
people will do a anything you ask of them if you make
them feel special. In return for adopting the right
attitude, a successful career is offered. Several
alumni from the CIA's Phoenix Program already enjoy
important top homeland security posts, like Major
General Bruce Lawlor, Chief of Staff of the Department
of Homeland Security, and Roger Mackin, the CIA
officer in charge of the Department's
counter-narcotics center. From mid-1967 until
mid-1968, Mackin ran the Phoenix Program in Da Nang
City, and managed its Intelligence and Operations
Coordination Center - the organizational model for the
Department of Homeland Security. Mackin is also touted
as the CIA officer who nailed Colombian drug smuggler
Pablo Escobar in a typical Phoenix assassination
operation in December 1993. [...] 


Douglas Valentine is the author of The Hotel Tacloban,
The Phoenix Program, and TDY. His new book The
Strength of the Wolf: the Federal Bureau of Narcotics,
1930-1968 will be published by Verso. Valentine was an
investigator for Pepper on the King case in 1998-1999.
For information about Valentine and his books and
articles, please visit his website at
www.douglasvalentine.com.

He can be reached at: redspruce at attbi.com

<http://www.counterpunch.org/valentine08112003.html>




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