Heimat, sweet heimat

To: Retort
From: Counterpunch, Nov 8th, 2001

Hefty backgrounder, by the author of the book on the Phoenix Program in
Vietnam, on the new domestic political police force (OHS) - its genealogy
and likely m.o. ("every town will probably be required to form an OHS
Committee...Perhaps once every week ...reports will be forwarded to the OHS
committee at the county level. The county committee will review the reports
and send the most urgent ones to the state committee".)


Homeland Insecurity
Doug Valentine


Prior to the 11 September terror attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon, two conditions defined American politics. In regard to foreign
affairs, the United States was universally recognized as the world's only
super power. And today that condition remains unchanged: no other nation
comes close to matching America's military might.

But domestic politics was defined by doubts about the legitimacy of the Bush
Administration. Al Gore had won the popular vote by an overwhelming
majority, and Bush had acquired his presidential powers through a
combination of nepotism and voter fraud in Florida, blatant media bias, and
a judicial coup d'etat by the right wing of the U.S. Supreme Court.

Before the terror attacks, the stench of venality clung to Bush like
cigarette smoke and stale beer after a night of bar hopping. Since the
attacks, his standing in the polls has nearly doubled, and there's been no
more talk of an oil crunch, or the ailing economy, or of the looting of
pensions plans down ten to twenty percent, or of looting of Social Security
and Medicare to pay for the war of revenge, or of Republicans losing
Congress in 2002.

This second, overarching condition--the inherent illegitimacy of the Bush
Administration--must be remembered when considering how the apocalyptic
events of 11 September changed the domestic political landscape.
Symbolically, they wiped the slate clean. The U.S. remains the most powerful
nation in the world, but Bush's legitimacy is no longer an issue. As a
result, all the moral and psychological prohibitions on the reactionary
right have been lifted, and all the anger and frustrations it cultivated
during the Vietnam War, and the Carter and Clinton Administrations, is
poised to be unleashed under the aegis of counter-terrorism, not only on the
usual suspects--foreign enemies sitting on vast oil reserves, suspected
terrorists, and domestic dissidents--but on the unwitting, flag-waving
American public as well.

Alas, righteous outrage over the crime of 11 September has enabled the once
wobbly "unpresident" to stand tall, assert himself, and exploit the
catastrophe in a way that seems at once crass, eerily preordained, and
suspiciously opportune. Though its moral authority and intentions are as
uncertain as the perpetrators of the carnage, the Bush Administration has
effectively silenced its critics, and, amid rapturous bipartisan
Congressional and public support, launched a "low intensity" war on
Afghanistan and a nebulous, "covert" war on world terrorism, while
reorganizing the executive branch of government into the most fearsome
political and psychological warfare machine the world has ever seen.

There is a grave, hidden danger in this situation, for the reactionary right
wing--by which I mean the owners, managers, and supporters of America's
totalitarian, military industrial information complex--have united the
nation behind the Bush Administration in a spirit of belligerent
nationalism. With its actions and intentions shrouded in secrecy, the Bush
Administration, in this respect, fits the classic definition of a fascist
dictatorship.

Already some of our most cherished freedoms have been sacrificed. Dissent
has been stifled, censorship imposed, and cherished legal protections,
especially regarding the Fourth Amendment, have been altered and suspended.
No one knows exactly how many "suspects" are being detained, or where, and
already there has been one suspicious death and widespread rumors of abuse.
And the situation will only get worse.

In a 21 October article for The Washington Post, Walter Pincus reported that
FBI and Justice Department investigators are increasingly frustrated by the
silence of some jailed suspects. Offers of lighter sentences, money, jobs,
and a new identity and life in America haven't loosened their tongues, and
alternative strategies under discussion include "using drugs or pressure
tactics, such as those employed occasionally by Israeli interrogators, to
extract information."

Images come to mind of stoic Israeli soldiers breaking the hands of
adolescent Palestinian rock throwers. But more serious measures are being
contemplated. According to Pincus, one law professor believes "the use of
force to extract information could happen" in cases where investigators
believe suspects have information on an upcoming attack. "If there is a
ticking bomb, it is not an easy issue," the professor said.

Right wing Republican stalwart Kenneth W. Starr, the former Clinton
inquisitor, said the danger of terrorism requires "deference to the
judgments of the political branches (italics added) with respect to matters
of national security." And right wing Republican Richard Thornburgh, a
former Pennsylvania governor and attorney general under Ronald Reagan and
George H. W. Bush, said that due process sometimes "strangles us." When it
comes to counter-terrorism, Thornburgh said that legally admissible evidence
"may not be the be-all and end-all."

According to Pincus, "the country may compare the current search for
information to brutal tactics in wartime used to gather intelligence
overseas and even by U.S. troops from prisoners during military actions."

Suddenly we've gone from breaking hands to cutting off fingers, attaching
electrodes to genitals, and pouring soapy water down windpipes while
suspects hang suspended on meat hooks.

But is there a "crisis" as government propagandist Pincus suggests? And even
if there is, why must we defer to the "political branches," as Starr claims,
to combat terrorism? And what does it mean for Bush's domestic political
opponents if, as Thornburgh suggests, the "current search for information"
should include the "brutal tactics" used "in wartime"?1

How To Organize A Fascist State

America was attacked and is at war; and in the rage and confusion following
the morning of 11 September Bush sought unprecedented emergency powers to
counter the threat of more terrorism. He received those powers from Congress
with near unanimous public support. The logic was irrefutable at the moment:
a murderous, suicidal enemy had invaded our homeland, and the military had
to be mobilized. Fear gripped the nation, and while Bush was ignominiously
hidden away in a military bunker by security forces (because, his aides
falsely claimed, terrorists planned to attack Air Force One) the White House
was able to impose what amounts to martial law. Armed National Guardsmen now
stalk our airports, concrete barriers surround our government buildings, and
the president's press secretary cautions our apologetic comedians (when
they're not sports casting or sharing emotional moments with Dan Rather) to
watch what they say.

And even though the attacks ended quickly, a bizarre outbreak of anthrax
keeps the body count climbing, emotions simmering, and the emergency
sustained. The military is now integrally involved in domestic
counter-terror operations, and intelligence gained from CIA covert
actions--evidence hitherto inadmissible in courts of law, due to the CIA's
refusal to reveal its illegal "sources and methods"--has been folded into
law enforcement operations. Any number of secret presidential edicts may
have been issued--we know of one authorizing the CIA to commit
assassinations--and thus the scope of the assault on our civil liberties has
yet to be fully revealed.

But we do know how the Bush Dictatorship will be organized. It will be based
on a broad policy of anti-terrorism covering the entire spectrum of possible
actions, from conventional military operations, to political intervention,
and to economic sanctions against nations like Afghanistan, Cuba, and Iraq.
This broad policy of anti-terrorism will include specific counter-terror
programs and operations, at home and abroad. White House political and
security advisors will coordinate this bifurcated effort under the
ostensibly direction of dimwitted George Bush and the actual direction his
Machiavellian Vice President, Dick Cheney. Should Haliburton Oil Company
executive Cheney depart the scene for health reasons, an equally aggressive
individual, most likely Secretary of State Colin Powell, will take his
place.

The job of managing overseas counter-terror operations will fall to National
Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. A board member of Chevron Corporation,
which operates in 100 foreign countries, Rice, like Bush and Cheney, has an
abiding personal interest in the growth of the oil industry. She is a "hard
liner" and advocates a worldwide war on terrorism, to be fought in more than
60 countries. As she said in an 18 October article posted on the CNN
website, "you've got to get to these (terrorist) cells and root them out and
disrupt them before they strike again."

The job of coordinating the domestic counter-terror effort will fall to
former Pennsylvania Governor Tom Ridge, as director of the newly created
Office of Homeland Security (OHS). In less sophisticated times, the domestic
counter-terror effort would be referred to as "internal security," and Ridge
would head the Office of Internal Security. But the Bush Administrations
public relations experts evidently think "internal security" has a negative
connotation, and that the word "homeland" connotes "the land of the free and
the home of the brave," as opposed to the Fuhrer and his adoring volkreich.

Although he is a personal friend of Bush and a decorated Vietnam veteran,
Ridge supports a woman's right to an abortion, and thus is mistrusted by the
reactionary right wing of the Republican Party. Even the mainstream media is
beginning to portray him as a mere spokesman and figurehead without real
authority, and it's clear the White House's political cadre will make the
real decisions about internal security, and foreign policy.

In existence since 1947, the National Security Council implements the
President's foreign policy wishes, which are to organize the world based on
the totalitarian corporate paradigm, in a political way that will enrich
himself and his loyal supporters. The new OHS has the same purpose, and same
organizational structure, as the NSC.

The political pretext for creating the OHS was simple enough: 6000 citizens
were killed in a terrible terror attack, and the Bush Administrations claims
that the OHS is the best mechanism to reduce the risk of such a calamity
happening again. To this end, the OHS will coordinate more than 40 federal
agencies involved in intelligence, security, and law enforcement endeavors.

Although the lines of authority have yet to be determined, the OHS will work
with the murky Military Homeland Defense Agency under Deputy National
Security Advisor General Wayne Downing. Though he is describe as Ridge's
deputy, Downing has far greater experience in counter-terror doctrine and
operations, including service as an intelligence and Civil Affairs officer
during the Vietnam War. Before his retirement in 1997, Downing was
Commanding General of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command at Fort Bragg
(1991-1993), and Commander in Chief of the U.S. Special Operations Command
at MacDill Air Force Base (1993-1996).

The man to watch, Downing will advise Ridge and Bush on how best to detect
and disrupt domestic terrorist organizations. Downing will be OHS's liaison
to the Pentagon and its highly evolved counter-terror units. These units
will likely serve as the OHS's "action" arm in hostage situations or in
cases when the "brutal tactics" used "in wartime" are required to persuade a
terrorist to reveal the location of a "ticking bomb."

Downing also will likely oversee the Stalinist military tribunals the Bush
Administration has proposed as a method of trying, dispensing with, and even
executing terrorists. In a 25 October article titled "How We Punish
Saboteurs" for Legal Times, Philip Lacovara, cited the case of eight German
saboteurs executed during World War II. President Roosevelt ordered the men
tried before a military tribunal composed entirely of military officers. The
saboteurs took their case to the Supreme Court, but the Justices backed the
President, ruling that the Germans had no right to a public trial or a trial
by jury. The Court even implied that the President as commander in chief had
the power to order the men executed without any trial at all. Ultimately the
military tribunal did its job, and in early August 1942, six would-be
saboteurs were hanged.

As Lacovara notes, without any sense of irony that every member of the CIA
falls within this definition, "The laws of war grant no quarter to those who
plot their evil in the shadows."

It's unclear if the OHS, in conjunction with Downing's organization, will
have the power to torture and summarily execute. But the OHS is being funded
by hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars, and Bush Administration
propagandists are busy lowering expectations. Defending our homeland will
not be an easy task, according to Michael Ledeen, a former counter-terror
expert in the Reagan Administration's State Department and National Security
Council. In a 1 October article for the National Review OnLine, Ledeen said
the difficulty will be getting the law-enforcement and intelligence agencies
"to coordinate better with one another." 2

Ledeen defines this organizational problem as ideological, and he
specifically blames the Clintons, "for failing to properly organize our
nation's security apparatus."

He even goes so far as to suggest that the Clinton Administration is liable
for the terror attacks of September 11th, because, "People who took security
seriously were sneered at by the Clintons. Bubba's White House was a
security shambles," and his Secretary of State, Madeline Albright, "presided
over one security debacle after another. Rooms were bugged, files and
computers disappeared, perhaps into the same black hole as the Rose Law Firm
records having to do with Ms. Hillary's billable hours."

Ledeen's vilification of "the Clintons" is a textbook example of the
unsubtle political and psychological warfare being waged on the American
public, to legitimize the Bush Administration, and to justify the political
repression of those people whom Clinton is presumed to represent: obviously
not those who take security seriously.

Bombing a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan, endless economic sanctions
against Iraq, more than a billion dollars to fight narco-terrorism in
Colombia, and the war in Bosnia--none of this was serious enough to suit
Ledeen and the radical right. Nor was Clinton's total commitment to Israel.
Clinton's failure was here, at home, and the radical right is about to set
things straight.

The terror attacks of 11 September cry out for violent retribution, and if,
as Ledeen alleges, "the Clintons" are to blame--through sins of omission,
ignorance, or arrogance--then violent retribution must surely be visited
upon them and their associates. This is exactly what Ledeen is advocating,
and this is the tricky part, because he does not define whom these people
were who sneered at security. But his visceral hatred of them is indicative
of the violence the reactionary right wing wishes to inflict, through the
OHS, on its political opponents--however erroneously represented by Clinton
they are--in order to instill "respect" for the illegitimate Bush
Administration.

According to Ledeen, Clinton's sneering lack of respect took "a terrible
toll on the system, and Ridge will not find it easy to instill a proper
respect for proper secrecy, even in his own offices. It takes quite a while
to stamp out corrupt habits of mind and action."

Ledeen's solution to the problem of domestic terrorism is "to stamp out" the
"corrupt habits of mind (italics added)" that are still lingering around,
somewhere. In other words, the reactionary right wing must impose its "prope
r" ideology through the institution of an official Thought Police, the OHS,
in order to create the politically correct, security conscious, uniform
American citizenry, marching in lockstep, flags waving, that is necessary to
win the tough war ahead. It's a matter of will.

"This is time for the old motto, "kill them all, let God sort 'em out." New
times require new people with new standards," Ledeen asserts. "The entire
political (italics added) world will understand it and applaud it. And it
will give Tom Ridge a chance to succeed, and us to prevail."

The "new times" means a society in which the organizing principle is terror.
The "new people" are those who take internal security seriously enough to
impose the "new standards," which allow military tribunals to order summary
executions and torture here in America, when necessary, and mass murder
anywhere in the world there are thought to be terrorists, as is happening in
Afghanistan right now.

It all depends on whether or the reactionary right wing succeeds in
terrorizing the American public into submission. As the Bush regime is fond
of saying, "You're either with us, or you're against us."

Ledeen is seriously proposing that the Bush Administration conduct a
counter-terror campaign against its political opposition in America, through
its nascent domestic political police force, the OHS. But this impending
attack has yet to begin, and there is still time to prepare for the
repression to come. And one very good way of preparing is by putting the
current "emergency" situation in an historical context. Doing that is the
object this article, in order to provide the potential dissident (Left,
Right, or otherwise) with a better understanding of the challenges he or she
will be facing in the future.

While the OHS appeared immediately after the tragic events of 11 September,
like a rabbit pulled from a magician's star-spangled hat, it's important to
understand that it has been at least four years in the making. Based on
studies and predictions that a catastrophic terror attack was inevitable,
the U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century (co-chaired by
former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman) had proposed an OHS-type entity
in January 2001. But the original concept for a domestic counter-terror,
internal security program is much older, and was first designed and
formalized 35 years ago by members of the CIA's Saigon station.

The CIA believed that in order to win the Vietnam War, it had to destroy the
political and administrative organization--what it called the Viet Cong
Infrastructure (VCI)--that managed the insurgency. The CIA based this belief
on the assumption that opposing ideological factions were battling for the
loyalty of the complacent Vietnamese masses, and that the VCI were winning
the war for the hearts of minds of the masses through the use of armed
propaganda and "selective terror," meaning the cold-blooded murder and
mutilation of government officials.

In response, the CIA created its first official counter-terror program in
1964, as CIA Station Chief Peer DeSilva explained it in his autobiography,
Sub Rosa, "to bring danger and death" to the VCI who were managing the reign
of terror.

DeSilva's statement is the key to understanding that language, or more
precisely "information management," is the most important weapon in
political warfare. This becomes self-evident when one realizes that, by
DeSilva's definition, counter-terrorism is just another word for terrorism.
They mean exactly the same thing, except that counter-terrorism is
justifiable terrorism because it's aimed at "them" not "us".

"Us" in 1964 included our proxy, the Government of Vietnam, and in order to
provide the GVN with "internal security," the CIA, along with the initiation
of its counter-terror program, began constructing a gulag archipelago of
secret interrogation centers in South Vietnam's 44 provinces. (These
fortresses, which were surrounded by high walls and gun towers, and equipped
with "real time" communication systems to CIA central in Saigon, were built
by Pacific Architects and Engineers.) Four regional centers also were built,
and an existing national interrogation center was modernized in Saigon. The
interrogation centers were staffed by South Vietnam's plainclothes secret
policemen, and advised and funded by undercover CIA "liaison" officers.

The Vietnamese secret police, which functioned like the FBI in America,
established a nation-wide informant network to identify VCI and their
sympathizers. Informants were recruited in every district, village, and
hamlet in Vietnam. On the basis of an accusation made by a single anonymous
informant, a VCI suspect or sympathizer could be arrested and detained
indefinitely under the An Tri (administrative detention) Laws. As is
happening everyday in Israel, and has been widely proposed as the only
viable means of dealing with the threat of terror in America, suspects and
sympathizers were put in an interrogation center and tortured until they
confessed, informed, died, or were sent to Stalinist internal security
tribunals (like Bush is proposing) for disposition.

Backed by the Pentagon's overwhelming firepower, the CIA, with its
counter-terror and interrogation center programs, was a formidable foe. And
yet the Viet Cong insurgents, armed only with sticks and stones, steadily
gained popular support; and by 1966, the CIA's brain trust had concluded
that the problem was organizational, not conceptual. The perceived problem
was that the gritty "covert action" officers, who advised the paramilitary
counter-terror teams, were not properly sharing intelligence with the CIA's
refined "liaison" officers, who advised the secret police at the torture
centers. Nor was there any way of coordinating intelligence among any of the
other, 25 some-odd entities--including the U.S. army, navy and air
force--that were involved in every aspect of the war in South Vietnam.

The solution concocted by the organizational geniuses in the CIA's Saigon
station was ICEX--the Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation Program.
Created in June 1967, ICEX was directed by senior CIA officer Evan J.
Parker. A veteran of OSS Detachment 101, Parker had served in Burma in the
Second World War, and after joining the CIA, served his first tour in
Vietnam in 1950, working closely with France's leading expert in
counter-insurgency and opium smuggling, Colonel Roger Trinquier. Parker
managed a staff of CIA and military officers in Saigon. As part of a support
program authorized by President Lyndon Johnson, Parker, with CIA station
chief Lou Lapham, also supervised 44 CIA contract officers--one for each
province--who were assigned as ICEX field officers. ICEX was soon renamed
the sexier-sounding Phoenix Program, and the 44 Phoenix advisors began
coordinating the Counter-Terror and Interrogation Center Programs, as well
as all other intelligence, security, and counter-insurgency programs in
their provinces. Phoenix centers were eventually established in almost every
district in South Vietnam, and from the district offices, secret policemen
and counter-terror teams conducted operations in almost every village and
hamlet.

Phoenix Director Evan Parker was the overall coordinator in Saigon, just as
Tom Ridge is the overall OHS coordinator in Washington. Like Phoenix, the
OHS will likely establish field offices in the 50 states, and all of
America's major cities.

In order to achieve its elusive goal of "internal security," the OHS, like
Phoenix, will need to extend its informant net into every American town.
Inevitably, every town will probably be required to form an OHS Committee,
which, like the traditional Zoning and Education committees, will be
composed of average citizens. The chair of the OHS Committee, however, will
be selected for his or her "loyalty" and ability to process "confidential"
reports sent by concerned citizens (informants) about the activities of the
Bush Administration's political opponents. Perhaps once every week these
reports will be forwarded to the OHS committee at the county level. The
county committee will review the reports and send the most urgent ones to
the state committee. At each level, OHS Committees are more likely to be
staffed by avid Bush supporters. In other words, the reports will pass
through an ideological filter. The prime suspects identified at Ridge's
national OHS headquarters will not be flag wavers, but peace activists,
feminists, environmentalists, people opposing globalization, liberals and
Leftists--in short, anyone posing a political challenge to the reactionary
right wing and the internal security forces that are firmly in its grip.

What makes such a system especially dangerous is that Attorney General John
Ashcroft has vowed to "arrest and detain any suspected terrorist who has
violated the law," and has promised "airtight surveillance" of them--but he
has yet to define what a suspected terrorist is. This is what happened in
Vietnam too. There was never any consensus about the definition of a VCI
sympathizer: at best, it was tacitly understood by the ideologues, and the
security forces under there control, that a person was either "for us or
against us." Moreover, as the CIA's internal security gurus espoused, it
wasn't enough just to be for us, passively: one had to be actively against
them.

So the definition of a terrorist suspect is deliberately left open, paving
the way for political repression. The anti-terror legislation passed by
Congress and signed by Bush allows for secret searches of the homes of
people who meet the nebulous criteria of "suspected terrorist." No doubt
these secret searches violate the Fourth Amendment, so Ashcroft, again
lifting a page from the Phoenix playbook, has vowed to "employ new tools
that ease administrative burdens." Already around 1000 terrorist suspects
have been arrested and detained indefinitely under these new administrative
procedures.

In Vietnam, "administrative detention" was the legal nail on which the
Phoenix Program hung. Under the An Tri administrative detention laws,
supporting the VCI was a crime of status. It was exactly like being a
Palestinian in Israel today: one is guilty of who one is, not what one does.
Indeed, administrative detention was prescribed only in cases where there
wasn't sufficient evidence to convict a person for a crime. One didn't have
to carry a weapon or shelter a VCI suspect. One's thoughts were reason
enough for the secret police to make a midnight arrest, no warrant required,
or for the counter-terror teams to conduct an assassination. Simply
advocating peace was punishable by indefinite detention, and due process was
totally non-existent. There was no right to an attorney, no right to
confront one's accusers, no justice at all. Thus the system was a boondoggle
for corrupt officials, especially those who sat on the internal security
councils that disposed of suspects. As legendary CIA officer Lou Conein
said, "Phoenix was a great blackmail scheme for the Government of Vietnam.
"Do what I say, or you're VC.'"

Anyone who expects anything different from the OHS is living in a dream
world.

Four years after the Phoenix Program was initiated, on 15 July 1971, the New
York Times revealed that 26,843 non-military Vietcong insurgents and
sympathizers had been "neutralized" in the previous 14-month period. During
Congressman Hearings that were being held at the time, Representative Ogden
Reid (D-NY) asked William Colby, the CIA officer in overall charge of the
Phoenix Program, "Are you certain that we know a loyal member of the VCI
from a loyal member of the South Vietnamese citizenry?"

Colby said, "No."

But the Nixon Administration, under the guidance of National Security
Advisor Henry Kissinger, was prepared to defend its pet project, and when
Congressman Paul McCloskey (R-CA) claimed that Phoenix violated that part of
the Geneva Conventions guaranteeing protection to civilians in time of war,
CIA legal experts argued that Article 3 applied "only to sentencing for
crimes, and does not prohibit a state from interning civilians or subjecting
them to emergency detention when such measures are necessary for the
security or safety of the state." Using the most advanced Orwellian
terminology, they claimed that torture, summary execution, and indefinite
detention, all carried out without previous judgment pronounced by a
regularly constituted court, were perfectly legal, precisely because they
were the result of "administrative procedures" and did not involve a
"criminal sentence."

As noted, double-speak is at the very crux of the current counter-terror
campaign in America, and it was through the Phoenix "internal security"
Program that the CIA refined psychological warfare (psywar) into the
political art form it is today. Because no one wanted to have his name on a
Phoenix blacklist, or his face on a Phoenix Wanted Poster, and because fear
of upsetting a Phoenix official was the most effective means of creating
informers and defectors, the CIA launched an intensive publicity campaign
called the Popular Information Program. Under the banner of "Protecting
People from Terrorism," Phoenix psywar teams crisscrossed the countryside,
using CIA-supplied radios, leaflets, posters, TV shows, movies, banners, and
loudspeakers mounted on trucks and sampans to spread the word.

The goal was to convince the public that only traitors didn't support the
government, and that its security forces were ubiquitous, like God; and thus
a typical broadcast would say, "You know who you are, John Smith. We know
where you live! We know you are a traitor and a lackey of the terrorists.
Soon the soldiers and police will come to get you. Rally now, John Smith,
before it's too late!"

The Phoenix Directorate also produced a movie explaining how Phoenix "Helps
Protect People From Terrorism," and hundreds of thousands of cartoon books
were distributed to the same end. As is happening in Afghanistan, where
propaganda leaflets describe the Taliban as anti-Islamic, Phoenix leaflets
portrayed Communism as a socially destructive force that violated
traditional Confucian beliefs.

Last but not least, in keeping with the dictum that it wasn't enough to
passively support the government, that one had to actively seek out the
enemy in order to prove one's loyalty, the Phoenix Directorate taught
village chiefs how to conduct classes on the spiritual value of government
internal security programs.

One can expect exactly the same avalanche of propaganda, only in far more
sophisticated form, from Tom Ridge and any OHS committees that are
established across America. Think of it as a DARE Program, hinging on some
vague definition of a suspected terrorist, but aimed at everyone, not just
children.

Ledeen is seriously proposing that the Bush Administration conduct a
counter-terror campaign against its political opposition in America, through
its nascent domestic political police force, the OHS. But this impending
attack has yet to begin, and there is still time to prepare for the
repression to come. And one very good way of preparing is by putting the
current "emergency" situation in an historical context. Doing that is the
object this article, in order to provide the potential dissident (Left,
Right, or otherwise) with a better understanding of the challenges he or she
will be facing in the future.

While the OHS appeared immediately after the tragic events of 11 September,
like a rabbit pulled from a magician's star-spangled hat, it's important to
understand that it has been at least four years in the making. Based on
studies and predictions that a catastrophic terror attack was inevitable,
the U.S. Commission on National Security in the 21st Century (co-haired by
former Senators Gary Hart and Warren Rudman) had proposed an OHS-type entity
in January 2001. But the original concept for a domestic counter-terror,
internal security program is much older, and was first designed and
formalized 35 years ago by members of the CIA's Saigon station.

The CIA believed that in order to win the Vietnam War, it had to destroy the
political and administrative organization--what it called the Viet Cong
Infrastructure (VCI)--that managed the insurgency. The CIA based this belief
on the assumption that opposing ideological factions were battling for the
loyalty of the complacent Vietnamese masses, and that the VCI were winning
the war for the hearts of minds of the masses through the use of armed
propaganda and "selective terror," meaning the cold-blooded murder and
mutilation of government officials.

In response, the CIA created its first official counter-terror program in
1964, as CIA Station Chief Peer DeSilva explained it in his autobiography,
Sub Rosa, "to bring danger and death" to the VCI who were managing the reign
of terror.

DeSilva's statement is the key to understanding that language, or more
precisely "information management," is the most important weapon in
political warfare. This becomes self-evident when one realizes that, by
DeSilva's definition, counter-terrorism is just another word for terrorism.
They mean exactly the same thing, except that counter-terrorism is
justifiable terrorism because it's aimed at "them" not "us".

"Us" in 1964 included our proxy, the Government of Vietnam, and in order to
provide the GVN with "internal security," the CIA, along with the initiation
of its counter-terror program, began constructing a gulag archipelago of
secret interrogation centers in South Vietnam's 44 provinces. (These
fortresses, which were surrounded by high walls and gun towers, and equipped
with "real time" communication systems to CIA central in Saigon, were built
by Pacific Architects and Engineers.) Four regional centers also were built,
and an existing national interrogation center was modernized in Saigon. The
interrogation centers were staffed by South Vietnam's plainclothes secret
policemen, and advised and funded by undercover CIA "liaison" officers.

The Vietnamese secret police, which functioned like the FBI in America,
established a nation-wide informant network to identify VCI and their
sympathizers. Informants were recruited in every district, village, and
hamlet in Vietnam. On the basis of an accusation made by a single anonymous
informant, a VCI suspect or sympathizer could be arrested and detained
indefinitely under the An Tri (administrative detention) Laws. As is
happening everyday in Israel, and has been widely proposed as the only
viable means of dealing with the threat of terror in America, suspects and
sympathizers were put in an interrogation center and tortured until they
confessed, informed, died, or were sent to Stalinist internal security
tribunals (like Bush is proposing) for disposition.

Backed by the Pentagon's overwhelming firepower, the CIA, with its
counter-terror and interrogation center programs, was a formidable foe. And
yet the Viet Cong insurgents, armed only with sticks and stones, steadily
gained popular support; and by 1966, the CIA's brain trust had concluded
that the problem was organizational, not conceptual. The perceived problem
was that the gritty "covert action" officers, who advised the paramilitary
counter-terror teams, were not properly sharing intelligence with the CIA's
refined "liaison" officers, who advised the secret police at the torture
centers. Nor was there any way of coordinating intelligence among any of the
other, 25 some-odd entities--including the U.S. army, navy and air
force--that were involved in every aspect of the war in South Vietnam.

The solution concocted by the organizational geniuses in the CIA's Saigon
station was ICEX--the Intelligence Coordination and Exploitation Program.
Created in June 1967, ICEX was directed by senior CIA officer Evan J.
Parker. A veteran of OSS Detachment 101, Parker had served in Burma in the
Second World War, and after joining the CIA, served his first tour in
Vietnam in 1950, working closely with France's leading expert in
counter-insurgency and opium smuggling, Colonel Roger Trinquier. Parker
managed a staff of CIA and military officers in Saigon. As part of a support
program authorized by President Lyndon Johnson, Parker, with CIA station
chief Lou Lapham, also supervised 44 CIA contract officers--one for each
province--who were assigned as ICEX field officers. ICEX was soon renamed
the sexier-sounding Phoenix Program, and the 44 Phoenix advisors began
coordinating the Counter-Terror and Interrogation Center Programs, as well
as all other intelligence, security, and counter-insurgency programs in
their provinces. Phoenix centers were eventually established in almost every
district in South Vietnam, and from the district offices, secret policemen
and counter-terror teams conducted operations in almost every village and
hamlet.

Phoenix Director Evan Parker was the overall coordinator in Saigon, just as
Tom Ridge is the overall OHS coordinator in Washington. Like Phoenix, the
OHS will likely establish field offices in the 50 states, and all of
America's major cities.

In order to achieve its elusive goal of "internal security," the OHS, like
Phoenix, will need to extend its informant net into every American town.
Inevitably, every town will probably be required to form an OHS Committee,
which, like the traditional Zoning and Education committees, will be
composed of average citizens. The chair of the OHS Committee, however, will
be selected for his or her "loyalty" and ability to process "confidential"
reports sent by concerned citizens (informants) about the activities of the
Bush Administration's political opponents. Perhaps once every week these
reports will be forwarded to the OHS committee at the county level. The
county committee will review the reports and send the most urgent ones to
the state committee. At each level, OHS Committees are more likely to be
staffed by avid Bush supporters. In other words, the reports will pass
through an ideological filter. The prime suspects identified at Ridge's
national OHS headquarters will not be flag wavers, but peace activists,
feminists, environmentalists, people opposing globalization, liberals and
Leftists--in short, anyone posing a political challenge to the reactionary
right wing and the internal security forces that are firmly in its grip.

What makes such a system especially dangerous is that Attorney General John
Ashcroft has vowed to "arrest and detain any suspected terrorist who has
violated the law," and has promised "airtight surveillance" of them--but he
has yet to define what a suspected terrorist is. This is what happened in
Vietnam too. There was never any consensus about the definition of a VCI
sympathizer: at best, it was tacitly understood by the ideologues, and the
security forces under there control, that a person was either "for us or
against us." Moreover, as the CIA's internal security gurus espoused, it
wasn't enough just to be for us, passively: one had to be actively against
them.

So the definition of a terrorist suspect is deliberately left open, paving
the way for political repression. The anti-terror legislation passed by
Congress and signed by Bush allows for secret searches of the homes of
people who meet the nebulous criteria of "suspected terrorist." No doubt
these secret searches violate the Fourth Amendment, so Ashcroft, again
lifting a page from the Phoenix playbook, has vowed to "employ new tools
that ease administrative burdens." Already around 1000 terrorist suspects
have been arrested and detained indefinitely under these new administrative
procedures.

In Vietnam, "administrative detention" was the legal nail on which the
Phoenix Program hung. Under the An Tri administrative detention laws,
supporting the VCI was a crime of status. It was exactly like being a
Palestinian in Israel today: one is guilty of who one is, not what one does.
Indeed, administrative detention was prescribed only in cases where there
wasn't sufficient evidence to convict a person for a crime. One didn't have
to carry a weapon or shelter a VCI suspect. One's thoughts were reason
enough for the secret police to make a midnight arrest, no warrant required,
or for the counter-terror teams to conduct an assassination. Simply
advocating peace was punishable by indefinite detention, and due process was
totally non-existent. There was no right to an attorney, no right to
confront one's accusers, no justice at all. Thus the system was a boondoggle
for corrupt officials, especially those who sat on the internal security
councils that disposed of suspects. As legendary CIA officer Lou Conein
said, "Phoenix was a great blackmail scheme for the Government of Vietnam.
"Do what I say, or you're VC.'"

Anyone who expects anything different from the OHS is living in a dream
world.

Four years after the Phoenix Program was initiated, on 15 July 1971, the New
York Times revealed that 26,843 non-military Vietcong insurgents and
sympathizers had been "neutralized" in the previous 14-month period. During
Congressman Hearings that were being held at the time, Representative Ogden
Reid (D-NY) asked William Colby, the CIA officer in overall charge of the
Phoenix Program, "Are you certain that we know a loyal member of the VCI
from a loyal member of the South Vietnamese citizenry?"

Colby said, "No."

But the Nixon Administration, under the guidance of National Security
Advisor Henry Kissinger, was prepared to defend its pet project, and when
Congressman Paul McCloskey (R-CA) claimed that Phoenix violated that part of
the Geneva Conventions guaranteeing protection to civilians in time of war,
CIA legal experts argued that Article 3 applied "only to sentencing for
crimes, and does not prohibit a state from interning civilians or subjecting
them to emergency detention when such measures are necessary for the
security or safety of the state." Using the most advanced Orwellian
terminology, they claimed that torture, summary execution, and indefinite
detention, all carried out without previous judgment pronounced by a
regularly constituted court, were perfectly legal, precisely because they
were the result of "administrative procedures" and did not involve a
"criminal sentence."

As noted, double-speak is at the very crux of the current counter-terror
campaign in America, and it was through the Phoenix "internal security"
Program that the CIA refined psychological warfare (psywar) into the
political art form it is today. Because no one wanted to have his name on a
Phoenix blacklist, or his face on a Phoenix Wanted Poster, and because fear
of upsetting a Phoenix official was the most effective means of creating
informers and defectors, the CIA launched an intensive publicity campaign
called the Popular Information Program. Under the banner of "Protecting
People from Terrorism," Phoenix psywar teams crisscrossed the countryside,
using CIA-supplied radios, leaflets, posters, TV shows, movies, banners, and
loudspeakers mounted on trucks and sampans to spread the word.

The goal was to convince the public that only traitors didn't support the
government, and that its security forces were ubiquitous, like God; and thus
a typical broadcast would say, "You know who you are, John Smith. We know
where you live! We know you are a traitor and a lackey of the terrorists.
Soon the soldiers and police will come to get you. Rally now, John Smith,
before it's too late!"

The Phoenix Directorate also produced a movie explaining how Phoenix "Helps
Protect People From Terrorism," and hundreds of thousands of cartoon books
were distributed to the same end. As is happening in Afghanistan, where
propaganda leaflets describe the Taliban as anti-Islamic, Phoenix leaflets
portrayed Communism as a socially destructive force that violated
traditional Confucian beliefs.

Last but not least, in keeping with the dictum that it wasn't enough to
passively support the government, that one had to actively seek out the
enemy in order to prove one's loyalty, the Phoenix Directorate taught
village chiefs how to conduct classes on the spiritual value of government
internal security programs.

One can expect exactly the same avalanche of propaganda, only in far more
sophisticated form, from Tom Ridge and any OHS committees that are
established across America. Think of it as a DARE Program, hinging on some
vague definition of a suspected terrorist, but aimed at everyone, not just
children.

The similarities between the Phoenix Program and the OHS are obvious, and
with its computerized database of terrorist suspects, Phoenix is certainly
the organizational model for an OHS-style counter-terror program based on
"intelligence coordination and exploitation." 3

But as everyone is aware, the threat of radical Islamic terrorism is not
comparable to the insurgency in Vietnam. In that case America rushed to
defend a hapless ally, thousands of miles away, much as we did in Kuwait. In
the present situation, the OHS has been created to defend us from terrorists
on our own turf. Its counter-terror function is equivalent to that of
providing internal security, in so far as the Bush Administration defines
"internal security" in political terms.

Historically, and ironically, the U.S. Government considered Native
Americans as our homeland's first domestic terrorists, and various methods
were devised to deal with the threat, such as the distribution of blankets
infected with smallpox.

Abolitionists, whether peaceful or violent like John Brown, also were
regarded as terrorists, and for decades the reactionary right wing of
American civilization, and its unreconstructed representatives in the
government (many of whom still hold office), regarded the Ku Klux Klan as a
legitimate means of countering the terror of Emancipation. Indeed, until
today, the reactionary right wing still considers a "genuine" American to be
an active proponent of this ideology, with its repulsive mix of racial
purity, patriotism, and Christian fundamentalism, with its divine savior
nailed to the cross, a symbol of the spiritual terror that enabled our
Founding Fathers to rationalize slavery in the land of free and the home of
brave.

Segregation persisted as unstated policy, and by the late 19th Century,
organized labor had emerged as our homeland's new breed of domestic
political terrorists; and after private police forces proved ineffective in
eliminating the unions, the U.S. Government created the FBI to nullify the
threat labor posed to its Robber Baron patrons. The FBI quickly established
that foreigners (mostly Jews, Bolsheviks and immigrants with no rightful
claim to America as their "homeland") were controlling the labor movement.
Over the years Communists replaced Bolshevists, and eventually Civil Rights
and Anti-War activists were added to the hit list of domestic
terrorists--all of which brings us the FBI's notorious Counter Intelligence
Program.

Created in the late 1950s, COINTELPRO was designed to neutralize "radical"
political movements inside the U.S. In its attempt to provide decent
Americans with "internal security," the FBI employed agent provocateurs,
conducted burglaries, engaged in black propaganda (disinformation), fraud,
and perhaps in the case of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and several other
black leaders, outright assassination. 4

But COINTELPRO failed to neutralize America's Anti-War and Civil Rights
insurgency, and by 1967, President Johnson and the FBI were sensing the
presence of foreign intelligence agencies. And the mere fear that the KGB
was directing the Anti-War and Civil Rights movements provided the FBI with
the pretext to enlist the CIA in domestic intelligence operations. The
precipitating event was a February 1967 expose in Ramparts magazine, which
revealed that the CIA had suborned the leadership of the National Student
Association. The exposure of this illegal CIA domestic activity prompted
even moderate students to join and support radical, alternative
organizations like the Students for a Democratic Society. The Anti-War
movement blossomed like never before.

The Ramparts revelation, and the resulting surge in anti-establishment
activities, was deemed to be a Soviet provocation, and confirmed the FBI's
suspicions that foreign agitators were fueling the Anti-War and Civil Rights
movements, so Johnson ordered the CIA to investigate Robert Scheer, the
author of the Ramparts article. Director of Central Intelligence Richard
Helms gave the job to veteran CIA officer Richard Ober, a Harvard graduate
(1943), World War II veteran, and member of the CIA's counter-intelligence
staff. And thus came Operation Chaos--which, with its counterpart
organizations in the Justice Department and White House, enabled the CIA and
political ideologues to get involved in "internal security" operations such
as will be conducted by the OHS. 5

Ober's Counter-Intelligence, Special Operations Group (CI/SOG), codenamed
MHCHAOS, was created in August 1967, concurrent with the Phoenix Program
(and for a similar purpose), and existed until March 1974. Its initial
mission, ostensibly on behalf of the FBI, was to collect intelligence
information on radical domestic political groups, to discover if they were
being manipulated by foreign intelligence agencies.

To coordinate Chaos and COINTELPRO operations, Johnson's attorney general,
Ramsay Clark, created the Interdepartmental Intelligence Unit (IDIU) within
the Justice Department's Internal Security Division. Ober became the CIA's
representative on the IDIU, which (like the OHS) was managed by senior
members from the White House staff. In other words, from its inception, CIA
intelligence information on dissidents was reported to people whose primary
interest was in politics, not internal security.

Upon assuming office in January 1969, President Nixon immediately grasped
the partisan political potential of the IDIU, which he moved under the Civil
Rights Division. In June 1969, through his advisor on Domestic Affairs, John
Dean--and Dean's youthful assistant, Tom Huston--Nixon directed Ober to
engage Chaos in covert actions against dissidents. Ober was assigned a
deputy and a case officer whose names remain secret until today. The deputy
and the case officer moved into Ober's suite of offices in a vault in the
basement at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Among the rooms was a
library where files were kept and where slides of suspects and potential
recruits were viewed. Several female CIA officers managed the precious,
super secret Chaos files.

Central to Chaos was its super-secrecy. Assignment to CI/SOG was considered
a "command performance," and security was commensurate with the
responsibility. Ober, at the direction of his immediate supervisor,
Counter-Intelligence Chief James Angleton, devised a communications system
exclusively for Chaos cables and couriers to overseas stations. These
"back-channels" by-passed the geographical division chiefs and reached right
into the stations, to trusted counter-intelligence officers. In some cases
Chaos by-passed the station chiefs, and corresponded directly with its
unilateral assets and representatives in a country. Chaos "traffic" carried
the highest security classification, was restricted only to those involved
in the operation (as were Chaos files), and was inaccessible even to the
CIA's top administrators, often for their own protection.

Based on names provided by the FBI (and the CIA's Offices of Security,
Domestic Contacts, Foreign Resources, and Domestic Operations 6 ) the Chaos
case officer in October 1969 began recruiting double agents from within the
Black Power and Anti-War movements. The case officer approached only those
people with "radical" credentials. Only those who proved trustworthy (some
were polygraphed, others given psychological assessments) were recruited.
Recruits were given a training course in the clandestine arts, supplied with
the proper technical equipment and sufficient funds, sheep-dipped (meaning
their records were falsified), and then sent overseas. The case officer
referred to his 40-50 double agents as "dangles," because their job was to
operate as a dissident normally would, and hope that a foreign intelligence
agent would make an approach.

With the approval of Nixon's National Security Advisor, Henry Kissinger, the
Pentagon joined in the counter-terror effort through a secret committee
formed under the aforementioned Tom Huston, and began leveling requirements
on the Chaos unit. The Pentagon was intent on tracking deserters, and
gathering information on foreign nationals who were attempting to persuade
American soldiers to desert from military bases in Germany. Chaos dangles
were sent to North Vietnam, North Africa and Cuba, and one Chaos agent,
possibly Timothy Leary, was launched against Eldridge Cleaver in Algeria.

Here it is important to remember that Bush has granted the CIA unprecedented
freedom to coordinate with law enforcement and military officials, through
the OHS. Previous restrictions on CIA domestic operations have been waived.
As Bob Woodward reported in the 21 October Washington Post, CIA covert
action is now a key element in defending America from terrorist attacks.
Every day the CIA provides the Bush Administration's top national security
and intelligence officials--including OHS Director Tom Ridge--with current
intelligence on possible bombings, hijackings or poisonings within the U.S.
But other than the anthrax outbreak, which appears to be the work of the
radical right, none of the threats has materialized, and there is no way of
knowing if, as the CIA is wont to do, the anthrax outbreak has been
manufactured for purely political and psychological warfare reasons.

It also is likely that the CIA, on behalf of the OHS, will start sprinkling
Chaos-type dangles overseas, and within the United States, to tempt
terrorists into exposing themselves. It is a chilling prospect, but these
dangles may exist only on paper, with the sole purpose of contriving reasons
to launch counter-terror operations against opponents of Bush Administration
policy. Hundreds of businesses and institutions across the country have
already been placed on the CIA's watch list. According to Woodward, one Bush
official said that merely being on the list "could destroy the livelihood of
all those organizations without a bomb being thrown or a spore of anthrax
being released."

Loss of livelihood is perhaps the heaviest psychological hammer a security
agency can hold over a middle class American's head. But that's what it's
come down to.

You Don't Need A Weatherman

Incidental to their role as dangles designed to entrap foreign agents, Chaos
agents reported on U.S. citizens. A folder, or hard file, was created for
each suspected dissident the CIA targeted. The folder contained the
dissident's 201 "personality" file, as well as Situation Reports about his
or her radical activities. The 201 file included every scrap of biographical
information about the person, from arrest records to report cards to
surreptitious photos taken of the person with other suspects. Some 7-10,000
hard files were eventually assembled.

In May 1970, Chaos chief Richard Ober starting entering the information from
his index cards and hard files onto IBM cards, and compiling them in a data
base codenamed HYDRA, which ultimately contained the names of some 300,000
people. HYDRA was developed at the same time as the Phoenix computer system
in Vietnam. A mail intercept program codenamed HTLINGUAL also was part of
the Chaos operation.

Thirty years later, far more sophisticated databases exist in the United
States, and so much information is already available on every American
citizen, that a computerized, national ID card system isn't required to keep
track of everyone. But the on-going anthrax scare, which may be a CIA
provocation, could serve as the pretext to institute, under the OHS, a mail
intercept program similar to HTLINGUAL. And OHS Director Tom Ridge already
has a deputy, "cyber security expert" Richard Clarke, to monitor and
ultimately censor all politically incorrect Internet information.

As is well known, the paranoid Nixon Administration--whose ideology is
compatible with Bush's--was ruthless in the application of its executive
authority to attack its domestic political "enemies" under the aegis of
national security. To this end, the Nixon Administration formed the IDIU's
secret Intelligence Evaluation Committee in December 1970 under Robert
Mardian, the assistant attorney general in charge of Internal Security.
Mardian reported directly to Nixon's attorney general, John Mitchell. A
major player in Nixon's illegal political and fundraising schemes, Mitchell
was sentenced for his Watergate crimes in February 1975.

Bush's right wing attorney general, John Ashcroft, will be a major player at
OHS, and can be expected to play the same partisan political role for Bush
as Mitchell played for Nixon. Indeed, it is evident from the records of the
1975 Report by the President's Commission on CIA Activities Within the
United States that Chaos agents, at the behest of White House officials,
operated domestically, illegally, and that Chaos operations were directed
against non-violent dissidents, including Daniel Ellsberg, the Berrigan
Brothers, Tom Hayden, and others. Many of these activists had important
political connections, and by association, Left politicians came under Chaos
scrutiny. The coverage was vast, and in order to advance policies he wished
to keep secret from the secretaries of State and Defense, Kissinger kept
close track of the most critical Chaos operations, especially agent
operations that might impact his secret peace negotiations with the North
Vietnamese.

One of Chaos' most important agents played a critical though undisclosed
role at the May 1971 anti-war demonstrations in Washington. DC. And at least
one Chaos agent may have been involved in the Watergate scandal that brought
down Nixon.

Yes, by 1971 Ober and the Chaos unit were working for Nixon's secret team of
political dirty tricksters, the infamous Plumbers. Master Plumber G. Gordon
Liddy, a deranged former FBI agent with a penchant for eating live rats,
actually leveled requirements on Ober at the Intelligence Evaluation
Committee. Before Liddy and his partner in crime, CIA officer E. Howard
Hunt, were imprisoned for burglarizing the office of Ellsberg's
psychiatrist, they directed Ober to spy on members of other government
agencies, as well as on Nixon's political and bureaucratic "enemies".

Ober, who died earlier this year, is thought to have reacted negatively to
this ultimate violation of the Constitution, and at least one researcher has
suggested that he may have been Woodward's Deep Throat. But there's never
any guarantee that any CIA officer will ever break ranks, and the threat of
Nixon-style abuses loom large under the OHS and the illegitimate Bush
Administration, with its fascist ideology and unprecedented, dictatorial
emergency powers.

The Shell Game

Incredible power was concentrated in the Chaos office. Ober was the CIA's
liaison to the National Commission on Civil Disorders and to the Ginsburg
Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence. He was the CIA's
liaison to the protean Law Enforcement Assistance Administration, and to the
Special Services units (Red Squads) of America's major metropolitan police
departments. He reported directly to DCI Richard Helms (later convicted of
lying to Congress about the CIA's major role in the violent coup that
toppled the elected government of Chile, and resulted in the torture and
murder of thousands of Leftists), and he sat on the Huston Committee, which
was chaired by FBI Counter Intelligence chief William C. Sullivan
(assassinated in 1977). 7

However, by mid-1972, CIA Executive Director William E. Colby was concerned
that revelations of illegal CIA domestic political activities, on behalf of
the Nixon Administration, might destroy the Agency. The big problem was
Ober's association with rat-eater Liddy and his partner in crime, CIA
officer Howard Hunt, and it is probably not a coincidence that the Chaos
"case officer" was reassigned concurrently with the 17 June 1972 arrest of
the five Watergate buggers. The IDIU was dissolved six months later.

By September 1973, Colby was the new Director of Central Intelligence, and
had prepared a list of the CIA's "family jewels," an array of illegal
domestic activities--now legal under the Bush Administration--which Colby
felt should be revealed. The abuses included spying on politicians and
government agencies, helping other agencies conduct domestic surveillance,
and following U.S. citizens abroad. Colby blamed counter-intelligence chief
James Angleton for the public relations disaster, and forced his retirement,
amid much bitterness and rancor.

But Colby's "limited hangout" and scapegoating of Angleton were part of a
clever shell game, and the Chaos staff continued to conduct name traces, and
follow dissidents abroad, and respond to FBI and military requirements.
Everything was exactly the same as before, including the ultra-secure
communications system and restricted filing system, except now it was
acceptable because it was done under the aegis of counter-terrorism.

Colby started the ball rolling in July 1972, when he assigned Ober a second
job as Chief of the CIA's newly created International Terrorism Group (ITG).
Ober told the Rockefeller Commission that his new responsibility was
"setting up and running a central program" within the CIA of information on
international terrorism and hijackings, and very possibly the penetration of
terrorist training camps in Algeria, Cuba and other enemy states. The ITG
also kept track of homeland-based black militants and white racists with
international terror connections. ITG reports were, like Chaos reports, were
sent to Kissinger at the National Security Council.

Ober's appointment as chief of ITG coincided with the establishment of
Nixon's Cabinet Committee to Combat Terrorism, the first U.S. Government
entity of its kind. But even after the official termination of Chaos in
March 1974, the ITG continued to exist in the same suite of offices in the
same vault in the CIA's basement.

In March 1974 Ober was assigned other duties and a new ITG chief (not named
in the Rockefeller Commission Report) was assigned. The second ITG chief
(perhaps Lawrence K. White), had no deputy or case officer, and was assisted
by approximately ten female file clerks in what is described as basically an
"analytical" capacity. But ITG operations still relied on the Chaos folders
and computer tapes, which were maintained and updated. As of 1975, despite
the recommendations of several Congressional Committees, no Chaos files had
been destroyed, because the CIA could not adequately define a "dissident."

Senior CIA officer John Ryan became the third ITG chief in April 1975 and
served until 1977, when he was replaced by veteran CIA officer Howard Bane.

While Chaos was evolving into the CIA's International Terrorism Group, the
Phoenix Program--which did not expire with South Vietnam in April 1975--was
being employed as the model for a worldwide anti-terrorism unit in the CIA's
paramilitary Special Operations Division (SOD). Its main proponents, all
veterans of the Phoenix Program, had climbed the corporate ladder and were
in positions to turn their monster loose on all mankind.

Colby, the "father" of Phoenix and its staunchest defender before
Congressional Hearings in 1970 and 1971, appointed his close friend, Evan
Parker (the first Phoenix Director) as chief of the SOD in 1973. Parker
awarded CIA officer Robert Wall (self-described as the "grandfather" of
Phoenix, for his pioneering work on a pilot program in 1966) the first
"terrorism account," and then began reorganizing the SOD to fight Communist
insurgencies, using the Phoenix anti-terrorism model.8

The CIA's resident counter-terrorists found willing allies, invariably
fascist military dictators, around the world, and gladly taught them how to
terrorize entire nations into submission, through the arcane art of
political and psychological warfare. Perhaps the CIA's greatest success, in
this regard, was achieved in the midst of the Watergate scandal, under the
supervision of Kissinger, Colby, and the CIA's Western Hemisphere Division
chief, Theodore Shackley.

Donald Freed in Death In Washington (p 83-84) describes the CIA's covert
action that resulted in the bloody right-wing military coup in Chile
September 1973. Devised by the CIA's resident "black propaganda" expert,
David Atlee Phillips, the plan used "classic depth psychology and behavior
modification techniques to program individual Chileans toward a destiny of
victims or executioners. The CIA aim was to "serialize" and atomize the
Chilean people by using psychological terror to fractionate what had been
growing popular unity behind (Allende's) government." Freed explains that,
"Under the CIA program the middle classes had to be organized to "save
freedom," the military to impose temporary controls, the workers to give up
their drive for power."

The centerpiece of the CIA's Track II plan to overthrow the elected
government of Chile, by terrorizing the middle class through incredible acts
of violence, was the widespread publication of pictures of a man who was
allegedly "quartered" by radical leftists--but who in fact was mutilated by
the CIA's proxies in the Chilean secret service, DINA.

This ability to commit the most horrific acts of terror, and successfully
blame them on its enemies through black propaganda, is what makes the CIA's
inclusion in the OHS so dangerous. This one-two punch, in conjunction with
the CIA's expertise at "provoked responses" and "false flag recruitments,"
also makes the CIA itself a prime suspect in the terror attacks of 11
September, and the current propaganda campaign being waged in America now,
as a pretext to threaten terror against the Bush Administration's domestic
political opponents, as well as to win support from the terrified middle
class for the illegitimate Bush regime.

As noted earlier, terrorism and counter-terrorism are the same thing, and as
Michael McClintock notes in Instruments of Statecraft, CIA instructors in
the early 1970s "trained students in making criminal terrorist devices and
in assassination methods." A four-week course took place at the Border
Patrol Academy in Los Fresnos, Texas, where students were given courses in
terrorist concepts, fabrication of terrorist devices, and assassination
weapons. As McClintock notes, the Los Fresnos "Bomb School" officials
offered courses "not in bomb disposal but in bomb making."

It is critically important to understand that members of the CIA's
paramilitary Special Operations Divisions are the people who provide this
instruction, and that they themselves are the world's leading experts in the
various tools of the terror trade.

The abolition of the Bomb School in 1974, however, did not deter the CIA's
terror experts, and they devised other methods of training foreign secret
policemen and paramilitaries to terrorize communist insurgents. Much of the
training took at the School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia, or was
conducted by the SOD's stable of counter-terrorists, working undercover as
private consultants.

Nor did the CIA's unilateral terror operations cease with Nixon's
resignation, in utter disgrace, in August 1974, nor did it abate with the
ascension of America's first "unpresident" Gerald Ford. Not even a series of
Congressional investigations into CIA abuses, starting in 1974 and
continuing through 1977, could keep the CIA from making its appointed
rounds. And it's no coincidence that the current President's father, in one
brief year, oversaw one of the CIA's most horrendous terror campaigns.

CIA terror activities flourished from January 1976 until January 1977 under
DCI George H. W. Bush, with much of the terror taking place in Latin
America, through a network of proxy foreign intelligence service united
under Operation Condor (the CIA's version of Phoenix in South America) and
operating closely with several CIA-supported anti-Castro Cuban terrorist
groups, including CNM (Cuban Nationalist Movement), CORU (Coordination of
United Revolutionary Organizations) and Omega Seven. Two Cuban terrorists
with direct ties to the CIA, Luis Posada Carrilles and Dr. Orlando Bosch,
blew a Cuban plane out of the sky in October 1976, killing 73 people. But
the CIA never pursued either man, and neither was ever convicted of the
crime. On the contrary, the CIA protected them, because both were involved,
through DCI Bush, his Assistant Deputy Director of Operations, Ted Shackley,
and the Chilean secret service, DINA, in the 21 September 1976 assassination
of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in downtown Washington, D.C. As in most
other terror incidents committed by the CIA's assets while Bush was DCI,
that crime too has gone unpunished.

The ITG continued to exist under DCI Bush, but only in an analytical
capacity, and Bush's anti-terrorism expert, Ted Shackley, managed actual
counter-terror operations out of his hip pocket. Having managed the CIA's
counter-terror and interrogation center programs in Vietnam, as chief of
station from 1969 through 1971, Shackley was well qualified for the
anti-terrorism job. He was aware of where the effort needed to be directed,
and terrorist training camps in Libya, Angola, and Iran ranked high on his
list of targets, along with established terrorist organizations in Europe,
Asia, and Latin America.

But Shackley and Bush were painfully aware that Gerald Ford was considered
illegitimate by the American public, and was destined to lose the 1976
elections to whatever candidate the Democrats threw at the Republicans. And
so in mid-1976 they began contracting the important work to mercenaries and
SOD operators who voluntarily retired or resigned. It was arranged for these
contractors to obtain employment in a few select foreign intelligence
services, and several proprietary oil equipment, shipping and computer
consulting companies established by veteran CIA agent, and notorious "rogue
elephant," Edwin P. Wilson. Having resigned from the CIA in 1971 to pursue
million dollar business ventures in several terrorist-infected nations
around the world, and having been fired from the Office of Naval
Intelligence's super secret Task Force 157 in April 1976, Wilson was the
perfect deniable "deep cover" agent.

Thus in mid-1976, at the direction of DCI Bush and ADDO Shackley, the secret
government's counter-terror apparatus, manifest as a private enterprise
owned and operated by "Death Merchant" Wilson and his unsavory associates
(including Shackley himself, CIA officer Tom Clines, Hussem Salem, and
perhaps, as a silent partner, Air Force General Richard Secord, in
EATSCO--the Egyptian American Transport and Services Company), began its
slow and steady descent off the CIA's organizational chart.

As a result of this shell game, little changed when President Jimmy Carter
named Admiral Stansfield Turner as his Director of Central Intelligence. In
response to negative publicity about the CIA's reign of terror under Bush,
and his right wing predecessors, and in response to Carter's policy of
stressing "Human Rights" over covert action, Turner drastically reduced the
SOD in size, firing 600 employees in what became known as the Halloween
Massacre of October 1977. Turner also scraped Air America, the CIA's private
air force, and named James Glerum, a former executive with Air America, as
Evan Parker's replacement as head of the SOD.

But Turner's purge merely earned Carter the same degree of hatred the
national security elite naturally felt toward Clinton, and thanks to the
off-the-shelf "Enterprise" established by Bush and Shackley, the purge
failed to curb CIA abuses. Holding their hatred close to their hearts, those
CIA terror experts still on the payroll burrowed deep within the labyrinth
at Langley headquarters, and began courting their right wing supporters in
the media, academia, private enterprise, and the Republican Party. To assure
Carter's defeat in the 1980 elections, they instructed their domestic assets
in the intricacies of political warfare--Phoenix-related skills such as
population control through psychological warfare, discrediting and
compromising one's political enemies through covert actions, the development
of political cadre within the officer corps, the placement of indoctrinated
military officers in control of civilian security forces like the OHS, and,
of course, selective terror and assassination.

Psychological operations were especially important in the covert political
war being waged by the right wing during the Carter Administration. In the
shadows of this propaganda war for the hearts and minds of the American
public, the CIA's privateers mounted covert actions below the radar of top
Carter Administration officials. They forged secret alliances with proxy
nations, such as Israel and Taiwan, which taught Latin American landowners
how to organize criminals into vigilante death squads, which then murdered
and terrorized labor leaders, Human Rights activists, and all other enemies
of the various oligarchies, including our own. To compensate for the
reduction in size of the SOD and the loss of the CIA's air force, the
military branches began beefing up their own terror capabilities. The Army
assembled Delta Force, the Air Force formed its own special operations unit,
and the Navy organized SEAL Team Six.

In these ways the national security elite was able to subvert Carter's Human
Rights policy, just as they were able to characterize Clinton as immoral and
unpatriotic, and establish the basis of public mistrust that would enable
them to drive Carter from office through a disingenuous political and
psychological warfare campaign in 1980. 9

The Office of Terrorism

This is an historical overview, and in order to fully inform potential
dissidents and subjects of homeland insecurity, it is necessary to pause and
go back in time, briefly.

By late 1977, when Howard Bane was assigned as chief of the CIA's new Office
of Terrorism, the threat of international terrorism had captured the
imagination of the world. Terror incidents had been increasing since the
1967 Six-Day War, when the Israeli Army, anticipating an attack by its
neighbors, occupied vast tracks of Palestinian territory. (The Six Day,
notably, occurred simultaneously with the birth of Phoenix and Chaos.) In
response to the Israeli land grab, Wadi Haddad formed the Popular Front of
the Palestinian Liberation Organization (which itself was formed in 1964).

Popular Front terrorists staged the world's first major terrorist act in
1968, hijacking an El Al 707 passenger aircraft en route from Rome to Tel
Aviv, and forcing it to land in Algiers. After a month of negotiations the
passengers were released unharmed. But no land was returned to the
Palestinians and instead, the Israelis started bombing Palestinian terrorist
training camps in Jordan. The cycle of violence escalated and on 6 September
1970, in an event that hauntingly resembled that of 11 September, Haddad
ordered the simultaneous hijacking of four airliners bound for New York. 10

In February 1972 a Popular Front team hijacked a Lufthansa airliner with 172
passengers, including Joseph Kennedy, son of the late Robert Kennedy. Again
there were negotiations, and a ransom was paid, and Kennedy and the other
hostages were released. But the policy of negotiating with terrorists began
to lose its appeal after Palestinian terrorists seized a group of Israeli
athletes and their coaches at the Munich Olympics. The situation ended with
a gun battle in which nine Israeli athletes and five terrorists were killed.

Meanwhile, more and more dissident groups began to adopt terror as a method
of waging political war. Chief among them were the PLO's Black September,
Germany's Baader-Meinhof gang, France's Action-Direct, and Italy's Red
Brigade. Carlos the Jackal became a famous terrorist for hire and held OPEC
hostage in 1976. By 1977 the notion of state-sponsored terrorism had also
emerged, and was attributed to Libya and Iraq, both of which were said to
have Soviet backing.

As a result, DCI Turner directed Howard Bane to organize the CIA against the
new threat of terrorism. But according to Bane, counter-terrorism was a "hot
potato" and a "low priority," and because of the seemingly endless
Congressional investigations into CIA abuses, Turner was "hung up" on the
definition of terror. He was insisting that CIA officers refer to
counter-insurgency as "low intensity warfare," and in his effort to polish
up the CIA's image, Turner renamed the ITG the Office of Terrorism.

Again, it was just a shell game, and the Bush-Shackley Enterprise continued
to operate off the reservation.

In the meantime, Bane moved into the Chaos office in Langley's basement, in
the room behind the vault door. An avid proponent of covert action, he'd
served as chief of the North Africa Division, and as chief of station at The
Hague prior to his return to headquarters in late 1977. He was nearing the
end of his career, and was expecting to be named head of a division, and he
approached his new assignment with all the energy of a man seeking to
enshrine his legacy.

As Bane describes it, the Chaos office was a windowless room as large as the
ground floor of a house, divided into cubicles. Ten to twelve little old
ladies running around in tennis shoes, all the operations were
compartmentalized, and there was a "vault mentality." Little was happening.
The acting chief was the ITG operations officer, and his job was mainly
following U.S. citizens overseas.

So Bane summoned everyone to a staff meeting and said, "Let's advertise
ourselves to divisions." He set up a reference system to service each of the
divisions, and each little old lady became an expert in regard to a
particular geographical area. Next Bane started meeting with his
counterparts at State, Treasury, the FBI, the Pentagon, the White House and
the National Security Agency. As the Office of Terrorism began to serve a
visible function, Bane was able to move it from the basement vault to a
fourth floor suite with windows. The office received new computers, and the
old girls started entering profiles of the world's new terrorists into it.
Bane was awarded an operations officer, and recruited several disgruntled
CIA officers, who began to replace the women as his liaison officers to the
divisions. And he began working closely with SOD chief Jim Glerum to beef up
the operational forces at his command.

Delta Force had been created by U.S. Army colonel Charles Beckwith in
response to the numerous, well-publicized terrorist incidents that occurred
in the 1970s. Delta, and later the Navy's elite counter-terrorist unit, SEAL
Team Six, were to serve as the CIA's front line forces in the nascent war
against terror. Within the context of the new strategy of low intensity
warfare, the Office of Terrorism and the anti-terror experts in the CIA's
SOD and Delta Force had adopted a new lexicon, in which anti-terrorism was
the term for broad policy, and counter-terrorism was used in regard to
specific, immediate actions.

Bane sought and acquired a bigger budget, and started improving and
developing the government's formal technological counter-terror
capabilities -- things like silenced weapons and covert eavesdropping
equipment for use in hostage rescues. Bane also worked to obtain a fleet of
black helicopters for use by counter-terror units. His own original
contribution was a Crisis Management Training Program team, composed of a
psychiatrist and a few case officers, which advised U.S. and foreign law
enforcement officers on how to negotiate with, and outwit, terrorists.

After all this, Bane set up a two-man intelligence unit at Delta
headquarters at Fort Bragg, and hooked them up to his office computer. At
this point Delta became a "customer" of CIA intelligence. Bane's Office of
Terrorism also sent daily reports, which profiled known terrorists and their
activities, to the Defense Intelligence Agency and the FBI. Very quietly his
unit began to coordinate actual counter-terror operations. "Say someone in
Frankfurt had access to the Red Army," Bane explains. "Then Delta would send
a team."

Bane's Office of Terrorism handled each incident on a case-by-case basis,
depending on whether or not it was defined as "international terrorism,"
meaning the terrorists crossed borders or had foreign support, or "domestic
terrorism," in which case the terrorists were operating within their own
country. If the incident related to domestic terrorism, the CIA's Office of
Terrorism could not get involved, unless specifically authorized through a
presidential executive order called a "finding."

The need for a "finding" was a nagging bureaucratic stumbling block, and as
an example, Bane cites the time Colombia's M19 terror group took 20 foreign
diplomats, including the American ambassador, hostage at a party at the
Dominican Embassy. Thinking the trans-national nature of the incident
qualified it as "international terror," Bane, with the approval of the State
Department's terrorism unit, launched a Delta operation in conjunction with
the CIA's new SOD chief, Rudy Enders. Bane provided intelligence on the
terrorists while Enders and his assistant, Burr Smith, provided Delta with
the equipment it needed to stage a rescue operation. Meanwhile the Crisis
Management Team assembled in Florida, and prepared to jump into Colombia.

But the operation came to a screeching halt when the CIA's Assistant Deputy
Director of Operations, John Stein, was forced to reveal the operation to
Turner's Deputy Director of Operations, John McMahon.

As Bane recalls, McMahon asked him, "Are you trying to send us all to jail?"
McMahon then put the operation on hold until Carter issued a finding. Bane
was forced to call his officers back to Langley, where they waited while
'the lawyers" met with members of Carter's national Security Council staff.
Only after the lawyers gave their approval did Carter issue the required
"finding."

In another situation Bane was not allowed to help mount a covert action to
rescue Italy's Prime Minister Aldo Moro, because Moro's Red Brigade captors
were Italian nationals, and were deemed to be operating domestically.

"Colby," Bane sighs, "felt that covert action should be equated with
intelligence. He said it was better than sending in Marines."

The take-over of the American Embassy in Tehran on 4 November 1979 propelled
Howard Bane and the Office on Terrorism into the limelight. Twenty-one years
later, the CIA is still reeling from the event, which saw all its files fall
into enemy hands, and every one of its agent networks exposed throughout the
region. This seminal event, which had an impact on the American public not
unlike that of 11 September, marked the beginning of the propaganda war
between the Great Satan and the Islamic fundamentalists, at the time
represented by Iran's Ayatollah Khomeni, and allowed Ronald Eagan to crush
Jimmy Carter in the 1980 presidential election.

In the wake of the Embassy take-over, President Carter ordered Howard Bane
to work with General "Shy" Meyer, Colonel Charlie Beckwith, and Delta Force,
to come up with a plan to rescue the 53 hostages. As Bane notes, the plan
was based on a covert action to obtain current intelligence on the status of
the hostages, including several top CIA officers. Bane needed this
intelligence information in order to know where to direct the black and gray
propaganda necessary to disguise the CIA's actual intentions. There was also
a need to train Delta Force to operate in the Iranian desert.

The required intelligence was obtained, but as is well known, the
government's first major counter-terror operation, the Desert One rescue
mission, failed to get off the ground. Sand clogged the aircraft and on 25
April 1980, eight soldiers were killed. To Ronald Reagan and George Bush's
delight, the hostage situation continued unabated for another six months,
and enabled them to characterize Jimmy Carter throughout the campaign as
someone who did not take security seriously.

Just as merrily George W. Bush capitalized on the 11 September catastrophe,
the Great Communicator shamelessly rode the Iranian hostage tragedy into the
White House. As in Chile, the secret to success was persuading the middle
class to support the cause of freedom. After defeating bumbling George Bush
(the CIA's preferred candidate) in the primary, Reagan repudiated Carter's
Human Rights crusade, and in the wake of the hostage crisis, declared a
totally disingenuous war against terrorism. The seizure of the embassy had
shaken the American public as never before, and Reagan played on that
infantile fear. Indeed, terror was the organizing principle in his campaign.
His avowed and central principle, written in stone, was of never negotiating
with terrorists, as Jimmy Carter was attempting to do, and of restoring
America to its rightful position as the most powerful and feared nation in
the world.

Meanwhile, according to eyewitness Ari Ben-Menasche, Reagan's campaign
manager, William J. Casey, had arranged for vice presidential candidate and
former CIA director George Bush to meet with Iranian officials in Paris on
the weekend of 18-19 October 1980. In exchange for holding the hostages
through the election, then releasing them, Reagan, Bush and Casey agreed to
sell weapons to Iran, which had been invaded in September 1980 by CIA asset
Saddam Hussein and Iraq.

The secret deal, called the October Surprise, allowed Reagan, Bush and Casey
to steal the presidency. The fact that the hostages were released on the day
of Reagan's inauguration highlighted the fact that a secret deal had been
made. But the American media had already been compromised by the National
Security elite's four-year old disinformation campaign, and under the Great
Communicator, the major TV networks and newspapers would become nothing more
than a mouthpiece for the Israeli Lobby and America's reactionary right
wing.

Terrorism As Growth Industry

The final chapter in the history of the national security elite's campaign
of terror against the American people began with Reagan and his successful
efforts to destroy the Soviet Union. It was advanced through the
presidencies of George H. W. Bush, and the aberration called Bill Clinton,
and has achieved its apotheosis under George W. Bush.

Upon assuming office, Reagan declared that he would replace Carter's Human
rights crusade with an all-out war on terrorism, and to implement this
policy he appointed OSS veteran William Casey as Director of Central
Intelligence. Casey immediately reconstituted the SOD under Rudy Enders,
wrapped anti-terrorism in a veil of black and gray propaganda, and began
mounting terror operations worldwide through a hip pocket operation managed
by a secret team of counter-terror experts.

Many old Phoenix veterans staffed several key positions in the Reagan, Bush
and Casey regime. SOD chief Rudy Enders had managed the CIA's counter-terror
teams in Vietnam's III Corps in 1965-1966, and 1970-1972. On his second tour
, Enders worked under the direction of III Corps Regional Officer in Charge,
Donald Gregg. During the Reagan Administration, Gregg would serve as
Vice-President George H. W. Bush's national security advisor.

In Vietnam, Gregg, Enders, and Enders' deputy Felix Rodriguez, a crazed
anti-Castro Cuban associated with some of the CIA's most ruthless
terrorists, managed III Corps' Phoenix Program. In this capacity the trio
developed what they called the "Pink Team" plan for identifying, capturing,
and killing specific members of the Viet Cong Infrastructure.

In 1981, after a survey in Latin America, Enders assigned Rodriguez to El
Salvador specifically to implement an updated version of the Pink Plan
against the political leadership of the insurgency. After receiving approval
from Bush, through Greg, the strategy was applied uniformly throughout
Central America and resulted in the proliferation of death squads and the
formation of the world's largest narco-terrorist group, the Contras, with
the able assistance of Panama's Manuel Noriega, one of the CIA's most famous
assets ever. Veteran field hands from the Phoenix Program were re-hired by
the SOD and assigned to security forces and death squads in numerous nations
around the world. Everywhere they went they carried a field manual developed
by the U.S. Army Special Forces for use in the Phoenix Program.

Titled "Psychological Operations In Guerilla Warfare," the manual
specifically states that "Guerilla warfare is essentially a political war,"
and that "the human being should be considered the primary target." Once the
mind had been reached, the manual said, the "political animal" was defeated,
without necessarily receiving bullets.

"Guerrilla warfare is born and grows in the political environment; in the
constant combat to dominate that area of political mentality that is
inherent to all human beings and which collectively constitutes the
"environment" in which guerrilla warfare moves, and which is where precisely
its victory or failure is defined.

"This conception of guerrilla warfare as political war turns Psychological
Operations into the decisive factor. The target, then, is the minds of the
population, all the population: our troops, the enemy troops, and the
civilian population."

The essential element in these psychological operations was "implicit
terror," as applied through Armed Propaganda Teams, as developed in Vietnam.
When "implicit terror" failed to convince people to join the cause, the
explicit terror of torture and summary execution were applied.

Here it is wise to note that the soldiers being trained and assigned to the
Office of Homeland Security will ultimately perform the same "psywar"
function, of implicitly terrorizing the American public, through their
uniforms and arms, into submission. Suspected terrorists and their
sympathizers can expect to receive explicit terror.

Through a junta headed by Oliver North at the NSC, and a group of secret
agents in the Enterprise originally formed by Ed Wilson, and managed after
1983 (when Wilson was convicted of selling 20 tons of C-4 explosive in 1977
to Libya's Moammar Quadaffi) by retired Air Force General Richard Secord,
Casey used profits from the illegal sale of weapons to Iran, and the profits
from CIA-protected drug smuggling through Panama, to fund the Contra terror
campaign in Nicaragua.

To cover these illegal terror operations--and a separate, immense covert
action, which involved the recruitment and training of Moslem mercenaries,
including Osama bin Laden, to repel the 1980 Soviet invasion of Afghanistan,
and thus bleed the Soviet Union into oblivion--Casey penetrated the Office
of Public Diplomacy within the State Department. A totally illegal CIA
domestic operation, Casey's hijacking of the Office of Public Diplomacy
enjoyed the tactic approval of the Senate Intelligence Committee. Part of
the reason for this incredible oversight was the fact that CIA officer
Robert Simmons was staff director of the Senate Intelligence Committee.
During the Vietnam War, Simmons had advised a CIA Interrogation Center for
18 months in Phu Yen Province. Today, unbelievably, he is now a Congressman
from Connecticut. Totally sympathetic to Casey's policy, Simmons was unable
to provide any information about illegal CIA covert actions, including the
mining of Nicaraguan harbors, to those Committee members who might have
objected. Thanks to Simmons and the Committee's chairman, Senator Barry
Goldwater (R-AZ), the Office of Public Diplomacy, under Otto Reich, had free
reign to inundate the media with black and gray propaganda, thus protecting
all of Casey's illegal activities.

"A staff report by the House Foreign Affairs Committee (September 7, 1988)
summarized various investigations of Mr. Reich's office and concluded that
"senior CIA officials with backgrounds in covert operations, as well as
military intelligence and psychological operations specialists from the
Department of Defense, were deeply involved in establishing and
participating in a domestic political and propaganda operation run through
an obscure bureau in the Department of State which reported directly to the
National Security Council rather than through the normal State Department
channels. Through irregular sole-source, no-bid contracts, S/LPD established
and maintained a private network of individuals and organizations whose
activities were coordinated with, and sometimes directed by, Col. Oliver
North as well as officials of the NSC and S/LPD. These private individuals
and organizations raised and spent funds for the purpose of influencing
Congressional votes and U.S. domestic news media. This network raised and
funneled money to off-shore bank accounts in the Cayman Islands or to the
secret Lake Resources bank account in Switzerland for disbursement at the
direction of Oliver North. Almost all of these activities were hidden from
public view and many of the key individuals involved were never questioned
or interviewed by the Iran/Contra Committees."" 11

The Office of Public Diplomacy was so successful in manipulating the media,
that it was able to convince the public that Reagan had not approved the
funding of the illegal Contras from profits from illegal secret arms sales
to Iran--even after he confessed to the crime, with a glistening Hollywood
tear in his eye, on national TV in November 1986. Likewise all Congressional
investigations into the Iran-Contra scandal were successfully subverted, and
George Bush was elected president in 1988, despite his integral role in what
was the most egregious violation of the Constitution in American history.
What amounted to a military coup went unpunished, due to the success of the
CIA's psychological warfare capabilities, and its near absolute control of
the major American media.

The current Bush Administration, incidentally, is considering nominating
Otto "Third" Reich as Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American
Affairs.


Prelude To Disaster

While Casey initiated covert terror actions around the world and in America,
the Office of Terrorism was reorganized to serve an essentially clandestine
purpose. Casey thrived on "hip-pocket" operations and compartmentalization,
and as DCI he took a more active role managing specific operations than any
of his predecessors.

Thus, as a replacement for Howard Bane, Casey chose William Buckley, a
veteran CIA officer who'd spent much of his career undercover as an officer
in the U.S. Army Special Forces. Buckley served several tours in Vietnam,
managing counter-terror and counter-intelligence operations, and from 1969
until 1972, under Ted Shackley, he was the director of the CIA's national
counter-terror program in Vietnam.

In 1978 Buckley was assigned to Damascus, Syria, and in mid-1979 he trained
President of Egypt Anwar Sadat's bodyguards. Buckley was assigned to
Islamabad, Pakistan in 1979, and in November 1979 he became involved in
planning for the Iran Embassy hostage rescue operation. In February 1981 he
was assigned to train the SOD's own counter-terror team at Fort Bragg, and
to reorganize CIA's counter-terrorism office.

Buckley was profoundly influenced during his first tour in Vietnam, when he
saw a Buddhist monk immolate himself. Buckley was convinced, like rat-eater
Liddy, that Americans must become as fanatically self-sacrificing as their
suicidal enemies if they were to persevere. Apparently Casey shared this
philosophy, and when they met in March 1981, he and Buckley formed an
affinity. Buckley became Casey's close advisor, and they traveled together
to Saudi Arabia in April to pave the way for the construction of secret
military bases, now occupied by U.S. counter-terror forces arrayed against
Al Qaeda, and to obtain private funding for Casey's Contra terror
campaign.12

The first step in this secret war of terror was the October 1981
assassination of Sadat by the bodyguards Buckley had trained. The
assassination nullified the Camp David Accords President Carter had worked
so hard to achieve. Israel was now free to target PLO bases in Lebanon, and
in May 1982, Israeli General Ariel Sharon invaded Lebanon, and, through his
paid assets in the Christian Phalange militia, organized one of the greatest
terror acts of all time--the massacre of hundreds of Palestinian men in the
Sabra and Shatila refugee camps.

Currently serving as the elected Prime Minister of Israel, the world's
greatest human rights abuser and second largest sponsor of state-terrorism,
Sharon may be indicted as war criminal for this despicable act, in the same
Belgian court that may try Nixon's ferocious National Security Advisor,
Henry Kissinger, for war crimes committed during the Chilean coup.

In August 1982 Buckley returned to CIA headquarters to revamp and coordinate
Reagan's anti-terrorism policy, through what was called the Domestic
Terrorism Group. According to author Mark Perry, "For six months Buckley and
the government officials hammered out a policy." The result was that the CIA
maintained responsibility for foreign counter-terror operations, while the
FBI acquired the domestic "internal security" terrorism account.

Under the direction of Attorney General Edwin Meese, the FBI went about its
internal security task with ideological fervor, harassing, discrediting, and
stifling each and every Peace group that sought to educate the public about
the CIA's human rights abuses. Citizens opposed to CIA death squads in
Guatemala and El Salvador fared the worst, because the Reagan
Administration, with the earnest assistance of its right wing supplicants in
the media, was eminently able to equate peace with an unpatriotic support
for terrorism.

It was all a Big Lie, of course, but the national security elite is willing
to deceive the public for the greater good of its internal security. In the
case of Reagan's "freedom fighters," as he called the terrorist Contras in
Nicaragua, it was done under the rubric of counter-terrorism, to protect the
CIA's illegal activities from coming to light.

The Office of Homeland Security will undoubtedly serve a similar
disinformation function for the Bush Administration, although all pretenses
that the CIA is not involved in domestic counter-terrorism have been
dropped. The CIA has been "unleashed."

In so far as spying on U.S. citizens with suspected links to foreign
terrorists was an on-going, albeit top secret priority since Chaos, it was
impossible for the CIA not be involved in domestic counter-terror in 1981.
But in that naïve era the myth needed to be maintained, and for that reason
Buckley suggested to Casey that the Domestic Terrorism Group be renamed the
International Anti-terrorism Group. "Buckley's plan," Perry said, "called
for a coordinated effort to combat security breaches under the leadership of
the NSC director, who'd be in charge of monitoring the agencies that were
responsible for domestic law enforcement."

Citing Pentagon officials, Perry says that the Domestic Terrorism Group
became a part of the Army's Intelligence Support Activity, and that
Buckley's plan for an independent CIA office disintegrated as a result.
Casey re-assigned Buckley as the CIA's chief of station in Beirut following
the March 1983 bombing of the American Embassy. Buckley arrived in June or
July, but failed to prevent the attack on the U.S. Marine Corps barracks, on
23 October 1983, that killed 241 Marines.

On 16 March 1984, Buckley was kidnapped by Hezbollah guerrillas, and after
being tortured for months, died in captivity in Tehran in June 1985, shortly
after a March 1985 car bomb, reportedly planted by the CIA or the Phalange
militia, and intended for terrorist suspect Hussein Fadallah, killed 80
Lebanese civilians. Hezbollah reportedly passed a copy of Buckley's 400-page
videotaped confession to Casey in May 1986.

Perry speculates that Buckley was part of secret, hip pocket operation into
Iran, to recruit members of Iran's junior officer corps. Be that as it may,
the Reagan, Bush, Casey reliance on covert actions had only worsened the
problem of terrorism, creating one disaster after another, and severely
escalating the cycle of violence. With Congress conducting a number of
official inquiries into CIA abuses, the time had come to take terror
operations out of escapading Bill Casey's hip pocket, and create a new
office within the CIA to manage the situation.

The CIA's counter-terror network, as established by William Casey, was a
direct descendant of the counter-intelligence special operations unit,
CHAOS, formed by James Angleton in August 1967, specifically to spy on the
New Left and other radical political groups in the anti-war and civil rights
movements. From its earliest beginnings, Chaos was distinguished from other
CIA operations by its secure communications system, its super
inaccessibility and "compartmentalization," it's inter-connected domestic
and international mandate, and its essentially political nature. All of this
was permissible in so far as Chaos was a "special" counter-intelligence
function designed to ferret out the plans and strategies of foreign
intelligence services.

As we know, the CIA underwent a major reorganization in 1974 after William
Colby fired counter-intelligence chief James Angleton, and exposed the CIA's
"family jewels" at a Congressional Hearing conducted by Representative Otis
Pike (D-NY). Chaos became the International Terrorism Group, and the
repository of some of the "hip pocket" operations that forced Angleton from
the Agency. The ITG remained buried in the bowels of the CIA until it was
resurrected as Howard Bane's Office of Terrorism in late 1977. The Iran
hostage crisis and the disaster of Desert One enabled Ronald Reagan to steal
the presidency, denounce Carter's Human Rights crusade, and initiate a new
foreign policy based on combating terrorism.

In 1981, Reagan's Director of Central Intelligence, William Casey, saw the
political possibilities of turning Buckley's Office of Domestic Terrorism
into a "back-channel" mechanism, like Chaos under Angleton and Ober, for
conducting secret "hip pocket" operations outside the normal chain of
command. And thus was born the Counter-Terror Network that exists until
today, as the official manifestation of the off-the-shelf Enterprise formed
by Bush and Shackley back in 1976. 13

The ultimate object of Reagan Administration policy was the destruction of
the Soviet Union through the application of "low-intensity warfare" in
Afghanistan; counter-terror in the Middle East, and pro-active terror in
Latin America. Effecting this policy involved a number of illegal covert
actions, and so Casey had to run his Counter-Terror Network outside of the
CIA itself, through a cabal of secret agents throughout the government,
acting under his direction through a group of veteran CIA officers who
embrace the same essentially fascist world view. Like Chaos, the
Counter-Terror Network had a secure communications system, as Peter Dale
Scott observed, "that excluded other bureaucrats with opposing viewpoints."

As Scott notes, "The counter-terrorism network even had its own special
worldwide antiterrorist computer network, codenamed Flashboard, by which
members could communicate exclusively with each other and their
collaborators abroad."

Casey laid the groundwork for this Counter-Terror Network in 1981, when he
appointed David Whipple as the CIA's National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for
counter-terrorism. A veteran CIA officer with extensive service in the Far
East, Whipple had been serving as the CIA's station chief in Switzerland,
where he'd conducted successful counter-terror operations, before being
summoned back to headquarters to take on the job as Casey's NIO for
counter-terrorism.

According to Whipple, Casey's staff consisted of 16 NIOs, eight of whom were
responsible for geographical divisions, while the other eight were
responsible for issues, such as narcotics, counter-intelligence, nuclear
weapons, economics, and in Whipple's case, counter-terror. Under Casey's
direction, every government agency established a counter-terror office as
part of this secret apparatus. Whipple as NIO coordinated them all,
collating all the information they provided at CIA headquarters. In
consultation with Casey, Whipple assisted the CIA's division chiefs, making
sure their station chiefs were properly handling counter-terror issues in
their designated areas.

Whipple maintained the Office of Domestic Terrorism after Buckley departed,
through a staff that included an operations chief, intelligence analysts,
photo interpreters, and several case officers. Because it had the authority
to access any division's files and to co-opt its most precious penetration
agents, the ODT was resisted by the divisions--especially by the Near East
Division, which was on the front lines of the war against terrorism. Thus in
1983 Casey sent Buckley to Beirut to personally oversee counter-intelligence
operations there. And he conscripted Oliver North, a doe-eyed Marine
lieutenant colonel assigned to the National Security Council, as his
penetration agent inside the NSC. Notably, Whipple served as North's case
officer in this monumental misadventure.

A Vietnam veteran, cut from the same erratic mold as Liddy and Buckley,
North came from nowhere and in 1982 was the NSC staff coordinator for crisis
management. According to Scott, Vice President Bush was in overall charge as
chair of the Cabinet-level Crisis Management Committee. Starting in February
1983, North, according to Scott, developed a secret Crisis Management
Center, and REX 84, "a plan to suspend the Constitution in the event of a
national crisis such as nuclear war, violent and widespread internal
dissent, or national opposition to a U.S. military invasion abroad."

Sound familiar? In light of the recent national emergency, it is not
surprising that North's plan called for "the round-up and internment of
large numbers of both domestic dissidents (some twenty-six thousand) and
aliens (perhaps as many as from three to four thousand), in camps such as
the one in Oakdale, Louisiana." And just as the vast majority of
Congresspersons went along with the draconian anti-terror legislation passed
on 29 October, Senator Daniel Inouye in 1986 cut-off all debate about
North's plan to suspend the Constitution when Congressman Jack Brooks raised
the issue during the televised Iran-Contra Hearings.

North next formed a personal relationship with Vice President Bush in the
winter of 1983, when they inspected El Salvador's death squad commanders.
After that North's stock soared, and in April 1984 he created the Terrorist
Incident Working Group (TWIG) specifically to rescue several American
hostages, including Buckley, held in Lebanon. North became TWIG's chairman,
and in October 1985 he managed its first successful operation--the capture
of the hijackers of the Achille Lauro.

A few months earlier, in June, after the hijacking of a TWA Flight 847 to
Beirut, Bush created the Vice President's Task Force on Combating Terrorism.
According to Scott, as the NSC's liaison to the Task Force, "North drafted a
secret annex for its report which institutionalized and expanded his
counter-terrorist powers, making himself the NSC coordinator of all
counter-terrorist actions."

On 20 January 1986, North's efforts were crowned with National Security
Decision Directive 207, making him chief coordinator of the Administration's
counter-terror program, and providing him with a secret office and staff
known as the Office To Combat Terrorism. Working through the inter-agency
Operations Sub-Group (OSG), North coordinated the secret Counter-Terror
Network and Secord's Enterprise in a series of mind-boggling illegal
operations, including illegal arms sales to Iran through Israel's
counter-terrorism expert Amiram Nir; illegal Contra drug smuggling by
through CIA asset Manuel Noriega in Panama, by a group of anti-Castro
Cubans, all of whom were directly connected to Bush through his chief of
operations, Donald Gregg, via Rudy Enders and Felix Rodriguez (all Phoenix
Program veterans); illegal arms supply operations to the Contras through
right wing domestic terror groups; and the repression of domestic dissent on
a massive scale unmatched until the recent assaults mounted on the civil
liberties of American citizens by fundamentalist Attorney General John
Ashcroft and the U.S. Congress.

As Scott notes, "the Office to Combat Terrorism became the means whereby
North could coordinatethe propaganda activities of Carl "Spitz" Channel and
Richard Miller (and) the closing of potential embarrassing investigations by
other government agencies."

The ranking members of this Counter-Terror Network included: Donald Gregg
(Bush's National Security Advisor); CIA officer Charles Allen (Whipple's
replacement as Casey's Counter-Terror National Intelligence Officer in
1985); Robert Oakley at the State Department's Office of Counter-Terrorism
(a former CIA officer with experience in political operations in Vietnam,
Oakley co-chair of North's Operations Sub-Group until mid-1986); Richard
Armitage (a member of the Enterprise) at the Defense Department, Lt. Gen.
John Moellering at the Joint Chiefs of Staff, FBI Counter-Terror Chief,
Oliver Revell, and, wonder of wonders, Michael Ledeen at the National
Security Council.

The lynchpin between the Israelis and the Americans, Ledeen had proposed
illegal arms sales to Iran in 1984 through Mossad double agent Manucher
Ghorbanifar. The CIA's Deputy Director for Operations, Clair George,
considered Ghorbanifar totally unreliable, and as having only his personal
financial interests, and Israel's security, at heart. But George's
objections were neutralized in June 1985, when Bush formed the Terrorism
Task Force, at which point the illegal arms sales went forward. And to
assure that no one else in the CIA would obstruct Reagan's secret policy,
Casey in January 1986 conscripted veteran CIA officer Duane Clarridge into
the Counter-Terror Network, as its de-facto security chief, and directed
Clarridge to form the CIA's Counter-Terror Center, which exists until today.
14

Terror Central

Under the current "unpresident" Bush, counter-terrorism is a mechanism to
conduct illegal operations on behalf of his economic patrons, to circumvent
Congress, and to his harass domestic critics. Counter-terrorism is the
preferred political and psychological weapon of the radical right wing, and
it was perfected in 1986 with the creation of the CIA's Counter-Terror
center

Duane "Dewey" Clarridge, a man with an extensive background in terror, was
well equipped for managing this job. A rabid right wing ideologue, he was
chief of the CIA's station in Turkey in the late 1960s and 1970s, when the
fascist Grey Wolves went on a terror rampage, bombing, shooting and killing
thousands of officials, journalists, students, lawyers, labor organizers,
social democrats, left-wing activists and Kurds. Since then, Turkey'
military dictatorship has been one of America's strongest allies.

A body-builder and certified member of the Old Boy clique that runs the CIA,
Clarridge in August 1976 helped ADDO Ted Shackley recruit Albert Hakim,
later a member of Secord's Enterprise, to spy in Iran.15 (Shackley was soon
thereafter forced into retirement due to his association with "rogue
elephant" Ed Wilson, the CIA officer who sold tons of explosives to Libya.)
Clarridge was serving as the CIA's station chief in Rome when the Pope was
shot, and was chief of Latin America Division from 1981 until 1984, when
Nicaraguan harbors were mined and the psyops "murder manual" was distributed
to the Contras, with his approval. In this capacity Clarridge helped Richard
Secord move PLO weapons captured by Israeli forces during their bloody
invasion of Lebanon, through Noriega in Panama, to the Contras.

Clarridge, as chief of the Europe Division, next played a pivotal role in
the illegal Iran-Contra operation, by providing the back channel, through
his station chief in Lisbon, that allowed North and Secord's Enterprise to
sell HAWK and TOW missiles to the Iranians, at a huge profit for Secord and
his Israeli counterparts, in exchange for the release of several American
hostages. The operation, which subverted the U.S. Constitution and the
Bolland Amendments passed by Congress, made Ronald Reagan into the world's
biggest, but most adorable, liar.

According to Scott, "The intrigues of North, Secord, Clarridge and Oakley at
this point showed a concern for politics rather than security."

In that case, the political imperative was to gain the release of hostages,
so that Reagan, who had sworn "never" to negotiate with terrorists, would
not be unfavorably compared to Carter, or exposed as bold-faced liar, and so
Bush would not lose the up-coming election. Gaining the release of the
hostages, of course, involved the illegal arms sales to Iran, which itself
was a flagrant flimflam by the Israelis and their agents in the U.S.
Government. One of those Israeli agents, Michael Ledeen, while serving as a
special assistant on terrorism at the State Department, made the original
proposal in 1982 to divert money from arms sales to fund covert
counter-terror operations. Ledeen also was responsible, while employed at
the National Security Council in 1984, for convincing North and Secord to
employ Mossad double agent and world-class swindler Manucher Ghorbanifar as
the middleman between the Iranians, the Israelis, and the Americans. As the
record shows, it was Ghorbanifar's duplicity and avarice that led the entire
misadventure to its ignoble conclusion.

The homeland thanks you, Michael Ledeen. You're exactly the sort of corrupt
public official we need advising the Bush regime on how to wage its
counter-terror campaign against the Moslem world.

In an interview with this writer, Clarridge described the Counter-Terror
Center, which has coordinated the CIA's back-channel activities since its
formation in 1986, as a central unit with members from the four
directorates, operating under a committee at the National Security Council.
With input from the different divisions, the Counter-Terror Center "divines"
anti-terrorism policy, and then constructs entities that can conduct
operations. It is not function of the U.S. Army Special Forces, according to
Clarridge, but pieces together counter-terrorism "action teams"--commando
squads trained to capture suspected terrorists and bring them to the United
States to stand trial.

During his tenure from 1986 to 1988, Clarridge oversaw a massive increase in
intelligence gathering on suspected terrorists, and developed new weapons
for use against them. He worked especially closely with George W. H. Bush,
much to his advantage. Indeed, after it was revealed that Clarridge had
assisted North in the transfer of surface-to-air missiles to Iran, he was
forced to resign from the CIA. He lied about it when called before Special
Prosecutor Lawrence Walsh, and was indicted on seven counts of perjury. But
he never went to trial, thanks to a last minute pardon issued by Bush on
December 24, 1992. Bush's pardon provided blanket amnesty to Clarridge,
Reagan's Secretary of Defense Casper Weinburger, Elliott Abrams, a former
assistant secretary of state for Inter-American affairs, former National
Security Adviser Robert McFarlane, CIA officer Alan Fiers, and CIA officer
Clair George.

Unlike Clinton, Bush received no criticism for his pardons, though they were
far worse than anything Clinton ever did. For with those pardons, Bush
assured that his role in the October Surprise, and the Iran-Contra Scandal,
and many other crimes, would never be revealed.

The moral to this story is crystal clear: Presidents Nixon, Reagan and Bush
created secret "counter-terror" cabals within their administrations to
conduct illegal operations and harass their domestic political opponents.
Under the aegis of counter-terrorism, the FBI since then has conducted
extensive surveillance against every peace group that opposes any right wing
Administration's blatant terrorism.

Oliver North blamed Washington for losing the Vietnam War. His hatred of the
peace movement was and is palpable, and it's no coincidence that he
exploited his power as chief of counter-terrorism to terrorize his domestic
opponents. As Scott notes, North believes that "the most pressing problem is
not in the Third World, but here at home in the struggle for the minds of
the people."

Thus, when Jack Terrell informed the Justice Department that North was
involved in drug smuggling, North labeled Terrell a terrorist and sicced the
FBI's counter-terror unit on him. Like all the other rabid right wing
ideologues presented in this essay, Oliver North was mostly concerned about
his own personal power. But none of his abuses, or those of the Reagan and
Bush regime were ever exposed, because, as McClintock notes, "the very
notion of counter-terror as terrorism was forbidden, while circumlocution
was the norm." 16

Michael Ledeen, who was forced from the Reagan Administration after the Iran
arms fiasco became public, described George Bush in the 20 August 1987
Boston Globe as "the most powerful man" in America." And after his election,
Bush tried his hardest to prove he was the most powerful man in the world as
well. His devastating invasion of Panama left thousands dead, and tens of
thousand homeless, but did nothing to curb international drug smuggling.
Likewise, his massive terror bombing of Kuwait and Iraq killed tens of
thousands, and his economic sanctions, endorsed by Clinton, have killed
hundreds of thousands, for no reason at all, save vengeance. Saddam Hussein
is still in power.

For all the violence and terror he inflicted on the world, Bush did nothing
to make America a safer place. And while America's anti-terrorism policy
remained unchanged under his son and ideological heir, our sacred homeland,
according to Michael Ledeen, is a much unsafer place.

In his 1 October article for NRO, Ledeen said: "The last great chief of the
CIA, Bill Casey, saw the necessity of creating a counter-terrorism center
where all the information came into a central location and was analyzed in
toto. He entrusted the task to Dewey Clarridge," who "cracked his very
active whipgreatly improving the quality of our intelligence."

Then came the "infamous" although unspecified "restrictions" put in place by
Clinton.

What it required now, Ledeen contends, is "a top guy with real power and
total support from the president, and it requires men and women at the
working level who not only have the resolve and the courage to do it -
laying waste to dead wood as they go - but who know the system cold, know
how the bureaucratic games are played, and know which walls have to be
broken down."

What Ledeen is prescribing, of course, is a recipe for the type of domestic
political repression outlined in detail in this essay, that American's have
endured under previous right wing regimes.

Will we never learn?

Our constitutionally protected right to political activity has been under
constant attack for decades now, and it will only get worse. As a result of
the recent anti-terror legislation, even your email can be subjected to
permanent monitoring by the FBI, CIA or the new OHS. As of this week, the
FBI can "seek a peak" inside your home or office without a warrant, and
seize your files, property or computers without any notice, and they don't
have to tell you about until afterwards. Committing any petty misdemeanor,
which can in anyway be interpreted as frightening some National Guardsman at
some Office of Homeland Security checkpoint of airport, is now grounds for
surveillance of your home and person, and monitoring of your internet
activity.

God forbid you should stoop to political dissent, or opposition to Bush's
eternal war.

Internationally the story isn't any prettier. Bush's ambassador to the
United Nations, John Negroponte, has stated that America must attack more
and more countries. Like other terrorists in the Bush Administration,
Negroponte is well suited to this task. As U.S. ambassador to Honduras under
Reagan, he funded that particular right wing regime's most notorious death
squads, Battalion 316.

In the name of anti-terrorism, the illegitimate Bush Administration can be
expected to revitalize this practice worldwide, training torturers and
tyrants to wage "global counter-terrorism" against any nation that harbors
suspected terrorists, or critics of U.S. foreign policy. And any connection
you have to these foreign enemies, even if it is merely sympathy for the
Palestinians, subjects you to imprisonment, loss of livelihood, and worst of
all, forfeiture of your sense of humor.

That's right. You can't even make fun of the situation anymore. Which is,
when you think of it, perfectly in keeping with out time honored
Judaic-Christian ethic.

Here at home, through the Office of Homeland Security, we will endure more
political and psychological warfare, more black and gray propaganda, and
more deceit and disinformation than any society on earth before. We're told
we must become new people in a brave new world, where indefinite detention,
torture and summary execution of our suspected enemies will make us free.

Award winning reporter and likely Mossad propagandist Seymour Hersh tells us
that we must resort to the tactics the Jordanian security service used to
catch the notorious Palestinian terrorist Abu Nidal. "The Jordanians did not
move directly against suspected Abu Nidal followers but seized close family
members instead, mothers and brothers," Hersh notes. Then he quotes an
anonymous CIA officer as saying, "Jordan is the one nation that totally
succeeded in penetrating a group," because it was able "to get their
families under control."

So much for family values.

Hersh disingenuously adds that these tactics defy CIA procedures, but
suggests it's a better alternative than "sitting around making diversity
quilts."

Well, this is exactly the type of psychological warfare you can expect to be
subjected to on a daily basis from here on out. As noted in the Marine Corps
Gazette, "Psychological operations may become the dominant operational and
strategic weapon in the form of media/information intervention. Logic bombs
and computer viruses, including latent viruses, may be used to disrupt
civilian as well as military operations. Fourth generation adversaries will
be adept at manipulating the media to alter domestic and world opinion to
the point where skillful use of psychological operations will sometimes
preclude the commitment of combat forces."

"Television news may become a more powerful operational weapon than armored
divisions."

Let me say it one last time: in the name of anti-terrorism, all of the
nation's pent-up anger and frustration over Vietnam, and a host of other,
mostly Clinton-related issues, is poised to be unleashed on an enemy that
lurks inside our borders.

And that enemy is you.

But in order to survive, and enjoy, and laugh, you need only know one thing:
when Bush and Cheney and Rumsfeld and Rice and Powell tell you that America
needs to wage unrelenting war for the next fifty years, in order to achieve
peace, they are lying.

War, dear Citizen, is not Peace.

Hail The Republic!

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Footnotes

1 Does Thornberg's statement, which sounds so much like Sen. Bob Kerrey's
recent confession about his unpunished massacre of civilians inVietnam, for
which he fradulently accepted a gold star, mean that America already does,
as a matter of policy, torture its enemies?

2 On behalf of Reagan's National Security Advisor, Robert McFarlane, likely
Mossad agent Ledeen directed Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres to
illegally sell weapons to Iran in 1985, thus instigating the Iran Contra
scandal.

3 In August 1968, a nationwide quota of 1800 "neutralizations" was imposed
on the Phoenix Directorate, as a "management-by-objective" tool to promote
CIA efficiency. Neutralization statistics were tracked by The Viet Cong
Infrastructure Information System. VCIIS had its origins in February 1966,
when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara established the Defense Department's
Southeast Asia Programs Division. The process was advanced in Saigon in
January 1967, when the joint Vietnamese CIA Combined Intelligence Staff fed
the names of 3000 terrorist suspects into the IBM 1401 computer, installed
at its "political order of battle" section. The era of the computerized
political blacklist had begun. In January 1969 VCIIS was renamed the Phung
Hoang Management Information System. It contained the names and biographical
information of tens of thousands of confirmed and suspected terrorists.
PHMIS was eventually turned over to two CIA proprietary companies: Southeast
Asia Computer Associates and the Computer Science Corporation. Researchers,
see where they go.

4 The Chicago "Red Squad", working with the FBI, killed Black Panther Party
leader Fred Hampton on 4 December 1969. That night BPP infiltrator William
O'Neal slipped Hampton a Mickey Finn., then left the apartment. Around
4:30am the police kicked in the door and shot another BBP member in the
chest as he lay in bed. Other bullets ripped through the walls, wounding
Hampton; as he lay in bed with his pregnant girlfriend, police entered the
room and shot Hampton in the head. It was a typical Phoenix-style
assassination. For more information on Hampton see the website COINTELPRO
and Government Oppression.

5 Information about Chaos was obtained through the Rockefeller Commission
report. See also the parts about Chaos and Ober in Deborah Davis's,
Katherine The Great.

6 The CIA's Office of Security was infiltrating the anti-war movement
through the use of a reserve cadre of trained personnel, like cab drivers,
construction workers, and janitors. These "cover assets" reported on
demonstrators that threatened CIA facilities. It's this writer's belief, not
paranoia, that all manner of public employees, from librarians to postmen to
Pakistani Seven-Eleven operators have already been recruited.

7 After Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile, Nixon told Helms to
"Make the economy scream," as indicated by Helms' notes of their September
15, 1970 meeting. Helms lied when he denied to Congress that the CIA was
involved in coup, in which Allende was assassinated, and tens of thousands
of Chileans were tortured and killed and disappeared. Having had acess to
many a politician's "sex and drugs and rock 'n' roll" files, Helms was
allowed to plead no contest to two misdemeanors but wore his conviction
"like a badge of honor."

Sullivan was killed in November 1977. He had just acknowledged that the FBI
had used "whatever means necessary" to hunt down the Weathermen, and was
about to testify as the chief witness in the trial of an FBI agent, John J.
Kearney, charged with having employed illegal wiretaps and mail intercepts
in the Weathermen investigation. He was killed by a New Hampshire state
trooper's son, who thought Sullivan was a deer, and shot him twice in the
neck. The kid lost his hunting license for a year.

8 The age of anti-terrorism can be traced to September 1972, when the last
Phoenix coordinator, John Tilton, crossed off the phrase "Phung Hoang
Program" (Vietnamese for Phoenix) in an evaluation report, and substituted
the phrase "anti-terrorism program" throughout the report.

9 According to McClintock (p. 304-5) "There was a conscientious effort by
(CIA and DIA) to shield host country counterterror programs from unwanted
attention." "However strong the signal that.selective counterterror had
become mass counterterror, the efforts from within to oppose mass killings
were stymied."

10 One group, led by Leila Khaled tried to hijack an El Al flight from Tel
Aviv via Amsterdam. But Khaled and her accomplice were overpowered by an El
Al "sky marshal" and several passengers after the pilot made a steep dive.
British security forces took Khaled into custody. The second hijacked plane
was flown to Cairo where the passengers and crew were ordered off before the
plane was blown up. A Swissair DC8 from Zurich and a TWA 707 from Frankfurt
were hijacked and flown to Zarqa airstrip in Jordan. The Popular Front
described the attacks as the first strike in avenging "the American plot to
liquidate the Palestinian cause by supplying arms to Israel." They demanded
that the Swiss and West German governments release several of their jailed
comrades. After another hijacking resulted in the release of 360 passengers
and crews in exchange for Khaled and six other convicted terrorists. As a
final act of revenge, terrorist bombers destroyed the aircraft. King Hussein
of Jordan had allowed over fifty terrorist groups into his country, but
Israeli attacks forced him to drive the Palestinians out of Jordan. The
purge created the "Black September" group. (From the website Crime Library,
article "Carlos the Jackal: Trail of Terror.")

11 See the National Security Archive website for Public Diplomacy and Covert
Propaganda: The Declassified Record of Ambassador Otto Juan Reich, by Thomas
Blanton, March 2001.

12 Some of the information on Buckley was obtained from Mark Perry's
February 1989 article in Regardies, p. 96

13 Some of the information on the Counter-Terror Network came from Peter
Dale Scott's essay, The CounterTerrorism Network: Bush, North, And The
Accumulation of Secret Power.

14 Scott: "Clair George.. testified how.Casey.bypassed him by having Charles
Allen, the national Intelligence Officer for Counter-Terrorism, deal with
Ledeen and Ghorbanifar on "terrorist" matters."

15 Emerson, Steve, Secret Warriors, p 24. Shackley, Secord, Hakim, Tom
Clines and Ed Wilson were all linked to various moneymaking scams conducted
under the aegis of national security.

16 Instruments, p 306.