Notes

Frontispiece

1. Countries are included on the Frontispiece diagram on the following criteria: (a) that they have been classified as using torture “on an administrative basis” or as “an essential mode of governance” in the Amnesty International (AI) Report on Torture (U.S. edition, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975), or in other AI reports on specific countries; (b) that there is other reasonably authentic evidence of extensive torture in the 1970s, with cumulative numbers tortured probably in excess of 500, and with torture carried out on a systematic basis in multiple detention centers. There are ambiguities in the concept of torture and in the notion of torture on an administrative basis. The data are also imperfect. But we see no reason to believe that there are any net biases that should call into question the fundamental drift of facts described in this chart (whose roots are discussed in Chapter 2, section 2.1.2). Amnesty International’s global concern for political prisoners and their maltreatment has made it the subject of abuse and criticism for alleged bias by a variety of ideologues and special interest groups. For several from the West, and a vigorous AI response, see the following: “Amnesty’s Odd Man In,” editorial New York Times (14 December 1978); Stephen Miller, “Politics and Amnesty International,” Commentary, March 1978; Andrew Blane, “The Individual in the Cell: A Rebuttal to ‘Politics and Amnesty International’,” Matchbox, Winter 1979.

The parent-client relationship is one of superiority-inferiority, dominance-subordination, and control-dependency. It arises commonly from sheer economic-military strength and interest by one power relative to its neighbors, and the relationship often emerges without the overt use of force. Among the 26 planets, for a substantial number the governments were installed by direct or indirect action of the sun; and for all of them the sun is recognized to be the friendly superpower within whose orbit the planets move, protected from external or internal threats by the military and economic might of the sun. We have limited the number of planets to cases of countries basking in the sun’s orbit that have also received significant flows of direct economic and military aid. South Africa is excluded immediately on grounds of the absence of such aid, but its ties to Great Britain and its strength and relative independence would disqualify it from planetary status in any event.

2. Data for the filiation lines connecting the sun with the planets were taken from the following: military aid, 1946-1975, from A.I.D., U.S. Overseas Loans and Grants and Assistance from International Organizations, 1976 ed.; number of client military trained in the United States, 1950-1975, from “The Pentagon’s Proteges, U.S. Training Programs For Foreign Military Personnel,” NACLA’s Latin America & Empire Report, January 1976, p. 28; and police aid or training to clients, from Michael T. Klare, Supplying Repression, Field Foundation, December, 1977, pp. 20-21.

Preface to the 2014 Edition

1. Among other publications, see E.S. Herman and N. Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent, 1988, Pantheon; second edition with new introduction, 2002. N. Chomsky, Necessary Illusions, 1989, South End. Edward Herman and Robert McChesney, Global Media: the Missionaries of Global Capitalism, 1997.

2. For review, see N. Chomsky, “‘Green Light’ for War Crimes,” in Chomsky, A New Generation Draws the Line (Verso, 2000). Richard Tanter, Mark Selden, and Stephen Shalom, eds., East Timor, Indonesia, and the World Community, Roman & Littlefield, 2000 (in which a slightly different version of “‘Green Light’ for War Crimes” also appears). For detailed review of the early years, in addition to the chapter reprinted here, see Chomsky, Towards a New Cold War (1982).

3. See Manufacturing Consent.

4. Fallows, Atlantic, June 1982. Power, “A Problem from Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, Basic Books, 2002.

5. Moynihan with Suzanne Weaver, A Dangerous Place, Little, Brown, 1978.

6. John Holdridge (State Dept.), Hearing before the Subcommittee on Asian and Pacific Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, 97th Congress, 2nd sess., Sept. 14, 1982, 71.

7. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad, ed., Cambridge History of the Cold War, Cambridge University Press, 2010.

8. Open Society Foundation, Globalizing Torture: CIA Secret Detention and Extraordinary Rendition, Feb. 2013.

9. Greg Grandin, “The Latin American Exception,” http://www.tomdispatch .com/blog/175650/.

Prefatory Note

1. The principal sources for this account of the suppression are affidavits supplied to the authors by the publisher and associate publisher of Warner Modular Publications, Inc.

2. See Chapter 2, section 2.2, and Volume II, Chapter 4.

3. For a more general discussion of mass media choices and bases of selection see chapter 2, section 2.0.

4. Herbert Mitgang, “Nixon Book Dispute Erupts at Meeting,” New York Times (28 May 1978) p. 16.

1 Introduction: Summary of Major Findings and Conclusions

1. See, for example, Andrei D. Sakharov, “Human Rights: A Common Goal,” Wall Street Journal (27 June 1978); also Valery Chalidze, “Human Rights: A Policy of Honor.” Wall Street Journal (8 April 1977). According to Chalidze, “A state does not initiate aggression with a declaration of war; it begins by persecuting its own citizens’ honest and lawful behavior. After its critics are silenced, a government can prepare international aggression, whip up a war psychosis among its citizens and secretly increase military expenditures at the expense of social needs.”

2. See M.J. Crozier, S.P. Huntington, and Joji Watanuki, The Crisis of Democracy: Report on the Governability of’ Democracies to the Trilateral Commission. NYU Press, 1975. For discussion, see N. Chomsky, “Human Rights” and American Foreign Policy, Spokesman, 1978.

3. See especially Richard A. Falk, The Vietnam War and International Law, Princeton University Press, 1968, 2 vols.

4. See Seymour M. Hersh, Chemical and Biological Warfare, Bobbs-Merrill, 1968; Eric Prokosch, “Conventional Killers,” The New Republic, 1 November 1969; AFSC-Narmic, Weapons for Counterinsurgency, 1970; Prokosch, The Simple Art of Murder: Anti-Personnel Weapons and their Development, AFSC-­Narmic, 1972.

5. See below, chapter 4, section 4.

6. The deep involvement of the U.S. government in the overthrow of the last democratic government of Brazil is discussed in detail in A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors, Pantheon, 1978, pp. 38-116 and in Jan K. Black, United States Penetration of Brazil, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1977, passim. Some of the key facts are as follows: the U.S. government not only knew of the plotting but probably helped to coordinate it and to persuade key military personnel to join the conspiracy. It never informed the legally established government of the plots, and never considered trying to talk the military out of carrying out the coup. The official U.S. worry was only that the coup might fail, and the United States was not only ready with standby arrangements for aid, but assured coup plotters of our intervention in their favor if trouble arose. The Sixth Fleet was standing offshore at the time of the coup. A great many of the Brazilian military had been trained in the United States, and their links with U.S. intelligence and military personnel were extensive and warm. The U.S.-trained elements of the Brazil military predominated in the conspiracy. The CIA had pervaded Brazil with informers and paid propagandists, and had engaged in extensive bribing in Brazilian elections. A state investigation of CIA bribery was cut short by the coup. While collaborating intimately in a real anti-democratic coup, cold war liberals like Ambassador Lincoln Gordon seem to have convinced themselves that Goulart and the Communists were an imminent threat to democracy. Goulart may have been a threat to U.S. economic interests, for which the embassy is the de facto representative, but the threat to democracy was a myth that conveniently helped justify U.S. subversion.

7. See below, chapter 2, sections 1.1, 1.4, and 1.5.

8. See below, chapter 2, section 1.

9. Langguth, op. cit., p. 251.

10. Ibid., pp. 225-26.

11. Ibid. Langguth cites a number of other examples as well, as have U.S. personnel who were directly involved in such programs; see chapter 5, sections 1.5, and 1.6.

12. See below, section 14.

13. See below, “Notes on Some Insecurity States in Latin America,” chapter 4, section 5.2. Also the corresponding definition of “security” as applied to “pacified” populations, chapter 5, note 66.

14. Black, op. cit., p. 6.

15. Ibid., p. 11.

16. “New Wounds on Both Sides in the Battle of Terrorism,” New York Times (25 June 1978).

17. See “Free Photography,” New Statesman, 29 September 1978, describing how over 600 Namibians, most of them children and old people, were killed by bombing by French-built Mirage jets and by paratroopers transported by U.S.-built Hercules troop carriers. The official South African explanation that Kassinga was a SWAPO military base “was a lie,” as discovered by foreign journalists who visited shortly after. Rather, “The massacre was planned with brutal cynicism to forestall a breakthrough in negotiations with the UN which might lead to fair and free elections in Namibia.” South Africa hoped that this murderous attack would provoke SWAPO to break negotiations, so that the guerrillas could be portrayed as “intransigents” while Vorster gained “much-needed international sympathy.” “Vorster must have known it would not be worth risking such a crude ploy unless he could expect only the shallowest of coverage from the Western press.” He was not disappointed. The article notes that the mainstream British press offered “little coverage” and refused even to publish photos supplied by AP. In the United States as well the media virtually suppressed this butchery. On the background, see Christopher Hitchens, “Namibia—The Birth of a Nation,” New Statesman, 3 November 1978; Fellowship, May 1977.

18. Haynes Johnson, “Terrorism: It’s the crime of our times,” Philadelphia Inquirer (13 March I977).

19. Or, at least, their “excesses,” though regrettable and offensive to high-minded and civilized Westerners, are nevertheless understandable under the unfortunate circumstances created by “terrorism.”

This process of thrusting a frightening symbol before the public, and simultaneously assuring them that their government is busily engaged in dealing with the problem, is an example of political action in which “a semblance of reality is created, and facts that do not fit are screened out of it. Conformity and satisfaction with the basic order are the keynotes; and the acting out of what is to be believed is a psychologically effective mode of instilling conviction and fixing patterns of future behavior.” Murray Edelman, The Symbolic Uses of Politics, University of Illinois, 1964, p. 17.

20. For an example of the brainwashing effect of media on willing victims, see the remarks by Encounter’s columnist R (G. Rees), Encounter, December 1976, describing the period when the thesis that universities (as part of an evil society) must be destroyed “rang across every campus in the United States, and libraries were burned, and universities wrecked”—all in his fevered imagination, needless to say. On the role of the U.S. government in inspiring terrorist acts by students and others through the use of provocateurs, see Dave Dellinger, More Power Than We Know, Doubleday, 1976; introduction to N. Blackstock, ed., Cointelpro, Vintage, 1976. See these references and also M. Halperin et al., The Lawless State, Penguin, 1976, for some discussion of FBI terrorism during this period, which vastly exceeded anything attributable to the student movement.

21. Within peace movement circles, the role of the government in fomenting violence was well-known long before it reached the attention of Senate inquiries. It was standard practice, from the earliest stage, to be wary of individuals who were calling for violent acts on the assumption, often verified later, that they were government agents.

22. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1975, pp. 184-85.

23. Ibid., p. 7.

24. Ibid., p.191.

25. Ibid.

26. The Amnesty International Report, 1975-1976, p. 84.

27. Ibid.

28. Report on Torture, pp. 206-7. For many more gruesome descriptions, see the Appendix: “Special Report on Chile,” by Rose Styron.

29. For further discussion, see chapter 2 and chapter 4, section 5.2.

30. Hugo Neira, “Guerre Totale contre les Elites en Amerique Latine,” Le Monde diplomatique, January 1977.

31. The Amnesty International Report, 1975-1976, p. 84.

32. See chapter 4, section 5.

33. See chapter 4, section 5.1.

34. International Movement of Catholic Intellectuals and Professionals, “Voice From Northeastern Brazil To III Conference of Bishops,” Mexico, November 1977, reprinted in LADOC (Latin America Document Service), May-June 1978, p. 15.

35. “Turning Point in Brazil,” 2 June 1965.

36. The review by Tom Buckley (27 December 1978) of the ABC documentary shown that evening neatly encapsulates many of the standard maneuvers of propagandists on both sides of the iron curtain. We return to it in section 7. Its main characteristic is distress at the very airing of the subject of torture in U.S. client states. There is not a word of sympathy for the victims of these little tyrannies, let alone any recognition of the U.S. role, but only outrage over the fact that ABC has engaged in this “simpleminded” exercise.

37. Quoted in Reza Baraheni, “Persia Today: No Magic Carpet Rides,” Matchbox (Amnesty International), Fall 1976.

38. Quoted in ibid.

39. William A. Dorman and Ehsan Omad, “Reporting Iran the Shah’s Way,” Columbia Journalism Review, January-February 1979.

40. See Reza Baraheni, The Crowned Cannibals: Writings on Repression in Iran, Vintage, 1976; Bahman Nirumand, Iran, the New Imperialism in Action, Monthly Review, 1969. The chief CIA analyst on Iran from 1968-73, Jesse Leaf, stated that the practice of torture by the SAVAK was well-known to the CIA and that “a senior C.I.A. official was involved in instructing officials in the Savak on torture techniques.... The C.I.A.’s torture seminars, Mr. Leaf said, ‘were based on German torture techniques from World War II’.” Seymour M. Hersh, “Ex-Analyst Says C.I.A. Rejected Warning on Shah,” New York Times (7 January 1979). On the corruption, see chapter 2, p. 64.

41. Of the non-industrialized countries, Iran has been the largest purchaser of military equipment in the world, buying over $18 billion in arms from the United States alone, 1950-1977. “Defense” spending increased tenfold from 1971 to 1975. See Cynthia Arnson, Stephen Daggett, and Michael Klare; “Background Information on the Crisis in Iran,” Institute for Policy Studies, Washington. D.C., December 1978.

42. As it became more obvious that the Shah’s regime was seriously threatened, the veil began to lift slightly. Thus, Youssef M. Ibrahim reported from Teheran in the New York Times (4 December 1978) that “the fear of torture, prison, arbitrary arrest, and the ubiquitous presence of Savak seems overwhelming,” and describes the torture of political detainees and the horrible conditions of life for the masses of people driven to urban slums by what is called in the West the Shah’s “progressive” land reform program, including people who work a 13-hour day, live in miserable huts, waste away from disease—but also ask the reporter to leave them alone, because “we don’t want to attract attention,” for obvious reasons. The continuing torture of prisoners is discussed away from the U.S. media mainstream by Alexander Cockburn and James Ridgeway, Village Voice (4 December 1978), reporting the experiences of a recently released British prisoner (from the International Herald Tribune). The same authors discuss the actual impact of the Shah’s “agricultural reforms,” citing the well-known French agronomist René Dumont, an adviser to the Shah who became “appalled” when he discovered that “the reforms were a farce” that drove the peasants from the land which was then taken over by agribusiness, much of the land becoming desert, with the effect that “large numbers of the Iranian people face starvation” (Village Voice, 20 November 1978). For further discussion, see Thierry Brun and René Dumont, “Imperial Pretensions and Agricultural Dependence,” MERIP Reports No. 71, October 1978. One rarely reads commentary on these matters in the mainstream press, but see the letter by Iran specialist Richard Cottam (Washington Post, 2 October 1978), responding to some absurd commentary by Joseph Kraft and outlining the progressive destruction of agriculture, real income decline for most Iranians, and the massive waste of resources on weapons and consumption for the newly rich. On SAVAK and other Iranian government activity in the United States (surveillance, subversion of Congress and universities, use of provocateurs, etc.), surely with the cooperation of the U.S. government, see Gregory F. Rose, “The Shah’s Secret Police Are Here,” New York, 18 September 1978.

43. Cited by James A. Bill, “Iran and the Crisis of ’78,” Foreign Affairs, Winter, 1978-79. Moderate opposition groups, according to Bill, were “stunned and embittered by Carter’s performance” and “turned more sharply than ever away from the United States.” While Western propaganda pretends that it was Carter’s advocacy of human rights that laid the basis for the explosive events in Iran in 1978, the fact of the matter is that it was his clarity in rejecting any concern for human rights that gave an impetus to these developments. Much the same was true in Nicaragua, as Carter’s expressed support for Somoza contributed to setting off the uprising of August-September, 1978. See chapter 4, section 5.2. See also notes 80 and 88, this chapter.

44. See New Statesman, 29 September 1978, citing new shipments of supplies for crowd control (insert in the Nation, 21 October 1978, Michael Klare, “Iranian Quagmire”). See also Internews International Bulletin, 20 November 1978, on “anti-riot” gear sent to the Shah after the declaration of martial law and the massacres of September 1978, and the plan to send a U.S. army team to train the Shah’s army in riot control.

45. Walter Laqueur, “Trouble for the Shah,” New Republic, 23 September 1978. The same journal also featured an hysterical article by Robert Moss explaining events in Iran as basically a Soviet plot (2 December 1978).

46. In chapter 3 and 4 we will give a number of examples. See the 13 reports on individual countries discussed by the State Department prepared under the direction of the Coalition on Human Rights and the Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy, reproduced in the Congressional Record, 5 April 1978, pp. H 2507-2518. These reports show in great detail the extent to which the State Department role amounts to apologetics for client terror. Typical is the statement by the Office of Haitian Refugee Concerns of the National Council of Churches, which claims that the section on Haiti consists largely of “generalized statements of improvements based either on flagrant misrepresentation or outright omission of facts that have been presented to the State Department by our office and by others.” They cite the repeated use of words like “apparently” and “appear” with respect to alleged improvements (the infamous Fort Dimanche prison is “reportedly” being replaced by a modern facility, etc.).

But even more instructive in the glossing over of such problems is the experience of the eleven opponents of the government exiled in 1977, to whom the State Department makes several references. Several of these men had been abroad and had returned under the “national reconciliation” program begun by Duvalier in 1972. The report notes the reconciliation program but does not point out that these men were rearrested and held without charges upon their return. All eleven then became part of a group of 105 who were released in September, 1977 and, according to the State Department, were “presented to the press and the diplomatic corps at the time of their release.” Not reported is the fact that the eleven who were to be exiled had been withdrawn from their cells the previous March and given six months of intensive medical treatment to prepare them for international inspection. Despite this precaution by the Haitian government all eleven were hospitalized again in Jamaica within a week of their release, an event which was covered widely in the Jamaican press.

On the treatment of “boat people” from Haiti, see Volume II, chapter 3.

47. Richard H. Rovere, “Letter from Washington,” New Yorker, 29 April 1974. He continues: “but our withdrawal has contributed no more than did our original intervention to the stability of the region...” The idea that the U.S. intervention to prevent the victory of the Indochinese revolutionaries was intended, or might be conceived, as a contribution to “stability” is the kind of drivel that one expects from such sources.

48. “Deliverance,” Washington Post (30 April 1975).

49. See Volume II, chapter 1, and on “the last days,” see Frank Snepp, Decent Interval, Random House, 1977. But see note 12 of Volume II, chapter 1, on Snepp’s account.

50. One exception was the effort of the CIA to eliminate Trujillo, who was not only becoming something of an embarrassment, but perhaps even more important had gone too far in taking over the economic opportunities of the country as his private domain. Military regimes that have “radical” or “populist” flavor, as in Peru, may also find themselves a target for U.S. intrigue and “destabilization”.

51. For a discussion of the remarkably close parallel between the Khrushchev and Brezhnev doctrines, and the antecedent Eisenhower and Johnson doctrines, respectively, which may well have contributed to the choice of rhetoric, see Thomas M. Franck and Edward Weisband, Word Politics: Verbal Strategy Among the Superpowers, Oxford University Press, 1971.

52. See chapter 5.

53. This may be an understatement of the disproportion; the ratio of firepower expended was closer to 500 to 1, and U.S. firepower was consistently used against civilian targets, as in the saturation bombing and “free fire zones” in populated regions or in random “harassment and interdiction” fire by artillery. Cf. General Douglas Kinnard, The War Managers, Univ. Press of New England, 1977, p. 47n., for one of many examples. See p. 310. NLF violence was far slighter in scale as well as more selective in character. See Edward S. Herman, Atrocities in Vietnam, Pilgrim Press, 1970, for discussion and evidence.

54. One reason why this happened is that “live” coverage in Vietnam was invariably a portrayal of U.S. actions, since those of the enemy were not accessible on the same basis to U.S. media. Despite controlled displays of U.S. actions, with so many of them destructive it was not easy to maintain an image of beneficence.

55. Some propagandists have not been satisfied with real or manufactured atrocities in postwar Indochina, so that we find such flights of rhetoric as those of Sidney Hook, who writes: “It is indisputably true that in every collectivist economy in the world today political despotism prevails, exercising a terror unexampled in its nature by anything known in previous history.” That is, it is “indisputably true” that the terror that prevails today in Hungary and Poland exceeds that of Nazi Germany. Reprinted from the New York Times in Encounter, February 1978.

56. The term “Khmer Rouge” was coined by Sihanouk as a defamatory appellation for the guerrilla and peasant movements that he was attempting to suppress in the 1960s, often with great brutality and violence. It has become standard in the West, so much so that we too will use it, with misgivings. Comparably, the term “Viet Cong” was created by the U.S.-Saigon propaganda services, and also became standard in Western commentary, though even those initially supportive of the U.S. client regime in the South (e.g., Joseph Buttinger) recognized that the “Viet Cong” were simply the Viet Minh reconstituted to defend themselves against the terrorism of the U.S.-Saigon regime. Similarly, the term “South Vietnamese” was used by the propaganda services, and adopted without question by the submissive intelligentsia of the West, to refer to the tiny elite placed in power by the United States, which even the U.S. command treated with contempt.

57. See Ian Black, “Peace or no peace, Israel will still need cheap Arab labour,” New Statesman, 28 September 1978, for a rare discussion, not matched in the United States, to our knowledge.

58. See chapter 4, section 1. As we shall see, it is not unusual in the Free Press to place the blame for the massacre on the victims.

59. See chapter 3, section 4.4.

60. See chapter 4, note 224.

61. The word “negligible” may be too generous. In response to this charge in a letter by the present authors, the Executive Director of the CDM wrote an indignant denial to the New York Times (letter, 9 August 1978) which failed to cite even a single example to the contrary. It is also intriguing to read his effort to interpret the charge against CDM—which, as his letter reveals, is fully accurate—as an expression of “indifference to truth and to the suffering of Soviet victims” on the part of the present authors. Comparably, someone who criticized a Russian party hack for focusing his attention on human rights abuses in the West could be denounced for his “indifference to the suffering of the Chileans and Vietnamese.” Compare also the New York Times critique of the ABC documentary, already discussed, with its effort to shift attention to the Communist enemy.

62. For illustrations, see chapter 2, sections 1.4 and 1.5.

63. The absence of official censorship allows room for sometimes vigorous debate among the substantial interests, and fringe and dissident elements are at least allowed to exist and argue, mainly among themselves, but occasionally penetrating to the consciousness of decision-makers, especially on matters of irrational behavior in relationship to establishment objectives.

64. The phenomenon has long been familiar. In a study conducted for the group of historians who enlisted in the service of the U.S. government in World War I (cf. Volume II, chapter 2, section 1), Victor S. Clark concluded that the “voluntary co-operation of the newspaper publishers of America resulted in a more effective standardization of the information and arguments presented to the American people, than existed under the nominally strict military control exercised in Germany.” (“The German Press and the War,” Historical Outlook, November 1919, cited by Carol S. Gruber, Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of the Higher Learning in America, Louisiana State University Press, 1975, p. 140.) The same has often been true since. Given the general community of interest among the Western powers with regard to the Third World, one is not surprised to find, for example, that the media in Great Britain tended to view the Vietnam War pretty much through U.S. eyes. See The British Press and Vietnam, Indochina Solidarity Conference, July 1973. See also, Alex Carey, “The ennobling of the Vietnam war,” unpublished, June 1978, for analysis of parts of a remarkable BBC TV “retrospective” on the war, which exhibits a degree of subservience to the U.S. propaganda system beyond what would be tolerated even by U.S. commercial TV, an interesting example of cultural colonization.

65. On the nature and quality of this ideology among the Brazilian military, see Black, op. cit., pp. 190, 195.

66. For extensive evidence, see ibid., pp. 188-199, and 210-222. On the long-standing strong current of extreme rightwing tendencies within the U.S. military establishment, see Fred Cook, “The Ultras,” Nation, 30 June 1962.

67. State ownership has continued to play an important though usually declining role in some of these states, based to a great extent on inertia and on the usefulness of state enterprise for more direct looting. See chapter 4, sections 1 and 2.

68. On the concept of “security” as its usage has developed in the West, see p. 5-6; also chapter 5, note 65.

69. Cited in Black, op. cit., p. 160.

70. Taylor Branch, “The Letelier Investigation,” New York Times Magazine, 16 July 1978.

71. Black, op. cit., quoting U.S. General Robert W. Porter, p. 211.

72. On the Letelier-Moffitt murders, see Saul Landau, They Educated The Crows, Transnational Institute, 1978. See also note 70.

73. See also note 42, above.

74. Black, op. cit., p. 73, note 34.

75. See the Nixon eulogies in ibid., p. 55.

76. Quoted in Black, op. cit., p. 55, from the Jornal do Brasil, 4 February 1972.

77. See chapter 2, section 2.2. Also Volume II, chapter 1, section 1.

78. Not entirely, however. For example, Jean and Simonne Lacouture point out that after “the reconquest and unification of Vietnam by Vietnamese citizens” in April 1975, there was no bloody revenge. The Vietnamese revolutionaries did not follow the example of “their French, Russian or Chinese predecessors. Not to kill is a great virtue; one seems to ignore that a bit too easily.” “They are probably the first victors in a civil war (embittered and aggravated by two foreign interventions) who have not unleashed any operation of massive reprisal.” Furthermore, “the Vietnamese maquisards, more honorable than their French comrades of 1944,” did not humiliate the hundreds of thousands of prostitutes created by the American invasion. (Vietnam: voyage a travers une victoire, Seuil, 1976, pp. 7, 11, 110-12).

The Lacoutures’ book is a record of their visit to Vietnam in April-May 1976. Though highly critical of the Vietnamese revolution—so much as to elicit a sharp rejoinder in the Vietnamese press—it was nevertheless sympathetic and balanced, and did not fail to describe the horrendous residue of thirty years of imperial violence. It was unable to find a U.S. publisher, and its very existence was denied in the U.S. press, as we shall see in Volume II, chapter 4. Jean Lacouture, a distinguished commentator on Vietnam with decades of experience in the country, is treated very differently when his message is more palatable to imperial tastes, as we shall see in Volume II, chapter 6.

79. For Western precedents, considered highly moral in contrast to the barbarous behavior of the Vietnamese, see Volume II, chapter 2, section 2.

80. Congress has barred aid (let alone reparations) to seven countries: Cuba, Angola, Mozambique, Uganda, Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. U.S. representatives to international financial institutions have been instructed to vote against aid to these countries, which are unique as “violators of human rights” (and by sheer coincidence, are also—apart from Uganda—countries which have recently freed themselves from the U.S.-dominated global system). In the case of Uganda, furthermore, the sanctions are pro forma, as we shall see. In contrast, proposals to bar aid to Nicaragua and South Korea, for example, because of human rights violations, were explicitly rejected, while Carter asked for—and received—authorization to continue arms aid to the Marcos dictatorship (Richard Burt, “Carter Asks For No Cut in Arms Aid to Marcos Despite Negative Human-Rights Report,” New York Times, 6 February 1978); it is expected that the 1979 fiscal year will surpass the preceding year’s total of $36 million despite massive human rights violations. The government has also made it clear that there is no intention “to link its massive arms sales to Iran with the issue of human rights” (Joe Alex Morris, Los Angeles Times-Boston Globe, 14 May 1977), naturally enough, since as Mr. Carter observed, “there is no leader with whom I have a deeper sense of personal gratitude and personal friendship” than the Shah, who received “no lecturing on the question of human rights” but only “a sympathetic ear” for a request for hundreds of advanced jet fighters (Geoffrey Godsell, Christian Science Monitor, 2 March 1978). See pp. 14f; see also William Branigan, “Vance Indicates Rights Issue, Iranian Arms Are Not Linked,” Washington Post (14 May 1977).

It is a real tribute to the propaganda system that the press can still refer to a “human rights campaign”—with occasional qualifications: e.g., “The Administration has been put in the embarrassing position of trying to check the zeal of some lawmakers who say they want to translate President Carter’s words into action.” (Clyde Farnsworth, New York Times, 19 June 1977, citing also a study that shows how the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank and the International Monetary Fund, with U.S. acquiescence and support, were increasing aid to the worst human rights violators.)

81. “The reader may have noticed that I never called the South Vietnamese dictatorships from Diem to Thieu fascist. There is a good historical reason for this: no matter how totalitarian some of the dictatorships are which the U.S. still supports around the world, they should be called fascist only if, in gaining power and at least temporarily maintaining it they can rely on—in addition to political terror—some organized mass support, something possessed by Mussolini, Hitler, and even Franco, but not by any of the South Vietnamese regimes.” Joseph Buttinger, Vietnam: The Unforgettable Tragedy, Horizon, 1977, p. 165. Other close observers were less reticent. General Lansdale, one of the chief U.S. specialists in subversion and counterrevolutionary intervention in Vietnam and elsewhere in the 1950s and 1960s, did not hesitate to describe the Diem regime that he backed as “fascistic” (cf. U.S. Department of Defense, United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-67, book 2, IV, A.5, tab 4, p. 66 (the government edition of the Pentagon Papers).

82. Louis P. Kubicka, “From the Plain of Jars,” Progressive, March 1978. See Volume II, chapter 5.

83. But curiously this is not true of the Viet Cong—who seem “eight feet tall” as they devise ingenious strategies to defeat American power and construct jungle laboratories, etc. Cf. John Mecklin, Mission in Torment, Doubleday, 1965, pp. 76f.

84. These insights are expressed by Townsend Hoopes, Undersecretary of the Air Force and a critic of the war after 1968, and William Pfaff, liberal-in-residence at the Hudson Institute. See Pfaff, Condemned to Freedom, Random House, 1971, a close paraphrase (with no acknowledgment) of Hoopes, Limits of Intervention, David McKay, 1969, where Pfaff is mentioned. It is unclear who deserves the credit for these deep thoughts. Cf. Chomsky, At War With Asia, (p. 297f.) and For Reasons of State (p. 94f.) for precise attribution and for additional examples and discussion, from these and other sources.

85. See Philip Shabecoff, “Murder Verdict Eased in Vietnam,” New York Times, 31 March 1970. While the New York Times and other Establishment journals repeatedly expressed their outrage over the uncivilized behavior of the barbarians we faced in Vietnam, their own reporters casually documented U.S. war crimes without notice or comment. See Seymour Melman, ed., In the Name of America, Turnpike, 1968—well before the full-force of U.S. “pacification” was unleashed. To cite just one subsequent example, Malcolm Browne, quoting an official who describes May, 1972 B-52 strikes as “the most lucrative raids made at any time during the war,” reports blandly that “every single bomb crater is surrounded with bodies, wrecked equipment and dazed and bleeding people. At one such hole there were 40 or 50 men, all in green North Vietnamese uniforms but without their weapons, lying around in an obvious state of shock. We sent in helicopter gunships, which quickly put them out of their misery” (New York Times, 6 May 1972). This was, needless to say, in express defiance of the laws of war to which the Times editors expressed their solemn devotion when deploring the treatment of pilots captured while bombing North Vietnamese villages.

86. “A Craving For Rights,” 31 January 1977.

87. Volume II, chapter 3, for reference and discussion.

88. See above for examples from December 1977 through the fall of 1978, repeated with continuing fervor through the fall 1978 crisis. As demonstrations against the Shah reached a peak of intensity at the year’s end, “A State Department spokesman, Hodding Carter, yesterday reiterated Washington’s backing for the monarch, saying the United States supports the shah ‘in his efforts to promote stability’.” Robert H. Reid, AP, “Rioters paralyze Tehran,” Boston Globe (27 December 1978).

89. Internews International Bulletin, 20 November 1978.

90. Martin Woollacott, “Egypt’s forces now without a role,” Manchester Guardian Weekly, 15 October 1978. See also Thomas W. Lippman, “Display of Egypt’s War Machine Hints at New Role,” Washington Post (7 October 1978); John Cooley, “U.S. arms boost to Egypt, Israel awaits peace gains,” Christian Science Monitor (12 October 1978); Ned Temko, “Egypt stepping forward to halt Soviets in Mideast,” ibid. (6 December 1978). The main thrust of these and similar reports is that the Egyptian army is being reconstructed by the United States as an African strike force rather than a force designed for desert warfare. On the close relation between U.S. support for Israel and perceived Israeli success in upholding U.S. interests, see N. Chomsky, “Armageddon Is Well Located,” Nation, 22 July 1977. It will be interesting to see whether the policy with regard to Egypt will be modified in the light of the collapse of the U.S. position in Iran.

91. See “Terror—Argentina Style,” Matchbox, Winter 1977; Geoff Rips, “Argentina: Gilding the Monster,” USLA Reporter, 30 November 1978, citing a special appeal from Amnesty International who reports that “disappearances” are again on the increase after some cosmetic touches timed to coincide with the World Soccer Cup.

92. See Rips, ibid.; also the report of the Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy, cited in the USLA Reporter, 30 November 1978; Karen DeYoung and Charles A. Krause, “Our Mixed Signals On Human Rights In Argentina,” Washington Post (29 October 1978).

93. Ibid. See also James Nelson Goodsell, “US takes a friendlier attitude toward Argentina,” Christian Science Monitor (14 November 1978). Noting that the administration “was forced to buckle under to business and trade considerations, letting its public human-rights policy go by the board,” Goodsell remarks: “This does not mean that Washington will not privately continue to nudge the Videla government behind the scenes on human rights. But it means that as a public issue, human rights is certainly going to take a less important role than in the past.” Given its actual role in the past, this “less important role” will approach zero.

94. Charles A. Krause, “Argentine Describes ‘Excruciating’ Pain of Torture,” Washington Post (29 October 1978).

95. Eric Bourne, “Czech dissident attacks Carter rights pressure,” Christian Science Monitor (6 February 1978).

96. Edward Walsh, “President to Remain Firm in Human Rights Campaign,” Washington Post (3 June 1977). See Chomsky, ‘Human Rights’ and American Foreign Policy, chapter 2, for discussion.

97. See chapter 3, section 4.4.

2 The CIA-Pentagon Archipelago

1. While we will speak of the “Brazilianization” of the Third World under U.S. aegis, we do not want to be understood as suggesting that the process began in 1964 with the U.S.-backed coup that installed the Brazilian generals in power, but merely that that coup and its totalitarian free enterprise aftermath have been warmly admired and considered worthy of emulation, maybe even in the United States (see p. 31). An earlier Latin American model is Guatemala (see chapter 4, section 5.2), and there are many still earlier precedents in Latin America and the Far East. The CIA effort in Guatemala in 1954 was no doubt stimulated in part by its earlier success in overthrowing the nationalist government in Iran and reinstalling the Shah in 1953. (Cf. David Wise and Thomas B. Ross, The Invisible Government, Bantam, 1964, pp. 116-121.) This achievement was highly praised in the United States. The New York Times, for example, explained in an editorial of August 6, 1954 that “underdeveloped countries with rich resources now have an object lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid by one of their number which goes berserk with fanatical nationalism.” In later interventions, as in Vietnam, this “demonstration effect” was also much lauded.

Anyone inclined to regard such interventions as a post-World War II phenomenon might turn to the list of “Instances of the Use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-1945,” containing over 200 entries, presented to Senate committees considering U.S. problems in Cuba by Secretary of State Rusk to show that there is ample precedent for intervention without congressional authorization. Hearings, “Situation in Cuba,” Committee on Foreign Relations and Committee on Armed Services, U.S. Senate, 87th Congress, Second Session, (17 September 1962), pp. 82-87.

2. Not only has liberalism contributed to the cold war anti-Communist ideology, but liberals were active leaders in the initiation of counterinsurgency and preventive subversion. The Vietnam War and the spread of military juntas in the American sphere of interest is to a considerable degree a product of cold war liberalism. Lobe points out that “the Kennedy Administration was infatuated with counterinsurgency theory and attempted to press this theory onto the practice and policies of Washington bureaucracies...Attorney-General Robert Kennedy was the energizing force in the Special Group (CI), and it was he who propelled this body to recommend police aid to friendly Third World governments.” Thomas Lobe, United States National Security Policy and Aid to the Thailand Police, University of Denver Monograph Series in World Affairs, Vol. 14, Bk. 2, 1977, pp. 5, 7. Langguth adds that “at no time did any of its members question the C-I Group’s goals. As one participant recalled, ‘We knew we were acting from damn good motives’”—in their mood of chauvinist arrogance, the Kennedy liberals were untroubled by the fact that their imperial predecessors had characteristically adopted a similar pose. (A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors, Pantheon, 1978, p. 50). Langguth describes in detail how the same group of Kennedy liberals engineered the overthrow of Brazilian democracy and its replacement with the subfascist regime that still rules, after President Goulart had refused Robert Kennedy’s admonition to end his flirtation with “romantic left-wing causes” (Langguth, p. 99). Particularly striking is his account of the great glee in Washington when Ambassador Lincoln Gordon returned after the successful military coup, the ninth case in which a military junta had replaced an elected government in Brazil since Kennedy was elected president, as General Andrew O’Meara reminded congressmen, adding that the Brazilian coup “saved that country from an immediate dictatorship.” Meanwhile the director of the AIFLD, which merged the talents of the AFL-CIO and the CIA, boasted of their role in instituting the new military dictatorship, and Robert Kennedy, though “still grieving over the murder of his brother,” nevertheless “found cheer in the events in Brazil,” saying: “Well, Goulart got what was coming to him. Too bad he didn’t follow the advice we gave him when I was down there.” Langguth, pp. 115-16.

The general attitude is expressed very well by William P. Bundy, referring to the origins and development of the CIA: to many in government, he wrote, “the preservation of liberal values, for America and other nations, required the use of the full range of U.S. power, including if necessary its more shady applications,” even if this might involve “ambiguity”. Foreword to Douglas S. Blaufarb, The Counterinsurgency Era, Free Press, 1977, p. x. Note that these words were written well after the ugly record could no longer be concealed.

3. Three-year comparisons were used except where data were unavailable or other political events intervened to require a two-year horizon.

4. One is the overall trend factor—if aid is going up in general, avoidance of bias may require deflating to the trend line. Such an adjustment does not alter the findings presented here.

5. On the valuable contribution of the Korean mercenaries to “security” in Vietnam, see below, chapter 5, section 1.4.

6. The origination, funding, and staffing of these institutions provide even more definitive evidence of U.S. dominance. See Teresa Hayter, Aid As Imperialism, Penguin, 1971; Michael Tanzer, The Political Economy of International Oil and the Underdeveloped Countries, Beacon, 1969, chapter 8.

7. There are eight countries common to Tables 1 and 2; Table 2 includes Ethiopia and Argentina, whereas Table 1 has instead Guatemala and the Dominican Republic.

8. Supplying Repression, Field Foundation, December 1977, p. 10. Italics in original. Table 2 is reproduced, with permission, from this work, p. 9.

9. Joanne Omang, “Latin American Left, Right Say U.S. Militarized Continent,” Washington Post (11 April 1977).

10. Black, United States Penetration of Brazil, pp. 220-22.

11. Ibid., pp. 96, 170; Jeffrey Stein, “Grad School For Juntas,” Nation, 21 May 1977.

12. “A frank Minister of Foreign Relations in the mid-1960s startled even the subservient Brazilian press with his declaration, ‘What’s good for the United States is good for Brazil’.” E. Bradford Burns, “Brazil: The Imitative Society,” Nation, 10 July 1976.

13. Op. cit., p. 23.

14. “Torture, an Official Way of Life,” New York Times (4 August 1974).

15. Washington Post (9 May 1977). On torture in Israel, see the London Sunday Times (19 June 1977), reporting the results of a 5-month investigation by the Insight team that produced evidence of torture of Arab prisoners so widespread and systematic that “it appears to be sanctioned at some level as deliberate policy,” perhaps “to persuade Arabs in occupied territories that it is least painful to behave passively.” This report was bitterly attacked in the United States, though the Sunday Times study itself, which is confirmed from many other sources, was barely reported. Two of the journalists who conducted the study, Paul Eddy and Peter Gillman, added substantial information on their procedures and discoveries and on the reaction to them in testimony before the United Nations, 6-7 September 1977; see the report of the Special Political Committee, Thirty-second session, Agenda item 57, UN General Assembly, Report of the Special Committee to Investigate Israeli Practices Affecting the Human Rights of the Population of the Occupied Territories, A/SPC/32/L.12, 11 November 1977. Mr. Eddy informs us that the London Times Insight team report was offered to both the New York Times and the Washington Post but was rejected.

16. Holmes Brown, Don Luce, Hostages of War, Saigon’s Political Prisoners, Indochina Mobile Education Project, 1973, pp. 62-63.

17. “U.S.-Iran Ties Strong but Controversial,” New York Times (9 July 1978). See also chapter 1, note 40, on direct CIA involvement in torture.

18. Black, op. cit. p. 146.

19. Ibid., pp. 141-43; Langguth, op. cit., pp. 162-65.

20. Op. cit., p. 81.

21. John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies, Norton, 1978, p. 172.

22. Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders, Interim Report of Select Senate Committee on Intelligence Activities, 20 November 1975, pp. 71-109.

23. See Volume II, chapter 5, and references cited there.

24. See below, section 2.2, this chapter.

25. Black, op. cit., pp. 59-110.

26. Ibid., p. 129.

27. See chapter 4, note 5.

28. Agee, Inside the Company, Stonehill, 1975, pp. 361-62.

29. Black, op. cit., pp. 111-124. See note 2.

30. Ibid., pp. 129, 155.

31. Stockwell, op. cit., pp. 185-190.

32. Cf. note 1. We stress again the systematic character of CIA and other forms of U.S. intervention abroad. By the 1960s, the official definition of covert action was “any clandestine activity designed to influence foreign governments, events, organizations or persons in support of United States foreign policy.” The major victims have been weaker, primarily Third World countries seeking a measure of independence, and there can be no doubt that covert action programs of the CIA have been a major factor in the deterioration of human rights throughout much of the world, including subversion of democratic elections, press manipulation, and direct export of violence. When subversion succeeds, some of the major terror organizations of the world (e.g., Iran’s SAVAK, South Korea’s KCIA, Chile’s DINA, the Greek CIA subsidiary under the fascist colonels—all noted for their ruthlessness, brutality and venality) have been installed with U.S. assistance; a minor aspect of their efforts is intimidation and control of residents in the United States, tolerated by the U.S. government in part to ensure that CIA agents will not be harassed in the parent country. There have been a number of important books reviewing a range of CIA activities, among them Agee, op. cit.; Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, Knopf, 1974; Howard Frazier, ed., Uncloaking the CIA, Free Press, 1978; The Pike Report, Spokesman, 1977, and the secret report of the House Select Committee on Intelligence headed by Congressman Otis Pike, published in the Village Voice (16, 23 February 1976). For a brief summary of CIA activities, see “CIA’s Covert Operations vs. Human Rights,” Center for National Security Studies, 122 Maryland Avenue, N.E., Washington, D.C.

33. See especially Langguth, op. cit., pp. 99-100; Black, op. cit., pp. 39-41.

34. Black, op. cit., pp. 100-107.

35. J. Levinson and J. de Onis, The Alliance That Lost Its Way, Quadrangle, 1970, p. 89.

36. “Helms Tells of Using Top U.S. Businessmen,” Washington Post (11 March 1974). A discussion of Ashland Oil’s report on corporate payments noted that $98,968 of CIA payments to Ashland wound up in the company’s own slush funds: “One speculation was that the money was CIA salary for its agents using overseas Ashland jobs as a cover.” “What Ashland Oil said about itself,” Business Week, 12 July 1975.

37. Black, op. cit., p. 87.

38. The latter case is an interesting one. While described by the compliant U.S. press as “Cuban subversion,” following the government’s lead, the secret arms cache in Venezuela is regarded with some skepticism by former CIA agent Joseph Smith, in a book written to support the CIA after Agee’s critical study had appeared (Joseph Smith, Portrait of a Cold Warrior, Putnam, 1976, p. 382). Smith believes that the cache may have been a CIA job to meet the requirements of John F. Kennedy’s anti-Castro crusade, which he was pressuring to make into a Latin American cause just before his assassination.

Arthur M. Schlesinger described the “great cache of weapons” found in Venezuela as “unquestionably Cuban in origin and provenance, secreted for terrorists at a point along the Caribbean coast,” sure proof of the “central threat” posed by Castro to freedom in the Americas. U.S. terrorism aimed at Cuba is not discussed. A Thousand Days, Houghton Mifflin, 1965; Fawcett reprinting, 1967, pp. 713-14.

39. American Banker, 28 November 1975, p. 13. For another banker’s expression of delight in the Marcos suspension of political democracy in the Philippines, see chapter 4, p. 238.

40. “Philippines: A government that needs U.S. business,” Business Week, 4 November 1972.

41. “Marginalization” is a term used extensively in Church documents in Latin America to describe the condition of the vast majority of the population, but neither the term nor its content has yet penetrated the Judeo-Christian conscience or the media of North America. In the terminology of economics, the concept can be expressed as follows: in the social welfare function of the subfascist leadership, the lowest 90% of the population does not appear as a maximized (i.e., a value to the maximized). On the contrary, the underlying population—Veblen’s suggestive phrase—appears in the economic calculations of this elite as a cost and threat.

42. International Movement of Catholic Intellectuals and Professionals, “Voice From Northeastern Brazil to III Conference of Bishops,” Mexico, November 1977, reprinted in LADOC, May-June 1978, p. 15.

43. See Eduardo Galeano, “The De-Nationalization of Brazilian Industry,” Monthly Review, December 1969.

44. Latin American Economic Report, January 1976, p. 9.

45. U.S. investment in Brazil grew from $323 million in 1946 to about $2.5 billion in 1972, although at the latter date it was only one-third of all foreign capital invested there. See Richard S. Newfarmer and Willard F. Mueller, Multinational Corporations in Brazil and Mexico: Structural Sources of Economic and Noneconomic Power, Report to the Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, 94th Congress, 1st Session, August 1975, p. 148.

46. Henry Kamm, “Philippine Democracy, an American Legacy, Has Crumbled,” New York Times (1 March 1977). What “crumbled” was, in any event, a short-lived facade, constantly manipulated by the U.S. (cf. Smith, op. cit.) and meaningless for most of the population. (See chapter 4, section 3.)

47. Bernard Wideman, “Dominating The Pineapple Trade,” Far Eastern Economic Review, 8 July 1974; also, for Bataan, interviews by AFSC staff.

48. Shelton H. Davis, Victims of the Miracle, Cambridge, 1977, chapter 8; also the two Church documents of 1973, “Marginalization of a People” and “I Have Heard the Cry of My People.”

49. Stephen Sansweet, “Captive Workers: Prisoners in Colombia Are Working for Units of U.S. Multinationals,” Wall Street Journal (20 May 1975).

50. “The Marginalization of a People, The Cry of the Churches,” 6 May 1973. This document was not allowed to circulate in Brazil, and the lay publisher and several of his co-workers were arrested, charged, and heavily fined for printing this “subversive” document. It has received negligible attention in the U.S. as well, by self-censorship rather than direct censorship as in Brazil.

51. 9 August 1976.

52. Black, op. cit., pp. 239-240.

53. 28 April 1975.

54. David Felix, “Economic Development: Takeoffs Into Unsustained Growth,” Social Research, Summer 1969, p. 267.

55. “I Have Heard the Cry of My People,” a powerful statement signed by 18 Catholic bishops of Northeast Brazil, 6 May 1973, discussed widely abroad, but again, not in the United States.

56. Marvine Howe, “Brazil’s Inflation Said to Halve Real Income of Poor in Decade,” New York Times (14 December 1974).

57. Black, op. cit., pp. 241, 246.

58. Stanford, 1973, p. vii.

59. Ibid., pp. 178-79.

60. Ibid., pp. 165, 169, 170.

61. Quoted in Gabriel Kolka, The Politics of War, Random House, 1970, p. 214.

62. Ibid., p. 229.

63. Ibid., p. 230.

64. “By American choice” in a very literal sense: According to General Khanh, “On January, 1964 Wilson [his U.S. advisor] told me a coup d’etat was planned in Saigon and that I was to become President.... On 8 February 1964 I took over as Premier.” Interview with the German magazine Stern, reprinted in Los Angeles New Advocate (1-15 April 1972).

It is interesting to contrast the official disavowals of any “arrogant” attempts to influence client governments, with the matter-of-fact assumption by U.S. officials that they determine who rules in these client states, as disclosed in internal governmental documents. General Taylor, in a briefing of 27 November 1964, for example, speaks with assurance about our “establishing some reasonably satisfactory government” in South Vietnam; and that if not satisfied with the way things are going, “we could try again with another civilian government....Another alternative would be to invite back a military dictatorship on the model of that headed of late by General Khanh.” (Pentagon Papers, Gravel Edition, III, p. 669; emphasis added.)

Taylor, in fact, expressed his contempt for his Vietnamese puppets quite openly on the public record as well. Thus, he describes Diem’s “unexpected resistance” to the U.S. demand for direct participation in civil administration, and adds: “On the chance that Diem might continue to be intransigent, the old search for a possible replacement for him was resumed in State.” Later he speaks of “the impetuosity of Diem’s American critics and our opposition to ousting him without a replacement in sight.” When General Khanh began to lose his shaky political base, “the question was: If not Khanh, who? This time there was again the possibility that ‘Big’ Minh might do. He had been behaving quite well....” Taylor’s attitudes are perhaps no more astonishing than the fact that he is willing to voice them in public. See Swords and Plowshares, Norton, 1972, pp. 248, 294, 322.

65. New York Herald Tribune (3 February 1964). The evidence available suggests that Khanh’s exit was as much a matter of internal Vietnamese politics as his rise to power. While he was technically removed by the Vietnamese generals and shipped out to “indefinite exile,” this followed a message to the generals from Ambassador Taylor “that the U.S. government had lost confidence in Khanh and could not work with him” in accordance with his plans, which seemed to the U.S. mission to amount “to a dangerous Khanh-Buddhist alliance which might eventually lead to an unfriendly government with which we could not work” (Taylor, op. cit., pp. 334f.).

66. Civilian Casualty and Refugee Problems in South Vietnam, Findings and Recommendations, Subcommittee on Refugees, Senate Judiciary Committee, U.S. Senate, 90th Congress, 2nd Session, 9 May 1969, p. 36.

67. See Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, “Saigon’s Corruption Crisis: The Search for an Honest Quisling,” Ramparts, December 1974-January 1975.

68. “Philippines: A government that needs U.S. business,” Business Week, 4 November 1972.

69. See the three-part series in the New York Times by Fox Butterfield, “Power of Philippine Ruler Growing,” (1 January 1977); “Marcos Facing Criticism May End $1 Billion Westinghouse Contract,” (14 January 1977); “Manila Inner Circle Gains Under Marcos,” (15 January 1977). (See chapter 4, section 3.)

70. Daniel Kirk, “The Bold Words of Kim,” New York Times Magazine (7 January 1973), p. 56.

71. “Yes, yes, it’s graft. But don’t fight.” New York Times (24 February 1977).

72. “Exporting Military-Economic Development—America and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-67,” in Malcolm Caldwell, ed., Ten Years’ Military Terror in Indonesia, Spokesman, 1975, p. 219.

73. Michael T. Kaufman, “Zaire: A Mobutu Fiefdom Where Fortunes Shift Quickly,” New York Times (3 June 1978).

74. John Stockwell, former chief of the CIA Angola Task Force, pointed out in his letter of resignation from the CIA that the decision of the Angolan government to permit “Zairian exiles to invade the Shaba province of Zaire” could hardly have been a surprise: “I myself warned the Interagency Working Group in October, 1975 that the Zairian invasion of northern Angola would be answered by the introduction of large numbers of Cuban troops...and would invite an eventual retaliatory invasion of Zaire from Angola” Washington Post (10 April 1977). The background was conveniently forgotten when the predicted retaliation took place. Carter’s attempt to make the Cubans the villains of the piece was inept and dishonest demagoguery, reminiscent of Johnson’s effort to have the U.S. embassy in Santo Domingo scout up some names of Communists to provide a rationale for the U.S. invasion. As for Angola itself, Stockwell states that the United States moved into Angola before the USSR and intervened steadily (and ineptly) thereafter. In Search of Enemies, pp. 66-67 and passim. Stockwell also notes that subsequent Cuban intervention was consistent with its ideology and international stance, while ours, as was so often the case, “was a direct contradiction of our public policies [more accurately, the proclaimed public policies], making it essential that we keep the American public [and also the Congress] from knowing the truth” (p. 171).

75. Stockwell, op. cit., p. 246.

76. According to Eric Pace, “In Iran, It’s Alms to the Poor and the Rich,” New York Times (26 September 1976), section F.

77. See Robert Graham, “The Pahlavi Foundation,” Nation, 9 December 1978.

78. See Fred Cook, “The Billion Dollar Mystery,” Nation, 12 April 1965.

79. Reportedly helped along by the display in front of the Royal Court, by the wife of the Commander-in-Chief of the Royal Navy, of a diamond valued at more than a million dollars. See Eric Rouleau, “Iran—Myths and Realities,” Le Monde (3-4 October 1976).

80. Ibid.

81. Flora Lewis, “Shah of Iran Forbids Royal Family To Make Profits on Business Deals,” New York Times (4 July 1978).

82. Black, op. cit., pp. 86-90.

83. This was also true in Guatemala, Iran, Brazil, Chile, the Dominican Republic, Zaire, Indonesia, and elsewhere.

84. Malcolm Browne, The New Face of War, Bobbs-Merrill, 1965, p. 211. See further below, chapter 5.

85. This is the effective meaning of Communism for the neo-fascist elites that the United States has sponsored in Latin America and elsewhere. (See below, chapter 4, section 5.1.)

86. Entirely outside of the club is, of course, the majority of the population, terrorized into passivity in the interest of “the club elite,” and clearly irrelevant except as a cheap labor force or threat to “stability.”

87. Stephen Sansweet and William Blundell, “On the Give: For U.S. Firms Abroad Bribery Can Often Be Routine Business Cost,” Wall Street Journal (9 May 1975).

88. The Brazilian military began to feed on itself in the 1970s. “Twenty percent of the field officers had been removed from their posts for ideological deviation by 1973, and in 1975 eleven army officers were arrested for ‘studying literature from the Portuguese Armed Forces Movement’.” Black, op. cit., p. 247.

89. Human slavery also lasted quite a long time in the Western democracies, not to speak of vicious exploitation, imported cheap labor, and other admirable practices, which still are prevalent.

90. William McNeill, The Rise of the West, Chicago, 1963, pp. 256-57.

91. Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad. Report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, 21 December 1970, p. 3.

92. The United States was, in fact, bombing the only major rail connection between southwestern China and the rest of China, which happened to pass through Vietnam near Hanoi. The dispatch of Chinese technicians to help restore rail service was offered in the U.S. press as another example of Chinese aggressiveness. As we now know, official U.S. policy enunciated in 1954 involved a readiness to use force against China if China was regarded by the U.S. leadership as the “external source” of local subversion or rebellion in Southeast Asia. For discussion of the relevant documents, see Chomsky, For Reasons of State, Pantheon, 1973, p. 100f.

93. See note 22 above.

94. Drew Fethersten and John Cummings, “Canadian Says U.S. Paid Him $5,000 to Infect Cuban Poultry,” Washington Post (Newsday) (21 March 1977), p. A18; this report states that “The major details of the Canadian’s story have been confirmed by sources within and outside the American intelligence community.” Fethersten and Cummings, “CIA tied to Cuba’s ’71 pig fever outbreak,” Boston Globe (Newsday) (9 January 1977): “With at least the tacit backing of Central Intelligence Agency officials, operatives linked to anti-Castro terrorists introduced African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971. Six weeks later an outbreak of the disease forced the slaughter of 500,000 pigs to prevent a nationwide animal epidemic.” This “was the first and only time the disease has hit the Western Hemisphere” and “was labeled the ‘most alarming event’ of 1971 by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization.” All production of pork came to a halt for several months. “A U.S. intelligence source said in an interview that he was given the virus in a sealed, unmarked container” at Ft. Gulick, the U.S. Army and CIA base in the Panama Canal Zone. See also UPI, “CIA reportedly tried to dry up Cuban crop,” Boston Globe (27 June 1976), reporting the allegation by a former Pentagon researcher that the CIA and the Pentagon seeded clouds “to try to dry up the Cuban sugar crop in 1969 and 1970” (denied by the Pentagon; cf. Globe, 28 June 1976). On the background, see Taylor Branch and George Crile III, “The Kennedy Vendetta, How the CIA waged a silent war against Cuba,” Harper’s, August 1975, reporting attempts as late as 1964 by the CIA, under the original orders of President Kennedy, to land weapons and destroy oil refineries, railroad bridges, sugar mills and other targets, many successfully attacked.

95. David Binder, “Carter Says Cubans May Leave Angola, Is Receptive on Ties,” New York Times (17 February 1977).

96. It is, for example, no surprise that the Washington Post (24 February 1978) can feature (in a special box) a letter to the editor from a reader who writes:

I wasn’t all that bothered when it turned out that the CIA had tried to poison Lumumba’s toothpaste and contaminate Castro’s diving suit with itching powder. The cold war always seemed to be a humorless comedy of errors anyway...[But I]...find it disconcerting to read that within the space of several weeks the CIA has published two contradictory estimates of Saudi Arabia’s capacity to produce oil.

97. For discussion of media handling of the Cambodia issue, and the factual context, see Volume II, chapter 6.

98. See the discussion of East Timor in chapter 3, section 5.4.

99. See especially the discussion below of the press treatment of human rights issues in Indonesia, Thailand, and the numerous subfascist clients of the U.S. in Latin America in chapters 3 and 4. We turn to the media treatment of the Communist states in Volume II.

100. Terror and repression are real enough, but the terms, in Free World jargon, are typically used to include, for example, the suffering of those who are starving in regions where farming is next to impossible because draught animals have been killed by bombing, the land is littered with lethal unexploded ordnance and cratered by saturation bombing, and much of the labor force has been killed, injured or disabled by malnutrition and disease. Particularly in the case of Cambodia, the U.S. bombing from 1969, the U.S.-ARVN invasion of 1970, and the ferocious bombing of 1973, at a time when it was surely understood in Washington that the war in Cambodia was lost, have large-scale (and predicted) effects with regard to starvation, disease, and retribution killings. (See Volume II, chapter 6, for details.)

101. If they deviate ever so slightly, they face serious problems. To cite one example, consider Business Week’s report (30 August 1976) that the New York Times has “slid precipitously to the left and has become stridently antibusiness in tone, ignoring the fact that the Times itself is a business—and one with very serious problems” (the concept of the Times sliding to the left, precipitously or even perceptibly, is so ludicrous as to suggest that irony was intended until one realizes how remarkably skewed the general spectrum of opinion is in the United States as compared with other industrial democracies). One example of “the paper’s political swing to the left” was an editorial recommending an increase in taxes on business to help overcome the city’s financial problems. “‘Something like that,’ muses a Wall Street analyst, ‘could put the Times right out of business’.” How? An accompanying remark supplies part of the answer: “Following a Times series on medical incompetence,” a magazine run by the parent company “lost $500,000 in pharmaceutical advertising.” In short, the Times had better remember that it too is a business. On the impact of these warnings, see James Aronson, “The Times is a-changing,” In These Times, 2 March 1977. Such overt pressures to prevent even the most minuscule departure from right-wing orthodoxy are rare, because the necessity rarely arises; but the threat is ever-present. For similar rcasons, corporate managers need not be admonished that their role is to maximize profits.

102. Eric Barnouw, The Sponsor, Oxford, 1978, pp. 127, 119.

103. “Where are you Mr. Chairman,” Chief Executive Magazine, July-September 1977.

104. Barnouw describes the commercial failure of an NBC weekly on ecology, “In Which We Live,” launched in May 1970 to depict various environmental hazards. It was abruptly ended the following month, having failed to attract much advertising, although ecology was then a hot topic for shows and commercials. Barnouw comments: “Since their [commercials and companies] message was one of reassurance, they apparently did not regard an NBC documentary series focusing on problems as a suitable vehicle” (op. cit., p. 135).

105. See Edward J. Epstein, News From Nowhere, Random House, 1973, pp. 72-75.

106. See chapter 3, section 4.4.

107. Thus Anthony Lewis joins with William Buckley in deploring the nastiness of the Soviets, the need to bring pressure on them, the foolishness of Andrew Young in drawing comparisons to the United States, etc. Liberals who join the chorus of protest over the Shcharansky-Ginzburg trials do not, however, note how curious it is to focus such unique attention on the plight of Russian dissidents in a world where literally thousands are incarcerated, tortured, or assassinated without even the mockery of a trial in the U.S. client states. Comparisons of the Shcharansky trial with that of David Truong and Ronald Humphries have been sparse indeed considering the important similarities between them. Another similar case that was ignored—or worse—is that of Sami Esmail, a U.S. citizen who had the temerity to try to visit his dying father in Ramallah in the occupied West Bank. He was arrested by Israeli police and during “interrogation” produced a “confession” (under duress, he alleges). On the basis of this “confession,” he was sentenced to 15 months in prison just prior to the Shcharansky-Ginzburg trials that aroused such indignation in the U.S. The crime extracted from him by the Israeli interrogators was to have visited Libya and taken part in “terrorist training” and to have been a member of an Arab guerrilla organization. He was also charged with having worked with Palestinian groups in the United States. No act of any kind was alleged. The court president “said the sentence had to be sufficient to act as a deterrent in view of attempts by Palestinian organizations to recruit supporters on American campuses” (New York Times 13 June 1978). None of this arouses any protest in the U.S. mainstream, where all sorts of punitive actions are urged against the Soviets but not against the recipient of about half of total U.S. military aid. Rather, it elicits the kind of apologetics that one recalls from the worst days of Stalinism; cf. Monroe H. Freedman and Alan M. Dershowitz, New York Times (2 June 1978)—neatly timed to appear just before the conviction. Worse yet, New York Times editorialists conclude on the authority of these apologists that the trial was “eminently fair” (11 June 1978); and in a spirit of collegiality, the Washington Post reported on May 29 that the two law professors “witnessed the trial and thought it was fair,” sure proof, since they are “well-known for their civil libertarian views” (in fact, Dershowitz in particular is well-known for his scandalous and often libelous attacks on political prisoners in Israel and on Israeli civil libertarians, including quite outrageous falsehoods; but it is true that he is a civil libertarian on domestic issues, exactly as was true of his Stalinist counterparts). Not content with a “news report,” the Post also devoted an editorial to the conclusions of the two “civil libertarians” (5 June 1978), and another news story on June 8 referring to the Freedman-Dershowitz report, which was hailed by the Israeli press as well. The Post cites a Jerusalem Post editorial: “a fuller vindication of Israel’s system of justice...would be hard to imagine.”

The fact that Esmail “confessed” should come as no surprise. Observers have noted a remarkably high rate of confessions by Arab prisoners under interrogation. Asked to explain this curious fact, Israeli Supreme Court Justice Moshe Etzioni said in London: “The Arabs in any case—if they are arrested—do not take much time before they confess. It’s part of their nature” (Amnesty International Newsletter, September 1977). Nothing here to disturb well-known civil libertarians.

108. For some discussion of the propagandistic use of this gambit, see chapter 5, section 2. See also Edward S. Herman, Atrocities in Vietnam, Pilgrim, 1970, chapter 4; and Tran Van Dinh, “Fear of a Bloodbath,” New Republic, 6 December 1969.

109. For example, John P. Roche, a long-time liberal apologist for U.S. aggression in Indochina, now writes: “I only regret the government of the United States repudiated its objectives and created the present Asian Auschwitz in Indochina.” The “objectives” to which he is referring are explicitly those of 1967, i.e., to maintain U.S. control over South Vietnam (or in official translation: the “independence” of South Vietnam). Thus Roche is asserting that South Vietnam is an “Asian Auschwitz.” The facts are as relevant to this distinguished thinker, now acting dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy of Tufts University, as they have always been in the past.

The occasion for Roche’s remarks was the disclosure by Richard Dudman that Roche had connived with Lyndon Johnson in 1967 to organize an allegedly independent prestigious pro-war group, with the White House role hidden. This chicanery not only served their political purposes, but also allowed the acting dean of the School of Law and Diplomacy to defraud the government by obtaining some $200,000 in tax-deductible contributions on the pretense that the purpose of the group that was secretly organized and sponsored by the government was “to make inquiry into the nonpartisan fundamentals of American foreign policy and to conduct educational activities in connection therewith; and to promote and contribute to a broad-based, nonpartisan public debate about Vietnam and related matters”—which would, as secret documents disclose, include only people who “share the same fundamental [pro-war] outlook.” The White House lied outright about its role. Roche has no comment on any of this, except to say that the committee “was a first-rate outfit organized in a good cause,” namely, to prevent the Asian Auschwitz which has since been created by the United States in South Vietnam. Nation, 23 December 1978.

110. “Signing 100,000 Death Warrants,” Wall Street Journal (26 March 1975). Hosmer wrote that “one could expect a ‘bloodbath’ of very large proportions,” with hardly fewer than 100,000 executions and possibly many more if the Vietcong “fostered” the kind of grass roots violence characteristic of the North Vietnamese land reform. Stephen P. Hosmer, Viet Cong Repression and Its Implications for the Future (Rand), 1970, pp. 117, 122. The forecast was erroneous, as was the suggestion that the DRV “fostered” grass roots violence in the land reform period (see chapter 5, section 2.2). Grass roots violence was indeed fostered in Indonesia and Chile; it is interesting to see how often propagandists transfer to the enemy the uglier features of their own state.

111. Max Lerner, “Flaps and rights,” New York Post (4 February 1977).

112. For discussion of these matters see N. Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins, Pantheon, 1969; For Reasons of State, Pantheon, 1973; “Human Rights” and American Foreign Policy, Spokesman, 1978. During the late 1960s, under the impact of the peace movement and the student movement, ideological controls were somewhat relaxed, but as these pressures waned, they are being reinstituted, though not quite with the earlier effectiveness, since the consequences of the slightly greater openness of the intervening period are difficult to erase completely.

113. See Thomas C. Cochran, Business in American Life: a History, McGraw-Hill, 1972, especially chapter 19. Also see Alex Carey and Trudy Korber, Propaganda and Democracy in America, forthcoming. On the educational system, see Joel H. Spring, Education and the Rise of the Corporate State, Beacon, 1972.

3 Benign Terror

1. See chapter 1, note 53.

2. See chapter 5, sections 1.1, 2.1.

3. Fiscal Year 1970 AID Report to the Ambassador, p. 35.

4. New York Times (20 December 1967).

5. To use the classic language of Ithiel de Sola Pool on the requirements for the maintenance of order on a world-wide scale, in “The Public and the Polity,” (in Pool, ed.), Contemporary Political Science: Toward Empirical Theory, McGraw Hill, 1967, p. 26.

6. “Stability” is used almost invariably by U.S. officials in an Orwellian sense, synonymous with a set of economic and political arrangements satisfactory to U.S. imperial interests. Thus for the period 1949-69 Thailand represented “stability,” China a source of “instability”.

7. In the case of Brazil, for example, “A hard policy of domestic repression has a politicized national life making it practically impossible for the lower classes to become socially conscious of their plight or to organize for change.” Agostino Bono, “Unjolly Green Giant,” Commonweal, 2 February 1973. They need change desperately, however. See “Torture, murder, hunger in Brazil,” The Guardian (Manchester) (19 May 1973).

8. Walter Laqueur, Terrorism, Little, Brown, 1977, p. 7.

9. Ibid., pp. 183-84.

10. We rely here on the account by A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors, Pantheon, 1978, chapter 6. Quotes are from Langguth.

11. J. Bowyer Bell, “Terrorist scripts and live-action spectaculars,” Columbia Journalism Review, May-June 1978.

12. J. Anthony Lukas, Don’t Shoot—We Are Your Children!, Random House, 1971.

13. Apologetics for torture among the U.S. intelligentsia are, of course, already implicit in their support and cover-up for the torture regimes in the U.S. sphere of influence; we refer here to explicit justification for torture.

14. One might inquire into the question how the state that is so abjectly served by the New Republic has chosen to answer this question, in its own internal practice. Its Prime Minister is the former leader of a terrorist group that was responsible for a long series of atrocities: bombs in Arab market places, blowing up buildings, massacres by armed thugs in villages, etc. The Speaker of the Knesset was a commander of the group that assassinated UN Mediator Folke Bernadotte among other atrocities. The recently appointed Secretary-General of the Jewish Agency is a man who murdered several dozen Arab civilians under guard in an undefended Lebanese village during the land-clearing operations of October 1948—he was sentenced to 7 years in prison but quickly amnestied, then granted a second amnesty which “denies the punishment and the charge as well,” and later granted a lawyer’s license by the Israeli Legal Council on grounds that his act carried “no stigma.” Al-Hamishmar (3 March 1978).

15. Seth Kaplan, “Torture Tempest,” New Republic, 23 July 1977. On the London Sunday Times report, see chapter 2, note 15; see also chapter 2, note 107.

16. There are exceptions. For the early stages, see particularly Yehoshua Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement: 1929-1939, Frank Cass, 1977, the second volume of an outstanding study by an Israeli scholar that discusses the sources of the 1936-39 rebellion, largely involving poorer sectors in regions of heavy Jewish colonization, after all other measures for redress of grievances had failed. See also David Hirst, The Gun and the Olive Branch, Harcourt, Barce, Jovanovich, 1977; Kenneth Love, Suez: The Twice-Fought War, McGraw-Hill, 1969.

17. “The Argentine situation concerning human rights,” September 1978.

18. Jeffrey A. Tannenbaum, “The Terrorists: For World’s Alienated, Violence Often Reaps Political Recognition,” Wall Street Journal (4 January 1977).

19. See “Rightist Terror Stirs Argentina,” 29 August 1976, and “Argentina’s Terror: Army Is Ahead,” 2 January 1977. (See also chapter 4, section 5.)

20. T.D. Allman, Far Eastern Economic Review, 7 May 1970.

21. Charles Meyer, Derriére le souirire Khmer, Plon, 1971, p. 405. Meyer, a long-time French resident of Cambodia and advisor to Sihanouk, remained for a time after the March 1970 coup. His book was never published in the United States, nor was it reviewed, in striking contrast to the treatment of French studies of Cambodian atrocities. (See Volume II, chapter 6.)

22. The 1969 bombings were kept “secret” in the United States until mid-1973 in part through the complicity of the press. (See Volume II, chapter 6.) But they were known, at least to a degree. Cf. Chomsky, At War with Asia, Pantheon, 1970, pp. 122-23.

23. Nixon Press Conference, 12 November 1971, New York Times (13 November 1971).

24. See Volume II, chapter 6.

25. Ibid.

26. The “aggression from the North” thesis of the Johnson administration, for example, was devastated quickly by analyses of the White Paper of 1965, two of the best being I.F. Stone, “A Reply to the White Paper,” I.F. Stone’s Weekly (8 March 1965), and the editors of The New Republic, “White Paper on Vietnam” (13 March 1965). None of these made a dent on the typical editorial, news article, column, or presentation of Administration handouts, however. Even after the Pentagon Papers release, which vindicated the hardest of hard-line dove analyses of aggression (locating it firmly in Washington, D.C.), the mythical truth held firm. (See chapter 5; and also Volume II, chapter 1.)

27. The Hue massacre, which was subject to early and effective challenge as a propaganda fabrication, was almost uniformly portrayed in the mass media as firmly established truth. The better papers would occasionally allow critics of the myth a few paragraphs of space for rebuttal, but on pages reserved for opinion. The government-approved version, in contrast, was presented on pages devoted to “news,” i.e., “fact.” (See chapter 5, section 2.3.)

28. Sidney Hook, “The Knight of the Double Standard,” The Humanist (January 1971).

29. In reviewing the impact of the war, Wendell S. Merrick and James N. Wallace concede that “a great many Vietnamese suffered terribly,” but note judiciously that “these effects of war would have occurred with or without Americans being here.” U.S. News and World Report (2 April 1973).

30. William F. Buckley, Jr. Boston Globe (23 April 1973).

31. See Vietnam Veterans Against the War, eds., Winter Soldier Investigation, Beacon Press, 1972; The Dellums Committee Hearing on War Crimes in Vietnam, Vintage, 1972; James S. Kunen, Standard Operating Procedure, Avon, 1971; D. Thorne and G. Butler, eds., The New Soldier, Collier, 1971; James Duffett, ed., Against the Crime of Silence, Proceedings of the Russell International War Crimes Tribunal, O’Hare Books, 1968.

32. Far Eastern Economic Review, 26 March 1973. On torture in the Saigon prisons, see Holmes Brown and Don Luce, Hostages of War, Indochina Mobile Education Project, 1973. (See chapter 5, section 1.)

33. New York Times editorial (8 April 1973). The New York Times meanwhile blandly reported U.S. violations of the Geneva Conventions without notice or comment. (See chapter 1, note 85.)

34. On the interesting concept of “internal aggression,” which refers to activities by local forces against governments placed in power by the United States and its allies, see Noam Chomsky, For Reasons of State, Pantheon, 1973, pp. 114ff.

35. Quoted in Jan K. Black, United States Penetration of Brazil, University of Pennsylvania, 1977, p. 143.

36. Frederick Nunn, “Military Professionalism and Professional Militarism in Brazil, 1870-1970,” Journal of Latin American Studies, vol. 4, n. 1 (1972), quoted in Black, op. cit., p. 194. On this issue, see further Black, pp. 179-199.

37. “The Marginalization of A People, The Cry of the Churches,” signed by Six Brazilian Church Bishops and Archbishops, 6 May 1973. IDOC, International Documentation, no. 65, p. 59.

38. Bishop Dom Pedro Casaldaliga, “The Gospel Is My Weapon,” 12 October 1975, Latin America Press (6 November 1975).

39. “I Have Heard the Cry of my People,” a statement signed by 18 Catholic religious leaders of Northeast Brazil, 6 May 1973, IDOC translation and reprint, p. 43.

40. E. Bradford Burns, “Brazil: The Imitative Society,” The Nation, 10 July 1972, quoted in Black, op. cit., p. 261.

41. Konrad Kellen, “1971 and Beyond: The View From Hanoi,” Rand Corporation (June 1971), pp. 14-15.

42. The flavor of “our” South Vietnam may be captured, however, in the finding by one former AID employee: “I have personally witnessed poor urban people literally quaking with fear when I questioned them about the activity of the secret police in a post election campaign. One poor fisherman in Da Nang, animated and talkative in complaining about economic conditions, clammed up in near terror when queried about the police....” Theodore Jacqueney, Hearings before Subcommittee of House Committee on Government Operations, U.S. Assistance Programs in Vietnam (July-August 1971), p. 251.

43. Cf. For Reasons of State, p. 96.

44. Bernard Fall, Street Without Joy, Stackpole, 1967, p. 373. Fall is often regarded as an opponent of the U.S. intervention in Vietnam. This is inaccurate. He was a bitter anti-Communist and a strong supporter of the goals of the U.S. intervention, though he was later to be appalled at the methods used, and feared that Vietnam would not survive this terroristic onslaught. The simple answer he gives in the text fails to come to grips with why the West systematically gravitated to regimes without popular support.

45. John P. Lewis, New York Times, Op-Ed, (9 December 1971).

46. New York Times (9 January 1972).

47. On this matter see the illuminating analysis by Eqbal Ahmad, “Notes on South Asia in Crisis,” Bulletin of the Concerned Asian Scholars (1972), vol. 4, no. 1.

48. “Purely internal” is also used by U.S. officials in an Orwellian sense, meaning not so threatening to our perceived interests as to demand intervention. Thus the Pakistan instance, or the case of Thailand where “the general tendency of most Americans [sic] was to declare that the ruthless suppression of political opposition by the military leaders [who, as we will see, were a product and on the payroll of the U.S.] was a purely internal affair.” Frank C. Darling, Thailand and the United States, Public Affairs Press, 1965, p. 129; for some years Darling was a CIA analyst specializing in Southeast Asia, Thailand in particular. In contrast, the NLF’s “aggression” in South Vietnam was clearly an “external affair”.

49. New York Times (9 January 1972).

50. The quotation, from a government official who followed internal cable reports from Burundi, is taken from Michael Bowen, Gary Freedman, Kay Miller and Roger Morris, Passing By, The United States and Genocide in Burundi, 1972, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (undated), p. 5. This document is referred to hereafter as Passing By. The Hutu constituted 85 percent of the population of Burundi, but have been ruled by the fourteen percent Tutsi minority since the 16th century.

51. Quoted from Passing By, p. 6.

52. On 14 July 1973 the New York Times brought up the subject again in a front page article by Charles Mohr entitled “Exiles Keeping Strife in Burundi Alive.” As suggested by the title itself, the article starts out with, and features heavily, the subversive activities of “militant Hutu refugees” allegedly trying to overthrow “the predominantly Tutsi Government.” A “major factor” in the Burundi tragedy is the “passionately militant Hutu students in exile,” who have disturbed the “relative quiet in recent days after a serious out-break of incidents [sic] in mid-May in which, it is said, thousands of Hutus were slain.” Later in the article Mohr discussed further the number of Hutus killed, but finds the matter inconclusive (Tutsis were killed also), and passes on quickly to the disruptive behavior of the Hutu students and refugees. According to the Carnegie study the Burundi government itself admitted to 80,000 casualties, and “the State Department had authoritative intelligence that the death toll in Burundi was two to three times that number.” Op. cit., p. 22.

53. See the 23 June 1972 hearings on the confirmation of Robert L. Yost, excerpted in Passing By, pp. 35-37.

54. Ibid., p. 27.

55. Ibid., pp. 13-17.

56. Ibid., pp. 17-19, 31-33.

57. Ibid., p. 24.

58. Ibid., p. 26.

59. In Richard Arens, ed., Genocide in Paraguay, Temple University Press, 1976. Unless otherwise indicated, references below (through note 67) are to articles in this collection.

60. The leading Paraguayan specialist on the Indians, Professor Miguel Chase Sardi, who had worked courageously to defend them and make their plight known, was imprisoned in December 1975, terminating the Indian aid project that he had headed. He and others arrested were tortured. Asked if the U.S. government could call a halt to the torture, the State Department responded that no steps could be taken.

61. The term “Guayaki,” meaning something like “rabid rat,” is used as a term of racist contempt for the Aché. See Mark Münzel’s article in the Arens collection. The reservation to which the Aché have been driven to die is called the “National Guayaki Colony.” It is, Wolf comments, not really a reservation or even a prison, but “an extermination camp.”

62. Richard Arens, “Death Camps in Paraguay,” Inquiry, 2 January 1978. This article was based on a personal visit to Paraguay by Arens in August and September 1977.

63. This Director of Indian Affairs was subsequently identified in eye-witness affidavits filed by Arens for the Aché in the UN as trafficking in female slaves—but although Arens addressed a UN Subcommittee on this subject on behalf of the British Anti-Slavery Society, the only media interest in the matter was in Western Europe.

64. Even an offer by Arens to underwrite the hospital costs of one dying child with a widespread cancer that had been ignored by reservation officials for 18 months could not prevent the child’s removal from the hospital within a few days by the reservation authorities. See “Death Camps in Paraguay.”

65. Ibid.

66. Ibid.

67. The curious role of the International League for Human Rights also deserves some comment. Though quite willing to organize press conferences on human rights violations attributed to enemies of the United States (e.g., Vietnam), the League has refused to do so in the case of the Paraguayan Indians. Richard Arens, a member of the League’s board of directors, has exerted strenuous but vain efforts to induce the League to overcome its reticence in this regard. The League ignored the condemnation of Paraguay for the mistreatment and enslavement of the Indians by the Inter-American Commission for Human Rights in June 1977, and while under Arens’s prodding it requested and obtained a place on the UN agenda for consideration of abuse of the Indians, no publicity was given this development. Had the League pressed the issue prior to the last Congressional appropriations bill, Paraguay might have been deprived of aid. The State Department, however, supported the Paraguayan appropriations and in fact used League documents in support of its position. (We are indebted to Richard Arens for this information.) League press conferences on Vietnam also comport well with U.S. policy. It is perhaps non-coincidental that the State Department is usually represented at meetings of the board of the League and that its former Executive-Director, Roberta Cohen, is now an employee of the State Department.

The relations of the League to U.S. government policy deserve a closer study, in our view. It is striking, for example, to compare the way in which the League treats evidence concerning alleged repression and atrocities in Vietnam or Russia and statements by officials of these enemy regimes, with its treatment of the prime recipient of U.S. aid, Israel. For a detailed commentary on the latter topic, see “Noam Chomsky on International League for Human Rights: And Israeli Human Rights Violations,” Palestine Human Rights Bulletin, no. 2, pp. 1-5, 30 August 1977. To cite only one instance, the International League disaffiliated its Israeli branch when the Israeli government attempted to take it over in an effort so clumsy that it was blocked by an Israeli Court that expressed extraordinary hostility to the Israeli affiliate. Despite repeated appeals, the League has refused to reverse this action, which is on a par with disaffiliation of a Russian branch on the sole grounds that it comes under state attack.

68. Amnesty International Report on Torture, 1974, p. 216.

69. Human Rights Reports, prepared by The Department of State, submitted to the Subcommittee on Foreign Assistance of the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, March 1977, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1977; Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, Report submitted to the Committee on International Relations, U.S. House of Representatives and Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, by The Department of State, 3 February 1978, Government Printing Office, 1978.

70. Robert J. Smith and Bartomeu Melia,” Genocide of Aché-Guayaki?,” Survival International Supplement, June 1978, p. 12.

71. Arens in his discussions with U.S. embassy personnel in Asuncion came away with the clear impression that the embassy staff saw Stroessner as a vital element of stability in South America and that there had been no change from the policies of past administrations in supporting Stroessner as a “friend”.

72. Penny Lernoux, “Apartheid Sails West: White Africans in Latin America,” Nation, 23 September 1978.

73. While these charges are common in Latin America, we know of no evidence to support them. The real problems are much deeper, relating to the missionary role, conscious or inadvertent, in preparing the ground for the kind of “assimilation” of the Indians that often leads to destructive or even genocidal consequences. See Christian Mission for the Empire, NACLA, December 1973, for discussion; and Søren Hvalkof and Peter Aaby, eds. God is an American: The Work of the Summer Institute of Linguistics, in preparation, for extensive study of this topic.

In an interview in the cited NACLA study, Doug Hostetter, formerly a Mennonite missionary in Vietnam, notes CIA efforts to use Wycliffe (SIL) missionaries, which were rebuffed, though he reports that missionaries often intentionally or casually gave information to the CIA (“An Insider’s Story: Religious Agencies in Vietnam”). See Volume II, chapter 4 for some comment on the role of the church in Indochina.

74. See chapter 4, section 5. From the earliest stages of colonization, religion has served as a cloak for pillage, torture and massacre. See Hans Koning, Columbus: His Enterprise, Monthly Review Press, 1976.

75. Cited from Translation, October-December 1971, in Laurie Hart, “Story of the Wycliffe Translators: Pacifying the Last Frontiers,” in Christian Mission for the Empire.

76. Washington Post (12 September 1978). Kraft is thinking specifically of Iran, where so far the “supersleuths” whose dangerous influence so worries Kraft have not prevented the country from virtually sinking into the sea under the weight of U.S. armaments, and where the application of “human rights principles” could not be discerned with an electron microscope. But it is never too early to issue a warning, reaffirmed, the same day, by the Post editorial.

77. Shelton H. Davis, Victims of the Miracle, Cambridge University Press, 1977, p. xi. Davis is an anthropologist who has taught in Brazil and done ethnographic work elsewhere in Latin America, and was a founder of the documentation and information center INDIGENA which is concerned with native Americans.

78. One might add that attempts to seek protection for victims of torture evoke similar consequences—for the fortunate, trials rather than death squads. As we write, trials are beginning before a military court for nine civilians accused “of leaking information in 1969 on torture in Brazilian prisons.” The information merits nine lines in the Boston Globe (1 October 1978). The Shcharansky-Ginzburg trials in the USSR, in contrast, were a major international incident only a few months earlier. (See chapter 1, section 9.)

79. Pp. 156-57, cited by Davis from the Los Angeles Times (5 April 1973).

80. For background, see Helen Hill, The Timor Story, Timor Information Service, 183 Gertrude Street, Fitzroy, Vic., 3065, Australia, second edition, undated, running through 1975. The story is carried forward in James S. Dunn, East Timor—from Portuguese Colonialism to Indonesian Incorporation, Parliament of Australia, the Parliamentary Library, Legislative Research Service, 14 September 1977; henceforth: Dunn Report. There is an illuminating study concentrating primarily on the crucial period before the Indonesian invasion by Jill Jolliffe: East Timor: Nationalism and Colonialism, University of Queensland Press (Australia), 1978; Prentice-Hall. Jolliffe was one of the few Western journalists in East Timor from September 1975 until December 2, when Australians were evacuated because of the impending Indonesian invasion. See also Richard W. Franke, East Timor: The Hidden War, East Timor Defense Committee, P.O. Box 251, Old Chelsea Station, New York, N.Y. 10010, second edition, December 1976; and Decolonization, publication of the United Nations Department of Political Affairs, Trusteeship and Decolonization, No. 7, August 1976, Issue on East Timor. For a rare if not unique review in the U.S. media, see Arnold S. Kohen, “Human Rights in Indonesia,” Nation, 26 November 1977. See also Indonesian Intervention in East Timor: A Chronology, updated edition, 10 April 1977, East Timor Information and Research Project and Cornell East Timor Association, 410 Stewart Ave., Ithaca, N.Y. 14850. Important information and documents also appear in Marcel Roger, Timor Oriental, L’Harmattan, Paris, 1977.

See also the hearings of the Fraser subcommittee: Human Rights in East Timor and the Question of the Use of U.S. Equipment by the Indonesian Armed Forces, 23 March 1977—henceforth, March Hearings; Human Rights in East Timor, 28 June and 19 July 1977—henceforth, June-July Hearings; U.S. Policy on Human Rights and Military Assistance: Overview and Indonesia, 15 February, 1978—henceforth, February 1978 Hearings. These were hearings before the Subcommittee on International Organizations of the Committee on International Relations, chaired by Rep. Donald M. Fraser, whose record throughout was consistently honorable, in marked contrast to most of his colleagues.

We are very much indebted to Kohen, Franke, Sue Nichterlein, Richard Tanter, and the information groups in the U.S. and Australia for access to material on East Timor. Their dedicated and futile efforts merely highlight the complicity of the media in the West, specifically the United States, in ongoing atrocities.

81. Shepard Forman, Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan, who lived with mountain people in Timor in 1973-74, June-July Hearings, p. 15.

82. Ibid., pp. 18f. Corroborative testimony appears in the same hearings from Elizabeth Traube, professor at Wesleyan University, who spent 2 years in other mountain areas of East Timor from 1972 to 1974.

83. Ibid., p. 30.

84. Decolonization, p. 9, citing “observers” and UN and Australian studies. Much the same is reported quite generally. See the sources cited in note 80.

85. Robin Osborne, Australian, 26 February 1975, cited by Jolliffe, p. 90.

86. Decolonization, p. 10. Dunn notes that most of the FRETILIN leaders “remained devout practising Catholics”; he refers to the party as “populist Catholic” (March Hearings, p. 27). He also points out that “from the outset they were at pains to dissociate the party from communist ideology and movements” (Dunn Report, p. 26), a point stressed by all informed observers, relevant here only because of Indonesian claims to the contrary, commonly repeated in the U.S. press, as we will see.

87. Decolonization, p. II. Again, this judgment seems unanimous apart from Indonesian propaganda.

88. Apologists have pointed out that collaboration with the Japanese was not untypical among Third World nationalists, but this claim, while accurate, is irrelevant here, given the Timorese resistance to the Japanese conquest and the massive Japanese atrocities. It is quite appropriate to describe Araújo as a collaborator in Japanese war crimes.

89. The Deputy Governor of this “Provisional Government,” his immediate subordinate, was Lopes da Cruz, “the only UDT leader regarded as reliable by the Indonesians,” who had in fact been placed under house arrest by other UDT leaders “for his virulently pro-Indonesian views” in August 1975 (Jolliffe, p. 272). He was later to be cited as an authority by the New York Times. (See pp. 191-92.)

90. Decolonization, p. 19. Dunn, who headed the Australian team, gives slightly lower estimates.

91. Quoted by Hill, op. cit., p. II, from an Australian TV interview with the pilot.

92. There is no reference to the fact that the only doctor had been forced to leave by the Portuguese at gunpoint, so FRETILIN sources claim, according to Stone.

93. Here is another example of New York Times editing. In his original story, Stone describes both the UDT and FRETILIN. “Where the UDT appears to draw its support from the better-educated and more comfortably situated classes, Fretilin has consistently sought its ideology and symbols from the people.” The New York Times edits as follows: the UDT “appears to draw support from the better-educated and more well-to-do people in the Portuguese territory.” The reference to FRETILIN is deleted, and of course the New York Times spares its readers the obscene word “classes”.

94. On the nature and character of these programs, which were bringing “a number of important changes in the patterns of village life,” see Jolliffe, pp. 100f. She suggests that FRETILIN was coming to identify itself as a “black nationalist movement” at this time (p. 116), and that it was much influenced by developments in Portuguese Africa.

95. New York Times (12 August 1975).

96. Ibid. Indonesian aspirations were widely recognized. A London Times editorial (4 November 1975) noted that “The Indonesians expect Timor to fall into their lap” and predicted that if FRETILIN declared independence and the Portuguese accept it then the Indonesians “would probably mount their own liberation movement.” Months earlier, the Economist had reported that “General Suharto and his advisers are reported to be seriously considering a military takeover of Portuguese Timor,” expecting that “Indonesia would not be seriously affected by any international odium that might follow” (15 March 1975)—an apt assessment of Western commitment to freedom and self-determination. In the United States, the Christian Science Monitor carried a report on 24 April 1975 (“Indonesia eyes Portuguese colony”) commenting that if a FRETILIN government were to be established “then some observers expect the Indonesians to waste little time in launching a military assault on the Portuguese colony.” There was no lack of similar predictions, which places the pretense of ignorance on the part of U.S. officials in an interesting light.

97. February 1978 Hearings, p. 78. Anderson is a specialist on Indonesia and Southeast Asia at Cornell University. Some speculate that elements in the Portuguese administration may also have had a hand in the coup. See Forman’s speculation in his Congressional testimony (July Hearings, p. 19) that the UDT coup was “hatched within the whitewashed walls of the colonial administration itself.”

98. Dunn Report, pp. 65-66. Dunn had been Australian consul in Portuguese Timor in 1962-64.

99. This was also noted by Stone, op. cit., who remarks that one of the prisoners who was beaten was a FRETILIN prisoner.

100. Cited from the Security Council record (S/ PV. 1909) in Decolonization, p. 24.

101. The letter is reproduced in Jolliffe, p. 66; Roger, p. 27.

102. Dunn Report, pp. 37-38.

103. Ibid., pp. 72ff. One of the Timorese who participated in the attack, Jose Martins (President of the right-wing KOTA party), later reported that about 1200 Indonesian troops (six companies) were involved in the attack, supported by tanks. Jolliffe, p. 284.

104. Their reports, and also reports in Le Monde, 30 November-1 December, and the Economist, 6 December, are cited in Decolonization, p. 28. We return to the U.S. press directly.

105. Jolliffe, pp. 177, 186, 201ff. See also Dunn Report.

106. Melbourne Age, 26 November 1975.

107. Jolliffe, pp. 226-27. A detailed report on the pre-invasion period by David Scott of the Australian aid mission appears in Sue Nichterlein, “The struggle for East Timor: 1976,” unpublished ms., 1 June 1977.

108. June-July Hearings, p. 37.

109. Tempo, 8 July 1978. Reprinted in Tapol, November 1978. Tapol is the journal of the U.S. Campaign for the Release of Indonesian Political Prisoners, P.O. Box 609, Montclair, N.J. 07042.

110. On Australian intelligence information, see Christopher Sweeney, Manchester Guardian, (10 January 1978) reporting from Sydney. On the Australian government cover-up, see Andrew Clark, National Times (Australia) (5-10 January 1976).

111. Bruce Juddery, Canberra Times (31 May 1976). An accompanying report states that “from late 1974 the Government, or at least the then Prime Minister, Mr Whitlam, was being given reports of Indonesian operations intended to result in the incorporation of East Timor.”

112. See Lee Lescaze, “U.S. Stopped Aid to Indonesia in ’75 Over E. Timor Repression,” Washington Post (18 March 1977); Reuters, “U.S. Briefly Halted Aid to Jakarta Because of Takeover of East Timor,” New York Times (18 March 1977). Both of the cited headlines are false.

113. February 1978 Hearings, p. 36-37. We omit Anderson’s footnote references documenting these statements.

114. Ibid., p. 59. The facts were reported by Lenny Siegel, “U.S. officials deny deception on aid,” In These Times (26 April-2 May 1978). The mainstream press seems to have shown no interest in the matter.

115. February 1978 Hearings, pp. 60-61.

116. Jacqui Chagnon, “East Timor and the Congress,” Tapol, 15 April 1977. Chagnon was a member of the Human Rights office of Clergy and Laity Concerned.

117. At that early point in the Indonesian aggression the Times did not yet quite have its signals straight. Thus, on 28 December 1975, it published a Reuters dispatch from Darwin, Australia, reporting correctly that FRETILIN had “abandoned the territory’s capital, Dili, to invading Indonesian troops on December 7,” along with an AFP dispatch from Jakarta citing an official Indonesian press agency report “that pro-Indonesian forces had advanced to a line 12 miles south of Dili.” The “pro-Indonesian forces” were, of course, the Indonesian army. If they had advanced 12 miles from the capital by December 27, when this dispatch was filed from Jakarta, they plainly had not seized the entire territory on December 7 as the Times had been claiming. The Reuters dispatch cited a radio message from FRETILIN stating, according to the Times, that “About 15,000 Indonesian-supported troops are advancing in eastern Timor on mountain strongholds” of FRETILIN. It is highly unlikely that this radio message referred to “Indonesian-supported troops” and no one with the vaguest familiarity with the situation believes that there were 15,000 such troops. No doubt the radio message referred to 15,000 Indonesian troops and the Times did a bit of re-editing, in its customary way.

According to Australian intelligence sources, the Indonesians landed an additional 15,000-20,000 troops on Christmas Day, 25 December 1975. See Jolliffe, p. 268.

118. State Department spokesman Robert B. Oakley at the March Hearings, p. 16, one of many statements to this effect before and since.

119. The Indonesian government, not surprisingly, agrees with its U.S. sponsor. The Fourth committee of the UN General Assembly agreed to hear testimony from one of the authors in November 1978 on Indonesian aggression and the services rendered it by the U.S. government and press, over the opposition of the representative of Indonesia, who said “it would serve no useful purpose.” United Nations Press Release, GA/T/2269, 30 November 1978, referring to the decision to grant a hearing to N. Chomsky (document A/C.4/33/7 Add. 3). See also Inquiry, January 1979.

120. John Hamilton, “Timor toll not the issue: US,” Melbourne Herald (7 April 1977).

121. On the terms under which Indonesia is willing to accept such assistance, see p. 224-25.

122. Michael Leifer, “Indonesia and the incorporation of East Timor,” The World Today, September 1976.

123. New York Times, “Strife-Torn Timor, Short of Food, Asks World Help,” special to the Times (15 September 1975).

124. Andelman, “Jakarta Strives to Keep Foreign Aid; More U.S. Arms and Other Help Due,” Jakarta, New York Times (26 November 1975).

125. November 9, our emphasis. There was in fact no civil war raging, contrary to Indonesian propaganda and its New York outlet. The statement about the five foreigners is also false. The bodies of the five journalists had been identified in propaganda broadcasts of the Indonesian collaborators as “Australian communists” by late October; cf. Jolliffe, p. 234f. (See note 157, this chapter.)

126. On the selectivity of Western humanitarianism in this regard, see Volume II, chapter 3.

127. Letter, Far Eastern Economic Review, 11 November 1977. On the floor of Congress, Burke has explained that “virulent Marxism” was spreading through East Timor in 1974 in a local struggle “in which inevitably the Government of Indonesia had to involve itself. However, by the time matters were put to rights by the Indonesians and their supporters in East Timor the situation had become a catspaw of Communist conspiracy, designed to embarrass and weaken the Government of Indonesia, erode the necessary and peaceful ties between Indonesia and Australia, and finally, to embarrass the current conservative government in Australia.” The House of Representatives itself “has been involved” in this deplorable attempt by “elevating the relatively insignificant question of East Timor to an attention it does not altogether deserve”; “by having hearings and suggesting the legitimacy of an independent East Timor, the remnants of the Fretilin forces are encouraged to continue killing other Timorese and Indonesians,” as resistance forces in France were encouraged to continue killing other Frenchmen and Germans by allied propaganda during World War II. Congressional Record-House, 20 July 1977.

128. June-July Hearings, p. 7. The visit by Meyner and Rep. William F. Goodling elicited some acid comment in the Australian press. Noel Hawken offered Rep. Meyner his “Simple-minded Soul Award for 1977” for her report of the “welcoming crowds” and general tranquillity. Noel Hawken, “Smile, Helen, you’re on credulity camera,” Melbourne Herald (27 April 1977). As for her colleague, Hawken reports that his views, “as he returned to Jakarta, were diamond clear. The Indonesian take-over was the best thing and should have been carried out three months earlier.” Hawken is presumably referring to Goodling’s statement quoted in the Indonesian press: “I deeply regret that Indonesia did not act three months earlier. Such a step would have prevented much of the bloodshed.” Canberra Times (14 April 1977). See the report of Goodling’s statements from Jakarta in the Melbourne Age (14 April 1977). Elizabeth Traube also dismisses the local response to the congressional delegation, noting that such “obligatory throngs of welcomers” were also customarily convened by the Portuguese authorities and regarded as “necessary nuisances” by the populations (June-July Hearings, pp. 22-23).

Hawken concludes that because of Australian complicity, we can never again “honestly speak up as a ‘freedom-loving nation’, dedicated to the freedom of other peoples”—a statement that is applicable with far greater force to the United States, where it has yet to be voiced in the press.

129. June-July Hearings, p. 62.

130. March Hearings, p. 1.

131. June-July Hearings, p. 72. The response by the State Department representative is an incoherent evasion that defies summary and would be pointless to quote.

132. June-July Hearings, p. 59.

133. Cited by Franke, op. cit., p. 42, from Foreign Assistance Act of 1968, Hearings, House Foreign Affairs Committee, p. 706.

134. June-July Hearings, p. 61. The reference to “the fighting that was going on” is disingenuous. There was fighting, because the Indonesian army was carrying out clandestine military actions against East Timor, the civil war having ended in September. Referring to allegations of loss of life in a wave of violence “from August to December, prior to Indonesian intervention” (Richard Holbrooke, Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, March Hearings, p. 6), Dunn remarks that the official was “seemingly ignorant of the fact that there was no fighting between the Timorese from mid-September onwards” (Dunn Report, p. 129). Holbrooke also seemed unaware of Indonesian military intervention from September, 1975.

135. As already noted, Australian intelligence was well aware of the impending invasion, and the press had been reporting its likelihood for some time. The Washington Post ran a story on 30 November 1975 stating that “Indonesia is preparing to intervene militarily to overturn yesterday’s declaration of independence by a leftist nationalist group in Portuguese East Timor, a high government official said today” (John Saar, “Jakarta Set to Use Force to Overturn Timor Independence,” citing Gen. Ali Murtopo, deputy chief of Indonesia’s intelligence agency and a senior adviser to President Suharto). The New York Times reported on December 5 that Foreign Minister Malik told pro-Indonesian Timorese “that the situation had gone beyond diplomacy and could be resolved only on the battlefield” (David Andelman, “President Ford’s Stop Today: Indonesia, one of Asia’s Richest Yet Poorest Countries”). Andelman reports that Malik’s statement “puzzled American officials” because of its “stridency” and timing, just before President Ford’s visit. Normal diplomacy would require cooperating in the pretense that the United States does not know about such things, the regular stance of government witnesses in the Congressional Hearings.

136. March Hearings, pp. 5, 10.

137. UPI, Lisbon, “Indonesia seizes E. Timor city,” Boston Globe (8 December 1975). Note that this report, from Lisbon, states accurately that Indonesia captured Dili, not East Timor, as the New York Times falsely reported. The report is primarily devoted to Portugal’s breaking diplomatic relations with Indonesia.

138. Los Angeles Times (7 December 1975). See also Christian Science Monitor (28 January 1976). The Ford and Kissinger reactions appear to have been effectively suppressed in the media, apart from these references.

139. Laurie Oakes, Melbourne Sun (1 May 1976). See also the Dunn Report, p. 44.

140. Ross Waby, Australian (22 January 1976) reporting from New York.

141. Most of the relevant UN Documents are cited in Decolonization. The text of the December 1976 resolution appears in the Dunn Report, Appendix IV.

142. The text of the cablegram appears in the New York Times (28 January 1976).

143. June-July Hearings, p. 57.

144. Paul Hofmann, “U.N. Calls on Indonesia to Leave Eastern Timor,” 23 April 1976.

145. Frederic A. Moritz, Christian Science Monitor (8 December 1977).

146. Cf. Jolliffe, pp. 267, 276.

147. Offered as a “rough guess” by Robert Oakley, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, March Hearings, p. 8; the context suggests that Oakley may also be including Indonesian casualties, which he states, “certainly were fairly heavy,” in this total. On the demoralizing effect of the war for the Indonesian invaders, see Jolliffe, p. 300. Oakley also claims that most of the violence ended in March 1976.

148. On the ridiculous character of the Timorese “ratification” of integration, see Forman, op. cit., pp. 12f.; Jolliffe, p. 289. Forman adds that “the Indonesians have largely ignored world opinion on the East Timor matter to date because of our government’s acquiescence” (p. 35). See also Dunn Report, p. 104; Decolonization, pp. 37-38.

149. Allen S. Nanes, Specialist in U.S. Foreign Policy, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, entitled “The U.S. Position on Recognizing Forced Annexation of Territory,” 1 June 1977; Appendix to June-July Hearings. Morocco’s King Hassan was in Washington in mid-November 1978 to request an additional $100 million worth of U.S. counterinsurgency equipment to fight the Polisario guerrillas, who at the same time were cooling their heels at the United Nations, hoping to testify on Moroccan aggression in the former Spanish Sahara (not that one would know this from the U.S. mass media). As we write, the Carter administration is deliberating, unwilling to alienate Algeria, with which the United States had trade relations amounting to over $3.5 billion in the preceding year. Meanwhile, “Northrop Corp., the giant military contractor, is plunging ahead with plans to develop a $200 million electronic surveillance network to help Morocco pinpoint Polisario guerrillas in the Western Sahara. Three of the U.S. experts devising this system are retired Air Force generals who developed a massive sensor network in Vietnam.” Internews International Bulletin (P.O. Box 4400, Berkeley, California 94704), 20 November 1978.

150. June-July Hearings, p. 53.

151. Ibid., pp. 61-62. Australia’s conservative government has similar scruples—with regard to the Baltic states. David A. Andelman reports from Canberra that the Fraser government “is reported preparing to inform Moscow that Australia does not recognize the incorporation of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania into the Soviet Union.” New York Times (18 December 1975). The same government, however, has given de facto recognition to Indonesian aggression in East Timor and has also sought to lend its assistance, e.g., by blocking FRETILIN communications to the outside world through Darwin.

152. But not total silence. The Washington Post commented editorially on “The Indonesian annexation of East Timor,” describing it as “a depressing example of international double standards.” The editorial observed almost correctly that Indonesian intervention began in October 1975 followed by the December invasion, “backed up by the sort of military paraphernalia the US used to employ in Vietnam.” It also noted the “sickening reports of thousands of civilians dying in massacres” as “the whole episode has been treated as fait accompli” and pointed out that “the need to keep about 20,000 troops to fight considerably smaller guerrilla forces gives the lie to this propaganda” that the “forcible act of integration” is “an act of free choice.” “Integration without choice,” editorial, Washington Post (23 May 1976) on the occasion of the announcement by the head of the Indonesian client regime that full integration would take place shortly.

153. March Hearings, pp. 19f.

154. February 1978 Hearings, pp. 39-40.

155. Ibid., p. 73, our emphasis.

156. “Australia’s Rift with Indonesians over Timor Troubles U.S.,” 2 May 1976.

157. On the killing of the five journalists, see Jolliffe, pp. 234f. and 283f. The evidence appears persuasive that they were killed by the Indonesian forces, and then identified as “communists.” See also Dunn Report, p. 77f. Also Dunn’s testimony in the March Hearings. See also Hill, op. cit. Martin’s account was covered in the Australian press; see Graeme Beaton, “Timor deaths ‘hidden’,” Australian (29 April 1976) reporting from New York. Beaton reports that Martins, official spokesman on Timor affairs for the Indonesian government until his defection, arrived in Balibó two hours after the Australians were killed and conducted an on-the-spot investigation which, he claims, provides documentary evidence that the Australians were killed “in cold blood” and that Indonesian reports were a “cover-up.” Martins alleged that he was required to sign fabricated reports almost under threat of death. See Jolliffe, pp. 283f., for further details. Two U.S. representatives of the American Friends Service Committee, Russell and Irene Johnson, were informed by reliable sources in Jakarta that the journalists were killed by Indonesian commandos dispatched for the purpose.

158. The reference to “a very Asian answer” is typical of Western journalistic racism.

159. Dunn, March Hearings, pp. 26ff.

160. Their numbers, according to the refugee reports, are far less than the State Department claims. In this as in other respects the U.S. State Department keeps closely to the Indonesian propaganda line. In general, as we have seen, one major feature of this propaganda is to exaggerate the severity of the civil war and its consequences, so as to mask the U.S.-backed Indonesian atrocities.

161. Cf. Jolliffe, p. 279, for discussion of the contents of some of these letters, which were smuggled to Darwin in January 1976 and describe wholesale murder and pillage.

162. March Hearings, pp. 12-13.

163. Marvine Howe, “Portugal Refugees Face Bleak Winter,” New York Times (24 October 1976).

164. See Volume II for many examples.

165. See note 89, this chapter.

166. The 15 February 1976 Times story was cited by Franck in his testimony at the June-July Hearings (pp. 68, 57).

167. John Sharkey, “House to Probe Charge Indonesians Killed 100,000 on Timor,” Washington Post (13 March 1977).

168. Bernard Gwertzman, New York Times (13 March 1977).

169. “Charge 100,000 slain in East Timor,” AP, Canberra, Ithaca Journal (28 February 1977). This AP report does not appear to have been considered worthy of publication by the national media.

170. See note 202, this chapter, for further details. Gwertzman, in the report cited in note 168, stated that 56 Australian parliamentarians (the number was actually 95) had urged President Carter “to take action over the alleged human rights violations.”

171. Richard Dudman, “American Aid to Indonesia Ignores Human Rights Abuses,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (1 January 1978).

172. June-July Hearings, p. 31.

173. Ibid., p. 38.

174. Ibid., p. 69.

175. Australian Broadcasting Commission, A.M. Program, 1 April 1977. We rely on a transcript provided by a reliable source.

176. The reference to “civil war” expresses the Indonesian claim that there were no Indonesian armed forces involved, but only “volunteers” assisting anti-FRETILIN Timorese who were being oppressed and massacred. Despite occasional genuflections, these claims are dismissed out of hand by Western governments and international bodies, as by independent observers. See, for example, the record of UN resolutions reviewed above. The Western press has been quite willing to present these absurd claims as fact, however, as we have seen.

177. See chapter 4, section 1, for Sudomo’s statement shortly before the State Department version appeared in Human Rights and U.S. Policy: Argentina, Haiti, Indonesia, Iran, Peru, and the Philippines, Reports submitted to the Committee on International Relations, U.S. House of Representatives, by the Department of State, 31 December 1976, Government Printing Office, Washington D.C., 1976.

178. Russell Skelton, “Indons Killed 60,000: Report,” Melbourne Age (19 November 1976). The report is undoubtedly the same one from which Dunn quoted the estimates transmitted by the Indonesian church officials.

179. Michael Richardson, “Timor: One year later—Fretilin’s alive and kicking,” Melbourne Age (8 December 1976).

180. The document was printed in part in Commonwealth of Australia, Parliamentary Debates, Senate, 17 March 1977, p. 319, introduced by Senator Gietzelt. It had already appeared in full in the Tribune (1 December 1976) (Communist), where the anti-FRETILIN contents are noted.

181. The talk of “volunteers” and “pro-Indonesian forces” is only for foreign consumption. (See note 176, this chapter.)

182. Bram Alexander, “100,000 killed by Indons in Timor: Report,” Sun News Pictorial, 17 January 1977.

183. Parts were published in Australia: John Hurst, “god hasnt forsaken Timor,” Nation Review, 12-18 January 1978.

184. March Hearings, p. 8. Recall also that the State Department estimated at the very same time that only 200,000 of the 650,000 population were in areas administered by Indonesia. (See p. 183.)

185. In his Congressional testimony of 15 February 1978 (p. 58; see note 80, this chapter), Benedict Anderson noted other apparent violations of U.S. law, specifically, the supply to Indonesia of military aid considerably in excess of what is permitted by law to countries that violate principles of the United Nations. Since “even the State Department has accepted the fact that Indonesia has not allowed the East Timorese to have self-determination, and that is clearly a United Nations principle,” it follows that the law has been violated. Anderson remarks: “It seems to me that this kind of calmly overturning or ignoring of American statutes is something very worrying and it concerns me very much. It is this evidence of what goes on in our Government that alarms me at least as much as what goes on in Indonesia,” a point worth making when one thinks of the global impact of United States policy, quite apart from its implications with regard to U.S. democracy.

186. ‘“Religious war’ in Timor, says Liberal MP,” Canberra Times (25 March 1978).

187. The letter was reported in the Internews International Bulletin (30 January 1978). Substantial excerpts appear in the Guardian, New York (15 February 1978). In short, it was not inaccessible to enterprising journalists.

188. Canberra Times (14 February 1978). Extracts reprinted in East Timor News, Bulletin of the East Timor Agency, 232 Castlereagh St., Sydney, NSW, 2000.

189. For an important exception, see the testimony by the two anthropologists who worked with the mountain tribesmen in the June-July Hearings, cited above. Like all other informed observers, they credit the accounts of Indonesian atrocities and dismiss the Indonesian claims to local support.

190. This one point is incorrect, Jolliffe notes, according to intelligence sources that place the Indonesian troop level at 14,000, “although this may be a too conservative estimate.” The Financial Review (Australia), 8 October 1976, estimated that “pacification of East Timor is being carried out by an Indonesian army of nearly 40,000 men, according to informed estimates.”

191. See pp. 217-19, this chapter.

192. Dunn Report, p. 97.

193. Cf. Volume II, chapter 6, for an account of his honors for these journalistic achievements, a Pulitzer Prize, bestowed over the heads of the jury just at the time of this penetrating report. (See note 198, this chapter.)

194. Cf. Jolliffe, p. 287, citing José Martins, who was directly involved as an Indonesian collaborator.

195. Press reporting from Vietnam as well as such material as the Pentagon Papers continually referred to Vietnamese “xenophobia,” which always posed serious difficulties for the U.S. liberators. The sheer stupidity of imperial propagandists over the years really is quite difficult to believe. (See section 3 for some examples from the Kennedy Administration.)

196. Reuters, Jakarta, “Collapse Forecast for the Revolt of East Timor,” San Francisco Chronicle (18 October 1978).

197. Letter to Arnold Kohen, dated 3 July 1978.

198. Henry Kamm, “Guerrillas in Timor Still Fight Indonesia,” New York Times, (19 April 1978). The Times refused to publish a letter by Arnold Kohen (see note 80, this chapter) objecting to some of the more obvious falsehoods in Kamm’s report, and noting Kamm’s curious failure even to mention allegations of genocide—particularly striking, given that the bulk of his reporting is concerned with precisely this issue—from “enemy territory,” however. Kamm’s report was the subject of appropriate derision by Alexander Cockburn, Village Voice (8 May 1978).

199. Cf. Jolliffe, pp. 291-92.

200. Cited in Timor Information Service, October 1978 (Australia) from the Review of International Affairs, 5-20 August 1978.

201. See, for example, Keith Martin, “Shipping ban on Indonesia to stay,” Sydney Morning Herald (25 February 1977) reporting that “the ban by Australian maritime unions on Indonesian shipping seems likely to remain in force.” The ban was imposed in November 1975 just prior to the Indonesian invasion, which was known to be imminent despite feigned State Department “ignorance.” Most unions “favoured retaining the ban as a continuing expression of protest against the Timor invasion,” rejecting the interest of Australia in wheat sales to Indonesia. See Hill, pp. 14-15, on union opposition to the Indonesian invasion and business support for it. Also Jolliffe, pp. 294-95. There has apparently been considerable internal union conflict on this issue.

202. The letter is reprinted in full in Hansard, op. cit., p. 321; cf. note 180, this chapter. According to Senator Gietzelt, who introduced it into the record, it was signed by 95 members of Parliament, the majority from Government parties, constituting a majority of the Australian Parliament. It applauded Carter’s concern for human rights in the USSR and Uganda and urged him to approach Indonesia on the matter of East Timor, apparently without irony.

203. We return to this matter in Volume II. In contrast, the U.S. press has recognized “responsible” opposition to the U.S. war on grounds of excessive cost and failure, the kind of opposition expressed in regard to Nazi aggression by thoughtful Germans after Stalingrad.

204. Newcastle Morning Herald (6 April 1977).

205. Michael Hodgman, “Timor appeasement must end,” Australian (21 February 1977).

206. Reuters, “30,000 deaths,” Manchester Guardian (14 September 1978), a 33-word item that did not reach the United States, to our knowledge.

207. The letter appears as Appendix 2 in the March Hearings.

208. The letter, dated 29 April 1976, is reproduced in full in Timor Information Service, 6 May 1976, Australia. As noted above, Martins was the official spokesman on Timor affairs for the Indonesian government.

209. Cf. Jolliffe, pp. 282f. for further details.

210. March Hearings, 52ff.

211. Interview translated in FBIS, Indonesia, IV, 28 September 1978, N1-N2, from l’Humanité, Paris, 18 September 1978. The context indicates that by the word translated as “casualties,” Alkatiri meant “deaths.”

212. George McArthur, “Indonesia Anxious to Replace Decrepit Arms,” reporting from Jakarta, IHT, 5 December 1977, reprinted from the Los Angeles Times. McArthur states that “the Indonesians generally have avoided using U.S. equipment to spare Washington’s sensibilities, but a lot of U.S. equipment nevertheless is being used.” This statement, perhaps, reflects the same logic that enabled him to say that the Indonesian Communist Party subjected the country to a huge massacre in the mid-1960s, and that the “attempted Communist coup...failed in a national bloodbath....” (See chapter 4, section 4.1., p. 245-46.)

213. This is a constant pretense in the media. In fact, arms sales have boomed under Carter, as the press also reports. See, e.g., George C. Wilson, “Arms Sales Record Set in Fiscal 1978,” Washington Post (3 October 1978), reporting that “the United States sold a record amount of military weapons and services to foreign nations in the fiscal year just ended, according to Pentagon figures released yesterday.” On sales to Indonesia, see note 235, this chapter.

214. Terence Smith, “Mondale is a Nonexpert Who Matters,” New York Times, Week in Review (14 May 1978). No mention of East Timor appears in this account, though that is where these planes are likely to be used. (But see note 223.) Representatives Donald Fraser and Helen Meyner wrote a letter on 22 June 1978 to Secretary of State Cyrus Vance expressing their reservations over the projected sale of A-4 aircraft to Indonesia, noting that these would be “particularly useful in East Timor” for air to ground attack. They questioned the State Department’s claim that these aircraft would be used primarily for training purposes. The response by Douglas Bennet of the State Department (15 August 1978) assured them that “the Indonesian Government has no intention of using the A-4 aircraft in East Timor” (he also noted, interestingly, that the U.S. government is not “sanguine over the prospects for a peaceful resolution of the fighting between Fretilin and the Indonesian Government,” as of August 1978; recall previous claims that the fighting is essentially over). This is a standard pretense by the governments that are taking part in the slaughter in East Timor. Thus, the State Department representative, Robert Oakley, testified in the February 1978 Hearings, when asked by Rep. Fraser about the sale of F-5E and F-5F jet warplanes to Indonesia: “So far as I know, sir, there is no intention on the part of Indonesia to use them....But this is something on which we cannot be categoric....I do not believe that the supply of one squadron of F-5E’s to replace a squadron of F-86E’s is going to have any impact on the situation in East Timor, sir,” though he agreed with Fraser’s comment that “F-86E’s are nearing the end of their life” (p. 67). Later he added that “the arms which we are supplying now,” including attack aircraft, “are not as best I know, destined for East Timor, although, as I said, we can’t give a guarantee to this effect” (p. 73). But we’ll give them the planes anyway, trusting our Indonesian friends.

215. East Timor Information Bulletin, 40 Concannon Road, London SW2, May 1978.

216. R.-P. Paringaux, “La France envisage de livrer divers armements a l’Indonesie,” Le Monde (14 September 1978).

217. We return to this matter in Volume II, chapter 4.

218. In Volume II, chapter 6, we will consider in some detail the evidence that has been produced by those who speak in these terms.

219. See Roger, op. cit., p. 77, for quotes and references, specifically, to La Croix, 23 June 1976, an article by Christian Rudel.

220. Tom Uren, then Deputy Leader of the Opposition, Parliamentary Debates (Australia), 17 November 1976, Representatives, 282s.

221. Laurie Oakes, Melbourne Sun (17 November 1976).

222. Technically, the answer is “yes.” In the early days of the Indonesian invasion—when, as already noted, proper news control had not yet been fully established (see note 117, this chapter)—the New York Times did publish tiny items based on radio communications of the forces resisting what the Times itself recognized as blatant aggression. See “500 Reported Killed,” (9 December 1975); “Indonesian Attack in Timor Reported,” (27 December 1975); “Broadcast from Timor Says Pro-Indonesian Forces Advance,” (28 December 1975); “Burning of Food Alleged in Timor,” (4 January 1976). The first of these is from Lisbon, the last three from Darwin, Australia. These exceptions, which a serious theory of the Free Press would treat as statistical error, show that it is not beyond the technical capacity of the Free Press to report the news of the world, were it to choose to do so; a fact which is obvious in any event.

On the December 28 dispatch, see note 117, this chapter. Note that the headline cited, with its reference to “Pro-Indonesian Forces,” almost certainly involves a Times editorial fabrication, which appears as well in the report itself.

223. On 1 December 1977, Amnesty International released a criticism of Indonesia for refusing to allow the Red Cross to visit East Timor. It received no press coverage. The Australian (11 May 1978) reports that Indonesia “has agreed to allow relief teams, including the International Red Cross, into East Timor for the first time since it was taken over in July, 1976.” The information comes from sources close to Vice-President Mondale, and allegedly Indonesia’s “decision” is a consequence of Mondale’s discussions in Jakarta in which he was so impressed with Indonesia’s leap forward in the Human Rights field that he exerted unusual efforts to obtain planes for them to use in their annihilation of simple mountain people in Timor. The reference is interesting; it shows that behind the mask of silence, the U.S. government is not as ignorant as it pretends. As we write, the International Red Cross has not been admitted, nor have journalists been permitted anything but a highly restricted glimpse. We assume that the A-4 ground attack bombers have been or will be delivered, however. It should all be good for a few laughs over coffee and Danish at the Friday breakfast. (See p. 217, this chapter.)

224. For example the Reuters report of 18 October 1978 in the San Francisco Chronicle cited above (see note 196, this chapter) states that “one sign of FRETILIN’s deteriorating strength can be seen in the fact that a radio station run by the guerrillas—a small portable transmitter—has not been heard for several months.” The report is false. Despite the efforts of Indonesia and Australia to stop communications, radio transmissions from FRETILIN were being received through November 1978. One may perhaps also question the conclusion supported by the false premise.

In a statement prepared for delivery before the Fourth Committee of the UN General Assembly, November 1978, Jill Jolliffe cites a radio broadcast of November 28.

225. “CIA Said to Aid Indonesia Units in East Timor,” International Herald Tribune (20 June 1978).

226. Richard Carleton, “Brainwash follows the bloodbath,” London Observer (31 July 1977); “Timor—and a story of massacre,” “The place of death in Timor,” Melbourne Age (10-11 August 1977); the version the Age has is considerably more detailed.

227. David Jenkins, “Timor’s arithmetic of despair,” Far Eastern Economic Review, 29 September 1978.

228. Sydney Morning Herald (11 September 1978).

229. Jill Jolliffe’s paraphrase in her prepared testimony for the Fourth Committee of the General Assembly. (See note 224, this chapter.)

230. Ibid. Recall that Dili was the one place where there may have been some initial willingness to accept Indonesian “integration,” prior to the invasion. Recall also the description of the situation in Dili by the Indonesian Church officials, who report that two-thirds of its original 30,000 people want to leave for Portugal while others are with FRETILIN in the mountains.

231. See p. 177 and note 177, this chapter, for the first of these.

232. Country Reports on Human Rights Practices, p. 235. (See note 69, this chapter.)

233. Human Rights Conditions in Selected Countries and the U.S. Response, prepared for the Subcommittee on International Organizations of the Committee on International Relations, U.S. House of Representatives, by the Foreign Affairs and National Defense Division, Congressional Research Service, Library of Congress, 25 July 1978, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1978, pp. 103-104.

234. Seth Lipsky and Raphael Pura, “Indonesia: Testing time for the ‘New Order’,” Foreign Affairs, Fall, 1978.

235. The diligent reader of the press might have been able to recall the story by Ann Crittenden, New York Times (17 July 1977) reporting “a recently completed and detailed analysis of American foreign aid to eight developing countries” which notes that “the Carter Administration has requested a sizable increase in military assistance to Indonesia in the 1978 fiscal year, in spite of that country’s invasion in 1975 of the neighboring island of East Timor, which it still occupies” in defiance of UN resolutions and “charges that 30,000 to 100,000 political prisoners have been held [in Indonesia] for years without trial,” after the bloodbath of the 1960s.

236. The official Indonesian figure for total detainees since the Communists were crushed in 1965 is 750,000. (See p. 237, this chapter.) Note also the lack of comment on the 12-year delay in releasing these “thousands.” This is rectified elsewhere. Thus on 30 October 1977, the Times remarks (“Topics”) that “hundreds of thousands of Indonesians were arrested after an aborted left-wing coup in 1965” (the U.S. government and media version; cf. chapter 4, section 1 on the facts) and that “tens of thousands remain in indefinite detention without even a trial,” most of them classified in “‘Category B,’ meaning that while they are believed to have been indirectly involved in the 1965 coup attempt, there is not sufficient evidence for court.” This seems excessive to the Times editorialists, who comment: “Twelve years in prison are surely enough for that offense.” That is, twelve years in prison seems to suffice for the “offense” of being “believed to have been indirectly involved” in a coup attempt that appears to have been a propaganda fabrication in the first place.

237. Mark Baker, “Iran war kills 9000,” Melbourne Age (24 April 1978).

238. Richard W. Franke, review of The Rule of the Sword: The Story of West Irian, by Nonie Sharp, Kibble Books, 1977; BCAS, vol. 10, no. 1, 1978.

4 Constructive Terror

1. The Orwellian twists and turns of Western usage of these words in the interests of a workable double standard is discussed above, chapter 3, section 1.

2. Peter Dale Scott, “Exporting Military-Economic Development: America and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-67,” in Malcolm Caldwell, ed., Ten Years’ Military Terror in Indonesia, Spokesman Books, 1975, p. 209.

3. As C.L. Sulzberger noted, “From an American viewpoint, this represents a positive achievement”; “As the Shadow Lengthens,” New York Times (3 December 1965). He refers only to the generals’ coup. The associated bloodbath, already well under way, he does not even find worthy of mention.

4. James Reston’s article featuring Indonesia, in which there is no mention of mass murder, was titled “A Gleam of Light,” New York Times (19 June 1966). The changes are referred to as “significant” and “hopeful,” with Indonesia no longer controlled by people “fiercely hostile to the United States.” See also the “moderate scholars” statement discussed on p. 98.

5. The model may well have been quite explicit. In a study of CIA psychological warfare leading to the coup in which Allende was deposed and murdered, Fred Landis points out that the CIA concocted a document purporting to reveal a leftist plot to murder Chilean military officers—the pretext used by the Indonesian generals to launch their mass murder—while the CIA-backed press ran headlines to the same effect. Meanwhile, “hundreds of leftist leaders received a card ‘Djakarta is approaching’” as did military officers, while a CIA agent directed right-wing groups “to paint this same slogan in red all over Santiago.” Fred Landis, “Psychological Warfare in Chile: The CIA Makes Headlines,” Liberation, March-April 1975. See also Scott, op. cit.

6. Scott, op. cit., p. 247; Malcolm Caldwell in Selden, ed., Remaking Asia, Pantheon, 1973, p. 48. The leaders seem to have been an anti-corruption and populist group, reacting against the frozen hierarchical structure of the military establishment and the massive looting by the top echelons. See Ben Anderson, “Last Days of Indonesia’s Suharto?” in Southeast Asia Chronicle, No. 62, July-August, 1978, pp. 2-3. For a broad account suggesting some PKI involvement, but giving little credence to PKI initiative or domination, see Harold Crouch, The Army and Politics in Indonesia, Cornell University Press, 1978, chapter 4.

7. Crouch, op. cit., pp. 34, 48-49.

8. Scott, op. cit., cites RAND memoranda by Indonesia specialist Guy Pauker who feared in 1964 that the Indonesian anti-Communist forces “would probably lack the ruthlessness that made it possible for the Nazis to suppress the Communist Party of Germany” in 1933, since they “are weaker than the Nazis, not only in numbers and in mass support, but also in unity, discipline, and leadership.” But, as he explained four years later, “The assassination of the six army generals by the September 30 Movement elicited the ruthlessness that I had not anticipated a year earlier and resulted in the death of large numbers of Communist cadres.”

9. Roger Hilsman, To Move A Nation, Doubleday, New York, 1967, p. 377. Before the 1965 coup over 4,000 Indonesian officers had been trained in the U.S. and a substantial proportion of Indonesian weapons were made in the U.S. See also Ruth McVey, “The Post Revolutionary Transformation of the Indonesian Army, II,” Indonesia, April 1972, p. 169. Before October 1965 the USSR was a major supplier of heavy equipment to the Indonesian navy and air force. It was displaced after the coup, and the U.S. became virtually sole supplier of the Indonesian armed forces.

10. “Lest We Forget,” in Caldwell, Ten Years’ Military Terror, p. 14.

11. Ibid., pp. 15-17.

12. Amnesty International, Indonesia, AI, 1977, p. 21.

13. “Lest We Forget,” op. cit., pp. 14-15.

14. “Indonesian Communism Since the 1965 Coup,” Pacific Affairs, Spring 1970, pp. 35-36.

15. Ibid., p. 52.

16. Ibid., p. 56.

17. AI, Indonesia, p. 22.

18. “Jakarta Says Most Political Prisoners Will Be Free in ’79,” New York Times (12 April 1978).

19. Ernest Utrecht, “The Indonesian Army as an Instrument of Repression,” Journal of Contemporary Asia, March 1972.

20. AI, Indonesia, p. 13.

21. Ibid., pp. 41, 44.

22. Ibid., p. 46.

23. Ibid., p. 9.

24. Ibid., p. 76.

25. Jacques Decornoy, “Des dizaines de milliers de personnes sont internees sans grand espoir d’etre jugees un jour,” Le Monde (11 November 1972).

26. Richard Robison, “Toward a Class Analysis of the Indonesian Military State,” Indonesia, April 1978, p. 24, n. 23.

27. Ibid., p. 21.

28. Anderson, op. cit., p. 13.

29. “Indonesia: Why foreign investors are scared,” Business Week, 18 April 1977.

30. David Andelman, “Indonesia Opens Inquiry on Charge of Huge Payoffs in Satellite Project,” New York Times (4 February 1977).

31. Burt Schorr, “Indonesia Restaurant Shows How Firms Can Succumb to Threat to Foreign Stakes,” Wall Street Journal (13 October 1977). Schorr quotes one restaurant critic saying: “Obviously somebody spent a lot of time (and money) putting it all together.” Schorr says: “Somebody did spend a lot of money on the Ramayana: more than 50 companies and individuals that either were doing business in Indonesia or hoped to. Altogether, they bought more than $1 million of stock in Ramayana’s parent company after some not-so-subtle arm-twisting by officials of...Pertamina, which organized the adventure in dining.”

32. Ibid.

33. Robison, op. cit., pp. 28-29.

34. Ibid., pp. 31-32.

35. Ibid., pp. 32.

36. Crouch, op. cit., pp. 287-88.

37. Ingrid Palmer, “The Economy, 1965-1975,” in Caldwell, op. cit., p. 148.

38. Crouch, op. cit., p. 269.

39. Barry Newman, “ ‘Sticky Handshakes’ Are Coming Unglued A Bit in Indonesia,” Wall Street Journal (8 December 1977).

40. Ibid.

41. Anderson, op. cit., pp. 8-9.

42. “Some indication of this scale is suggested by the recent criminal conviction of a middle-level provincial official of the National Supply Board for the embezzlement of $19 million.” Ibid., p. 9.

43. Ibid.

44. Andelman, op. cit. (note 30).

45. David A. Andelman, “Indonesia Is One of the Richest and Poorest Countries in Asia,” New York Times (5 December 1975).

46. Robison, op. cit., p. 33.

47. Ibid., p. 37.

48. Barry Newman, “Slowed Development and Huge Debts are Pertamina’s Legacy to Indonesia,” Wall Street Journal (11 February 1977). Only a few years previously, Fortune had written an accolade to General Sutowo and Pertamina for his understanding of the need to be very nice to foreign oil companies. While pointing out that some critics “have accused him of milking the company,” Fortune swallowed at face value Sutowo’s denials. See Louis Kraar, “Oil and Nationalism Mix Beautifully in Indonesia,” Fortune, July 1973, pp. 99ff.

49. Newman, op. cit.

50. See chapter 3, section 4.4, for a discussion of the material results of Mondale’s pleasure over the improvement in the human rights situation: namely, Mondale’s personal intervention to obtain A/4 attack bombers that can be put to use to murder the population of East Timor, while the accompanying Indonesian promise to allow entry to the International Red Cross was conveniently forgotten by all concerned as soon as the state visit was completed. See p. 217-18 and chapter 3, note 223.

51. The Pentagon is reasonably pleased with the satellite status of Indonesia, but it is far from happy with the abysmal performance of the Indonesian military in its now three-year-old unsuccessful war of aggression in East Timor. (See chapter 3, section 4.4.)

52. According to a study by Joel Rocamora, “Political Prisoners and the Army Regime in Indonesia,” Cornell University, June 1970, p. 1.

53. “It is authoritatively estimated that 10% to 15% of the total cost of bank-financed projects in Indonesia is dissipated through ‘leakage’.” Barry Newman, “Missing the Mark: In Indonesia Attempts By World Bank to Aid Poor Often Go Astray,” Wall Street Journal (10 November 1977).

54. Don Moser, “Where the rivers ran crimson,” Life, 1 July 1966; cited by Landis, op. cit.

55. George McArthur, “Teng’s successes in SE Asia,” Los Angeles Times-Boston Globe (15 November 1978).

56. George McArthur, “Indonesia Anxious to Replace Decrepit Arms,” International Herald Tribune (5 December 1977), reprinted from the Los Angeles Times. On the contents of this quite significant report from Jakarta, see chapter 3, section 4.4., p. 216-17.

57. These moderate scholars not only use a double standard—with violence in the interest of opposition to social change justified by a set of nationalistic rationalizations—they also show themselves to be incompetent scholars, or propagandists, or both. As already noted, the U.S.-Diem forces always gave violence a higher priority on the spectrum of means for effecting or opposing change than did the NLF, and up until 1960 the NLF used minimal violence. They were not “committed to the thesis that violence was the best means of effecting change;” but Diem and his advisors never were able to make a serious and sustained effort at any course other than counterrevolutionary violence. (See chapter 5, sections 1.1, 2.1)

58. New York Times (6 July 1966).

59. U.S. News and World Report, 27 November 1972.

60. See the reviews by Coral Bell and B. Anderson in the China Quarterly, No. 28, October-December 1966, pp. 140-43.

61. Frank C. Darling, Thailand and the United States, Public Affairs Press, 1965, p. 65. For some years Darling was a CIA analyst specializing in Thailand.

62. Ibid., p. 169.

63. Testimony of Leonard Unger, in Senate Foreign Relations Committee Hearings on U.S. Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad, Kingdom of Thailand (1969), p. 613. Hereafter, Thailand.

64. Darling, op. cit., p. 111.

65. Ibid., p. 106.

66. Ibid., p. 138.

67. “And we are trying to preserve, trying to help them preserve, their independence.” Ambassador Unger, Thailand, p. 859.

68. Thailand, p. 639.

69. Ibid., p. 648.

70. Ibid., p. 611.

71. Ibid., p. 613.

72. Ibid.

73. Myrdal, Asian Drama, Pantheon, 1968, vol. I, p. 486.

74. Darling, op. cit., p. 74.

75. Ibid., p. 117.

76. Thailand, p. 748.

77. David A. Andelman, “Thai Business Chiefs Still Uneasy in Wake of Military Coup,” New York Times (17 October 1976).

78. Ibid.

79. Darling, op. cit., p. 168.

80. Ibid., p. 128.

81. Ibid., p. 82.

82. This is reminiscent of the Thieu technique of allegedly “releasing prisoners,” not to the PRG as required in the January 1973 agreement, but into the population at large. (See chapter 5, section 1.6.) This device was thought by some to have been a mechanism for covering up the murder of political prisoners.

83. Ibid., p. 169.

84. Ibid., p. 114.

85. See especially, Thomas Lobe, United States National Security Policy and Aid To The Thailand Police, University of Denver Monograph Series in World Affairs, vol. 14, no. 2, 1977, pp. 19-25.

86. E. Thadeus Flood, The United States and the Military Coup in Thailand: A Background Study, Indochina Resource Center, 1976, pp. 1-2.

87. Ibid., p. 2.

88. Ibid.

89. Lobe, op. cit., pp. 47-48.

90. “The U.S. Role in Thai Society,” in “Military Coup in Thailand,” Indochina Chronicle, January-February 1977, pp. 6-7.

91. Thailand Fact Sheet (1932-1976), Southeast Asian Specialists at Cornell University, 18 October 1976, pp. 7-8.

92. See especially, Ben Anderson, “Withdrawal Symptoms: Social and Cultural Aspects of the October 6 Coup,” Bulletin of Concerned Asian Scholars, October 1977, pp. 16-19.

93. Flood, op. cit., pp. 5-7; Thailand Fact Sheet, pp. 8-10.

94. On U.S. involvement, see also Don Luce, “Thailand: How the U.S. Engineered A Coup,” Win, 21 October 1976; Harvey Wasserman, “Thailand on the Tide of Reaction,” The Nation, 30 October 1976; David and Susan Morell, “Thailand and the U.S.,” New York Times (Op.-Ed.) (22 November 1976).

95. Thailand Fact Sheet, p. 8.

96. Both media fabrications and agents provocateurs played a significant role in counterrevolutionary activity in Thailand. The major pre-coup fabrication is described by Anderson as follows:

Some days earlier [prior to the coup on 6 October 1976], on September 24, two workers at Nakhon Pathom, putting up posters protesting former dictator Thanom’s re-entry into Siam under the cloak of monkhood, were beaten to death by some local policemen and their corpses hanged. Two days before the coup, a radical student troupe staged a dramatic re-enactment of the murder in the Bo Tree courtyard of Thammasat University as part of a nationwide campaign for Thanom’s expulsion. The rabid right wing newspaper Dao Sayam touched up photographs of the performance in such a way as to suggest that one of the actors “strangled” had been made up to look like the crown prince. In a coordinated maneuver, the Armored Division Radio broadcast the slander, urged the citizenry to buy copies of Dao Sayam, and demanded retribution for this “cruel attack” on the royal family. From this stemmed the lynch-mobs that paved the way for the military takeover. (“Withdrawal Symptoms...,” op. cit.)

97. Luce, op. cit.; “U.S. Role in Thai Society,” p. 9, n.1.

98. See Luce, Susan and David Morell, and Flood, op. cit.

99. Flood, p. 4.

100. Ibid., p. 7.

101. Ambassador Gauss wrote to Cordell Hull during World War II that Chiang Kai-Shek had reminded him that “In the matter of world problems, China is disposed to follow our lead....” Department of State, Relations With China, p. 561. Chiang’s state, though deeply corrupt and unstable, therefore held out a great potential for becoming “the principal stabilizing factor in the Far East,” Yalta Papers, p. 353. Cited by Gabriel Kolka, Politics of War, Random House, 1968, p. 221.

102. National Security Council; 5429/2 (20 August 1954). U.S. Department of Defense, United States—Vietnam Relations, 1945-67, Book 10, pp. 731ff., Government Printing Office, I 971. (This is the government edition of the Pentagon Papers.)

103. An exception in its detail on Thai corruption is the Andelman article cited in note 77, this chapter, but even this article completely avoids any analysis of U.S. involvement and responsibility, or the economic consequences of military shakedowns and intervention (either efficiency or income distribution effects). The article conveys a resigned flavor of objective recognition of inevitable forces, avoiding any trace of the moral indignation that is standard in news stories dealing with official enemies.

104. An early illustration is a 1966 report by Peter Braestrup, “U.S. Helps Thailand at Village Level in Effort to Thwart Reds,” New York Times (27 December 1966), which conveys the straight U.S. propaganda line that while Bangkok had been engaged only in suppression in the villages up to now, with U.S. aid there was a new thrust toward winning hearts and minds. Corruption appears only in quotes, as a Communist allegation. The nature and quality of the political and social order and the U.S. role are completely ignored.

105. “The U.S. has maintained an official silence on developments here during the past five months, and, for better or worse, this silence is widely viewed, among both friends and foes of Marcos, as signifying U.S. support for the president and his policies.” Peter Kann, “Marcos’s Manila: ‘Smiling Martial Law’ Leaves Most Filipinos Carrying On as Usual,” Wall Street Journal (12 March 1973).

106. General “Jake” Smith. Cited in Teodoro A. Agoncillo and Oscar M. Alfonso, History of the Filipino People, Malaya Books, 1967, p. 272.

107. Cited by Jonathan Fast, “Crisis in the Philippines,” New Left Review (March-April, 1973), p. 75, from Moorfield Storey and Julian Cadman, Secretary Root’s Records: Marked Severities in Philippine Warfare, Chicago, 1902, pp. 116, 71-73. For similar observations from U.S. War Department records, see Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins, Pantheon, 1969, chapter 3, pp. 252-53.

108. Sixto Lopez, “The Philippine Problem: a proposition for a solution,” The Outlook, 13 April 1901.

109. Bernard Wideman, “The Philippines: Five Years of Martial Law,” Ampo: Japan-Asia Quarterly Review, July-November 1977, p. 69.

110. Justus M. van der Kroef, “Communism and Reform in the Philippines,” Pacific Affairs, Spring, 1973, p. 31.

111. For an account of the postwar peasant rebellion, which has been clouded for years in one of the more successful propaganda campaigns, see Benedict J. Kerkvliet, The Huk Rebellion: A Study of Peasant Revolt in the Philippines, University of California Press, 1977.

112. Fast, op. cit., pp. 85-86.

113. “Real wage rates of Philippine skilled workers dropped [1955 is 100] from 89.2 in 1969 to 74.9 at the end of the first half of 1971; the rates for unskilled workers fell in the same period from 100.0 to 90.4.” Vander Kroef, op. cit., p. 41.

114. The last item is Vander Kroef’s summary of one of the findings of the 1970 Agbayani House Sub-Committee Report, ibid., p. 39.

115. Ownership of the main elements of the press, radio and TV quickly passed into the hands of Marcos, his family and associates, after the declaration of martial law. Ibid., p. 58.

116. Ibid., p. 30.

117. Ibid., pp. 52-53.

118. See chapter 2, pp. 70-71.

119. Wideman, op. cit., p. 64. The methods of classification of land eligible for reform has tended to accelerate conversion to intensive uses qualifying for exemption, with further displacement effects.

120. There have been strikes even under martial law, but thousands of workers have been detained by the military in strike-breaking efforts, and there can be no question but that the number and effectiveness of strikes has been greatly reduced.

121. Wideman, op. cit., p. 69.

122. Ibid.

123. Tom Jones, “Philippines Report,” Matchbox (Amnesty International), Winter, 1977, p. 13.

124. This is quite reasonable since Marcos bears direct responsibility for the system of torture. And Marcos’s masters in the background, such as McNamara (as head of the World Bank), Nixon, Ford, Carter, and their top advisers complete the circle of responsibility in the same fashion as Johnson-Rusk-Nixon-Kissinger did for the multitude of Mylais in Vietnam.

125. Such visits as Mondale’s are, of course, a big political plus for the rulers of the provinces, acknowledging the importance of the province and the supportive link to the tyrant. The New York Times noted that “there was, to be sure, the requisite ‘candid and constructive’ chat with Mr. Marcos, who was reportedly told that if the Philippines did not shape up on human rights, strained relations could result. But before flying off, Mr. Mondale left his host a going away present, signing four rural aid agreements worth $41 million.” “Tread Not on Us, Filipino Answer On Human Rights,” New York Times (7 May 1978). It would be interesting to know what was said that was “constructive.” Even more interesting would be Mondale’s conception of human rights conditions in the Philippines, if any, that could alter our continuing solid support of that police state. (See note 50 on Mondale’s contributions to human rights as he passed through Jakarta.)

126. The demonstration election technique was in regular use during the U.S. occupation of South Vietnam, where, as in the Philippines, it was geared strictly to the needs of the external power. In a 1968 volume by one of the authors, the concept was defined as follows: “A circus performed in a client state to reassure the populace of the intervening country that their intrusion is well received.” (Edward S. Herman, The Great Society Dictionary, Philadelphia, 1968, p. 11) George Kahin recently described the last elections in the Philippines as “strongly influenced by senior American foreign policy officials who apparently hoped that such an exercise would help improve the deteriorating image Marcos had developed abroad as a consequence of 51/2 years of martial law...It must be understood that this election was conducted primarily for a foreign audience, the American Congress in particular.” Kahin went on to point out the incongruity for an allegedly human rights-oriented administration “that so far it has indicated no audible concern over the fact that within less than 2 hours of the close of the polls on April 7, Marcos ordered troops and police to round up a number of the key 21 opposition candidates, people who had had the courage to run against him and his wife in metropolitan Manila.” Human Rights in the Philippines: Recent Developments, Hearings Before the Subcommittee on International Organizations of the House Committee on International Relations, 95th Congress, 2nd Session, 27 April 1978, p. 5.

127. This new technique is discussed in many of the expatriate journals such as Ang Katipunan (“Victims of Liquidation? Many Political Prisoners Missing,” 27 July-10 August 1977, p. 12) and the Philippine Liberation Courier (“Political Prisoners Missing,” 10 February 1978, p. 6). As described by George Kahin:

...beginning a little over a year ago, a new and rapidly increasing tactic has been introduced, referred to by the Philippine army as “salvaging,” a process wherein the torture continues but most of the physical evidence is removed.

This calls for the removal of the person who has been tortured, in most cases—one of the most knowledgeable sources estimated about 90 percent of the time—removed through out-right killing. Now, the killings, of course, help insure the disappearance of the often quite indelible marks of torture.

A frequent pattern of these so-called salvage operations is for the Government to announce that in a fire-fight, alleged or real, with forces of the pro-Communist insurgents the bodies of one or more who disappeared after torture had been found and then, of course, conveniently buried.

Thereby the Government secures two objectives: It “proves” that the missing person had, as the Government alleges, Communist or subversive connections because of the context in which the body was found, and it hides the physical evidence of the previous torture.

(Testimony before the Subcommittee on Intergovernmental Organizations of the House Committee on International Relations, 27 April 1978, p. 6.)

128. Ibid.

129. “Philippines: A government that needs U.S. business,” Business Week, 4 November 1972.

130. Donald McCouch (Vice President of MHT), “As Lenders See It, Philippines Excels in Managing Debt,” American Banker, 21 September 1976, p. 10A.

131. For a good discussion of the dispensability of the Philippine bases, see George Kahin’s article in the Washington Post (27 August 1978), reprinted in the Congressional Record (“Philippine Bases Reconsidered”), 8 September 1978, pp. S14841-4.

132. See Table 1, chapter 2.

133. Far Eastern Economic Review (5 August 1972), p. 13; cited by Vander Kroef, op. cit., p. 51.

134. Ibid., pp. 51-52.

135. Geoffrey Arlin, “The Organisers,” Far Eastern Economic Review, 2 July 1973.

136. Walton was subsequently reassigned to Iran, “his capacity there being what it was in Saigon and Manila: the creation and strengthening of the civil police in order to ‘protect’ the people from any anti-Government movements.” Ibid.

137. Ibid.

138. Ibid.

139. Ibid.

140. Tad Szulc, “The Moveable War,” New Republic, 12 May 1973.

141. “Another Senate Test,” New York Times (9 July 1973).

142. See Volume II, chapters 4 and 5.

143. For some details, see Chomsky, At War with Asia, Pantheon, 1970, chapter 4 and For Reasons of State, Pantheon, 1973, chapter 2 and references cited there. For a Laotian view, see Fred Branfman, ed., Voices from the Plain of Jars, Harper, 1972.

144. The program of the NDF and a discussion of its constituency and growth is given in “Preparing For Revolution, The United Front in the Philippines,” Southeast Asia Chronicle, No. 62, May-June 1978.

145. Ibid., pp. 8-9.

146. Thus, on the eve of the demonstration election of April 7, 1978, hundreds of thousands of people in Manila turned out—“workers and upper class matrons, students and soldiers, young and old, housewives and taxi drivers, bar hostesses and stockbrokers—poured into the streets shouting, banging pots and pans, honking car horns, exploding firecrackers, singing, marching through the streets in demonstration of support for the opposition Laban (Fight) Party. For three hours, the people shouted their anger, frustration and hatred for the Marcos regime. Laban organizers had called for a 15-minute demonstration.” Ibid., p. 2.

This is reminiscent of Greece on November 3, 1968. The last legally elected Greek Prime Minister, George Papandreou, died on November 1, 1968, and the junta of Colonels, by then in power for 18 months, could hardly prevent a public funeral for this notable. One month previously the junta had “won” a completely fraudulent and meaningless referendum. The funeral of November 3 brought out a crowd of 500,000 mourners into the streets of Athens, who in the safety of overwhelming numbers made very clear their contempt and hatred for the U.S.-sponsored client fascist regime of Greece. It was a moment of truth for the junta and for those outside Greece who wanted to see.

147. See Joseph Lelyveld, “Church in Philippines Becoming A Focus of Opposition to Marcos,” New York Times (18 October 1973); “Manila Presses Its Drive on Liberal Catholics With Arrests and Closing of Radio Stations,” New York Times (28 November 1976); Richard Deats, “Christian Resistance Intensifies in the Philippines,” Social Questions Bulletin, The Methodist Federation For Social Action, March-April 1975.

148. See section 4.5. of this chapter.

149. Johnson put out a search for Communists in the Dominican Republic after the decision to invade had already been made, in order to provide the touch of acceptability that an honest admission of an intent to prevent a modestly independent democracy would not have given him. In their hasty mustering up of a list of “Communists,” the Embassy in Santo Domingo included a number of small children and deceased individuals. See Theodore Draper, The Dominican Revolt: A Case Study in American Policy, Commentary, 1968; Jerome Slater, The United States and the Dominican Revolution, Harper, 1971.

150. Alan Riding, “Balaguer and His Firm Ally, the U.S., Are Targets of Dominican Unrest,” New York Times (6 June 1975).

151. AI, Report on Torture, pp. 211-212.

152. Norman Gall, “Santo Domingo: The Politics of Terror,” New York Review of Books, 22 July 1971.

153. AI, Annual Report for 1977, p. 138.

154. Coalition for Human Rights, Congressional Record, 5 April 1978, H 2511.

155. The PRD ran on a vague platform that promised improved health programs, a larger educational budget, and mild land reform. But under the pressures of the military and economic elites Guzman gradually backed away from the mildly threatening aspects of his program and also promised to send abroad for a year the PRD’s black Secretary General, Jose Francisco Pena Gomez, one of the few top level holdovers from the far more reformist PRD of the Bosch era. While Guzman was backtracking on his reformism,

At the same time, Balaguer successfully maneuvered 40 measures—including new military statutes—through a lame duck legislature that will significantly limit Guzman’s freedom of action. Civil courts will no longer have jurisdiction over members of the armed forces, and the military will have the power to decide which Dominican citizens living abroad (some in exile) can return home. In addition, under pressure from Balaguer, the Electoral Commission gave four contested Senate seats to his right-wing Revolutionary Party, assuring it a majority in that body. All legislation has to be approved by both houses....[All judges in the Republic are appointed by the Senate, including the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, who would become President if Guzman or the Vice President were deposed.] Under the new legislative constraints and the continuing strength of a vigilant military, it seems unlikely the new government will change much in the Dominican Republic. Elizabeth Farnsworth, “U.S. Endorses Dominican Election: New President Has Little Room to Maneuver,” International Bulletin, 28 August 1978.

156. The PRD moved steadily to the right following the 1965 invasion, with important leaders killed or exiled, and with Bosch himself leaving the party in 1973 to form a new party. It has become more and more a party of the mildest sorts of reform, under the leadership of increasingly respectable men of wealth with close ties to foreign corporations and representatives of foreign powers. Philip Wheaton notes that Jacob Majluta, the vice presidential candidate, is an economist-businessman with long-standing ties to foreign companies and to Sacha Volman, a key CIA-labor operative in the Dominican Republic, now a labor adviser to Falconbridge Nickel. George Blanco, who ran on the PRD ticket as Senator for Santo Domingo, serves as a lawyer for a number of multinationals. “Dominican Republic Elections,” NACLA Report on the Americas, vol. XII, July-August 1978, pp. 39-41.

157. We have noted elsewhere that in its search for justifications for military support of terror states, the State Department grasps at resounding promises, and the leaders of subfascism are very obliging on this point. As the Washington Office on Latin America points out in regard to the State Department treatment of the Dominican Republic:

The report admits that Amnesty was critical of human rights practices in the Dominican Republic in 1977. It goes on to cite “regrets” by Balaguer, his “signing” of the American Human Rights Convention, and his “agreement” to invite Amnesty to visit the country, an invitation which was later rescinded. In other words, the State Department accepts Balaguer’s verbal promises rather than looking at actual evidence as a means of countering the Amnesty report. Balaguer is playing the game of endorsing the campaign for human rights in order to whitewash the actual violations. (Coalition For Human Rights, Congressional Record, 5 April 1978, H 2511.)

158. See note 150, this chapter.

159. “A Reporter’s Notebook: For the Dominicans the Elections Is a Test of a Shaky Democracy,” New York Times (27 May 1978).

160. Deborah Sue Yaeger, “Internal Philip Morris Filings Outline Payoffs by Dominican Republic Affiliate,” Wall Street Journal (28 December 1976).

161. “Gulf & Western In The Dominican Republic: II,” CIC Brief, November-December 1976, p. 3D.

162. “Gulf & Western In The Dominican Republic,” CIC Brief, October 1975, p. 3C.

163. The phrase is attributed to “some cynics” in Alan Riding, “The Caribbean Role of G&W,” New York Times (24 June 1974).

164. Of the eight divisions of G&W’s conglomerate operations, the food and agricultural products group in 1974 accounted for 6% of total revenues but 26% ($58 million) of operating income. Most of that profitability came from G&W’s Dominican sugar operations. See “Gulf & Western In the Dominican Republic,” CIC Brief, October 1975.

165. Stanley Penn, “Angry Investor Thinks Gulf & Western Is Trying to Block His Dominican Resort,” Wall Street Journal (1 June 1976).

166. “An Employer’s Paradise: America’s sweatshop in the sun,” Chicago Sun-Times (26 March 1978).

167. In its Report No. 3 on Gulf & Western In the Dominican Republic, dated May 1968, G&W notes that “Wage scales in the Free Zone are established by the Dominican Republic’s Secretariat of Labor....” At the time the report was written the minimum wage in the Free Zone was 55¢ an hour according to G&W (p. 53), 34¢ an hour according to Michael Flannery.

168. In its 1978 report on Dominican Operations G&W stresses the fact that it was a successor to South Puerto Rico Sugar Company (SPR), which still controlled operations at the time of the strike-breaking. G&W contends that the SPR management was “imperious” and that there was “chronic neglect of employees, wages, working conditions and health care.” An example of imperiousness was the fact that “At 5 p.m. every day the city water supply was shut off so SPR executives could water their lawns” (p. 29). This practice was stopped immediately, and G&W contends that radical changes took place otherwise, but no independent union yet exists and wages are low. Wages are hard to measure, but G&W acknowledges that real wages per ton of sugar cane cut fell between 1966-78 (p. 61). It claims that free housing, medical services and subsidized food that it now provides make a big difference, however, and that its wages are well above those paid in government sugar operations.

169. “U.S. team denounced Balaguer, Jesuit accuses U.S. government of ‘aid’,” National Catholic Reporter (3 October 1975).

170. Michael Flannery, “Dominican guns keep unions out,” Chicago Sun-Times (27 March 1978).

171. The lower echelons, visiting the Dominican Republic, have bitterly criticized the repression of the unions (ibid.), a consequence of the U.S. policy that is aided consistently by their AFL-CIO superiors. On the role of the AFL-CIO and CONATRAL in undermining the Bosch regime, see Suzanne Bodenheimer, “The AFL-CIO In Latin America,” The Dominican Republic: A Case Study, Viet-Report, September-October 1967.

172. Jonathan Kwitny, “Strange Bedfellows From Labor, Business Own Dominican Resort,” Wall Street Journal (25 May 1973).

173. An advertisement in the Wall Street Journal (25 January 1974), p. 9.

174. See further the items cited above, notes 166-170.

175. See note 168, this chapter.

176. The October 1975 CIC Brief on Gulf & Western quotes a June 1975 U.S. Embassy (Santo Domingo) document on economic trends as indicating that wages have not been keeping up with prices.

177. See the discussion in “Gulf & Western In The Dominican Republic,” CIC Brief, November-December 1976, p. 3B.

178. “An Employer’s Paradise...”

179. See the discussion in “Gulf & Western In The Dominican Republic,” CIC Brief, November-December 1976, p. 3B.

180. “Open Letter to North American Christians” (signed by a number of religious leaders of Latin America, sent to the American National Council of Churches), reprinted in Fellowship, journal of the Fellowship of Reconciliation, September 1977.

181. Statement of General Golbery de Couto e Silva, member of the Brazilian government and chief aide to the President. Quoted in IDOC Monthly Bulletin, January-February 1977, p. 6. (IDOC abbreviates International Documentation; the Bulletin is a Catholic Church-affiliated service that publishes documents of international interest.)

182. See “Jose Comblin on National Security Doctrine,” a summary of the work of the leading author on this subject, with annotated bibliography, IDOC Monthly Bulletin, January-February 1977, pp. 3-9.

183. “The nation is absolute or it is nothing. A nation can accept no limitations of its absolute power.” (Silva, op. cit., p. 3.)

184. “For many it is difficult to admit that the world is living in a situation of permanent warfare.” Col. Baciagalupo (Chile), quoted in ibid., p. 4.

185. “The Third World’s armed forces are the only social organization that is cohesive, capable and efficient enough to cope with the socio-economic problems of the underdeveloped countries.” Major Claudio Lopez Silva (Chile), quoted in ibid.

186. Rockefeller Report on the Americas, Quadrangle, 1969, p. 32.

187. See pp. 113-14.

188. Rockefeller Report on the Americas, p. 58.

189. Frederick O. Bonkovsky, “The German State and Protestant Elites,” in Franklin H. Littell and Hubert Locke, eds., The German Church Struggle and the Holocaust, Wayne State University, 1974, p. 136.

190. Peter Hoffman, “Problems of Resistance in National Socialist Germany,” in ibid., p. 99.

191. Bonkovsky, op. cit., p. 143.

192. This is a statement of members of a mission to Paraguay of the U.S. Disciples of Christ, quoted in Penny Lernoux, Notes on a Revolutionary Church: Human Rights in Latin America, Alicia Patterson Foundation, February 1978, p. 55.

193. See the church statement quoted earlier on the relationship between “security” and the development model, pp. 61-62.

194. “Voice From Northeastern Brazil to III Conference of Bishops,” November 1977, LADOC, May-June 1978, p. 9.

195. We will not review here the internal conflicts over these issues in the Catholic Church, which are far from resolution. As we have seen, the role of the churches in Latin America is complex and often destructive, to this day. (See chapter 3, section 5.3.)

196. Lernoux gives an estimate of 3.5 million; op. cit., p. 41.

197. Ibid., p. 40.

198. “For Justice and Liberation,” (published in Brazil by 20 lay organizations of Sao Paulo, 18 September 1977), reprinted as “Brazilian Lay People Decry Persecution of the Church,” Latinamerica Press (20 October 1977).

199. Lernoux, op. cit., p. 46.

200. Ibid.

201. Ibid., p. 45.

202. Ibid.

203. Bishop Casadaliga, “The Gospel Is My Weapon,” Latinamerica Press (6 November 1975).

204. Lernoux, op. cit., p. 47.

205. “Christian Requirements of a Political Order,” presented by the Brazilian Bishops in Itaica, Sao Paulo, 17 February 1977, reprinted in LADOC, January-February 1978, p. 5.

206. “The Marginalization of a People,” p. 64.

207. “The Gospel Is My Weapon,” see note 203, this chapter.

208. On the Philippines, see above, section 3; on the emergence of such conflict in South Korea, see H.H. Sunoo, Repressive State and Resisting Church: The Policies of the CIA in South Korea, Korean American Cultural Association, 1976.

209. The words are by Venezuelan Bishop Mariano Parra Leon, quoted in Lernoux, op. cit., p. 16.

210. Ibid., pp. 17-18.

211. A Brazilian Bishop, quoted in ibid., p. 19.

212. Quoted in ibid.

213. See chapter 1, section 9.

214. See chapter 3, section 1.

215. See, for example, the regular reports of Amnesty International, some cited above, or Repression in Latin America, a Report of the Russell Tribunal Session in Rome, Spokesman, Winter 1975-76. The latter is one of many studies that will never reach a U.S. audience. As in its earlier hearings on U.S. war crimes in Vietnam, the Russell inquiries lay bare the impact of the U.S. presence in their stark and brutal reality, an intolerable imposition on a free society from which its mass media thoughtfully preserve it. The Russell Tribunal on Vietnam was either ignored or vilified; the Latin American Tribunal is simply ignored. The reason for the difference is that it was impossible, under the circumstances of the 1960s, simply to ignore the Vietnam proceedings. A few years later, when it was considered appropriate by U.S. ideologists to lift the curtain on U.S. atrocities in Vietnam—that is, when powerful groups in the U.S. determined that the game was not worth the candle and that the U.S. should limit its intervention—much material of a similar sort appeared in the U.S. press, though without the systematic analysis accompanying the Russell Tribunal hearings. But that did not put an end to the denunciation of the Tribunal or of Russell personally for his association with it.

One can find occasional reference in the U.S. press to the Russell Tribunal on repression in Latin America. For example, the Boston Globe (1 October 1978) devoted 9 lines to a report from Rio de Janeiro that nine civilians were put on trial for having leaked information in 1969 on torture in Brazilian prisons to the Russell Tribunal, as well as to Amnesty International and the international press. The report aroused no response in a press which is in a continual uproar over the mock trials of Soviet dissidents.

216. The New York Times, editorializing on “Repression in Argentina” (26 May 1976), says that “what is in doubt is not General Videla’s good intentions but his ability to control military men driven by obsessions...” etc. Since the abuses in question followed Videla’s assumption of power, the placing of his good intentions as beyond doubt—without the slightest substantive evidence here or elsewhere of lack of control or agreement with the terror—is solid evidence of bias in favor of subfascism. Can one imagine, for example, comparable remarks in a Times editorial on the good intentions of the Cambodian government which is unfortunately unable to control local commanders or vengeful peasants?

217. “Argentines begin a chilly recovery in cold light of harsh economics,” Philadelphia Inquirer (27 March 1977).

218. “Politics Are Only Part of Argentina’s Difficulties,” New York Times (20 November 1977).

219. “Rightist Terror Stirs Argentina,” New York Times (29 August 1976).

220. Philippe Labreveux, “Argentine: La repression se poursuit sans susciter la reprobation de la communaute internationale,” Le Monde (19 October 1977).

221. It should be noted that other powers, great and small, have found no problem in accommodating to the U.S.-sponsored terror system in Latin America. The USSR is one of Argentina’s main trading partners, “unwilling to alienate this supplier of wheat without which Soviet citizens will be at the mercy of the Americans in the case of a bad harvest;” and the Soviets are apparently quite unconcerned by torture and murder by state authorities, by economic policies that in two years halved the standard of living of the working class, or by the violent anti-communist ideology exuberantly proclaimed by the military. One of the first countries to offer its support to General Videla was democratic Venezuela, and the Third World generally has supported the Argentine regime, as have the European powers. See Jean-Pierre Clerc, “Un pays en etat de choc,” Le Monde (6 June 1978); Labreveux, op. cit.; Marek Halter, “Pourquoi l’Argentine,” Le Monde (4 February 1978).

222. Michael D. Boggs and Andrew C. McLellan, “Argentine trade unions,” AFL-CIO Free Trade Union News, February 1978.

223. For a description of one such meeting, “virtually a meeting of the Trilateral Commission,” see “The Argentine Economic Debacle,” Argentina Outreach, March-April 1978, pp. 2-3.

224. Quoted in Christopher Knowles, “Strike wave grips Argentina,” Guardian, New York (16 November 1977).

225. Le Monde (2 June 1978).

226. “Open Letter;” 24 March 1977; published by the Argentine Commission for Human Rights, Washington Information Bureau, P.O. Box 2635, Washington, D.C. 20013.

227. Amnesty International Newsletter, April 1977, volume VII, no. 4, summarizing the report of an Amnesty International Mission of November, 1976, eight months after the coup.

228. Matchbox (AI) Spring, 1978, pp. 9-10.

229. “Testimony of a Prisoner,” Argentina Outreach, July-August 1977, pp. 13-14. Ms Erb was a sociology student at the University of Buenos Aires. The junta position is that only guerrillas and left-wing suspects and extremists are ever put through their torture chambers. Juan de Onis assumes this rule to be true, despite the extensive evidence that the Argentinian police and military have killed and tortured the children of political enemies and despite the fact that the subfascist definition of “suspected subversive” could include his employer Arthur Sulzberger (just as it reached out to cover Jacobo Timmerman, the Jewish editor of La Opinion). In an article describing the Chilean secret police involvement in the assassination of Orlando Letelier, de Onis explained that the juntas exchange information and “cooperate” with one another (translation: allow one another’s death squads to murder at will across state lines) “in combating left wing guerrilla groups that are also structured on regional lines.” “Paraguayan Links Chilean General to Letelier Case,” New York Times (20 July 1978). The Letelier murder nails the lie that targets of subfascist murders are confined to “left-wing guerrilla groups,” but even in this specific context de Onis slides automatically into apologetics.

230. New York Times (30 June 1978).

231. See “Every voice can save a life...,” A resource and action update on Argentina, American Friends Service Committee, December 1977; William Goodfellow and James Morrell, “Small Change,” 4 March 1977, mimeographed. Similar observations hold for Uruguay. Goodfellow and Morrell note that in fiscal 1976, the last year for which complete figures were available to them, the U.S. aid that has since been cut off amounted to about 7 percent of total international financing in which the United States was directly involved, since increased after the coup.

232. “Carter’s Aid: A Slap on the Wrist While Money Still Flows,” Argentina Outreach, March-April, 1977, p. 5.

233. See NACLA’s Latin America & Empire Report, January 1977, for a fuller discussion. Also Jon Steinberg, “More than a world cup,” Seven Days, July 1978.

234. See, among many other sources, James Petras and Morris Morley, The United States and Chile, Monthly Review Press, 1975; Robinson Rojas Sandford, The Murder of Allende, Harper and Row, 1976; John Gittings, ed., The Lessons of Chile, Spokesman, 1975; Amnesty International, Chile, AI publications, 1974.

235. Amnesty Action, March 1976, published by AI, U.S.A.

236. Fellowship, September 1977.

237. Recall the interview with Conservative leader Wilson Ferreira Aldunate, who notes that the terrorism of the Uruguayan military government began after the total destruction of the Tupamaros. (See chapter 3, pp. 103-104).

238. See A.J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors, Pantheon, 1978, and sources cited there. For a sympathetic Uruguayan account, see “The Tupamaros,” reprinted as a booklet from Tricontinental, November-December 1968, January-February 1969, March-April 1970. See also James Kohl and John Litt, Urban Guerrilla Warfare in Latin America, MIT Press, 1974.

239. Recall the estimate by Wilson Ferreira Aldunate that the number of exiles is half a million. (See chapter 3, pp. 103-104.)

240. Juan de Onis, New York Times (22 November 1976).

241. See note 215. As the introduction to this volume points out, though the Tribunal was rather fully reported in the Italian, French and Belgian press and the Scandinavian media, the English-speaking world has ignored it, in part for reasons mentioned in note 215.

242. Cf. p. 10. Eduardo Galeano, “Un petit pays dans le ‘marche commun de la mort’,” Le Monde diplomatique, September 1977. In an accompanying article, a “Uruguayan personality” who must remain anonymous estimates on the basis of official figures that about 12% of the population is unaccounted for, presumably abroad, including a large part of the trained and educated sectors. The two articles give an account of Uruguayan fascism and its support by the U.S. (in part through international financial institutions, overcoming the “human rights” gestures) that would be difficult to find in the U.S. press.

243. Cf. Langguth, op. cit., p. 253. There are similar reports of direct U.S. involvement in torture elsewhere; e.g., ibid., pp. 164-65. A double agent who infiltrated the CIA from 1962 to 1970 on behalf of Cuban intelligence testified in Havana that Mitrione had personally tortured beggars to death in demonstration sessions for Uruguayan trainees. New York Times (5 August 1978). Cf. Langguth on Mitrione’s career and the U.S. program of terrorism in Uruguay and Brazil. (See also chapter 1, note 40.)

244. A. J. Langguth, “The mind of a torturer,” The Nation, 24 June 1978.

245. See note 236.

246. On the ways in which the Russians have regularly mimicked U.S. doctrine on regional hegemony, both in rhetoric and in practice, see Thomas M. Franck and Edward Weisband, Word Politics, Oxford, 1971. For still earlier interactions of this nature in the latter stages of World War II, see G. Kolko, Politics of War, specifically, his discussion of Italy and Rumania.

247. Cited by Laurence H. Shoup and William Minter, Imperial Brain Trust, Monthly Review, 1977, p. 197.

248. See chapter 3, note 34.

249. For an informative review, see Susanne Jones and David Tobis, eds., Guatemala, NACLA, Berkeley, 1974, and Roger Plant, Guatemala: Unnatural Disaster, Latin America Bureau, London, 1978. Guatemala is not the sole supplier of blood. The assassinated editor Pedro Joaquin Chamorro of Nicaragua is reported to have been murdered by agents of a company “which bought the blood of impoverished Nicaraguans and exported it to the United States.” Alan Riding, New York Times Magazine, 30 July 1978. On the mechanism by which the poor countries of the world provide agricultural assistance to the rich, see Susan George, How the Other Half Dies, Allanheld, Osmun & Co., 1977; Frances Moore Lappe and Joseph Collins, Food First, Houghton Mifflin, 1977; Lappe and Collins, “Food First Revisited,” Ag World, April 1978. See also several articles in Le Monde diplomatique, September 1978. Gonzalo Arroyo (“L’agro-business en Amerique latine”) comments that the new agri-business model spreading throughout the underdeveloped world may increase production, “but it creates disequilibrium at the regional level and in types of [agricultural] production, essentially oriented towards production of primary materials for agri-industry and/or for export. Meanwhile the increase of production is null for certain other agricultural products, in particular, basic commodities for the local population,” and also tends to exhaust the soil and damage the ecological system in the interests of short-term profit.

250. Plant, op. cit., p. 86.

251. Plant, op. cit. p. 73, citing the English sociologist Andrew Pearse.

252. Guatemala and the Dominican Republic, staff memorandum prepared for the use of the Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere Affairs of the Committee on Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, 30 December 1971, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, 1971.

253. Guatemala, Amnesty International Briefing, London, 1976.

254. Ibid., p. 3.

255. Guatemala—Another Vietnam?, Penguin, 1971, p. 293. They are quoting an embassy statement cited in a UPI dispatch by Theodore Ediger, 19 January 1968.

256. Op. cit., p. 14. (See note 253.)

257. Amnesty International Newletter, April 1978, London.

258. Stephen Kinzer, “Guatemala beyond Bananas,” New Republic, 5 March 1977.

259. James P. Sterba, “The quake hit a stricken land,” New York Times (18 February 1976).

260. Jonathan Dimbleby, “Kissinger Comes to the Rescue,” New Statesman (26 March 1976).

261. Alan Riding, “Free Use of Pesticides in Guatemala Takes a Deadly Toll,” New York Times (9 November 1977).

262. Marlise Simons, “Guatemala Massacre of Indians,” reprinted from the Washington Post in the Manchester Guardian Weekly (9 July 1978).

263. Amnesty International, Newsletter, September 1978.

264. “Instances of the use of United States Armed Forces Abroad, 1798-1945,” pp. 82-87 (see chapter 2, note 1).

265. Alan Riding, “National Mutiny in Nicaragua,” New York Times Magazine, 30 July 1978.

266. For an illustration, see the Reuters dispatch, “Somoza Widening His Control but Foes Vow No Letup,” New York Times (17 February 1974).

267. Riding, op. cit. (See note 265.)

268. John Huey, “Human Rights and Nicaragua,” Wall Street Journal (19 September 1978).

269. John Huey, “Business Elite Joins Struggle to Displace Nicaraguan Dictator,” Wall Street Journal (23 February 1978).

270. Alan Riding, New York Times (3 March 1977).

271. Alan Riding, New York Times (2 March 1977).

272. See, for example, Penny Lernoux, “‘Our S.O.B.s’: The Somozas of Nicaragua,” The Nation, 23 July 1977; Stephen Kinzer, “Nicaragua, a Wholly Owned Subsidiary,” New Republic, 9 April 1977.

273. See above, section 4.4. For more extensive background supplementing Lernoux’s valuable direct report, see Nicaragua, NACLA’s Latin America and Empire Report, February, 1976.

274. John M. Goshko and Karen DeYoung, “‘Garbled’ Rights Message,” and Karen DeYoung, “Peasants Expect Little Help,” side-by-side on 24 October 1977.

275. John M. Goshko, “U.S. Frees Aid to Nicaragua in a Policy Reversal,” Washington Post (16 May 1978).

276. DeYoung, op. cit.

277. Alan Riding, New York Times (12 November 1978).

278. Smith Hempstone, “It’s Logical for Israel to Continue Supplying Weapons to Nicaragua,” Washington Post (3 December 1978).

279. See Volume II, chapter 6.

280. John Huey, “Dictator’s Decline; as Nicaragua Turmoil Intensifies, Support of Somoza Evaporates,” Wall Street Journal (12 September 1978). This report is largely concerned with the “dark mood of businessmen” whose “unity against General Somoza now is almost complete.”

281. Karen DeYoung, “He Was Crying, ‘Don’t Kill Me, Don’t Kill Me!’,” Washington Post (20 September 1978).

282. Tad Szulc, “Rocking Nicaragua—‘The Rebels’ Own Story, Anger at Carter letter and other U.S. actions motivates pro-Castro guerrillas, a spreading problem for Washington in Central America,” Washington Post (3 September 1978). Szulc also found that the anti-Somoza campaign involved “virtually every civic organization in Nicaragua, including businessmen and the Roman Catholic Church,” and that its intensity was such that “any gesture toward Somoza [from Washington] would backfire.” This was the State Department assessment prior to the President’s letter to Somoza.

283. UPI, “Carter phones support to Shah; troops again fire at crowd,” Boston Globe (11 September 1978). (See also chapter 1, section 5, and notes 80, 88.)

284. Edward Cody, “The Shah of Iran Given Assurance of U.S. Support,” Washington Post (1 November 1978).

285. See chapter 1, note 43.

286. On this matter, see Access to Oil—The United States Relationships with Saudi Arabia and Iran, report of the Committee on Energy and Natural Resources, Henry M. Jackson, Chairman, U.S. Senate, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, 1977. The report emphasizes Iran’s role in blocking any “threats to the continuous flow of oil through the Gulf,” which “would so endanger the Western and Japanese economies as to be grounds for general war.” It notes further that “the most serious threats may emanate from internal changes in Gulf states...if Iran is called upon [sic] to intervene in the internal affairs of any Gulf state [as it already has, with U.S. blessings and in coordination with Britain and Jordan in counterinsurgency in Oman] it must be recognized in advance by the United States that this is the role for which Iran is being primed and blame cannot be assigned for Iran’s carrying out an implied assignment” (p. 84, our emphasis). Thus “a strong and stable Iran” serves “as a deterrent against Soviet adventurism in the region” and “against radical groups in the Gulf” (p. 111). This is, of course, the real reason for the enormous build-up of the Iranian military by the United States and the reason why the United States found the Shah’s regime “progressive,” whatever the facts might be.

287. Alan Riding, “U.S. Strategy in Nicaragua Keeps the Time Bomb Ticking,” New York Times (17 December 1978).

288. John M. Goshko, “Nicaragua: Case of Limits on U.S. Clout Abroad,” Washington Post (30 September 1978). On 24 September, the U.S. Senate voted to delete from the foreign aid bill “$150,000 for military training and education [sic] in Nicaragua;” already scaled down from programs totaling $579,000 in 1977 and $400,000 in 1978. Christian Science Monitor (25 September 1978).

289. Le Monde (23 September 1978); translated in the Manchester Guardian Weekly (1 October 1978). One wonders when the pressure of facts will lead to some skepticism in the West about this “human rights stance.”

290. Manchester Guardian Weekly (1 October 1978).

291. New York Times (25 July 1978). For background on Bolivia, see Laurence Whitehead, The United States and Bolivia, Haslemere Group Publications, 515 Liverpool Road, London N7, 1969.

292. Alan Riding, New York Times (27 August 1975).

293. Alan Riding, “Fear Rules in El Salvador as Political Foes Turn Violent,” New York Times (30 July 1978).

5 Bloodbaths in Indochina: Constructive, Nefarious and Mythical

1. Examples will appear below and in Volume II.

2. In the apologetic model, of course, the civilians were terrorized by the NLF and were thus harboring the terrorists out of fear and coercion. Most of the less hysterical apologists knew that this coercion theory of support was highly suspect. (See sections 1.1 and 2.1, this chapter.)

3. Sidney Hook, “Lord Russell and the War Crimes ‘Trial’,” New Leader (24 October 1966); “The Knight of the Double Standard,” The Humanist, January 1971.

4. The restriction is regrettable as the systematic character of U.S. aggression in Indochina can only be appreciated by an account that shows how the war machine was unleashed against North Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia in ever more savage efforts to maintain U.S. control at least of South Vietnam. (See Volume II, chapter 1.)

5. For our own views and background for them, see Edward S. Herman and Richard B. Du Boff, America’s Vietnam Policy, The Strategy of Deception, Public Affairs Press, 1966; E.S. Herman, Atrocities in Vietnam: Myths and Realities, Pilgrim Press, 1970; Noam Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins, Pantheon, 1969; At War with Asia, Pantheon, 1970; For Reasons of State, Pantheon, 1973; and many other publications.

6. Phillipe Devillers, Histoire du Vietnam, Seuil, 1952, p. 337.

7. “The Problem of Democracy in Vietnam,” The World Today (February 1960), p. 73. Later he was to write that by 1956 “it was already clear that...[Diem]...was establishing an authoritarian regime which would tolerate no political dissent” (P.J. Honey, “Viet Nam Argument,” Encounter, November 1965), though if it was already clear in 1956, one did not learn this from his pen. The Encounter article was devoted to showing how much things were improving since the “popular revolt headed by the army” that overthrew Diem, that is, the U.S. backed military coup.

8. See sections 1.5 and 1.6, this chapter.

9. Jean Lacouture, Vietnam: Between Two Truces, Vintage, 1969, p. 29.

10. David Hotham, in Richard Lindholm, ed., Vietnam: The First Five Years, Michigan State, 1959, p. 359.

11. J.J. Zasloff, Origins of the Insurgency in South Vietnam, 1954-1960: The Role of the Southern Vietminh Cadres, Rand, March 1967, p. 11.

12. Ibid., pp. 12-13.

13. See Buttinger, Vietnam: The Unforgettable Tragedy, Horizon, 1977, for some documentation on his advisory role and also for an account of his radical change in view, which led him to believe that “future historians may very likely regard the claims that in South Vietnam the United States was defending a free country against foreign aggression among the great political lies of this century” (p. 34)—a lie which, however, like others of its genre, is generally believed (or at least propounded) by the intelligentsia of the state that produced it. See, for example, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House, Houghton Mifflin, 1965 (Fawcett, 1967 edition, p. 695): “1962 had not been a bad year: ...aggression checked in Vietnam.” In fact, 1962 was the first year in which U.S. military forces were directly engaged in combat and combat support, bombing of villages, gunning down of peasants from helicopters, defoliation, etc. Only three years later, in April 1965, did U.S. intelligence report the presence of the first North Vietnamese battalion in the South. The “aggression” was of the sort that liberal intellectuals like to call “internal aggression”; see above, p. 99. For many more examples, see the above references of note 5. On the internal U.S. government analysis of “North Vietnamese aggression,” see Chomsky, “The Pentagon Papers as Propaganda and as History,” in N. Chomsky and H. Zinn, eds., The Pentagon Papers: Critical Essays, published with an index to Volumes 1-4 as Volume V of the Senator Gravel edition of the Pentagon Papers, Beacon Press, 1971-72.

14. “Lösung für Vietnam,” Neues Forum (August/September, 1969), p. 459. Later, Buttinger was to write that “Communist control of the whole country [North and South) was achieved without the use of force, not of course because the Vietnamese Communists reject force as a means to gain power, but for the simple reason that in the absence of any effective political resistance, the Communists needed no force to establish control over the whole of Vietnam.” Vietnam: The Unforgettable Tragedy, p. 17. For exactly the same reason, substantial use of force was required by the United States and its clients to suppress the Viet Minh movement that had successfully withstood the French invasion. As Buttinger remarks, “It required a tidal wave of falsehood to persuade Americans into accepting the myth that not French, but Communist, aggression was responsible for the first Indochina war” (ibid., p. 22), as was constantly trumpeted by Dean Acheson and a host of sycophants.

15. Jeffrey Race, War Comes to Long An, University of California, 1971, p. 197; to date, the best account of the origins of the insurgency under the U.S.-Diem regime. There is also important material on this subject in the massive “Vietcong Motivation and Morale Study” undertaken by the Rand Corporation. For an interesting study based on this generally ignored material, see David Hunt, “Organizing for Revolution in Vietnam,” Radical America, vol. 8, nos. 1-2, 1974. See also Georges Chaffard, Les deux guerres du Vietnam, La Table Ronde, Paris, 1969. U.S. government sources, in addition to the Pentagon Papers, also contain much useful information: see Robert L. Sansom, The Economics of Insurgency In the Mekong Delta, MIT Press, 1970; Douglas Pike, Viet Cong, MIT Press, 1966 (here, one must be careful to distinguish the documentary evidence presented from the conclusions asserted); William A. Nighswonger, Rural Pacification in Vietnam, Praeger, 1967.

16. Pentagon Papers, Gravel edition, v. I, p. 259. See also the Government edition of the Pentagon Papers, U.S. Department of Defense, United States-Vietnam Relations, 1945-67, 12 vols., Government Printing Office, Washington, 1971; henceforth: DOD. See note 33, this chapter.

17. Pentagon Papers, Gravel edition, v. I, p. 259.

18. Ibid., p. 254.

19. Ibid.

20. Ibid., p. 255.

21. Ibid., p. 243.

22. Diem had publicly repudiated the Accords in January 1955 and the U.S. gave him complete support until he became a liability and was removed (indeed, eliminated) in 1963 in a U.S.-backed Generals’ coup. The same record was replayed 18 years later when Washington signed a “peace agreement” in Paris in January 1973 with much fanfare (even collecting a Nobel Prize) but immediately announced with utter clarity that it had not the slightest intention of observing its terms, which it proceeded at once to subvert quite openly—all of this before the eyes of the media, which remained silent and obedient. (See Volume II, chapter 1, for some comment and references.)

23. Bernard Fall, “Vietcong—The Unseen Enemy in Vietnam,” New Society, 22 April 1965; reprinted in Bernard Fall and Marcus G. Raskin, eds., The Vietnam Reader, Vintage, 1965. Fall, basically a military man, was no dove. (See chapter 3, note 44.)

24. The problem was seen to be, in part, the “tremendous sense of dependence on the U.S.” of countries like the Philippines and South Korea. National Security Council Working Group Project—Courses of Action, Southeast Asia (10 November 1964), Pentagon Papers, Gravel edition, v. I, p. 627.

25. In the State Department’s view, “a fundamental source of danger we face in the Far East derives from Communist China’s rate of economic growth which will probably continue to outstrip that of free Asian countries, with the possible exception of Japan.” (DOD, bk. 10, p. 1198). The Department urged that we do what we can to retard the progress of Asian Communist states. The assault on North and South Vietnam certainly contributed to that end, as did the no less violent attacks on Laos and Cambodia. We return in Volume II, chapter 1, to this theory of how to combat the dangers we face.

26. The NSC Working Group Project says that “In South Korea, there is...some discouragement at the failure to make as much progress politically and economically as North Korea (from a much more favorable initial position) has made.” Op. cit. See note 24, this chapter. Recall that North Korea had been almost totally demolished in the Korean War, including even the bombing of dams to destroy the food supply of the population when the U.S. Air Force could find no more targets.

27. An intelligence estimate of 1959 concluded that “development will lag behind that in the North, and the GVN will continue to rely heavily upon US support....” In the North, while life is “grim and regimented...the national effort is concentrated on building for the future.” (DOD, bk. 10, pp. 1191-1193). In essence, this forecast proved to be correct. See the quotes from Kellen, chapter 3, note 41, and text.

28. Revised Bundy/McNaughton Draft of November 21, 1964, Pentagon Papers, Gravel ed., v. III, p. 661.

29. Ibid.

30. Dean Acheson, Present at the Creation, Norton, 1969, p. 219.

31. Gabriel Kolko, “The American Goals in Vietnam,” Pentagon Papers, Gravel ed., v. V, Critical Essays, p. 2.

32. On this matter, see John Dower, “The Superdomino in Postwar Asia: Japan in and out of the Pentagon Papers,” in Pentagon Papers, Gravel ed., v. V, Critical Essays.

33. As should be obvious, the Pentagon Papers, though a useful source, must be regarded with the same caution that one would use in the case of productions, even for internal use, by scholars and bureaucrats working for other states. In fact, there is substantial misrepresentation, particularly with regard to such ideologically crucial matters as the origins of insurgency. For discussion, see Chomsky, “The Pentagon Papers as Propaganda and as History,” in Pentagon Papers, Gravel ed., v. V, Critical Essays. The same is true with regard to intelligence analyses. It is necessary to study the record to see how dominated the intelligence agencies were by the framework of propaganda that they themselves were helping to construct in their disinformation campaigns. To mention one striking example, the Pentagon Papers analysts were able to discover only one staff paper in a record of more than two decades “which treats communist reactions primarily in terms of the separate national interests of Hanoi, Moscow, and Peiping,” rather than regarding Hanoi simply as an agent of International Communism, directed from abroad. One expects this from Dean Acheson, Dean Rusk, and the more chauvinist elements of academic scholarship, but it is surprising to find such total subordination to state dogma in the intelligence agencies as well. For discussion, see Chomsky, For Reasons of State, p. 51.

34. See NSC Working Group on Vietnam, Sec. 1: “Intelligence Assessment: The Situation in Vietnam,” 24 November 1964, Doc. 240, Pentagon Papers, Gravel ed., v. III, pp. 651-56.

35. In an unpublished and untitled memorandum on pacification problems circulated within the military in 1965, a copy of which was given by Vann to Professor Alex Carey, University of New South Wales, Australia.

36. For the intellectual backup of a policy of terror and violence, see Charles Wolf, Jr., United States Policy and the Third World, Little, Brown, 1967. Wolf was Senior Economist for the Rand Corporation.

37. For references, and a general review of Komer’s theories and policies, see Chomsky, For Reasons of State, pp. 84f.

38. Cited by Richard Critchfield, The Long Charade, Harcourt Brace and World, 1968, p. 173.

39. Douglas Kinnard, The War Managers, University Press of New England, 1977, pp. 75, 47.

40. Katsuichi Honda, Vietnam—A Voice from the Villages, published in English translation in Tokyo, though it never reached the status of a best-seller in the United States. (See note 48, this chapter; and note 53, chapter 1.)

41. Letter from a U.S. soldier in Vietnam to Senator Fulbright, reprinted in the Congressional Record, 16 June 1967.

42. See Rafael Littauer and Norman Uphoff, eds., The Air War in Indochina, revised edition, Beacon, 1971, p. 62.

43. Ibid., p. 55.

44. Michael J. Uhl, Hearings Before Subcommittee of House Committee on Government Operations, U.S. Assistance Programs in Vietnam (July/August 1971), p. 315; henceforth, U.S. Assistance Programs. For a more extensive quote, see text at note 97, this chapter.

45. Quoted in Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Bitter Heritage, Houghton Mifflin, 1967, p. 47.

46. Indochina Resource Center, “A Statistical Fact Sheet on the Indochina War,” (27 September 1972).

47. The Air War in Indochina, p. 63.

48. See, for example, Herman, Atrocities in Vietnam, Chapter 3; Seymour Hersh, My Lai 4, Random House, 1971; Katsuichi Honda, Vietnam War: A Report Through Asian Eyes, Mirai-sha, 1972; Jonathan Schell, The Military Half: An Account of Destruction in Quang Ngai and Quang Tin, Vintage, 1968; James Kunen, Standard Operating Procedure, Avon, 1971.

49. Shimkin, who was killed in Vietnam, was an International Voluntary Services (IVS) worker who had aroused the ire of the US-Saigon authorities when he “told a New York Times reporter about the forced use of farm labor to clear a mine field in Ba Chuc village in the Mekong Delta when American officials there refused to act even after some of the farm people were killed and several wounded” (Don Luce, “‘Tell Your Friends That We’re People’,” in Pentagon Papers, v. V, Critical Essays). IVS was later expelled for being “too political.” Its director had protested before the Kennedy Refugee Subcommittee of the Senate on “the forced movement of the Montagnards from their mountain homes into the city slums” (Luce). Kevin Buckley was the head of the Newsweek Bureau in Saigon. We are indebted to Buckley for allowing us to use his original notes for the Newsweek article in which his account of SPEEDY EXPRESS was partially reported (“Pacification’s Deadly Price,” Newsweek, 19 June 1972). Quotes are from Buckley’s notes unless identified as Newsweek, in which case they are from the published article.

50. See Peter Braestrup, Big Story, Westview, vol. II, Documents, p. 20. On this Freedom House effort to show how the media undermined our noble enterprise in Vietnam, see volume II, chapter 1.

51. On the behavior of the 9th Division and its commander, see Daniel Ellsberg, “Bombing and Other Crimes,” in his Papers on the War, Simon & Schuster, 1972. Ellsberg writes in part on the basis of direct observation as a DOD analyst in Vietnam.

52. See the references cited in Chomsky, For Reasons of State, pp. xx, xxxiii.

53. Earl S. Martin, Reaching the Other Side, Crown, 1978, pp. 133f.

54. Gordon S. Livingston, “Letter from a Vietnam Veteran,” Saturday Review (20 September 1969).

55. Ithiel de Sola Pool, letter, New York Review of Books, 13 February 1969. For news reports on the exploits of the 9th Division at the time, see Chomsky, At War with Asia, pp. 99f.

56. Cf. Henry Kamm, New York Times, 29 November 1969. This forcible evacuation complicated the task of the investigators of the My Lai massacre, he reported.

57. For references and further details, see Chomsky, At War with Asia, p. 104; For Reasons of State, p. 225; see Martin, op. cit., p. 133, for an eyewitness account; also the testimony by Martin Teitel of the American Friends Service Committee, Hearing before the Subcommittee to Investigate Problems Connected with Refugees and Escapees, Committee on the Judiciary (Kennedy Subcommittee), U.S. Senate, 92nd Congress, Second Session, 8 May 1972. Teitel also describes US-GVN atrocities of April 1972 in the same area subsequent to the virtually bloodless liberation by the NLF-NVA—the victims, once again, included remnants of the My Lai massacre, whose torment was endless. (See note 199, this chapter.)

58. Guenter Lewy, America in Vietnam, Oxford, 1978, p. 143. Lewy could have referred not only to Newsweek but also to the material cited here from Buckley’s original notes, which had already been published. See Chomsky, “U.S. Involvement in Vietnam,” Bridge: An Asian American Perspective, November 1975; “From Mad Jack to Mad Henry,” Vietnam Quarterly, Winter 1976. In the case of Operation BOLD MARINER Lewy avoids reference either to press reports or to reports by the AFSC observers at congressional hearings and elsewhere, and thus has no need to comment on purposeful destruction of dikes to deny food and the numerous recorded atrocities, again revealing his scholarly technique in this effort to show that the United States cannot justly be accused of war crimes. Cf. Lewy, op. cit., pp. 139-40. We will see below (note 168, this chapter) how Lewy deals with alleged crimes of the official enemy.

59. 2000 Koreans were dispatched on 8 January 1965. The Honolulu meeting of 20 April 1965 recommended that the numbers be increased to 7,250 (just at the time of the first notice by intelligence that there might be a North Vietnamese battalion in the South; as late as July 1965 the Pentagon was still concerned over the possibility that there might be such forces in or near South Vietnam). See Chomsky, For Reasons of State, p. 122, for references. Koreans are reported to have been involved in an attack on a Cambodian village in February 1967; see Chomsky, At War With Asia, p. 122.

60. Robert M. Smith, “Vietnam Killings Laid to Koreans,” New York Times (10 January 1970).

61. Craig Whitney of the New York Times, who was given extensive documentation on South Korean murders by Diane and Michael Jones, summarized their findings briefly toward the end of an article focusing on the future role of the South Koreans in Vietnam. Toward the beginning of his article, Whitney states that “they [the South Koreans] have been providing a military shield [Whitney does not say for whom] in a poorly defended section of the central coast ...” (“Korean Troops End Vietnam Combat Role,” New York Times (9 November 1972).

62. A large number of South Korean murders were “random” in the sense of not being attributable to any ongoing military actions.

63. The Rand Corporation “Viet Cong Motivation and Morale Study” of 1966, which gave documentary evidence of indiscriminate South Korean murders of civilians, was classified and suppressed. See American Report (28 July 1972).

64. Letter in the New York Times, (25 January) 1970).

65. “Security” is another Orwellism consistently applied to Vietnam by official spokesmen for the United States, and applied in analogous fashion throughout the empire. With reference to Vietnam it meant unthreatened control by the U.S. client regime in Saigon. If Saigon controlled by sheer force and violence—often the case—the people and hamlet were “secure”; if the NLF controlled without force, the hamlet and its people were “insecure”. Similarly, a National Intelligence Estimate of June 1953 gloomily discussed the inability of the French “to provide security for the Vietnamese population,” who warned the guerrillas of the presence of French Union forces, thus permitting them to take cover. In short, popular support for the Vietminh made it difficult for France to provide security for the population from the Vietminh. Pentagon Papers, Gravel ed., v. I, p. 396.

66. See “‘Pacification’ by Calculated Frightfulness: The Testimony of Diane and Michael Jones on the Massacres of South Vietnamese Civilians by South Korean Mercenary Troops,” Pacification Monograph Number 2; edited with an Introduction by Edward S. Herman, Philadelphia, 1973.

67. The same tendencies quickly manifested themselves in the Australian “pacification” effort. See the documentation in Alex Carey, “Australian Atrocities in Vietnam,” Sydney, N.S.W., 1968.

68. On the interaction of U.S.-Diem terror and NLF counter-terror, see above. Nevertheless, we will adhere to the terminology of the propaganda system here and refer to the U.S. assassination programs as “counter-terror.”

69. U.S. Assistance Programs, p. 183.

70. We will not review the depressing record of apologetics. To cite one example, when Senator Kennedy, in Congressional Hearings, brought to the attention of William Sullivan (then Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for the Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs) a Saigon government report stating that the Phoenix program was launched in order to “eradicate Communist infrastructure” and that it reported “40,994 killed by assassination,” Sullivan corrected the record, noting that it said just “killed,” not “assassinated,” and then added that “some could have been killed in taking part in military action.” As for the Phoenix program, “the Phoenix, basically, is only a program for the interchange of information and intelligence,” he asserted. Hearings before the Subcommittee on Refugees and Escapees of the Committee on the Judiciary, U.S. Senate, 92nd Congress, Second Session, 28 September 1972, pp. 21-22.

71. An earlier predecessor was the “counter-terror,” or “CT” program organized by the CIA in the mid-1960s to use assassination and other forms of terror against the NLF leadership and cadres. See Wayne Cooper, “Operation Phoenix: A Vietnam Fiasco Seen From Within,” Washington Post (8 June 1972). See also Nighswonger, op. cit., pp. 136-37, on earlier U.S. efforts to develop “assassination teams” and “prosecutor-executioners.”

72. Pentagon Papers, Gravel ed., v. II, pp. 429, 585.

73. Ibid., pp. 503-504.

74. Ibid., v. IV, p. 578.

75. Richard S. Winslow, a former AID employee, pointed out that Phoenix program language at one time spoke of the “elimination” of VCI. “‘Elimination,’ however, gave the unfortunate impression to some Congressmen and to the interested public that someone was being ‘eliminated.’ Now the major goal is ‘neutralization’ of the VCI. Of course, the same proportion of VCI are being killed....But Congress seems mollified now that suspected Vietcong are ‘neutralized,’ rather than ‘eliminated.’” U.S. Assistance Programs, p. 244.

76. U.S. Assistance Programs, p. 207.

77. Saigon Ministry of Information, Vietnam 1967-1971, Toward Peace and Prosperity, 1971, p. 52.

78. U.S. Assistance Programs, p. 207.

79. Ibid., pp. 184, 225.

80. Ibid., p. 183.

81. Ibid., p. 212.

82. Ibid., p. 186.

83. For Robert Komer, writing in April 1967, the problem is that “we are just not getting enough payoff yet from the massive intelligence we are increasingly collecting. Police/military coordination is sadly lacking both in collection and in swift reaction.” Pentagon Papers, Gravel ed., v. IV, p. 441.

84. Ibid., v. II, p. 407, referring to the officials of Bien Hoa Province.

85. See Jon Cooper, “Operation Phoenix,’’ Department of History, Dartmouth, 1971, mimeographed. The IVS volunteer was Don Luce.

86. U.S. Assistance Programs, p. 314.

87. New York Times (13 August 1972).

88. Washington Post (17 February 1970).

89. U.S. Assistance Programs, p. 314.

90. Dispatch News Service International, No. 376 (6 July 1972).

91. U.S. Assistance Programs, p. 321.

92. Tad Szulc, New York Times (7 April 1971). Saigon costs were also borne by the U.S., overwhelmingly.

93. Frances Starner, “I’ll Do It My Way,’’ FEER (6 November 1971).

94. Richard West, “Vietnam: The Year of the Rat,’’ New Statesman (25 February 1972).

95. U.S. Assistance Programs, p. 252.

96. Ibid., p. 314.

97. Ibid., pp. 314-15. U.S. intelligence nets were infiltrated by right-wing Vietnamese who had their own reasons for inciting terror, according to former intelligence agents. See the report by Jeffrey Stein, an agent-handler in 1968-69, Boston Phoenix (10 May 1972).

98. U.S. Assistance Programs, p. 321.

99. Ibid., p. 252.

100. UPI, Le Monde (5 November 1971).

101. After the Phoenix program was officially phased out, as a result of the bad publicity it received, a new program under the code name “F-6” of a similar nature was instituted, according to a number of former U.S. intelligence officers. Earl Martin came across some independent evidence in support of this not very surprising allegation. Shortly before the Saigon army fled from Quang Ngai (which, he reports, was liberated by NLF troops without a shot being fired), Martin was picked up by the Saigon army and kept briefly in the local Provincial Interrogation Center, where the main torturers had operated. He happened to notice an organizational chart on which every number began with “F-6.” Op. cit., p. 82.

It is interesting to see how the indiscriminate character of Phoenix murders is used by some of the current apologists for U.S. terrorism in Indochina. Guenter Lewy, for example, points out that very few of those killed under the Phoenix program were specifically targeted. He argues that “the fact that so few of those killed were on the Phoenix target list certainly undermines the charge that the Phoenix program was a program of planned assassinations” (op. cit., p. 281). The logic is astounding. Actually, the facts Lewy cites merely show that this program of planned assassination degenerated into indiscriminate slaughter, as we have discussed, not a surprising fact given the background and context, which Lewy characteristically ignores in his apologetics. As in the cases noted earlier (see note 58, this chapter), Lewy selectively cites government documents, carefully omitting testimony from participants in Phoenix operations or reports by journalists and others on the scene that would permit a serious scholar to determine the character and significance of the programs he seeks to justify.

102. Nazi extermination camps, of course, occupy a place by themselves, but for systematic torture and brutalization of ordinary citizens, often using sophisticated technology, the “Free Vietnam” established by U.S. force bears comparison to European fascism.

103. For extensive documentation on this point, see After the Signing of the Paris Agreements, Documents on South Vietnam’s Political Prisoners, Narmic-VRC (June 1973), p. 27; Communauté Vietnamienne, Saigon: un régime en question: les prisonniers politiques, Sudestasie, Paris, 1974; A Cry of Alarm, New Revelations on Repression and Deportations in South Vietnam, Saigon, 1972; Jean-Pierre Debris and André Menras, Rescapés des bagnes de Saigon, nous accusons, Editeurs Francais Réunis, Paris, 1973; The Forgotten Prisoners of Nguyen Van Thieu, Paris, May 1973; Holmes Brown and Don Luce, Hostages of War, Saigon’s Political Prisoners, 1973, Indochina Mobile Education Project; Pham Tam, Imprisonment and Torture in South Vietnam, Fellowship of Reconciliation, undated; Prisonniers Politiques au Sud Vietnam, Listes de Prisonniers, Appel des 30 Mouvements, Saigon, February 1973.

104. Quoted in Brown and Luce, op. cit., p. 14.

105. Ibid., p. 15.

106. Ibid., p. 32.

107. Quaker Team in Quang Ngai Province, “To Report Truthfully on the Treatment of Prisoners in 1972.”

108. After the Signing, p. 32.

109. U.S. Assistance Programs, p. 314.

110. After the Signing, p. 27.

111. Ibid., pp. 26-27.

112. After the Signing, p. 33.

113. Ibid., pp. 33-34.

114. Michael Field, The Prevailing Wind: Witness in Indo-China, Methuen, 1965, p. 210.

115. “M. Thieu...appliquons la loi des cowboys,” Le Monde (27 January 1973).

116. Nothing new in that. For example, the May 1969 meeting of the Council on Vietnamese Studies, which pretended to be a scholarly organization, was devoted to a discussion led by Harvard’s Samuel Huntington on the apparently insuperable problems that would face the U.S. and its local client if compelled to enter into political competition with the NLF, admittedly “the most powerful purely political national organization.” Huntington suggested various forms of deceit and chicanery that might overcome the advantages of the enemy, but apparently without convincing his more skeptical colleagues. For discussion, in the context of the plans being developed in the early 1970s by U.S. scholars for incorporating South Vietnam permanently within the U.S. system, see Chomsky, For Reasons of State, chapter 4.

117. Boston Globe (24 June 1972).

118. San Francisco Chronicle (4 June 1972).

119. Cited in Saigon: un régime en question, p. 69, from the Washington Post (10 November 1972), in a discussion of the intensifying terror.

120. Le Monde (17 May 1973).

121. Chris Jenkins, “Thieu’s Campaign of Terror,” American Report (29 January 1973); letter of the Committee Campaigning for the Improvement of the Prison System of South Vietnam (9 December 1972); After the Signing, pp. 35ff.

122. Sylvan Fox, “Saigon Bypasses Accord by Freeing Many Prisoners,” New York Times (6 February 1973).

123. The press also failed to note the suspiciousness of the huge number (40,000) allegedly being released, and the illogic in the contention that the political component, numbering 10,000, had “renounced Communism.” (All at once? If not, why were they held to this point?)

124. Prison News of the Committee Campaigning for the Improvement of the Prison System of South Vietnam (14 December 1972).

125. Prison News (9 December 1972); Ngo Vinh Long, “Thieu starving refugees to keep the throne,” Boston Phoenix (12 December 1972), citing South Vietnamese newspaper reports; Prison News (9 December 1972); After the Signing, pp. 35ff.

126. Le Monde (3 January 1973).

127. Ibid.

128. New York Times (27 January 1973).

129. U.S. Assistance Programs, p. 5.

130. GAO Report (July 1972), p. 42.

131. U.S. Assistance Programs, p. 197.

132. Ibid., p. 224.

133. Ibid., p. 96.

134. Ibid., pp. 177, 179. (Our emphasis.)

135. AID, Fiscal 1971 Program and Project Data Presentation to Congress; cited by Michael T. Klare, “America’s Global Police,” American Report, 15 September 1972.

136. See pp. 55-56.

137. U.S. Assistance Programs, pp. 186ff. One illustration of “improvement” cited by William Colby was that confessions obtained during “interrogations,” which “used to be used exclusively...are not used exclusively any more.” p. 197.

138. Quoted in Brown and Luce, op. cit., p. 32.

139. Ibid., p. 36.

140. Ibid., p. 111.

141. For a discussion of the 1967 attack on Dak Son and this general issue, see Herman, Atrocities in Vietnam, pp. 46-54.

142. The quote is from a captured Communist document dated March 1960, cited at length in Race, op. cit., pp. 116-119. The specific quote is on p. 119.

143. Douglas Pike, Vietcong, pp. 91-92.

144. Ibid., p. 101. This conclusion is generally accepted even by scholars who bend over backwards to find evidence for Hanoi’s aggression. See, e.g., King C. Chen, “Hanoi’s Three Decisions and the Escalation of the Vietnam War,” Political Science Quarterly, Summer 1975: “It was the growing military campaign of the Diem regime against the Communists with America’s support that compelled Hanoi to decide to revert to war.” p. 258.

145. Race, op. cit., p. 184. Law 10/59 initiated a system of military courts that, within three days of a charge, were to sentence to death “whoever commits or attempts to commit...crimes with the aim of sabotage, or of infringing upon the security of the State” (Article 1), as well as “whoever belongs to an organization designed to help to prepare or to perpetrate [these] crimes” (Article 3). This law made all dissent and opposition subversive and punishable by death.

146. However absurd it may be, this picture was widely disseminated throughout the Indochina War, and still is, in essence: For example, it is seriously argued today that a tiny group of Paris-educated fanatics (“nine men at the top”) held the entire country of Cambodia in their grip as they proceeded systematically to massacre and starve the population—the reason for this policy, according to the widely praised account that has reached by far the largest international audience, may be that their leader suffers from “chronic impotence.” The same authorities (John Barron and Anthony Paul of the Readers Digest) hold that a tiny group of completely inconsequential leaders succeeded through the use of terror to organize a force capable of defeating the world’s greatest military power and the government it supported. This is put forth with utter seriousness in a work lauded for its insights throughout the Western world. Meanwhile another authority regarded with much awe among the intelligentsia (Francois Ponchaud) assures us that the group of fanatics who held the terrorized country in their iron grasp were proceeding to eliminate some 5-7 million people out of a total of 8 million, including all but the young. For discussion of these ideas and the evidence that is advanced to support them, see Volume II, chapter 6. As will be seen, the characterization just given is literally accurate.

147. Ibid., pp. 196-97. Emphasis added.

148. Op. cit., pp. 188-89, note 25.

149. Ibid., p. 104.

150. Ibid., pp. 110-11.

151. Ibid., pp. 94-95, 116, 184ff.

152. Ibid., p. 140.

153. Ibid., p. 211.

154. Ibid., p. 200. After talking with the Saigon leadership in 1965, James Reston wrote: “Even Premier Ky told this reporter today that the communists were closer to the people’s yearnings for social justice and an independent life than his own government.” New York Times (1 September 1965). It was a constant refrain apart from propaganda exercises.

155. Race, op. cit., p. 200.

156. These reports reached flood proportions during the DRV offensive of 1972, with the New York Times contributing its share in the writings of Joseph Treaster and Fox Butterfield. Their reports, heavily dependent on official handouts of Saigon and U.S. information officers, do not withstand close scrutiny. See, for example, Tom Fox, “The Binh Dinh ‘Massacre’,” American Report (15 September 1972); Le Monde, 28-29 May 1972 (report of interviews with refugees by an AFP special correspondent). See also notes 174, 198, 199, this chapter. (See Volume II for many additional examples.)

157. When we speak of “mythical bloodbath” we do not mean to imply that no killings took place. In fact they did, on a considerable scale. But the evidence seems to us decisive that the core of truth was distorted, misrepresented, inflated and embellished with sheer fabrication for propaganda purposes. As to the events themselves, we are not attempting to offer any definitive account, but rather to compare the evidence available with its interpretation by the government and the media.

158. This system of responsiveness extended into the military sphere, helping to explain the “astonishing” fighting capacity and “almost incredibly resilient morale” of DRV soldiers, who benefit from a system of “morale restitution...designed to lend great emotional and physical support to its members,” a system which “anticipates and alleviates possible future morale troubles.” Konrad Kellen, “1971 and Beyond: The View from Hanoi,” Rand Corporation, June 1971, p. 9.

159. In R.N. Pfeffer, ed., No More Vietnams?, Harper and Row, 1968, p. 227.

160. Race, op. cit., pp. 182-83, note 22.

161. Diane Johnstone, ‘“Communist Bloodbath’ in North Vietnam is Propaganda Myth, says former Saigon Psychological Warfare Chief,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch (24 September 1972).

162. The analysis that follows is based on D. Gareth Porter, The Myth of the Bloodbath: North Vietnam’s Land Reform Reconsidered, International Relations of East Asia, Interim Report No. 2, Cornell, 1972. See also the abbreviated version in the Bulletin of the Concerned Asian Scholars, September 1973.

163. Myth of the Bloodbath, pp. 26-28.

164. Ibid., pp. 44-45.

165. “Figure on N. Vietnam’s Killing ‘Just a Guess,’ Author Says,” The Washington Post (13 September 1972).

166. Late 1954 was also a period of famine in much of North Vietnam, affecting the very area in which Chi had lived, which further compromises his inferences drawn from a count of village deaths by starvation.

167. Fire in the Lake, Little, Brown, 1972, p. 223. FitzGerald gives no footnote reference for this estimate, but she relies heavily on Fall and her language is similar to his.

168. Author (not Congressman) Michael Harrington writes that he and other “socialist cadre... knew that Ho and his comrades had killed thousands of peasants during forced collectivization in North Vietnam during the ’50s (a fact they themselves had confessed).” Dissent (Spring 1973). In fact, the only known “confessions” are the fabrications that had been exposed many months earlier, and neither Harrington nor other Western observers “know” what took place during the land reform. Note the claim that “Ho and his comrades had killed thousands of peasants,” when in fact there is no evidence that the leadership ordered or organized mass executions of peasants.

Guente Lewy writes that “the Communists in the North had severe problems with their own ‘counterrevolutionaries’. In 1955-56 perhaps as many as 50,000 were executed in connection with the land reform law of 1953....A North Vietnamese exile puts the number of victims at one-half million” (op. cit., p. 16). His two footnote references for these estimates are Chi for the latter and Fall (who appears to have relied on Chi) for the former. Lewy then adds, “Attempts by the Hanoi sympathizer D. Gareth Porter to deny the scope of this terror remain unconvincing.” This exhausts Lewy’s discussion, and once again reveals clearly the scholarly standards of this apologist for U.S. terror. The material just reviewed is nowhere discussed. For Lewy, an extrapolation from one execution reported in one village by a highly unreliable source to an estimate of 50,000 executions (or 500,000 victims) for all of North Vietnam is quite legitimate, and there is no need to concern oneself over Chi’s demonstrated fabrications, Chau’s report that the whole story was an intelligence fabrication, the results of Moise’s careful study (see note 170, this chapter), or any of the abundant evidence that calls this parody into question. This reference to alleged crimes of the enemy is a natural counterpart to Lewy’s efforts to deny U.S. crimes, in the manner already illustrated (see notes 58 and 101, this chapter).

169. Porter, Myth of the Bloodbath, p. 55. We return in Volume II to 1978 repetitions of the long-exposed propaganda fabrications, in addition to Lewy.

170. See his “Land Reform and Land Reform Errors in North Vietnam,” Pacific Affairs, Spring 1976, and his University of Michigan Ph.D dissertation, 1978. We quote from the former.

171. The analysis below is based primarily on D. Gareth Porter, “U.S. Political Warfare in Vietnam—The 1968 ‘Hue Massacre’,” Indochina Chronicle, No. 33, 24 June 1974 (reprinted in the Congressional Record, 19 February 1975); and Edward S. Herman and D. Gareth Porter, “The Myth of the Hue Massacre,” Ramparts, May-June 1975. See also references cited below.

172. Stewart Harris, London Times (27 March 1968).

173. Marc Riboud, Le Monde, (13 April 1968). Riboud reports 4,000 civilians killed during the reconquest of the “assassinated city” of Hue by U.S. forces.

174. Report by John Sullivan of the AFSC, 9 May 1968. He reports that none of the AFSC workers who were in Hue throughout the fighting had heard of abusive or atrocious behavior by the NLF-NVA.

175. Len Ackland, “Hue,” unpublished; one of the sources used by Don Oberdorfer in his Tet, Doubleday and Co., 1971.

176. Richard West, New Statesman, (28 January 1972).

177. And despite Pike’s government position and quite remarkable record as a propagandist. For some samples, see N. Chomsky, American Power and the New Mandarins, pp. 365-66.

178. Fire in the Lake, pp. 174-75. In a subsequent edition of her book, FitzGerald qualified her earlier wholesale acceptance of the myth, but the impact was slight.

179. New York Times, Op.-Ed. (15 June 1972). In his book, No Exit From Vietnam, McKay, Updated Edition, 1970, Thompson says, “Normally Communist behavior toward the mass of the population is irreproachable and the use of terror is highly selective” (p. 40); but that work, while biased, involved some effort at understanding and contained a residue of integrity, entirely absent in the New York Times piece.

180. Porter, “U.S. Political Warfare in Vietnam.”

181. Ibid.

182. Ibid.

183. Ibid.

184. Quoted in Townsend Hoopes, The Limits of Intervention, McKay, 1969, p. 142.

185. Vietnam Inc., Macmillan, 1971, p. 137.

186. Cited in Herman and Porter, op. cit.

187. See Harris, op. cit.

188. Op. cit., pp. 141-42.

189. Riboud, op. cit.

190. See Wilfred Burchett, Guardian (New York), 6 December 1969.

191. Riboud, op. cit.

192. Interview with Mr. Tony Zangrilli (2 February 1973).

193. Alje Vennema, The Tragedy of Hue, unpublished; quoted by Porter, op. cit. Subsequently Vennema changed his views on Hue. He returned for a visit during which he collected secondary and tertiary source information, which he then used in a book in which his own personal first hand observations were shunted aside. See Alje Vennema, The Viet Cong Massacre At Hue, Vantage Press, 1976.

194. Oriana Fallaci, “Working Up to Killing,” Washington Monthly (February 1972).

195. John Lengel, AP, A010—Hue Descriptive, 10 February 1968, cited by Peter Braestrup, Big Story, Westview Press, volume I, pp. 268-69. After the reference to a psychological warfare program pinning the blame on the Communists, Braestrup adds a footnote that reads: “At this point, the ‘Hue massacre’ by the Vietcong was still unknown to newsmen.” It naturally does not occur to him to ask whether this “massacre” may not relate to the psywar program so desperately needed. While Braestrup cites Porter’s critique, he assumes without comment or discussion that the official line must be correct, as does his Freedom House sponsor, a typical manifestation of subservience to official dogmas. See note 168, this chapter. We return to some discussion of the Braestrup-Freedom House version of history in Volume II, chapter 1.

196. D. Gareth Porter and Len E. Ackland, “Vietnam: The Bloodbath Argument,” Christian Century (5 November 1969).

197. Ibid.

198. Katsuichi Honda, Vietnam War: A Report Through Asian Eyes, pp. 55-69.

199. Martin Teitel, op. cit., p. 17 (see note 57, this chapter); “Again, the suffering of My Lai,” New York Times (7 June 1972). In the same Senate Hearings Teitel reports other instances of terrorism attributed to the NLF but apparently carried out by ARVN.

5 Appendix

1. Hospitalized prisoners are chained.

2. It appears, in fact, that if freedom of movement were re-established at the same time as democratic liberties, the great majority of the province would opt for the P.R.G. One of the “liberated zones” begins only three kilometers from the town of Quang Ngai (N.D.L.R.).