“GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — In the torturous history of the U.S. government’s black sites, the F.B.I. has long been portrayed as acting with a strong moral compass. Its agents, disgusted with the violence they saw at a secret C.I.A. prison in Thailand, walked out, enabling the bureau to later deploy “clean teams” untainted by torture to interrogate the five men accused of conspiring in the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.
But new information that emerged this week in the Sept. 11 case undermines that F.B.I. narrative. The two intelligence agencies secretly arranged for nine F.B.I. agents to temporarily become C.I.A. operatives in the overseas prison network where the spy agency used torture to interrogate its prisoners.
The once-secret program came to light in pretrial proceedings in the death penalty case. The proceedings are currently examining whether the accused mastermind of the Sept. 11 plot, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, and his four co-defendants voluntarily confessed after years in the black site network, where detainees were waterboarded, beaten, deprived of sleep and isolated to train them to comply with their captors’ wishes.
At issue is whether the military judge will exclude from the eventual trial the testimony of F.B.I. agents who questioned the defendants in 2007 at Guantánamo and also forbid the use of reports that the agents wrote about each man’s account of his role in the hijacking conspiracy.
A veteran Guantánamo prosecutor, Jeffrey D. Groharing, has called the F.B.I. interrogations “the most critical evidence in this case.” Defense lawyers argue that the interrogations were tainted by the years of torture by U.S. government agents.
In open court on Thursday, another prosecutor, Clayton G. Trivett Jr., confirmed the unusual arrangement, in which nine F.B.I. agents were “formally detailed” to the agency “and thus became a member of the C.I.A. and worked within C.I.A. channels.”
He said that the agents served as “debriefers,” a C.I.A. term for interrogators, and questioned black site prisoners “out of the coercive environment” and after the use of “E.I.T.s.”
E.I.T.s, or enhanced interrogation techniques, is a C.I.A. euphemism for a series of abusive tactics that the agency used against Mr. Mohammed and other prisoners in 2002 and 2003 — tactics that were then approved but are now illegal. They include waterboarding, painful shackling and isolating a prisoner nude, shivering and in the dark to break his will to resist interrogation.
Mr. Trivett offered no precise time period but made clear that the F.B.I. agents were absorbed by the C.I.A. sometime between 2002, when the black sites were established, and September 2006. On their return to the F.B.I., they took on the status of C.I.A. assets, he said, and so their identities are classified.
If, after the horrors of this week in Afghanistan, the 4-Starry-eyed generals responsible for this 20-year March of Folly are not held accountable, there will be still worse to come. None were held accountable for the disasters of Vietnam or Iraq, and now the allegedly smart 4-Star Generals and Admirals are – get this – preparing for war with China and Russia.
“Civilian control” of the military is a fiction when the Departments of Defense and State are headed by windsock politicians like Robert Gates and Hillary Clinton, not to mention President Barack Obama who lacked the spine to stand up to political generals like David Petraeus. This was clear as a bell 12 years ago, when on March 24, 2009, Obama announced his first surge of troops into Afghanistan.
He claimed his decision was the result of a “careful policy review” by military commanders and diplomats, the Afghan and Pakistan governments, NATO, and other international organizations. That he did not mention any intelligence input into this key decision for a slow surge in troops and trainers was not an oversight. There was no intelligence input – just as there was none before the benighted “surge” of U.S. troops into Iraq in 2007, during which an extra thousand GIs were killed.
Gen. David Petraeus and Defense Secretary Robert Gates were in charge, and they knew best. They would run their own policy review, thank you very much. And if the outcome meant an automatic fourth star for the generals, who’s to complain.
The pressure on Obama was so clear that when he announced his decision to surge troops into Afghanistan I wrote “Welcome to Vietnam, Mr. President.”
“The road ahead will be long,” Obama warned. That part he got right; that was guaranteed by the strategy adopted.
It seemed only right and fitting that Barbara Tuchman’s daughter, Jessica Tuchman Mathews, then-president of the Carnegie Foundation, showed herself to be inoculated against the kind of “cognitive dissonance” about which her historian mother Barbara Tuchman warned in her classic book, The March of Folly: From Troy to Vietnam. In a January 2009 Carnegie report on Afghanistan concluded, “The only meaningful way to halt the insurgency’s momentum is to start withdrawing troops. The presence of foreign troops is the most important element driving the resurgence of the Taliban.”
Many old hands in intelligence and the military were also highly skeptical, but Congress and the mainstream media remained bedazzled by the medals and merit badges of Petraeus and other generals, some of whom looked forward to another star and kept their mouths shut. Only one summoned the courage to speak out. He happened to be the top US commander in Afghanistan, Gen. David McKiernan, who a few months before had publicly contradicted his boss, Defense Secretary Gates, when Gates started talking up the prospect of a “surge” of troops in Afghanistan.
McKiernan insisted publicly that no Iraqi-style “surge” of forces would end the conflict in Afghanistan. “The word I don’t use for Afghanistan is ‘surge,’” McKiernan said, adding that what is required is a “sustained commitment” that could last many years and would ultimately require a political, not military, solution.
One argument Gates adduced to support his professed optimism made us veteran intelligence officers gag – at least those who remember the US in Vietnam in the 1960s, the Soviets in Afghanistan in the 1980s and other failed counterinsurgencies.
“The Taliban holds no land in Afghanistan, and loses every time it comes into contact with coalition forces,” Gates explained. Was he unaware that his remark echoed one made by US Army Col. Harry Summers as the Vietnam war was approaching its own denouement?
In 1974, Summers was sent to Hanoi to try to resolve the status of Americans still listed as missing. To his North Vietnamese counterpart, Col. Tu, Summers made the mistake of bragging, “You know, you never beat us on the battlefield.”
Colonel Tu responded, “That may be so, but it is also irrelevant.”
Obama’s generals resemble all too closely the gutless general officers who never looked down at what was really happening in Vietnam. The ones standing behind Obama at the press conference on March 24, 2009 had smarts – but not courage – enough to have told him: NO; IT’S A BAD IDEA, Mr. President.
That should not have been too much to expect. Sadly, after that press conference it was easy to predict: “Gallons of blood are likely to be poured unnecessarily in the mountains and valleys of Afghanistan – probably over the next decade or longer. But not their [4-star] blood.”
It Will Happen Again, Unless…
This time there must be accountability for Afghanistan. The more so since generals and admirals, active duty and retired, are going off half-cocked. Some of them, like Admiral Charles Richards, head of US Strategic Command, are saying nuclear war is possible. Earlier this year Richard wrote that the US must shift from a principal assumption that nuclear weapons’ use is nearly impossible to “nuclear employment is a very real possibility.”
And retired Adm. James Stavridis, former commander of NATO, is already talking about war with China “perhaps ten years from now.”
Accountability and effective civilian control of such general officers can prevent the next March of Folly.
Ray McGovern works with Tell the Word, a publishing arm of the ecumenical Church of the Saviour in inner-city Washington. His 27-year career as a CIA analyst includes serving as Chief of the Soviet Foreign Policy Branch and preparer/briefer of the President’s Daily Brief. He is co-founder of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
“The 20th century muckraking journalist Upton Sinclair once opined that “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” With this in mind, it is easy to understand why a small but powerful class of war profiteers might not acknowledge or seek to educate the public about the nefarious nature and immorality of U.S. empire.
Furthermore, members of the military-industrial complex certainly have no interest in the rest of us gaining understanding of the truth of U.S.-inflicted violence. However, for the majority of Americans whose finances are not dependent on violent global domination, this wall of ignorance provides no benefit and, thus, needs to be dismantled.
The reality is that the fortress of American exceptionalism rests on a foundation of assumptions that are easily disproved with the application of basic interrogation. Serious consideration of the following questions will go a long way to disabuse U.S. citizens of the altruistic nature of U.S. hegemony.
1. Does the United States Actually Oppose the Behaviors It Claims to Oppose?
This question is especially important because U.S. aggression toward weaker nations is often justified through allegations of nefarious actions committed by the targeted country. However, the idea that the U.S. government actually opposes these transgressions crumbles when examining the behavior of U.S. allies as well as the actions of the United States itself.
An analysis of U.S. violence, along with the stated reasoning by U.S. officials for those actions, is revealing. Take the 1991 Gulf War, perpetrated by the George H.W. Bush administration on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq. This was launched because Iraq had invaded Kuwait, violating the UN principle of respect for territorial sovereignty. While Iraq’s incursion into Kuwait—though rooted in disputed colonial borders—was an affront to international law, the outrage of the U.S. was extremely selective. Both before and after, the U.S. regularly supported far more destructive invasions than Iraq’s into Kuwait.
Somalis protest U.S. support for the Ethiopian invasion of their country. This U.S.-backed war killed tens of thousands of Somalis. (Souce: Al Jazeera)
Just a few years years before being deemed a pariah by the U.S., Iraq itself had enjoyed U.S. support in the form of arms, intelligence and diplomatic support when it invaded the Islamic Republic of Iran, resulting in more than a million deaths.
Iranian troops were often subjected to chemical weapons attacks during the Iran-Iraq war, a war initiated by an Iraqi invasion of the Islamic Republic. As Saddam Hussein’s forces perpetrated these crimes, the United States continued to lend him full diplomatic and armed support. (Source: pri.org)
Even more egregiously, just a year prior to Iraq’s venture into Kuwait, the U.S. itself earned the condemnation of the UN for invading Panama for the purpose of making a drug arrest of former CIA asset Manuel Noriega. That war, curiously dubbed “Operation Just Cause,” killed up to 3,000 civilians as the U.S. military pummeled Panama City with air power.
The U.S. invasion of 1989 brought devastation to Panama, killing up to 3,000 people and displacing at least 20,000. (Source: Wikipedia)
In 2018, the United States bombed Syria over the (highly disputed) claims that the government of Bashar al-Assad had used chemical weapons within the context of the Syrian civil war. Again, even a superficial review of recent U.S. history reveals a very narrow objection to this alleged crime. One would be hard-pressed to find a more destructive example of chemical warfare in the human record than the Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon administration’s use of Agent Orange in Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s.
The United States’s use of the defoliant chemical Agent Orange devastated the people and environments of Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. (Source: technologyworks.com)Children born generations after the Vietnam War still suffer genetic deformities due to the U.S. deployment of Agent Orange. (Source: Daily Mail)
Equally abhorrent was the United States’s use of depleted uranium encased ammunition in the 1999 war on Serbia and the 2003 war in Iraq.
The devastating toll of this practice can be seen in the Iraqi city of Fallujah. In the years since depleted uranium was deployed in the 2004 U.S. attack on the city of nearly 300,000, cancer rates have skyrocketed.
Additionally, birth defects have risen to levels higher than those seen in Nagasaki in the years following the atomic bombing of 1945. Contrary to objecting to the use of chemical weapons, history shows that the U.S. simply prefers that it maintain a monopoly on the practice.
In Fallujah, Iraq, cancer rates and birth defects have skyrocketed since the U.S. military’s use of depleted uranium encased ammunition in 2004 (Source: ALJazeera).
The United States’s feigned opposition to violations of territorial sovereignty and use of chemical weapons are emblematic of a larger trend. Nearly all of the actions of other nations that the American populace is led to believe warrant U.S. violence are actions that the United States either engages in itself or supports its allies to do. A longer list would also include alleged concerns over genocide, women’s rights violations, torture,harboring terrorists, imprisoning journalists, and narco trafficking.
2. Does the United States Seek Peace?
Often taken for granted is the assumption that the United States government desires peace. Just as individuals, governments’ values are best indicated not through rhetoric but by behavior. If peace were truly a priority, one would expect the United States to take every possible opportunity to avoid war. The evidence overwhelmingly contradicts this notion. Most strikingly refuting this notion is the fact that the United States has been at war in all but 11 years of its 245-year existence. Far from defensive violence, nearly all of these wars have been aggressive wars of choice.
Furthermore, if peaceful coexistence with the world’s people were a goal, one would expect that, when periods of international tension arose, the U.S. government would exhaust every possible option before initiating violence. Far from this, historically the United States has often employed violence when other choices were available. Prior to George W. Bush launching the 2003 war on Iraq based on false pretexts, Saddam Hussein’s government offered diplomatic solutions.
In the month preceding the invasion and destruction of their nation, Iraqi intelligence attempted to satisfy the United States by offering a variety of overtures to the superpower. These were concessions that the Iraqis believed would alleviate any need for violence on the part of the U.S. They included offers of:
Providing full cooperation with the U.S. in combatting terrorism;
Allowing U.S. law enforcement unlimited access to conduct inspections for weapons of mass destruction;
Holding UN-supervised elections;
Assisting with the Arab-Israeli peace process; and
Giving the U.S. first priority in oil and mining rights.
Hussein’s government must have been under the misguided assumption that the United States would only choose war as a last resort, one of the most basic principles of the millennium-old Just War theory. However, the 2003 war on Iraq had been desired and planned for by the neo-conservative clique in the U.S. government since the late 1990s.
No diplomatic offer was going to assuage the bloodlust of the Bush administration. This was illustrated in response from Pentagon adviser Richard Perle upon being notified of Iraq’s attempts at diplomacy: “Tell them that we will see them in Baghdad.”
Neo-conservative Richard Perle served as a Pentagon adviser to the Bush administration and reportedly provocatively responded to Iraq’s attempt at peace with “Tell them that we will see them in Baghdad.” (Source: charlierose.org)
Had Hussein been a more informed student of U.S. history, he would have understood that war has always been the preferred path for the superpower. Just two years earlier as the War on Terror began, the Taliban of Afghanistan had offered to give up Osama bin Laden numerous times. The United States refused those offers, electing to launch a 20-year war on the impoverished people of Central Asia instead.
The United States war in Afghanistan could have been avoided. The Taliban offered to give up Osama bin Laden but they were rebuffed by George W. Bush. (Source: ABC News)
Prior to that, in 1999 the U.S. and NATO sabotaged a potential peace process in the former Yugoslavia. As tensions had erupted into violence between the Serbian government of Slobodan Milošević and ethnic Kosovars, the West saw an opportunity. Preferring war to peaceful negotiation, the “peace” proposal offered by U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright all but guaranteed war.
The Rambouillet Agreement contained stipulations that Serbia would allow for a military occupation of the country by NATO troops, a condition that no sovereign government on earth would accept. The deal crafted with the purpose of ensuring war was indeed rejected. Serbia was subsequently subjected to a 78-day NATO bombing campaign which killed hundreds of civilians and completed the dissolution of the former Yugoslavia.
The Rambouillet peace summit was essentially a “fake peace summit” designed to lay the groundwork for the U.S.-NATO bombing of Kosovo. [Source: news.bbc.co]
The above examples are demonstrative of a larger pattern of the U.S. consciously avoiding peace while starting or continuing wars. The list of such occurrences is long and extends to more recent occasions, such as in Libya in 2011 and Syria in 2012. In both of these cases, the U.S. was again granted offers for cessations of violence but declined to take the opportunities.
Libyan leader Muammar Gadaffi was lynched by U.S.-backed forces in 2011 and the nation has since fallen into chaotic violence. This war was avoidable as more peaceful options proposed by African leaders were ignored by the U.S. (Source: The Telegraph)
The seeming allergy to peaceful behavior also includes examples where bellicose actions short of outright war could have been avoided. Crippling sanctions on Iran continue on the basis of Iran’s (alleged) pursuit of nuclear weapons and destabilizing actions around the Middle East (a hypocritical accusation made by the power that has recently attacked seven nations in the region).
The U.S. was given an off ramp from the path of aggression toward Iran in 2003 when the Islamic Republic offered what was referred to as the “Grand Bargain.” This included offers to negotiate its (civilian) nuclear program, cooperate in the U.S. War on Terror, and a reconsideration of its regional relationships with groups including Hezbollah. The offer was left unanswered and aggression toward the Iranian people continues to the present day.
Iranian Ambassador to the UN (now Foreign Minister) Javad Zarif reportedly played a top role in proposing the “Grand Bargain” rapprochement with the United States in 2003. He was ignored. (Source: Tehran Times)
The same phenomenon is evident in the U.S. relationship with Russia.
The current cold war with Russia can be attributed to U.S. aggression in the form of NATO expansion to the Russian border. However, back in 1990, as the USSR collapsed, Secretary of Defense James Baker promised former Soviet Premier Mikhail Gorbachev that the North Atlantic military alliance would not advance “one inch” to the East of the former East German border.
James A. Baker with Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 in Moscow. [Source: nsarchive.gwu.edu]
The anti-Russian military alliance has since expanded more than 1,000 miles right up to the Russian doorstep. Along the way the military alliance has incorporated Poland, the Baltic states, and has even threatened to absorb Ukraine and Georgia.
One need only imagine how the United States would react were the Russians to develop a Warsaw Pact 2.0 that included Mexico, Canada or any of the Caribbean nations. Needless to say, the common view amongst U.S. officials in that scenario would not be that Russia is simply pursuing peace.
Since the end of the Cold War, the anti-Russian NATO military alliance has added 14 member nations, including nations on Russia’s border. (Source: Monthly Review)
Lastly when discussing a nation’s priorities, how it allocates funds within its budget is instructive. No reasonable person could draw the conclusion that the United States values peace when presented with the reality of its military spending.
The United States dedicates roughly half of its discretionary spending to war. The $753 billion dedicated to the Pentagon is equal to the sum of military spending of the next ten nations combined. This starkly contrasts with the spending on the entity which is supposed to be dedicated to diplomacy; the U.S. Department of State receives a comparatively miniscule $58.5 billion.
Combine that with the fact that the United States is, at $175 billion, by far the largest exporter of arms in the world, and the assumption that the superpower seeks peace seems downright absurd. Rhetoric from U.S. leaders proclaiming aspirations for peace are simply not matched by the historical record, current behavior, or allocation of resources.
The U.S. spends more on war than the next ten nations combined. This seems like odd behavior for a nation allegedly dedicated to peace. (Souce: The National Priorities Project)
3. Does the United States Care about Democracy?
The “D” word is often brandished by U.S. leaders while pursuing aggression against the people of the Global South. Criticisms of the undemocratic nature of governments have been used to justify interventions in a plethora of nations, including Venezuela, Panama, Grenada and Haiti. However, once again this rhetoric is out of sync with the historical record of the actual behavior of the United States.
For a nation whose leaders have self-appointed themselves as the defenders of democracy, the United States seems to keep some rather undemocratic company. To start with, the United States currently provides arms to 73% of the world’s dictatorships. This provision of weaponry is often also accompanied by the training of military or security forces of these undemocratic governments.
Needless to say, the U.S.-trained security forces of dictatorships are frequently deployed against their own populations, committing atrocities against civilians in what is often referred to as “counterinsurgency.” U.S.-trained security forces also have a nasty habit of perpetrating coups. In the period from 1970 to 2009, 275 (decidedly undemocratic) military-backed coups took place globally. Of those, U.S. trained forces carried out 165 of them.
A brief examination of the U.S.’s closest allies and partners in the Middle East and North Africa should also dissuade one of the notion that democracy is an animating value in U.S. policy making. Across the region the U.S. has found useful imperial surrogates in a variety of autocracies, military dictatorships, apartheid states, and monarchies.
In Egypt the U.S. has proved a consistent ally to undemocratic governments, first supporting the dictator Hosni Mubarak for decades until his downfall due to popular uprising in 2011. Since 2013, the military dictatorship of Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi had enjoyed the backing of the superpower, even after his forces brutally massacred more than 800 citizens in 2013.
The brutal dictatorship of Egyptian strong man Hosni Mubarak received U.S. support for decades until he exited power in 2011. Now, the U.S. supports his successor, Fattah al-Sisi. (Souce: The Times)
The United States currently provides an unconditional 3.8 billion dollars along with ceaseless diplomatic coverage at the UN to the apartheid state, Israel. Given this fact, it should not come as a shock that the U.S. had previously supported apartheid-era South Africa. This relationship even saw the U.S. classify anti-apartheid revolutionary Nelson Mandela as a terrorist. This characterization was maintained by the State Department until 2008.
Anti-apartheid revolutionary Nelson Mandela was considered a terrorist by the United States until 2008. This classification was part of the larger pattern of U.S. support for apartheid South Africa. (Source: Time Magazine)
Elsewhere in the Middle East, the last remaining monarchies on earth repress their internal populations, and wage war on their neighbors with U.S. complicity. The royal families of Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates enjoy immense privilege and wealth while their domestic populations suffer in destitute poverty.
Far from being concerned with democracies, the U.S. supports monarchies such as Saudi Arabia, which beheads its citizens for petty crimes. (Source: Amnesty International)
The right of a nation’s people to select their own government via elections would seem to be a basic tenet of democracy. Yet in its time as a superpower since 1945, the U.S. has constantly interfered in foreign elections in an effort to assure a favorable result.
Since World War II, Uncle Sam has attempted to meddle in electoral contests in more than 81 nations. The imperial mindset of U.S. leaders was revealed in 2006 after elections in Gaza resulted in Hamas winning over the U.S.-preferred Fatah party.
Regarding the Palestinian electorate’s having defeated the self-anointed right of the U.S. to pick their leadership, then New York Senator Hillary Clinton lamented, “if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”
With this comment, the eventual Secretary of State was exemplifying the Mafia Don mentality that is the dominant orthodoxy of the U.S. elite.
Hillary Clinton traveling in the Holy Land. [Source: nytimes.com]
In other cases wherein the collective will of the citizenry of foreign nations triumphed over U.S. desires, more drastic forms of sabotage were employed.
This has most often occurred when the popular governments of nations of the Global South have had the audacity to implement policies in favor of the poor, such as land reform or nationalization of their natural resources.
In such cases, the U.S. has resorted to the most undemocratic of practices, using subversive means to overthrow democratically elected governments around the world.
The people of Iran,Guatemala, Brazil, Chile, Honduras and a host of other nations are more than familiar with the asymmetry that exists between speech and action when it comes to the United States and its alleged concern over democratic practices.
The Chilean military bombs the Presidential Palace in an effort to oust leftist President Salvador Allende. This CIA-backed coup led to the rise of Augusto Pinochet, a right-wing despot whose forces killed, tortured, and disappeared tens of thousands with full U.S. support. (Source: Smithsonian Magazine)
Revealing Hypocrisy Is Not an End on Its Own
The ability to answer the above questions is useful in the sense that it highlights the contradiction between commonly held assumptions and the truth about U.S. policy.
However, drawing the (correct) conclusions that U.S. foreign policy is not animated by concerns about human rights abuses, a desire for peace or a mission to “make the world safe for democracy,” is only a starting point in developing a vibrant anti-imperialist movement in the United States.
This initial act of challenging and eradicating the foundational assumptions that form American exceptionalism is an imperative step.
The mythology of U.S. magnanimity is one of the primary psychological barriers to further confronting imperialism. These walls of fiction are erected in most Americans’ minds through a lifetime of propaganda that is disseminated through education, entertainment, and news media, and thus are difficult to penetrate.
However, once these walls are breached, a systemic analysis of capitalism and the military-industrial complex becomes possible. Indeed, no one is likely to engage in boycotts, protests, or other forms of direct action against the empire without first reducing its wall of mythology to rubble. With a critical mass of people attuned to its flawed ideological foundations, the violent hegemony of the U.S. cannot persist.”
