Year: 2014 - The Greanville Post

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Introduction by Jack Balkwill / LUVNews

[dropcap]Politico[/dropcap] has a piece this morning asking “Will cheap oil kill Keystone?” (see article below)

The thing that makes the Keystone pipeline profitable is the high price of oil, because it is expensive for our ruling Forces of Greed (FOG) to collect this extremely dirty oil.

Lima to Paris – Will the UN Solve the Climate Crisis? with Brian Tokar and Karen Orenstein by Clearingthefog on Mixcloud

Jack Balkwill
LUV News
email: libertyuv@hotmail.com

INDISPENSABLE READS
JOHN PILGER

The Idiot Prince proclaiming "the mission accomplished." A moment of embarrassment for the ages. But how many intelligent people are really out there? — **BY JOHN PILGER**

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hy has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do the New York Times and the Washington Post deceive their readers?

Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what’s called the mainstream media is not information, but power?

These are urgent questions. The world is facing the prospect of major war, perhaps nuclear war – with the United States clearly determined to isolate and provoke Russia and eventually China. This truth is being turned upside down and inside out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the bloodbath in Iraq in 2003.

The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an “invisible government”. It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies.

The information age is actually a media age. We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media – a surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.

This power to create a new “reality” has been building for a long time. Forty-five years ago, a book entitled The Greening of America caused a sensation. On the cover were these words: “There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual.”

I was a correspondent in the United States at the time and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of the author, a young Yale academic, Charles Reich. His message was that truth-telling and political action had failed and only “culture” and introspection could change the world.

Within a few years, driven by the forces of profit, the cult of “me-ism” had all but overwhelmed our sense of acting together, our sense of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political, and the media was the message.

In the wake of the cold war, the fabrication of new “threats” completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.

In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the distinguished American investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him, “What if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims, instead of channelling what turned out to be crude propaganda?”

The Idiot Prince proclaiming “the mission accomplished.” (May 1, 2003) A moment of embarrassment for the ages. But how many intelligent people are really out there?

He replied that if we journalists had done our job “there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq.”

That’s a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question. Dan Rather, formerly of CBS, gave me the same answer. David Rose of the Observer and senior journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous, gave me the same answer.

Corpomilitary Gen. Breedlove (sic) addressing the media. (AP) Where are the honest generals of yesteryear? Did they ever exist? All we seem to have these days is careerist, corrupt buffoons.

In other words, had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous Islamic State might not now exist.

Even now, despite the millions who took to the streets in protest, most of the public in western countries have little idea of the sheer scale of the crime committed by our governments in Iraq. Even fewer are aware that, in the 12 years before the invasion, the US and British governments set in motion a holocaust by denying the civilian population of Iraq a means to live.

Those are the words of the senior British official responsible for sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s – a medieval siege that caused the deaths of half a million children under the age of five, reported Unicef. The official’s name is Carne Ross. In the Foreign Office in London, he was known as “Mr. Iraq”.

Today, he is a truth-teller of how governments deceive and how journalists willingly spread the deception. “We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised intelligence,” he told me, “or we’d freeze them out.”

Denis Halliday—a rare man of principle.

The main whistleblower during this terrible, silent period was Denis Halliday. Then Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations and the senior UN official in Iraq, Halliday resigned rather than implement policies he described as genocidal. He estimates that sanctions killed more than a million Iraqis.

What then happened to Halliday was instructive. He was airbrushed. Or he was vilified. On the BBC’s Newsnight programme, the presenter Jeremy Paxman shouted at him: “Aren’t you just an apologist for Saddam Hussein?” The Guardian recently described this as one of Paxman’s “memorable moments”. Last week, Paxman signed a £1 million book deal.

The handmaidens of suppression have done their job well. Consider the effects. In 2013, a ComRes poll found that a majority of the British public believed the casualty toll in Iraq was less than 10,000 – a tiny fraction of the truth. A trail of blood that goes from Iraq to London has been scrubbed almost clean.

Rupert Murdoch is said to be the godfather of the media mob, and no one should doubt the augmented power of his newspapers – all 127 of them, with a combined circulation of 40 million, and his Fox network. But the influence of Murdoch’s empire is no greater than its reflection of the wider media.

Once again, the evil empire is coming to get us, led by another Stalin or, perversely, a new Hitler. Name your demon and let rip.

And again, supposedly liberal media are the censors. Citing no facts, no evidence, one journalist identified a pro-Russian leader in Ukraine as the man who shot down the airliner. This man, he wrote, was known as The Demon. He was a scary man who frightened the journalist. That was the evidence.

Many in the western media have worked hard to present the ethnic Russian population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.

What the Russian president has to say is of no consequence; he is a pantomime villain who can be abused with impunity. An American general who heads Nato and is straight out of Dr. Strangelove – one General Breedlove – routinely claims Russian invasions without a shred of visual evidence. His impersonation of Stanley Kubrick’s General Jack D. Ripper is pitch perfect.

Forty thousand Ruskies were massing on the border, according to Breedlove. That was good enough for the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Observer – the latter having previously distinguished itself with lies and fabrications that backed Blair’s invasion of Iraq, as its former reporter, David Rose, revealed.

There is almost the joi d’esprit of a class reunion. The drum-beaters of the Washington Post are the very same editorial writers who declared the existence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction to be “hard facts”.

“If you wonder,” wrote Robert Parry, “how the world could stumble into world war three – much as it did into world war one a century ago – all you need to do is look at the madness that has enveloped virtually the entire US political/media structure over Ukraine where a false narrative of white hats versus black hats took hold early and has proved impervious to facts or reason.”

Parry, the journalist who revealed Iran-Contra, is one of the few who investigate the central role of the media in this “game of chicken”, as the Russian foreign minister called it. But is it a game? As I write this, the US Congress votes on Resolution 758 which, in a nutshell, says: “Let’s get ready for war with Russia.”

In the 19th century, the writer Alexander Herzen described secular liberalism as “the final religion, though its church is not of the other world but of this”. Today, this divine right is far more violent and dangerous than anything the Muslim world throws up, though perhaps its greatest triumph is the illusion of free and open information.

In the news, whole countries are made to disappear. Saudi Arabia, the source of extremism and western-backed terror, is not a story, except when it drives down the price of oil. Yemen has endured twelve years of American drone attacks. Who knows? Who cares?

“What we need is a Fifth Estate: a journalism that monitors, deconstructs and counters propaganda and teaches the young to be agents of people, not power. We need what the Russians called perestroika – an insurrection of subjugated knowledge…”

In 2009, the University of the West of England published the results of a ten-year study of the BBC’s coverage of Venezuela. Of 304 broadcast reports, only three mentioned any of the positive policies introduced by the government of Hugo Chavez. The greatest literacy programme in human history received barely a passing reference.

In Europe and the United States, millions of readers and viewers know next to nothing about the remarkable, life-giving changes implemented in Latin America, many of them inspired by Chavez. Like the BBC, the reports of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and the rest of the respectable western media were notoriously in bad faith. Chavez was mocked even on his deathbed. How is this explained, I wonder, in schools of journalism?

Why are millions of people in Britain are persuaded that a collective punishment called “austerity” is necessary?

Following the economic crash in 2008, a rotten system was exposed. For a split second the banks were lined up as crooks with obligations to the public they had betrayed.

But within a few months – apart from a few stones lobbed over excessive corporate “bonuses” – the message changed. The mugshots of guilty bankers vanished from the tabloids and something called “austerity” became the burden of millions of ordinary people. Was there ever a sleight of hand as brazen?

Today, many of the premises of civilised life in Britain are being dismantled in order to pay back a fraudulent debt – the debt of crooks. The “austerity” cuts are said to be £83 billion. That’s almost exactly the amount of tax avoided by the same banks and by corporations like Amazon and Murdoch’s News UK. Moreover, the crooked banks are given an annual subsidy of £100bn in free insurance and guarantees – a figure that would fund the entire National Health Service.

The economic crisis is pure propaganda. Extreme policies now rule Britain, the United States, much of Europe, Canada and Australia. Who is standing up for the majority? Who is telling their story? Who’s keeping record straight? Isn’t that what journalists are meant to do?

In 1977, Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, revealed that more than 400 journalists and news executives worked for the CIA. They included journalists from the New York Times, Time and the TV networks. In 1991, Richard Norton Taylor of the Guardian revealed something similar in this country.

Assange is hated because WikiLeaks tore down the facade of a corrupt political elite held aloft by journalists.

None of this is necessary today. I doubt that anyone paid the Washington Post and many other media outlets to accuse Edward Snowden of aiding terrorism. I doubt that anyone pays those who routinely smear Julian Assange – though other rewards can be plentiful.

It’s clear to me that the main reason Assange has attracted such venom, spite and jealously is that WikiLeaks tore down the facade of a corrupt political elite held aloft by journalists. In heralding an extraordinary era of disclosure, Assange made enemies by illuminating and shaming the media’s gatekeepers, not least on the newspaper that published and appropriated his great scoop. He became not only a target, but a golden goose.

Lucrative book and Hollywood movie deals were struck and media careers launched or kick-started on the back of WikiLeaks and its founder. People have made big money, while WikiLeaks has struggled to survive.

None of this was mentioned in Stockholm on 1 December when the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, shared with Edward Snowden the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize. What was shocking about this event was that Assange and WikiLeaks were airbrushed. They didn’t exist. They were unpeople. No one spoke up for the man who pioneered digital whistleblowing and handed the Guardian one of the greatest scoops in history. Moreover, it was Assange and his WikiLeaks team who effectively – and brilliantly – rescued Edward Snowden in Hong Kong and sped him to safety. Not a word.

What made this censorship by omission so ironic and poignant and disgraceful was that the ceremony was held in the Swedish parliament – whose craven silence on the Assange case has colluded with a grotesque miscarriage of justice in Stockholm.

David lloyd George: Member of a breed of privileged “gentlemen” doing the bidding of their class. A heinous and cynical pestilence in all ages, supported by the machinery of control of public opinion and myth.

“When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”

It’s this kind of silence we journalists need to break. We need to look in the mirror. We need to call to account an unaccountable media that services power and a psychosis that threatens world war.

In the 18th century, Edmund Burke described the role of the press as a Fourth Estate checking the powerful. Was that ever true? It certainly doesn’t wash any more. What we need is a Fifth Estate: a journalism that monitors, deconstructs and counters propaganda and teaches the young to be agents of people, not power. We need what the Russians called perestroika – an insurrection of subjugated knowledge. I would call it real journalism.

It’s 100 years since the First World War. Reporters then were rewarded and knighted for their silence and collusion. At the height of the slaughter, British prime minister David Lloyd George confided in CP Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: “If people really knew [the truth] the war would be stopped tomorrow, but of course they don’t know and can’t know.”

It’s time they knew.

**ABOUT THE AUTHOR**
www.johnpilger.com

SOURCE: Belfast Telegraph (UK)

BreedloveGen.AddressesMedia — **BY JOHN PILGER**

[dropcap]W[/dropcap]hy has so much journalism succumbed to propaganda? Why are censorship and distortion standard practice? Why is the BBC so often a mouthpiece of rapacious power? Why do the New York Times and the Washington Post deceive their readers?

Why are young journalists not taught to understand media agendas and to challenge the high claims and low purpose of fake objectivity? And why are they not taught that the essence of so much of what’s called the mainstream media is not information, but power?

These are urgent questions. The world is facing the prospect of major war, perhaps nuclear war – with the United States clearly determined to isolate and provoke Russia and eventually China. This truth is being turned upside down and inside out by journalists, including those who promoted the lies that led to the bloodbath in Iraq in 2003.

The times we live in are so dangerous and so distorted in public perception that propaganda is no longer, as Edward Bernays called it, an “invisible government”. It is the government. It rules directly without fear of contradiction and its principal aim is the conquest of us: our sense of the world, our ability to separate truth from lies.

The information age is actually a media age. We have war by media; censorship by media; demonology by media; retribution by media; diversion by media – a surreal assembly line of obedient clichés and false assumptions.

This power to create a new “reality” has been building for a long time. Forty-five years ago, a book entitled The Greening of America caused a sensation. On the cover were these words: “There is a revolution coming. It will not be like revolutions of the past. It will originate with the individual.”

I was a correspondent in the United States at the time and recall the overnight elevation to guru status of the author, a young Yale academic, Charles Reich. His message was that truth-telling and political action had failed and only “culture” and introspection could change the world.

Within a few years, driven by the forces of profit, the cult of “me-ism” had all but overwhelmed our sense of acting together, our sense of social justice and internationalism. Class, gender and race were separated. The personal was the political, and the media was the message.

In the wake of the cold war, the fabrication of new “threats” completed the political disorientation of those who, 20 years earlier, would have formed a vehement opposition.

In 2003, I filmed an interview in Washington with Charles Lewis, the distinguished American investigative journalist. We discussed the invasion of Iraq a few months earlier. I asked him, “What if the freest media in the world had seriously challenged George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld and investigated their claims, instead of channelling what turned out to be crude propaganda?”

The Idiot Prince proclaiming “the mission accomplished.” (May 1, 2003) A moment of embarrassment for the ages. But how many intelligent people are really out there?

He replied that if we journalists had done our job “there is a very, very good chance we would have not gone to war in Iraq.”

That’s a shocking statement, and one supported by other famous journalists to whom I put the same question. Dan Rather, formerly of CBS, gave me the same answer. David Rose of the Observer and senior journalists and producers in the BBC, who wished to remain anonymous, gave me the same answer.

Corpomilitary Gen. Breedlove (sic) addressing the media. (AP) Where are the honest generals of yesteryear? Did they ever exist? All we seem to have these days is careerist, corrupt buffoons.

In other words, had journalists done their job, had they questioned and investigated the propaganda instead of amplifying it, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children might be alive today; and millions might not have fled their homes; the sectarian war between Sunni and Shia might not have ignited, and the infamous Islamic State might not now exist.

Even now, despite the millions who took to the streets in protest, most of the public in western countries have little idea of the sheer scale of the crime committed by our governments in Iraq. Even fewer are aware that, in the 12 years before the invasion, the US and British governments set in motion a holocaust by denying the civilian population of Iraq a means to live.

Those are the words of the senior British official responsible for sanctions on Iraq in the 1990s – a medieval siege that caused the deaths of half a million children under the age of five, reported Unicef. The official’s name is Carne Ross. In the Foreign Office in London, he was known as “Mr. Iraq”.

Today, he is a truth-teller of how governments deceive and how journalists willingly spread the deception. “We would feed journalists factoids of sanitised intelligence,” he told me, “or we’d freeze them out.”

Denis Halliday—a rare man of principle.

The main whistleblower during this terrible, silent period was Denis Halliday. Then Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations and the senior UN official in Iraq, Halliday resigned rather than implement policies he described as genocidal. He estimates that sanctions killed more than a million Iraqis.

What then happened to Halliday was instructive. He was airbrushed. Or he was vilified. On the BBC’s Newsnight programme, the presenter Jeremy Paxman shouted at him: “Aren’t you just an apologist for Saddam Hussein?” The Guardian recently described this as one of Paxman’s “memorable moments”. Last week, Paxman signed a £1 million book deal.

The handmaidens of suppression have done their job well. Consider the effects. In 2013, a ComRes poll found that a majority of the British public believed the casualty toll in Iraq was less than 10,000 – a tiny fraction of the truth. A trail of blood that goes from Iraq to London has been scrubbed almost clean.

Rupert Murdoch is said to be the godfather of the media mob, and no one should doubt the augmented power of his newspapers – all 127 of them, with a combined circulation of 40 million, and his Fox network. But the influence of Murdoch’s empire is no greater than its reflection of the wider media.

Once again, the evil empire is coming to get us, led by another Stalin or, perversely, a new Hitler. Name your demon and let rip.

And again, supposedly liberal media are the censors. Citing no facts, no evidence, one journalist identified a pro-Russian leader in Ukraine as the man who shot down the airliner. This man, he wrote, was known as The Demon. He was a scary man who frightened the journalist. That was the evidence.

Many in the western media have worked hard to present the ethnic Russian population of Ukraine as outsiders in their own country, almost never as Ukrainians seeking a federation within Ukraine and as Ukrainian citizens resisting a foreign-orchestrated coup against their elected government.

What the Russian president has to say is of no consequence; he is a pantomime villain who can be abused with impunity. An American general who heads Nato and is straight out of Dr. Strangelove – one General Breedlove – routinely claims Russian invasions without a shred of visual evidence. His impersonation of Stanley Kubrick’s General Jack D. Ripper is pitch perfect.

Forty thousand Ruskies were massing on the border, according to Breedlove. That was good enough for the New York Times, the Washington Post and the Observer – the latter having previously distinguished itself with lies and fabrications that backed Blair’s invasion of Iraq, as its former reporter, David Rose, revealed.

There is almost the joi d’esprit of a class reunion. The drum-beaters of the Washington Post are the very same editorial writers who declared the existence of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction to be “hard facts”.

“If you wonder,” wrote Robert Parry, “how the world could stumble into world war three – much as it did into world war one a century ago – all you need to do is look at the madness that has enveloped virtually the entire US political/media structure over Ukraine where a false narrative of white hats versus black hats took hold early and has proved impervious to facts or reason.”

Parry, the journalist who revealed Iran-Contra, is one of the few who investigate the central role of the media in this “game of chicken”, as the Russian foreign minister called it. But is it a game? As I write this, the US Congress votes on Resolution 758 which, in a nutshell, says: “Let’s get ready for war with Russia.”

In the 19th century, the writer Alexander Herzen described secular liberalism as “the final religion, though its church is not of the other world but of this”. Today, this divine right is far more violent and dangerous than anything the Muslim world throws up, though perhaps its greatest triumph is the illusion of free and open information.

In the news, whole countries are made to disappear. Saudi Arabia, the source of extremism and western-backed terror, is not a story, except when it drives down the price of oil. Yemen has endured twelve years of American drone attacks. Who knows? Who cares?

“What we need is a Fifth Estate: a journalism that monitors, deconstructs and counters propaganda and teaches the young to be agents of people, not power. We need what the Russians called perestroika – an insurrection of subjugated knowledge…”

In 2009, the University of the West of England published the results of a ten-year study of the BBC’s coverage of Venezuela. Of 304 broadcast reports, only three mentioned any of the positive policies introduced by the government of Hugo Chavez. The greatest literacy programme in human history received barely a passing reference.

In Europe and the United States, millions of readers and viewers know next to nothing about the remarkable, life-giving changes implemented in Latin America, many of them inspired by Chavez. Like the BBC, the reports of the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian and the rest of the respectable western media were notoriously in bad faith. Chavez was mocked even on his deathbed. How is this explained, I wonder, in schools of journalism?

Why are millions of people in Britain are persuaded that a collective punishment called “austerity” is necessary?

Following the economic crash in 2008, a rotten system was exposed. For a split second the banks were lined up as crooks with obligations to the public they had betrayed.

But within a few months – apart from a few stones lobbed over excessive corporate “bonuses” – the message changed. The mugshots of guilty bankers vanished from the tabloids and something called “austerity” became the burden of millions of ordinary people. Was there ever a sleight of hand as brazen?

Today, many of the premises of civilised life in Britain are being dismantled in order to pay back a fraudulent debt – the debt of crooks. The “austerity” cuts are said to be £83 billion. That’s almost exactly the amount of tax avoided by the same banks and by corporations like Amazon and Murdoch’s News UK. Moreover, the crooked banks are given an annual subsidy of £100bn in free insurance and guarantees – a figure that would fund the entire National Health Service.

The economic crisis is pure propaganda. Extreme policies now rule Britain, the United States, much of Europe, Canada and Australia. Who is standing up for the majority? Who is telling their story? Who’s keeping record straight? Isn’t that what journalists are meant to do?

In 1977, Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, revealed that more than 400 journalists and news executives worked for the CIA. They included journalists from the New York Times, Time and the TV networks. In 1991, Richard Norton Taylor of the Guardian revealed something similar in this country.

Assange is hated because WikiLeaks tore down the facade of a corrupt political elite held aloft by journalists.

None of this is necessary today. I doubt that anyone paid the Washington Post and many other media outlets to accuse Edward Snowden of aiding terrorism. I doubt that anyone pays those who routinely smear Julian Assange – though other rewards can be plentiful.

It’s clear to me that the main reason Assange has attracted such venom, spite and jealously is that WikiLeaks tore down the facade of a corrupt political elite held aloft by journalists. In heralding an extraordinary era of disclosure, Assange made enemies by illuminating and shaming the media’s gatekeepers, not least on the newspaper that published and appropriated his great scoop. He became not only a target, but a golden goose.

Lucrative book and Hollywood movie deals were struck and media careers launched or kick-started on the back of WikiLeaks and its founder. People have made big money, while WikiLeaks has struggled to survive.

None of this was mentioned in Stockholm on 1 December when the editor of the Guardian, Alan Rusbridger, shared with Edward Snowden the Right Livelihood Award, known as the alternative Nobel Peace Prize. What was shocking about this event was that Assange and WikiLeaks were airbrushed. They didn’t exist. They were unpeople. No one spoke up for the man who pioneered digital whistleblowing and handed the Guardian one of the greatest scoops in history. Moreover, it was Assange and his WikiLeaks team who effectively – and brilliantly – rescued Edward Snowden in Hong Kong and sped him to safety. Not a word.

What made this censorship by omission so ironic and poignant and disgraceful was that the ceremony was held in the Swedish parliament – whose craven silence on the Assange case has colluded with a grotesque miscarriage of justice in Stockholm.

David lloyd George: Member of a breed of privileged “gentlemen” doing the bidding of their class. A heinous and cynical pestilence in all ages, supported by the machinery of control of public opinion and myth.

“When the truth is replaced by silence,” said the Soviet dissident Yevtushenko, “the silence is a lie.”

It’s this kind of silence we journalists need to break. We need to look in the mirror. We need to call to account an unaccountable media that services power and a psychosis that threatens world war.

In the 18th century, Edmund Burke described the role of the press as a Fourth Estate checking the powerful. Was that ever true? It certainly doesn’t wash any more. What we need is a Fifth Estate: a journalism that monitors, deconstructs and counters propaganda and teaches the young to be agents of people, not power. We need what the Russians called perestroika – an insurrection of subjugated knowledge. I would call it real journalism.

It’s 100 years since the First World War. Reporters then were rewarded and knighted for their silence and collusion. At the height of the slaughter, British prime minister David Lloyd George confided in CP Scott, editor of the Manchester Guardian: “If people really knew [the truth] the war would be stopped tomorrow, but of course they don’t know and can’t know.”

It’s time they knew.

**ABOUT THE AUTHOR**
www.johnpilger.com

SOURCE: Belfast Telegraph (UK)

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by DOUGLAS VALENTINE, Counterpunch

The Phoenix Program, Revisited ABCs of American Interrogation Methods

[dropcap]As counterinsurgency[/dropcap] expert David Galula notes above, a census is an effective way of controlling large numbers of persons. Thus, while CIA paramilitary officers used their covert Census Grievance Program to gather intelligence in Viet Cong controlled villages, CIA police advisers were conducting a census program of their own. Its origins are traced to Robert Thompson, a British counterinsurgency expert the State Department hired in 1961 to advise the US on police operations in South Vietnam. Based on a system he had used in Malaya, Thompson proposed a three-pronged approach that coordinated military, civilian intelligence, and police agencies in a concerted attack on the Viet Cong Infrastructure.

On Thompson’s advice, the National Police in 1962 initiated the Family Census program, in which a name list was made and a group photo taken of every family in South Vietnam. The portrait was filed in a police dossier along with each person’s political affiliations, fingerprints, income, savings, and other relevant information, such as who owned property or had relatives outside the village, and thus had a legitimate reason to travel. This program was instrumental in identifying persons who could be blackmailed into working in their villages as informers. By 1965 there were 7,453 registered families.

Through the Family Census, the CIA learned the names of Communist cell members in government-controlled villages. Apprehending the cadre that ran the cells was then a matter of arresting all minor suspects and “softening them up” until they informed. The idea was to weaken the insurgency by forcing its political cadres to flee to guerrilla units in the jungle, thus depriving the VCI of its leadership in GVN areas. This was no small success, for, as Nguyen Van Thieu once observed, “Ho Chi Minh values his two cadres in every hamlet more highly than ten military divisions.”’

Thompson’s method was successful, up to a point, because many VCI were not terrorists but, as Galula writes, “men whose motivations, even if the counterinsurgent disapproves of them, may be perfectly honorable. They do not participate directly, as a rule, in direct terrorism or guerrilla action and, technically, have no blood on their hands.”’

John Brennan at CIA HQ defending torture.

Thompson’s dragnet technique engendered other problems. Mistakes were made, and innocent people were routinely tortured or subject to extortion by crooked cops. On other occasions VCI double agents prompted CIA “contractors” to arrest people hostile to the insurgency. Recognizing these facts, Thompson suggested that the CIA organize a police special branch of professional interrogators who would not be confused with mercenary contractors. This, in 1964, at Thompson’s suggestion, the Police Special Branch was formed plans were made to center it in Province Intelligence Coordinating Committees (PICCs) in South Vietnam’s 44 provinces. As one of their main features, the CIA-controlled PICCs were designed to coordinate paramilitary kidnapping and assassination operations with the intelligence operations of the Special Branch.

Also in 1964, as part of the effort to combine police, intelligence and paramilitary programs, the CIA formed paramilitary reaction forces in seven key districts surrounding Saigon. The CIA provided supplies and training, while military intelligence and Special Forces provided personnel. Lists of defectors, criminals, and other potential recruits, as well as targets, came from Special Branch files.

The CIA’s “motivational indoctrination training program” was designed by its creator, Frank Scotton, to “develop improved combat skills-increased commitment to close combat-for South Vietnamese. This is not psywar against civilians or VC. This is taking the most highly motivated people, saying they deserted, typing up a contract, and using them in these units. Our problem,” Scotton said, “was finding smart Vietnamese and Cambodians who were willing to die.”’

Minds capable of such murderous scenes were not averse to exploiting American soldiers who had committed war crimes. Rather than serve time in military stockades in Vietnam or elsewhere, Americans with deviant personalities were likely to volunteer for dangerous and reprehensible jobs for the CIA’s Special Operations Group.

About the assassination squads he and the CIA developed, Scotton said, “For us, these programs were all part of the same thing. We did not think of things in terms of little packages.” That “thing,” of course, was a grand scheme to win the war, at the bottom of which-were the province interrogation centers.

The PICCs

[dropcap]John Patrick Muldoon[/dropcap]— “Picadoon” to those who knew him, was the first director of the CIA’s Province Interrogation Center (PIC) program in South Vietnam. Legendary CIA officer Lucien Conein told me I could find him at a particular bar in Washington, D.C. “Tell him I said he was the worst private investigator ever,” Conein said. “Tell him I said he’d lose a guy halfway across the street.”

I took cab over to Tenley Square and walked into the bar. It was midnight. The bartender was cleaning glasses. “Is John Muldoon here?” I asked. The bartender looked at me suspiciously and nodded at a really big guy hunched over a drink at the far end of the bar.

I walked down. “Are you Muldoon?” He turned and gave me a menacing look. I took that for a yes. “Conein says you’re the worst PI in the world. Says you’d lose a guy,” etcetera.

Muldoon was offended. “You can tell that fucker Conein I wouldn’t lose the guy till he was all the way across the street,” he said indignantly.

Based on that introduction, Muldoon and I began a series of interviews over the next few days, one of which was conducted at his brother’s sprawling horse and polo farm in Maryland.

Standing six feet four inches tall, weighing well over two hundred pounds, Muldoon had a scarlet face and deep voice. A Georgetown University dropout, he joined the Agency in 1958. At least one of his family members was already working there. He did his first tour in Germany and in 1962 was sent to South Korea. “I worked interrogation in Seoul,” Muldoon recalled. “I’d never been involved in interrogation before. Ray Valentine was my boss. There was a joint KCIA-CIA interrogation center in Yon Don Tho, outside Seoul.”

In recruiting cadres for the Korean CIA, the CIA used the same method it used to staff the South Vietnamese Central Intelligence Organization (CIO), which the CIA under Station Chief William Colby created in 1961.

As revealed by John Marks in The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, the CIA sent its top psychologist, John Winne, to Seoul to “select the initial cadre,” for the KCIA using a CIA-developed psychological assessment test. “I set up an office with two translators,” Winne told Marks, “and used a Korean version of the Wechsler.” CIA psychologists “gave the tests to 25 to 30 police and military officers,” Marks writes, “and wrote up a half-page report on each, listing their strengths and weaknesses. Winne wanted to know about each candidate’s ability to follow orders, creativity, lack of personality disorders, motivation-why he wanted out of his current job. It was mostly for the money, especially with the civilians.”’

In this way secret police are recruited as CIA assets in every country where the Agency operates. In Latin America, Marks writes, “The CIA … found the assessment process most useful for showing how to train the anti-terrorist section. According to results, these men were shown to have very dependent psychologies and needed strong direction.” Direction that comes from the CIA. Marks quotes one assessor as saying, “Anytime the Company spent money for training a foreigner, the object was that he would ultimately serve our purposes.” CIA officers “were not content simply to work closely with these foreign intelligence agencies; they insisted on penetrating them, and the Personality Assessment System provided a useful aid.”’

Water-boarding was widely practiced in Nam.

Muldoon was assigned to South Vietnam in November 1964. “I was brought down to the National Interrogation Center [NIC] and told, `This is where you’re going to work. You’re going to advise X number of interrogators. They’ll bring you their initial debriefing of the guy they’re working on, then you’ll give them additional CIA requirements.”’

The CIA had different requirements because “the South Vietnamese wanted information they could turn around and use in their battle against the Vietcong in the South. But we were interested in information about things in the North that the South Vietnamese couldn’t care less about. And that’s where the American advisers would come in-to tell them, `You gotta ask this, too.’

“We had standard requirements depending on where a guy was from. A lot of VC had been trained in North Vietnam and had come back down as volunteers. They weren’t regular North Vietnamese Army. So if a guy came from the North, we wanted to know where he was from, what unit he was with, how they were organized, where they were trained…. If a guy had been up North for any length of time, we wanted to know if he’d traveled on a train. What kind of identification papers did he need? Anything about foreign weapons or foreigners advising them. That sort of thing.”

Built in 1964, the National Interrogation Center served as CIO headquarters. It was where the CIA coordinated civilian, police, and military intelligence. “It was located down on the Saigon River,” Muldoon recalled, “as part of a great big naval compound. On the left was a wing of offices where the American military chief, an Air Force major, was located. In that same wing were the chief of the CIO, his deputy, and the CIA advisers.” Muldoon notes that the same CIA interrogators were there until his departure for Thailand in August 1966. There were four interrogators when he arrived and he was the fifth. Three were Air Force enlisted men serving under an Army captain. Muldoon’s boss, the CIA chief of the National Interrogation Center was Ian “Sammy” Sammers, who worked under the station’s senior liaison officer, Samuel B. Harman Hopler, who had supervised construction of the NIC in early 1964.

And we may ask, all of this for what? So that a puny, exorbitantly privileged percentage of humanity can lord over billions of human beings and most of the planet, living like kings, while the rest of humanity remains immersed in a swamp of poverty, ignorance and unnecessary suffering?

According to Muldoon, “There was a conference in Nha Trang in April 1965. They were putting together an interrogation center in an existing building they had taken over, and they asked for help from the NIC. So I was sent up there with the Army captain to look at the place, figure out what kind of staff we needed, and how we were going to train them. And while we were up there trying to break these guys in, the CIA liaison officer in Nha Trang, Anthony Bartolomucci, asked Sammy if they could keep me there for this conference, at which all of our people were going to meet Jack `Red’ Stent, who was taking over from Paul Hodges as chief of foreign intelligence. Bartolomucci wanted to show off his new interrogation center to all these big shots.

“The military people from the NIC had done their job,” Muldoon continued, “so they left. But I stayed around. Then (CIA officer) Tucker Gouglemann http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tucker_Gougelmann and Stent showed up for this conference. Tucker was chief of Special Branch field operations. Things were just starting to get off the ground with the PICs. A couple of them were already under way one in two provinces and Tucker told me, `We’re going to build, build, build, and I need someone to oversee the whole operation. I want you to do it.’

“So we had this big conference, and they packed the interrogation center full of prisoners. Bartolomucci wanted to show off with a bunch of prisoners, so he got his police buddies to bring in a bunch of prostitutes and what have you and put them in the cells. I don’t think they had one VC in the place. After the conference they all went back to the regular jail, and I went to work for Tucker.”

“It’s funny,” Muldoon reminisces,” but me and Tucker used to talk about the PICs. He said something like `John, if we lose this war one day, we could end up in these god-dammed things if we get caught.’

“’Well,’ I asked, `what would you do if you were in there?’

“He said he thought he’d kill himself rather than go through interrogation.” Then Muldoon laughed. “Tucker wanted to turn the PICs into whorehouses. The interrogation rooms had two-way mirrors.

“Tucker was a hero in the Marine Corps in World War Two,” Muldoon added. “He joined the Agency right after and worked in Korea, running operations behind the lines. He was in Afghanistan and worked in training, too. He got to Vietnam in 1962 and was base chief in Da Nang running everything that had to do with intelligence and paramilitary operations. When I arrived he was in Saigon trying to set up the Province Intelligence Coordination Committees with Jack Barlow, a British guy from MI Six. Barlow had been in Malaya with Robert Thompson, and they were the experts.

PICCs

Forerunner to the Province Interrogation Center program, the Province Intelligence Coordination Committee program was designed to extend CIO operations into the provinces. Each PICC was to serve as the senior intelligence agency within each province and to guide, supervise, and coordinate all military, police, and civilian operations. But the US military refused to go along, so the CIA settled on its unilateral Province Interrogation Center program. And that’s how and when the PICs became the place where the CIA coordinated its paramilitary and intelligence operations at the province level.

The Special Branch and CIA officers (often contractors) stationed at the PIC would get informants to tell them who and where the VC cadre and secret agents were, and then the CIA would send the Provincial Reconnaissance Unit (PRU) team to kidnap or kill them. This was the one-two punch of the counter-insurgency; the secret PICs and the PRU, which, prior to 1964, were known as counter-terror teams.” Through the PICs, the CIA learned the identity and structure of the VCI in each province; through the PRU, the CIA wiped them out, along with their families and friends.

The problem with Bartolomucci’s initial PIC was its design, so CIA architects re-designed it. The end product was strictly functional, minimizing cost while maximizing security. Through Pacific Architects and Engineers (PA&E), the CIA’s logistics staff hired local Vietnamese contractors to build interrogation centers in each of South Vietnam’s 44 provinces. Funds and staff salaries came from the Special Branch budget, which itself was totally funded by the CIA. After a PIC was built, the CIA bought it and donated it to the South Vietnamese National Police, at which point it became a National Police facility under the direction of the Special Branch. Each provincial capital had a secret CIA interrogation center, as did the four region capitals. The difference was that regional interrogation centers were larger, holding two to three hundred prisoners each.

According to Muldoon, it was up to the CIA’s liaison officer to convince the province chief and his CIO counterpart to find a spot for the PIC near the provincial capital. Once the interrogation center was built, the liaison officer became its adviser, and Muldoon helped him recruit its staff. Most PICs were built or under construction by August 1966, when Muldoon was transferred to Thailand to build the CIA’s huge interrogation center in Udorn.

Inside a PIC

One story high, fashioned from concrete blocks, poured cement, and wood in the shape of a hollow square, a PIC was four buildings with tin roofs linked around a courtyard. In the center of the yard was a combination lookout-water tower with an electric generator under it. “You couldn’t get the guards to stay out there at night if they didn’t have lights,” Muldoon explained. “So we had spotlights on the corners, along the walls, and on the tower shooting out all around. We also bulldozed around it so there were no trees or bushes. Anybody coming at it could be seen crossing the open area.”

People entered and exited the PIC through green, steel-plated gates, “Which were wide open every time I visited,” said Muldoon, who visited the PICs only during the day. “You didn’t want to visit at night,” when attacks occurred. PICs were located on the outskirts of town, away from residential areas, so as not to endanger the people living nearby, as well as to discourage rubbernecking. “These were self-contained places,” Muldoon emphasized.

Telephone lines running in and out of the PICs were tapped by the CIA.

On the left side were interrogation rooms and the cellblock; depending on the size, 20 to 60 solitary confinement cells the size of closets. Men and women were not segregated. “You could walk right down the corridor,” according to Muldoon. “It was an empty hallway with cells on both sides. Each cell had a steel door and a panel at the bottom where you could slip the food in and a slot at the top where you could look in and see what the guy was doing.” There were no toilets, just holes to squat over. “They didn’t have them in their homes.” Muldoon laughed. “Why should we put them in their cells?”

Prisoners slept on concrete slabs. “Depending on how cooperative they were, you’d give them a straw mat or a blanket. It could get very cold at night in the highlands.” A system of rewards and punishments was part of the treatment. “There were little things you could give them and take away from them, not a lot, but every little bit they got they were grateful for.”

Depending on the amount of VCI activity in the province and the personality of the PIC chief (a Special Branch officer), some interrogation centers were always full while others were always empty. In either case, “We didn’t want them sitting there talking to each other,” Muldoon said, so “we would build up the cells gradually, until we had to put them next to each other. They were completely isolated. They didn’t get time to go out and walk around the yard. They sat in their cells when they weren’t being interrogated. After that they were sent to the local jail or were turned back over to the military, where they were put in POW camps or taken out and shot. That part I never got involved in,” he said, adding that they “were treated better in the PICs than in the local jails for common criminals. Public Safety was advising them, working with the National Police. Sometimes they had sixty to seventy people in a cell that shouldn’t have had more than ten. But they didn’t care. If you’re a criminal, you suffer. If you don’t like it, too bad. Don’t be a criminal.”

The CIA interrogation process worked like this. “As we brought prisoners in, the first thing we did was run them through the shower. That’s on the left as you come in. After that they were checked by the doctor or nurse. That was an absolute necessity because God knows what diseases they might be carrying with them. They might need medication. They wouldn’t do you much good if they died the first day they were there and you never got a chance to interrogate them. That’s why the medical office was right inside the main gate. In most PICs,” Muldoon noted, “the medical staff was usually a local South Vietnamese Army medic who would come out and check the prisoners coming in that day.”

After the prisoner was cleaned, examined, repaired, weighed, photographed, and fingerprinted, his biography was taken by a Special Branch officer in the debriefing room. This initial interrogation extracted “hot” information that could be immediately exploited (the whereabouts of an ongoing Communist Party committee meeting, for example), as well as the basic information needed to come up with requirements for the series of interrogations that followed. Then the prisoner was given a uniform and stuck in a cell.

The interrogation rooms were at the back of the PIC. Some had two-way mirrors and polygraph machines, although sophisticated equipment was usually reserved for regional interrogation centers, where expert CIA staff interrogators could put them to better use. Most province liaison officers were not trained interrogators. “They didn’t have to be,” according to Muldoon. “They were there to collect intelligence, and they had a list of what they needed in their own province. All they had to do was to make sure that whoever was running the PIC followed their orders. All they had to say was: `This is the requirement I want.’ Then they read the initial reports and went back and gave the Special Branch interrogators additional requirements, just like we did at the NIC.”

The guards lived in the PIC. As they returned from duty, they stacked their weapons in the first room on the right. The next room was the PIC chief’s office, with a safe for classified documents, handguns, and his bottle of scotch. The PIC chief’s primary job was to “turn” captured VCI into double agents, and maintain informant networks in the hamlets and villages. Farther down the corridor were offices for interrogators, collation and report writers, translator-interpreters, and clerical and kitchen staff. There were file rooms with locked cabinets and map rooms for tracking the whereabouts of VCI in the province. And there was a room where defectors were encouraged to become counter-terrorists.

Once an interrogation center had been constructed and a staff assigned, Muldoon summoned the training team from the NIC. Each member of the team was a specialist. The Army captain trained the guards. Air Force Sergeant Frank Rygalski taught report writers how to write proper reports. There were standard reporting formats for tactical as opposed to strategic intelligence and for agent reports. To compile a finished report, an interrogator’s notes were reviewed by the chief interrogator, then collated, typed, copied and sent to the Special Branch, CIO, and CIA. Translations were never considered totally accurate unless read and confirmed in the original language by the same person, but that rarely happened. Likewise, interrogations conducted through interpreters were never considered totally reliable, for significant information was generally lost or misrepresented.

Air Force sergeant Dick Falke taught Special Branch interrogators how to take notes and ask questions during an interrogation. “You don’t just sit down with ten questions, get ten answers, then walk away,” Muldoon said. “Some of these guys, if you gave them ten questions, would get ten answers for you, and that’s it. A lot of them had to learn that you don’t drop a line of questioning just because you got the answer. The answer, if it’s the right one, should lead you to sixty more questions. For example,” he said, “Question one was: `Were you ever trained in North Vietnam?’ Question two was `Were you ever trained by people other than Vietnamese?’ Well, lots of times the answer to question two is so interesting and gives you so much information you keep going for an hour and never get to question three: `When did you come to South Vietnam?”’

Special Branch officers in region interrogation centers were sent to a special interrogation-training program conducted at the NIC by experts from the CIA’s Support Services Branch, most of whom had worked on Russian defectors and were brought out from Langley headquarters to handle important cases. Training of Special Branch administrative personnel was conducted at region headquarters by professional female secretaries, who taught their students how to type, file, and use phones.

According to Muldoon, the Special Branch had “the old French methods.” That means interrogation that included torture. “All this had to be stopped by the Agency,” he said. “They had to be re-taught with more sophisticated techniques.”

In CIA officer Ralph Johnson’s opinion, “the Vietnamese, both Communist and GVN, looked upon torture as a normal and valid method of obtaining intelligence.”

But of course, the Vietnamese did not conceive the PICs; they were the stepchildren of Robert Thompson, whose aristocratic English ancestors perfected torture in dingy castle dungeons, on the rack and in the iron lady, with thumbscrews and branding irons.

As for the American role, according to Muldoon, “you can’t have an American there all the time watching these things.”

“These things” included: rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes, or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electrical shock (“the Bell Telephone Hour”) rendered by attaching wires to the genitals or other sensitive parts of the body, like the tongue; “the water treatment”; “the airplane,” in which a prisoner’s arms were tied behind the back and the rope looped over a hook on the ceiling, suspending the prisoner in midair, after which he or she was beaten; beatings with rubber hoses and whips; and the use of police dogs to maul prisoners.

Simmons: The ugly American writ large.

All this and more occurred in PICs, one of which was run by erstwhile US Congressman Rob Simmons (R-CT) while he was the CIA officer running the Phu Yen Province PIC in 1972.

“The PIC adviser’s job was to keep the region officer informed about real operations mounted in the capital city or against big shots in the field,” Muldoon said, adding that advisers who wanted to do a good job ran the PICs themselves, while the others hired contractors, usually military or corrections officers, who were paid by the CIA but worked for themselves, doing a dirty job in exchange for a line on the inside track to the black market.

Apart from being known as torture chambers, PICs are faulted for producing only information on low-level VCI. Whenever a VCI member with strategic information (like a cadre in the north who knew what was happening in the south) was captured, he was immediately grabbed by the region interrogation center, or the NIC in Saigon, where expert CIA interrogators could produce quality reports for Langley and the National Security Council. The lack of feedback to the PIC for its own province operations resulted in a revolving door syndrome, wherein the PIC was reduced to picking up the same low-level people month after month.

“A lot of PICs didn’t produce anything because the (CIA advisors) in the provinces didn’t push them,” Muldoon said. “Some of them said, `It’s not that we didn’t try; it’s just that it was a dumb idea in the first place, because we couldn’t get the military, who were the ones capturing prisoners, to turn them over. The military weren’t going to turn them over to us until they were finished with them, and by then they were washed out.’

“This,” Muldoon conceded, “was part of the overall plan: Let the military get the tactical military intelligence first. Obviously that’s the most important thing in a war. But then we felt that after the military got what they could use tomorrow or next week, maybe the CIA should talk to this guy. That was the whole idea of having the Province Intelligence Coordination Committees and why the PICs became part of them, so we could work this stuff back and forth. And in provinces where our guys went out of their way to work with the MACV sector adviser, they were able to get something done.”

Douglas Valentine is the author of The Phoenix Program: America’s Use of Terror in Vietnam.

Notes

1 A longer version of this article appeared in CounterPunch in 2004.

2 See 0491 General, August 8–15, 1962, http://cisupa.proquest.com/ksc_assets/catalog/9222.pdf for Hopler’s arrest on espionage charges in Cambodia with his agent Kwang P. Chu.

3 “Clement, (H. Christopher) Bartolomucci (Anthony’s son), and Bancroft founder Viet Dinh became close friends in the early 1990s while working on the Harvard Law Review. (Barack Obama was president of the law review during Clement and Bartolomucci’s first year at the publication.) The three bonded over long hours checking legal citations, wonky arguments over the Commerce Clause, and late-night dinners of Vietnamese food. “Those are guys who would be successful whatever they would do,” says Harvard Law professor Charles Fried, who hired Dinh and Bartolomucci as research assistants when they were students.” http://www.businessweek.com/magazine/content/11_25/b4233033857445.htm

4 http://www.counterpunch.org/2000/11/04/the-spook-who-would-be-a-congressman/

And now a word from the Editors of The Greanville Post

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AS YOU KNOW, THERE’S A COLOSSAL INFORMATION WAR GOING ON, AND THE FATE OF THE WORLD LITERALLY HANGS ON THE OUTCOME.

THEIR LIES.
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Brazil president weeps as she unveils report on military dictatorship’s abuses. (Photograph: Agencia Estado/Xinhua Press/Corbis)

• Dilma Rousseff was herself tortured; thousands of people killed and ‘disappeared’
• US and UK trained interrogators in torture during 1964-85 military rule

Jonathan Watts in Rio de Janeiro and Jan Rocha in São Paulo
The Guardian (UK)

[dropcap]T[/dropcap]he Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff, wept on Wednesday as she unveiled the findings of a Truth Commission investigation into the systematic murder, torture and other abuses carried out during the country’s military dictatorship.

After a nearly three-year study, the commission confirmed that 191 people were killed and 243 “disappeared” under military rule, which lasted from 1964 to 1985. More than 200 have never been found. (These official figures are notoriously conservative. The actual figure is widely known to have been much higher.—Eds)

The 2,000-page report named 377 officials who were blamed for serious human rights violations and recommended a revision to the 1979 Amnesty Law so that perpetrators can be prosecuted.

It also called on the military to recognise its responsibility for “grave violations” of the law and human rights, noting that even today the armed forces were uncooperative in providing materials and granting interviews about alleged abuses.

A share of the blame went to the United States and the UK, which were found to have trained Brazilian interrogators in torture techniques. (As they did throughout Latin America, particularly in Chile, Argentina and Uruguay. These nations had also plotted to bring about these coups.—Eds.)

Among the victims of abuse was Rousseff, a former Marxist guerrilla who was beaten and jolted with electric shocks during her three-year detention at Tiradentes prison in the 1970s.

The president was visibly moved as she released the report of the seven-member commission, which she set up in 2012.

“Brazil deserves the truth,” she said as tears welled up in her eyes. “The truth means above everything the opportunity to reconcile ourselves and our history.”

As was the case elsewhere in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s, the elite and middle class aligned themselves with the military to stave off what they saw as a communist threat. Killings, torture and detention were commonly used against political enemies. In Argentina and Chile, the toll of dead and missing were proportionally much higher than in Brazil.

Many of the worst crimes in Brazil were already known, but the commission emphasised the political motives and organisation behind them, dismissing claims that the killings and other abuses were isolated acts of overzealous individuals.

“Under the military dictatorship, the repression and elimination of political opposition was [carried out] because of the policy of the state, conceived and implemented based on decisions by the president of the republic and military ministers,” the commission concludes.

Several other countries have been implicated by commission members. The Brazilians initially used French counter-insurgency techniques developed in Algeria, but in the 1960s US influence became stronger.

Many Brazilian officers went to Panama to train at the School of the Americas, alongside military and police officers from almost every other Latin American country, whether run by dictators or not.

Courses they were given included training in “counter-insurgency techniques, command operations, intelligence and counterintelligence, psychological warfare operations, police-military operations and interrogation techniques,” the report says.

Secret instruction manuals used at the school were declassified by the US department of defence in the mid-1990s, revealing training in torture and other serious violations of human rights.

In the 1970s, Brazilian officers were sent to London for training in torture techniques. A former president, General Ernesto Geisel, who ruled from 1974-79, is quoted as saying, “The English, in their secret service, acted with discretion. Our people, inexperienced and extroverted, did it openly. I don’t justify torture, but I recognise there are circumstances when the individual is impelled to practise torture, to obtain certain confessions and so avoid a greater evil.”

The report also quotes former general Hugo de Andrade Abreu, who said “at the end of 1970 we sent a group of army officers to England to learn the English system of interrogation. This consists of putting the prisoner in a cell incommunicado, a method known as the ‘refrigerator’.”

In 1971, the “English system”, as it became known, was put into practice in Rio army HQ in Barão de Mesquita street, which had become a torture centre. Four new cubicles were built. One, lined with polystyrene and asbestos, was a “cold room”, another a “sound room”. A third was all white and the fourth all black.

Each cubicle was monitored to enable interrogators to listen to the prisoners’ heartbeats.

“They were variations on the techniques used by the British army against Irish terrorists,” said Amílcar Lobo, an army psychiatrist who worked in a torture centre at Petrópolis known as the ‘house of death’. “They were destined to destructure the personality of the prisoners without touching them.”

To uncover the truth about such abuses, the commission questioned victims and former officers, combed archives and re-examined medical records.

Many activists, however, said the truth was not enough. After the report was unveiled, a group of 10 protesters waved banners and shouted demands for punishment of those responsible for executions and torture.

Members of the commission also called for punishment. They said abuses continue today because the dictatorship era set an example of impunity.

“Amnesty does not extend to the agents of the state who put in practice excesses of violence,” said the former minister of justice José Carlos Dias, one of the six out of seven commission members to call for a lifting of the amnesty.

But there are many obstacles to doing so. Supreme court justices have previously rejected requests to lift the amnesty and described the issue as a “page that has been turned”.

Rousseff has also previously indicated her reluctance to settle old political scores, saying national unity was a higher priority.

The report notes that even though the widespread torture and executions were not covered in the Brazilian media due to censorship, “surprising” details of how they worked were revealed in a recently declassified telegram by the US consul general, Clarence A Boonstra, in Rio de Janeiro in 1973.

The commission notes that Boonstra told his superiors about a crackdown in which there was an increase in arrests, mostly of college students. Their interrogations, he noted, were carried out under “a system of intensive psychophysical abuse, developed to extract information without leaving visible and lasting marks on the body”. The detainees suspected of being “hardline terrorists” continued, according to the report, “to be submitted to old methods of physical violence that sometimes cause death”.

One of the few former military officers who agreed to talk to the Truth Commission was ex-colonel Paulo Malhães, who was among those sent to the UK for training. Malhães told the commission “psychological torture was best, and England was the best place to learn it”.

“It didn’t leave physical marks, and it was much more efficient than brute force, especially when you were trying to transform militants into infiltrated agents.”

Malhães, by his own admission was also a sadistic physical torturer, who used snakes, crocodiles and rats to terrify prisoners. Two weeks after giving evidence to the Truth Commission in Rio, he was found dead at his home in mysterious circumstances. Former political prisoners believe he was eliminated to stop him talking more to the Truth Commission and providing the names of torturers.

Some of the information in the report came from diplomatic correspondence in the UK National Archives at Kew, but the commission notes that a request for access to still-classified British documents, sent to the British government, has not yet been answered.

And now a word from the Editors of The Greanville Post

FRIENDS AND FELLOW ACTIVISTS—

AS YOU KNOW, THERE’S A COLOSSAL INFORMATION WAR GOING ON, AND THE FATE OF THE WORLD LITERALLY HANGS ON THE OUTCOME.

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BARRY GREY

Brennan discussing the management of state terror with his nominal boss. The NYT caption read: “President Obama with John O. Brennan in 2012. At the White House, Mr. Brennan managed the “kill lists” for drone strikes. Credit Pete Souza/The White House”

[dropcap]CIA Director[/dropcap] John Brennan’s televised press conference Thursday at the agency’s headquarters, an unprecedented event, marked a new threshold in the collapse of American democracy and the erection of a police state.

The very fact that it was left to the head of the spy agency rather than President Obama to issue the government’s rebuttal to this week’s devastating Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA torture makes clear who is really in control of the American state.

In statements riddled with lies, and with little attempt to conceal his contempt for democratic procedures and the law, Brennan defended the agency’s use of horrific forms of torture during the Bush administration as a legitimate and “patriotic” response to the 9/11 terror attacks. He recycled all of the official myths associated with the “war on terror” to imply that the CIA and the military/intelligence apparatus as a whole had to remain outside of any congressional or legal restraints.

While declaring nominal support for Obama’s decision to end the Bush-era program of “enhanced interrogation techniques,” he fiercely defended the administration’s expanded program of drone assassinations, saying “the US military has done some wonderful things with these platforms.”

It must be recalled that Brennan is also quite directly responsible for the carnage in Ukraine, as he has directly advised the Kiev regime on its “punitive” expeditions.

He also suggested that “EITs” might have to be revived to deal with future security threats. In reply to a reporter’s question, he said, “I defer to the policy makers in future times when there is going to be the need to be able to ensure that this country stays safe if we face a similar type of crisis.”

At one point in his potted narrative on the origins of the “war on terror” and the CIA torture program, he hailed as an example of the agency’s heroism paramilitary operations officer Mike Spann, the first US casualty in the 2001 invasion of Afghanistan. The invocation of Spann summed up the criminality of the policies being defended by Brennan and the Obama administration and the link between imperialist war abroad and the destruction of democratic rights at home.

Spann was killed in the November, 2001 uprising of Taliban prisoners at the Qala-i-Jangi Fortress in Mazar-i-Sharif. He was the chief CIA interrogator of hundreds of captured Taliban who were held in barbaric conditions at the fortress.

Among those he questioned and abused was the American Taliban soldier John Walker Lindh, one of 86 survivors out of 800 prisoners who were victims of a massacre carried out by US-allied forces led by CIA and Special Forces troops.

Brennan painted a grotesquely false picture of an American public clamoring for the most brutal possible measures to defend them against new and imminent terror attacks. “Our government and our citizens recognized the urgency of the task,” he declared. Why then, despite the shock and disorientation produced by the 9/11 attacks and the relentless fear-mongering of the government and media, did the Bush administration and the CIA feel obliged to keep their torture program secret?

The criminal conspiracy documented by the Senate report is directed at the American working class as much or more than at the victims of US imperialism internationally. It cannot be halted by appeals to any of the institutions of a state that is run by criminals. It can only be stopped by the mobilized working class, that is, ordinary Americans.

Among his other lies was his denial that the CIA misled Congress and the American people about its interrogation program. The Senate Intelligence Committee’s unclassified executive summary, however, concludes with a 37-page appendix devoted entirely to listing the lies told to it by then-CIA Director Michael Hayden at an April 12, 2007 hearing.

Brennan said, with a straight face, that the CIA had fully supported and cooperated closely with the Senate Committee’s investigation. In fact, he and Obama obstructed the investigation, withholding thousands of documents, and then held up the report for two years after its December 2012 completion. Brennan then had the CIA hack into the computers of Committee staffers working on the final version of the document, a brazen violation of congressional oversight and the US Constitution.

Demanding “collaborative and constructive” congressional oversight, as opposed to what he called the partisan and “flawed” report issued on Tuesday, he pointed to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s whitewash of the CIA’s lies about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction as a model of such collaboration.

He went on to characterize abuses in the interrogation program as aberrations carried out by a few bad apples who went beyond the bounds laid down by the Bush administration. The “overwhelming majority” of CIA interrogators, he insisted, acted properly. “I look back at the record,” he said, “and I see that this was a workforce that was trying to do the right thing.”

What makes so many Irish-Americans, descendants of a brutally colonized nation, buy so easily into authoritarianism and side with the cause of the Empire?

He rejected the Senate Committee’s conclusion that torture did not produce useful intelligence and declared that the interrogation program “saved lives.”

He then echoed the position of the White House in demanding that there be no prosecutions of high-ranking state officials who ordered and oversaw the torture program, such as President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, CIA Directors George Tenet, Porter Goss and Michael Hayden, and others. In this, Brennan has a direct interest, since he was deputy executive director of the CIA at the time the program was being carried out.

He demanded that “this debate” on torture be “put aside” in order to focus on “issues that are relevant to our current national security challenges.”

Showing his contempt for the public’s right to know, Brennan refused to answer a reporter who asked him directly if he supported the release of the Senate report, quipping, “I think there’s more than enough transparency that has happened over the last couple of days. I think it’s over the top.”

Brennan and others who have come forward publicly to denounce the Senate report and defend the CIA torture program, such as Bush, Cheney and a host of former CIA officials, have been emboldened by the Obama administration’s repeated declarations of confidence in Brennan and opposition to launching criminal investigations in the light of the crimes exposed by the Intelligence Committee—and even more so by the impotence and cowardice of the liberal critics of the torture program.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairman of the Committee, was reduced to carping at Brennan’s statements via Twitter, after which she issued a groveling statement praising Brennan for showing “that CIA leadership is prepared to prevent this from ever happening again—which is all important.”

In fact, the establishment critics of the CIA all accept the basic framework of the “war on terror,” which provides the political and ideological justification for militarism abroad and the militarization of American society at home.

The New York Times summed up the craven position of the so-called liberal establishment in an editorial titled “Dark Again After Report on CIA Torture.” Praising Feinstein and the Intelligence Committee Democrats for bucking pressure from the CIA and Obama and releasing their report, the newspaper wrote: “Sadly, that is pretty much it on the disclosure front. In post-9/11 America, when it comes to momentous matters of national security, democratic tradition and the rule of law, there is precious little disclosure and no justice and accountability. It’s a bipartisan affliction.”

Of Brennan’s press conference, the Times wrote: “Mr. Brennan’s lack of interest in further discussion was fairly clear… Unhappily, he’s likely to get his wish.”

Indeed, after Brennan laid down the law on Thursday, the mass media all but dropped the entire subject of CIA torture. It virtually disappeared from the front pages of newspapers and the television news.

The working class, however, cannot allow the criminal perpetrators of torture to go unpunished. It is not only a matter of crimes committed overseas. If the argument that “torture works” is allowed to go unanswered, then what remains of the Eighth Amendment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” within the United States?

The criminal conspiracy partially documented by the Senate report is directed at the American working class as much or more than at the victims of US imperialism internationally. It cannot be halted by appeals to any of the institutions of a state that is run by criminals. It can be stopped only by a mass, independent and revolutionary political movement of the working class.

Barry Grey is a senior political observer with wsws.org, an organ of Social Equality Party (Trotskyist).

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