“Jihadi John,” imperialism and ISIS

“Armed Islamist movements existed in neither Iraq nor Syria—nor, for that matter, in Libya—before US imperialism intervened to topple secular Arab governments in all three countries.”

RT.COM (Screengrab)

[dropcap]O[/dropcap]n Thursday, the Washington Post revealed the identity of “Jihadi John,” the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) operative featured in grisly videos depicting the beheading of US journalists James Foley and Steven Sotloff, as well as two British aid workers, David Haines and Alan Henning.

The Post named the ISIS member as Mohammed Emwazi, a 26-year-old who was born in Kuwait and raised in London. He is described in a CNN report as “a Briton from a well-to-do family who grew up in West London and graduated from college with a degree in computer programming.”

The media reporting on this identification has been dominated by discussions of the psychology of terrorism and the role of Islamist ideology, along with speculation as to why someone from such a background would choose to engage in such barbaric acts.

All of these banalities are part of a campaign of deliberate obfuscation. Purposefully left in the shadows is the central revelation to accompany the identification of “Jihad John”—the fact that he was well known to British intelligence, which undoubtedly identified him as soon as his image and voice were first broadcast in ISIS videos.

Not only did Britain’s security service MI5 carefully track his movements, it carried out an active campaign to recruit him as an informant and covert agent. As the British daily Guardian put it Thursday, MI5 has “serious questions” to answer about its relations with Emwazi.

Chief among these questions is whether the intelligence agency was successful in its recruitment efforts. In other words, did Emwazi go to Syria with MI5’s foreknowledge and blessings?

If there is doubt as to whether Emwazi was recruited, it is clear that other ISIS jihadists have been. The BBC reported that British intelligence has refused to name Emwazi for “operational reasons.” It adds: “The practice by intelligence agencies of approaching jihadist sympathisers to work for them is likely to continue. It’s believed both Britain and the US have informers inside the Islamic State ‘capital’ of Raqqa. Yet this seems to have been little help in stopping the actions of Mohammed Emwazi, or bringing him to justice.”

At its heart, the case of “Jihadi John” is of significance because of what it says about the real relationship between Western imperialism and ISIS. In the final analysis, ISIS is a product of the interventions by Washington and its allies in the region.

Armed Islamist movements existed in neither Iraq nor Syria—nor, for that matter, in Libya—before US imperialism intervened to topple secular Arab governments in all three countries.

It is not only a matter of these movements emerging out of the mayhem, death and destruction unleashed by the US military and CIA in these countries at the cost of well over a million lives and wholesale social devastation.

Like Al Qaeda before it, ISIS is a creation of US and Western imperialism, unleashed upon the peoples of the region in pursuit of definite strategic aims. In Libya, Islamists now affiliated with ISIS provided the principal ground forces for the US-NATO war to topple Muammar Gaddafi. In Syria, ISIS, the Al Qaeda-affiliated Al Nusra Front and similar Islamist militias have played a similar role in a war for regime-change that has been backed by Washington and its allies.

By all accounts, so-called “foreign fighters” comprise the largest component of the “rebels” who have sought to topple Syrian President Bashar al-Assad over the past three-and-a-half years. Estimates have put their number at over 20,000, with recruits drawn from throughout Europe, North America, Central Asia and elsewhere.

While the media presents the flow of these fighters into Syria as something of a mystery, the question of how they have gotten there can be easily answered. The CIA, MI5 and other Western intelligence agencies have not merely turned a blind eye to Islamists traveling from their respective countries to the Syrian battlefield, it has offered them active encouragement. Turkey, a key US ally, has facilitated the flow of these elements across its border into Syria.

It should be recalled that Western governments and media painted forces like ISIS in Syria as democratic “revolutionaries” waging a progressive struggle against a tyrant. The war, which was stoked through orchestrated provocations, was cited as a justification for “humanitarian” intervention.

Arms and funding poured in to back the largely Islamist “rebels,” even as Washington and its allies steadily escalated the threat of direct intervention. The Obama administration went to the brink of launching a savage bombardment of Syria in September 2013, only to beat a tactical retreat in the face of unexpected opposition.

The Islamist forces on the ground in Syria felt themselves the victims of a double-cross. Much like the CIA’s Cuban counterrevolutionaries at the Bay of Pigs a half-century earlier, their promised US air support did not come and they lashed out in retribution. Ultimately, this took the form not only of the serial beheadings of Western hostages, but also the debacle inflicted upon the US-trained security forces in Iraq.

Washington has hypocritically seized upon the beheadings in an attempt to whip up support for its new intervention in the Middle East. But when similar atrocities were carried out by ISIS and its cohorts against Syrian Alawites, Christians and captured conscripts, the Obama administration looked the other way.

In the wake of the revelations about “Jihadi John,” Britain’s Tory Prime Minister David Cameron issued a ringing defense of the country’s security services, describing its members as “incredibly impressive, hard-working, dedicated, courageous.” He declared his sympathy for their “having to make incredibly difficult judgments.” He insisted that “the most important thing is to get behind them.”

If Britain were a functioning democracy, the revelations about the role of MI5 and its relations with Mohammed Emwazi and ISIS generally would be the subject of a parliamentary inquiry that could spell the fall of the government.

However, in London, as in Washington, the government has been largely taken over by the military and intelligence apparatus, whose crimes are systematically covered up with the aid of a complicit corporate-controlled media.

For workers in Britain, the US and internationally, these revelations only underscore the necessity to build up a genuine antiwar movement based on a socialist and internationalist program and in intransigent opposition to all attempts to exploit the crimes of ISIS—the Frankenstein’s monster created by imperialism—to justify the escalation of war abroad and repression at home.

[box] Bill Van Auken is a senior editorial writer with wsws.org, organ of Social Equality Party. [/box]

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Half of Humanity Now Forms the ‘Resistance’

Kashmir is Bleeding

Kashmiri Intifada: It’s happening, and Delhi can’t seem to stop it. (Photo by the author)

ANDRE VLTCHEK

[dropcap]A day before[/dropcap] leaving Srinagar, in the ‘Indian administered Kashmir’, my comrades asked me to address a small gathering of local as well as progressive visiting Indian intellectuals. They mainly wanted to hear about the state of the resistance against Western imperialism. And Western imperialism is what India is now trying to join so eagerly and shamelessly.

It was dark outside, literally and metaphorically. Kashmir has been bleeding horrifically. At least 80,000 people have died, most of them from the terror spread by the fascist Indian state. The victims have been mainly civilians. At least 8,000 people have been “disappeared”. There have been countless, predominantly unreported, rapes and cases of beastly, unimaginable torture. Much of it has happened in just the last two decades.

I am going to write about this, soon, next week. But before I do, let me tell this story.

During that dark night, several men and women were gathered in a cramped room, asking me one simple and essential question: “Could the brutality of the Empire be prevented, and if not prevented, could it be stopped?”

I replied that “Yes!” And “Yes!” again.

Because no matter how dark the night appears to be, no matter how hopeless the struggles seems to be, the world had changed in the last several years; and it had changed profoundly.

***

When I stood in the middle of the street on 26th January 2015, just with my camera, right between stone-throwing youth and heavily armed Indian security forces, I was the only person willing to report the event. Later a Kashmiri human rights activist explained to me: “Foreigners don’t dare to do this, local reporters would be, as always, beaten up by the Indian security forces, and if Indians were to dare and come, they would encounter the wrath of those indignant stone-throwing youth.”

And so I was alone there.

But was I really?

Behind me – not visibly behind – but psychologically not too far away, stood a comrade who has been working for a huge international press agency. He couldn’t be here with me, but before I went, he offered his support, contacts, and expertise. Without his help and backing, my work would be next to impossible, or at least much more dangerous than it already was.

The struggle for justice, for true freedom, and above all, for the survival of humanity, is becoming increasingly broad, joined by countries located on all the continents and by individuals from all walks of life.

Two decades ago we lived in a totally different world. The lackeys of the West, with Boris Yeltsin leading the pack, boozed the Soviet Union out. Eastern Europe was mostly led by the children of former elites, such as Vaclav Havel. China was still very far from reversing its moderately toxic pro-market ‘reforms’ introduced by Deng Xiaoping. And Latin America: it was in total disarray, either engaged in civil wars and conflicts, recovering from monstrous pro-Western dictatorships, or run by the market-fundamentalists, or all the above. In Africa and in the Middle East, right-wing dictatorships were consolidating their power, and in many Asian nations, the elites were busy re-grabbing power, applauded by their own private press, as well as by the Western mainstream media.

Language and terminology, the linguistics, had been totally perverted or at least confused. Fascism was called ‘democracy’. Terms like ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ were determinedly and constantly smeared.

What a world it used to be!

But no more: everything has totally changed.

***

“Language and terminology had been totally perverted or at least confused. Fascism was called ‘democracy’. Terms like ‘socialism’ and ‘communism’ were… constantly smeared.”

Just two months ago I was invited to Eritrea, a great and brave African country that is fighting the direct intimidation and embargoes of the Empire. The lady who hosted me, used to work in South Sudan, for the World Bank. She got so disgusted with what she was expected to do – destroying her fellow African people – that she left her highly paid job, just a year ago, in order to set up her own progressive organization, defending the Horn Of Africa. She set up its headquarters in the capital of her native Eritrea, Asmara. Since then she has been courageously fighting for her people, and for those in this totally abused and tortured part of the world.

I have met and worked with countless staff-members of the United Nations: educators and statisticians, academics, economists and other professionals. Some are just lamenting about how the dream of the “World Government” degenerated and gone to the dogs. But others are actively fighting, often behind the scenes, breaking countless rules and regulations.

Some quit, unwilling to compromise.

Rwanda's Western henchman Kagame. (Via Veni, flickr)

Rwanda’s Western henchman Paul Kagame. (Via Veni, flickr)

I have to mention my deceased friend, Australian lawyer Michael Hourigan, a former UN genocide investigator from ICTR, who managed to identify those who shot down the airplane carrying the Presidents of Rwanda and Burundi, in 1994. He was forced to fly to The Hague, and literally ordered to shut up, by a high UN official. That was because all the evidence was pointing at the Rwandan President Paul Kagame and his Tutsi army, RPF. Kagame has been a brutal Western implant, responsible for millions of dead people in the plundered Democratic Republic of Congo.

The shooting down of the Presidential ‘Falcon’ jet triggered the epic 1994 violence, and terrible inter-tribal bloodletting.

Michael Hourigan resigned, in disgust, and returned to his native Adelaide in Australia. He passed the evidence on to me, during the filming of my feature documentary, “Rwanda Gambit”.

Another horror story I was asked to tell to the world, was by Ms. Masako Yonekawa, a former UNHCR head in Goma, perhaps the most tattered and terrorized part of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and of Africa in general.

Ms. Yonekawa resigned from the UN, and then went on record, testifying in my film, about the brutality of the RPF, about the Western support for the RPF, and about the UN staff, particularly the Indian peacekeepers, who had been involved in the smuggling of raw materials from the DRC.

There were others, many others, who managed to identify the genocide in the DR Congo, particularly those UN staff members who wrote and consequently ‘leaked’ the reports (including the ‘Mapping Report’) on the involvement of both Rwanda and Uganda in the genocide in Goma and other parts of the DRC.

Two UN statisticians helped me, when I was writing my book on the horrors of modern, post-Suharto Indonesia, “Indonesia – Archipelago of Fear.”

Not everyone has the guts to ‘go public’, or to resign. But I know: whenever great matters are at stake, there are thinkers and teachers, doctors and pilots, UN experts, economists, lawyers, even some government officials and soldiers, who are ready to risk their careers, and support me, or people like me, and therefore directly or indirectly joining the struggle.

These days I never feel desperate or hopeless. Some of the greatest individuals are on our side.

Just look at the “Brussells Tribunal”! Or look at the ‘composition’, the list of those who are writing for Counterpunch or The Greanville Post.

Of course, the journey, the process, is not without those who betray it. There are always people who put their petty fears and interests above the great struggles. They betray individuals, the fighters, and they also betray entire concepts. But nothing is, or should be ‘perfect’.

Those who betray will, one day, face their own conscience, if they have any at all. They will not be at peace with themselves. As for the honest fighters, traitors will certainly hurt them, but after a while, they will get up, straighten themselves again, and march forward.

***

There is great hope, everywhere. And not too see it, not to sense it, would take truly great ‘discipline’.

Russia got up from its knees and confronted the Empire. China did the same, in many ways returning to Socialist, even Communist designs. Both big nations are increasingly ‘internationalist’ when it comes to their foreign policy. Both are also deeply concerned with the lives of their people.

Latin America broke the shackles of Western imperialism and of the racist and cynically self-serving ‘Monroe Doctrine’. Each one of these great nations: Cuba, Venezuela, Ecuador, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Chile, Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, is going its own way, but in brilliant solidarity with each other, and as a bloc. Each one is also forging closer and closer links with China and Russia.

Those nations that have been overrun by the West, recently: Paraguay and Honduras are seen clearly as scarecrows. Nobody in their sane mind would like to follow their ‘examples’.

Africa, the most injured continent on Earth, is standing tall at least at its two extremes: South Africa and Zimbabwe in the South, and Eritrea in the north.

As complex as the situation is there, North Korea, Vietnam and Laos are still in the camp of the rebels, and have to be taken seriously.

Were India not to betray the BRICS, were it not to jump into an horrific embrace of the West and Israel, as well as its own grotesque religious and cast-driven nationalism, at least one half of the planet would now be standing firmly against the Empire and its sinister design to fully control the world.

***

I spoke to my Kashmiri friends about all of this.

But Kashmir is bleeding, from torture and rape, from extra-judicial killings. There, India is conducting joint exercises with both the US and Israel. It is learning how to massacre, control and torture, and it is often outdoing its gurus.

The victims of the bestiality committed by the Empire and its client states are our allies. We will not hide the facts! We will not maneuver. We will speak openly and clearly. If we have any ‘ideological differences’, we will take care of them later. But our message, for now, is clear: enough of torture, enough of rape, enough of genocides.

I told them, to my friends: “Kashmir is not alone. We will stand by you, we will struggle with you, and if needed, we will risk our lives for you!”

The era of cowardice is over. A new age of solidarity has arrived.

As Indian guns were pointed at me, I felt calm. “If anything happens to me, many others will take my place”, I thought. I am not a hero, I don’t believe in heroism, but I am not a coward, either. And after learning what has been taking place in Kashmir, every pore of my body was supporting the victims.

In Kashmir I felt that Leningrad and Beijing, Caracas, Havana, Asmara and Quito are behind me. The songs of resistance from Srinagar were the songs of resistance of the Russian, Chinese, African and Latin American people.

We are all connected. And that is why I was standing there, in the middle of the road, in Srinagar, facing the soldiers of the Indian state – those lackeys of the Empire.

“He is really coming with us!” one of the boys said, in disbelief.

“Yes!” I said, squeezing my camera. As always, I wanted to survive. I wanted to survive so much! But not by all means! Not as a slave, not as a lackey.

“Half of humanity is now with us”, I thought, as the bandits, those security forces of India, trained openly by US and Israeli began closing in on us, firing teargas canisters, not into the air but directly at people’s heads. “And many more will be joining, soon.”

Point of No Return is now re-edited and available. Oceania is his book on Western imperialism in South Pacific. His provocative book about post-Suharto Indonesia and market-fundamentalist model is called “Indonesia – The Archipelago of Fear” (Pluto). He just completed a feature documentary, “Rwanda Gambit”, about Rwandan history and the plunder of DR Congo. After living for many years in Latin America and Oceania, Vltchek presently resides and works in East Asia and Africa. He can be reached through his website, or at andre.vltchek@greanvillepost.com

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Western Democracy Crusaders are Foes of Democracy.

The World Seen Through a “Progressive” Western Keyhole versus a Panoramic Lens.

The cover of an album that tells the story of the Cuban Revolution in 268 trading cards that were given away with tinned fruit in the early sixties. Up in the clouds you can see Jose Marti looking down on the unfolding drama. As well as being a Cuban hero, poet and revolutionary, Marti also penned the lyrics to that latino chart topper “Guantanamera”…(Jeremy Richardson, via flickr)

John V. Walsh

[dropcap]“One of Castro’s[/dropcap] closest comrades, the Argentine-born guerilla Che Guevara, had been in Guatemala in 1954 and witnessed the coup against Arbenz. Later he told Castro why it succeeded. He said Arbenz had foolishly tolerated an open society, which the CIA penetrated and subverted, and also preserved the existing army, which the CIA turned into its instrument. Castro agreed that a revolutionary regime in Cuba must avoid those mistakes. Upon taking power, he cracked down on dissent and purged the army. Many Cubans supported his regime and were ready to defend it.” (Emphasis, jw)—The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen Dulles and Their Secret World War.
Stephen Kinzer

The stark choice that confronted Castro and Guevara is faced by every nation seeking independence from the U.S., a far more powerful nation with enormous resources in terms of “soft” power, economic power and military power. The more open the society, the more opportunities for CIA-engineered regime change. This was the lesson Arbenz learned in 1954 and Mossadegh before him in 1953, lessons that brought so much pain, death and destruction to their peoples in the decades to follow.

Judged by that outcome, the Castros made the right decision and as a result have presided over a healthy, educated and secure people. The drawback was that the Empire isolated Cuba economically, stifling the possibilities of more development and a higher standard of living. The Empire wants nations charting an independent course to be politically open to the regime change schemes and NGOs of the West but economically closed, shut off from more advanced economies. It is as simple as that.

For some defiant states the sort of regime change operation used against Mossadegh and Arbenz may be the only option which the United States has. This is certainly the case for China and Russia. All out war on these countries is out of reach – although the U.S. is trying to change that. The modus operandi of the Empire for the moment is to put Russia and China on the horns of tried and true dilemmas. Open up politically, permit the development of forces that favor regime change – or remain less open and face criticism, especially criticism from Western governments and Western intellectuals, including the “progressive” or liberal intellectuals. This is crucial because “progressives” are the very people who – until Obama – were most likely to oppose imperial warfare – both military and economic. The Democracy Crusade is designed to neutralize them.

This criticism from the West is one lever, and an important one, that is used to force a society to be more open in its governance than its survival permits. Let us be clear. Without a rapacious West at the doorstep, the possibilities of openness and democracy are much greater in scope. Conversely, the more rapacious the West, the more restricted are the possibilities for a besieged nation if it wishes to survive and prosper with its sovereignty intact. Without sovereignty there can be no democracy. Rule conditioned on approval by a foreign source or by a puppet regime is never self-rule. So it is never democracy.

“Without a rapacious West at the doorstep, the possibilities of openness and democracy are much greater in scope…”

It follows that the best way to crusade for openness and democracy is to work against Western interventionism, whether that interventionism takes the form of armed attack, economic sanctions or the work of NGOs like the NED (National Endowment for Democracy). This is absolutely crucial to understand. A criticism of a besieged country will increase the pressure on that country and hence lead to a decrease in political openness. Paradoxically, this is true even if the criticism is one that calls for more democracy.

The recent events in Hong Kong are but the latest example of this dynamic. There the NED had long been actively involved in promoting “democracy,” along with other U.S. NGOs and the U.S. Consulate, with its staff of 600. These forces recruited very young “activists,” with high school students at the forefront. (A Chinese friend of mine noted with disgust that easily manipulated high school students were also in the forefront of the Cultural Revolution.) The movement sought elimination of the screening of candidates by a committee of 1200 Hong Kong residents for the next election of the CEO, a position akin to governor. The composition of the committee was open to negotiation. (It went unmentioned in the West that there was no election when Hong Kong was a colony of the UK. The governor was appointed by the Queen – period. It also went unmentioned that there is a similar sort of “screening” of candidates in the U.S., with the major parties serving in the role of screeners. If you do not believe that, ask the Greens or the Libertarians or Ralph Nader.) Most importantly the leaders of the movement and their U.S. backers made no secret of their hope that the disturbances in Hong Kong would spread to the mainland and provoke a movement against the Chinese government. They are advocates of regime change in China as are their mentors at the NED.

What has the current government of China, led by its Communist Party, done for China? It has led China out of colonial domination by the West. It has forged a level of economic development with a rapidity unseen before in all of human history. It has ended poverty for 600 million people and continues on the quest to raise millions more out of poverty. For the world it has meant a power, China, which is sufficiently strong to provide a multipolar world. That in turn means that the countries of the world have an alternative to Western domination, which has been the fate of most of the world for hundreds of years. Russia and Iran, for example, can trade with China when the West slaps sanctions on them. As a result at this moment there is the possibility of genuine decolonization (or de-neocolonization, if you will) – after centuries of the planet’s domination by a small fraction of the world’s population.

hongKongUmbrellaRevol.PasuAuYeung.flickr

Panoramic view of “Umbrella Revolution” rally, taken Sept. 29, 2014. As time went by it became clearer that Washington had indeed been pulling strings, as usual. (Via Pasu Au Yeung, flickr)

CLICK TO ENLARGE

In short the current government of China is the agent of the most stunning defeat of Euro-American colonialism that the world has seen to date. After all the Chinese are almost one-fifth of humanity. One would think that this fact would be part of the evaluation of Western progressives when they looked at the Hong Kong affair. With few exceptions it was not. And this is a big problem. The world is going through a major upheaval as colonialism and neo-colonialism are suffering major defeats. That upheaval, that shift, is a lens through which Western “progressives” should look at the world. They rarely do. In failing to do so, they see the world through the ideological eyes of the West, that is, “the 1%“ at the top of the heap (or at least the 10%) if one may put it that way. China has achieved what the West hates most. It is relatively closed politically to the intrigues and machinations of the West – but economically open. This is the recipe for sovereignty and development.

The difference between the two views is the difference between looking at the world through a panoramic lens, with history in the background, and looking through a keyhole. In the latter case of tunnel vision one may only see a patch of grey through the keyhole, whereas a mighty elephant stands beyond the door.

Afterthoughts: Old China Hand. One “progressive,” and an “Old China Hand” to boot, even charged the minority on the Left with “neocolonialist” attitudes when they criticized him for siding with the NED in Hong Kong. He claimed that the dissidents in Hong Kong were too sophisticated, too “smart,” to be taken in by the NED, NID, U.S. Consulate officials and other detritus with whom they regularly consort.

But what about the cases where we now know that the CIA et al successfully deceived the population – sufficiently to overthrow an anticolonial government, as with Mossadegh or Arbenz or Allende? Does Old China Hand mean to say that the people of Iran or Guatemala or Chile were “stupid”? And is that not neocolonialist arrogance? No, Old China Hand is defending tunnel vision, the view through the keyhole, not the people of Hong Kong. And if ever there were an unwitting agent of neocolonialism, it is sadly the likes of Old China Hand.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

John V. Walsh writes for Antiwar.com, CounterPunch, DissidentVoice.org and The Unz Review. He can be reached at john.endwar@gmail.com.

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The French Role in the Use and Export of Torture

We Must Denounce the French Participation in the Dissemination of Torture Around the World.

The French "paras" arrive to settle the insurrection in Algiers, by any means necessary. (Still from The Battle of Algiers, 1966, by Gillo Pontecorvo.)

The French “paras” arrive to settle the insurrection in Algiers, by any means necessary. (Screen grab from The Battle of Algiers, 1966, by Gillo Pontecorvo.)

CESAR CHELALA

[dropcap]As the world[/dropcap] is reacting with justified condemnation to the tragic events in Paris, the same condemnation should be extended to industrialized countries that have resorted to violence and torture in their recent history. In addition, those countries not only have used these techniques themselves but have exported them to other countries.

France is a case in point. There is ample evidence of the widespread use of torture and assassination of political opponents during that country’s occupation of Algeria. Less well-known, however, is that French military officers trained the Argentine military in the psychological and physical torture of political prisoners in Argentina.

In December 2013 died in France French General Paul Aussaresses, who was responsible for executions and torture of prisoners during the Algerian war for independence. A French judge, Roger Le Loire, when investigating the disappearance of French citizens in Argentina during the last military regime, interrogated Gen. Paul Aussaresses about his knowledge of torture techniques provided by his soldiers to the Argentine military.

Aussaresses’ testimony helped draw a picture of the French military’s role in teaching torture to their Argentine colleagues. Aussaresses defended his use of torture during the Algerian War in the book “The Battle of the Casbah,” and argued for torture in the fight against al-Qaida. “I express regrets,” he said in a 2001 interview, “But I cannot express remorse. That implies guilt. I consider I did my difficult duty of a soldier implicated in a difficult mission.”

Aussaresses in his prime. (French Wikipedia). The caption reads: “Paul Aussaresses, (1918-2013), général de l’armée française. Parachutiste, il est connu pour son utilisation de la torture pendant la guerre d’Algérie, en particulier lors de la bataille d’Alger.”

Aussaresses stated that the French government insisted that the French military in Algeria “liquidate the FLN (Front de Liberation Nationale) as quickly as possible.” Following the controversy fueled by his statements, he was stripped of his rank, the right to wear his uniform and his Légion d’honneur. (See special section below)

Aussaresses had close links with the Brazilian military. According to Gen. Manuel Contreras, former head of the Chilean DINA (Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia), Chilean officers were trained in Brazil by Aussaresses. He also advised South American militaries on battles against counterinsurgency and on the use of torture.

Lt. Col. Roger Trinquier was reportedly the architect of brutal repression in Algeria and the development of the concept of “modern war.” One of that concept’s basic tenets was the “secrecy doctrine,” which was to cause havoc in Argentina during the last military regime that ruled that country.

Don’t miss the classic film The Battle of Algiers, directed by Gillo Pontencorvo, in the Appendix. The best reconstruction in the history of cinema of a revolutionary insurrection against colonialism.

An important premise of that doctrine was the need to maintain strict secrecy with regard to the detention of political prisoners, as well as their death, and to ensure the elimination of all corpses. Many were dumped in the ocean; some later washed ashore on Argentine and Uruguayan beaches.

The use of military personnel dressed as civilians, looking for political opponents to interrogate and torture, was a technique implemented by the French in Indochina and Algeria, and later exported to Argentina through French military advisers. In Argentina, these techniques led to the “disappearance” of some 30,000 political prisoners in the 1970s, almost all of whom are still unaccounted for.

Interrogation, at blowtorch point, of FLN militant. (Still from Battle of Algiers, 1966)

The justification, according to French officials for this “assistance” is that it had been requested by the Argentine government. As Pierre Messmer, a former Gaullist prime minister, stated, “Argentina wanted the advisers so we gave them what they wanted. Argentina is an independent country and there was no reason for us to deny their request.” He was thus indicating that training in repression wasn’t the isolated decision of a few but a definite state policy.

If there is a moral to this sad story, it is that no country, no matter how technically advanced, is free of the dangers inherent in the use of brutal repressive techniques and their export. And it is the duty of informed citizens to denounce these vicious policies.

César Chelala is a winner of an Overseas Press Club of America award and a national journalism award from Argentina.

SPECIAL: READ THE WASHINGTON POST OBIT OF GEN. AUSSARESSES, NOTABLE BECAUSE THE WRITER CLEARLY STATES THAT THE ALGERIAN REBELLION WAS SPARKED BY THE BRUTAL COLONIAL ABUSES OF THE FRENCH.
The account however does not dwell at all on the role played by Aussaresses as an adviser to Latin American dictatorships in the use of “dirty war” methods. Still, the admission that the rebels were acting as a result of legitimate grievances is something of a novelty and is not exactly normal for American media, especially the WaPo, a cynical instrument of US imperial policy. Click on the bar below.

[learn_more caption=”EMBARRASSING CONFESSIONS BY AN UNREPENTANT TORTURER”]
By Emily Langer December 4, 2013
THE WASHINGTON POST

Paul Aussaresses, a French army general who in the final years of his life dispassionately revealed the torture techniques he employed during the Algerian war for independence and defended them as appropriate measures in the modern age of terrorism, has died. He was 95. His death was announced Dec. 4 by a French veterans’ association. No details were provided.

Gen. Aussaresses spent nearly his entire career in the service of his country’s military. He was described as a hero of World War II and fought in the French Indochina War before being posted to Algeria at the outset of the anticolonial rebellion there in 1954. The insurgency raged on until Algeria gained its independence in 1962.

Five decades later, the war and its prosecution remain the subject of intense soul-searching in France, much as the Vietnam War continues to weigh on the American psyche. Gen. Aussaresses was chief of French military intelligence during the Battle of Algiers, the uprising in the Algerian capital in 1956 and 1957. Working under French Gen. Jacques Massu, he helped put down the guerrillas who had been radicalized by past abuses perpetrated by their colonial rulers.

The rebellion continued in other regions, however, and the French victory in Algiers came to represent the folly of winning a battle but losing the war. In 2001 — long after his retirement — Gen. Aussaresses made international headlines with the publication in France of a memoir later translated in English as “The Battle of the Casbah: Terrorism and Counter-Terrorism in Algeria 1955-1957.” The book detailed the torture and summary executions in which he had taken part, and they provoked an uproar in France.

Then-President Jacques Chirac said in a statement at the time that he was “horrified” by the book’s contents. “The methods I used were always the same: beatings, electric shocks, and, in particular, water torture, which was the most dangerous technique for the prisoner,” Gen. Aussaresses wrote. “It never lasted for more than one hour and the suspects would speak in the hope of saving their own lives.” He wrote that he was “indifferent” to the executions of his adversaries and that some deaths were concealed as suicides. “If I myself went on to carry out these summary executions,” he had once told an interviewer, “it was because I wanted to assume personal responsibility. I didn’t want to make someone else do the dirty work.”

Gen. Aussaresses contended that French government officials, including then-justice minister and future president François Mitterrand, were aware of and condoned the use of torture in Algeria. Confronted by international outcry, Gen. Aussaresses insisted on the rightness of his actions. “I express regrets, regrets, regrets,” he told the Associated Press. “But I cannot express remorse. That implies guilt. I consider I did my difficult duty of a soldier implicated in a difficult mission.”

Writing in the New Republic, the human rights and international affairs scholar Michael Ignatieff argued that the book was notable not for its specifics but for the author’s perception of their meaning. “What was distinctive about Aussaresses,” Ignatieff wrote, “was his jaunty impudence about the whole issue, his insistence that he had no regrets and that he would do it again in the context of the contemporary war on terrorism.” Months after the release of the book, and amid intensifying national outrage, Gen. Aussaresses was charged in a French court with “complicity in justifying war crimes.” He stood trial for having been an apologist for the torture techniques — not for having used them, as long-standing amnesty legislation protected French veterans of the Algerian conflict. Gen. Aussaresses was convicted and fined the equivalent of about $6,000. His publishers were fined about twice that amount. He was stripped of his Legion of Honor award.

Amid the drama of the trial, Gen. Aussaresses was interviewed by “60 Minutes” newsman Mike Wallace. Wallace asked him if Zacarias Moussaoui, a conspirator in the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, should be tortured for information. “It seems to me,” Gen. Aussaresses replied, “it is obvious.”

Gen. Aussaresses was born on Nov. 7, 1918, in Saint Paul Cap de Joux, in southern France, and trained at the Saint-Cyr military academy. He was an officer cadet in Algeria during World War II before joining the Free French Forces and parachuting to the aid of French resistance fighters in German-occupied territory in Europe. Gen. Aussaresses wore a patch over his left eye. At least one newspaper over the years reported that he had lost the eye during the war. At the time of his death, however, the Associated Press reported that the cause had been a failed cataract surgery.

After his assignment in Algeria, he was a military attache in Washington and lectured U.S. Army Special Forces at Fort Bragg, N.C., according to the Encyclopedia of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency. He later was an adviser to Latin American governments.

Gen. Aussaresses was reportedly married twice and had several children. A complete list of survivors could not be confirmed. He acknowledged that many observers wanted him to display repentance but said that he could not. “If tomorrow and every day bombs went off in Paris stadiums, cafes, or elsewhere, do you think the government and police would fight back with classic means?” he said. “When one has seen, like I have, civilians, women, children, dismembered or nailed to a door, you are marked for life.”

Emily Langer is a reporter on The Washington Post’s obituaries desk. She has written about national and world leaders, celebrated figures in science and the arts, and heroes from all walks of life.[/learn_more]

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APPENDIX

VIVA CUBA!

The US embargo has forced Cubans to use their imagination to keep a lot of 1950s cars and other equipment running against all odds. They have succeeded and the result can be seen all over the island.

By Mike Faulkner, Senior Contributing Editor

“Cuba and the United States have quite a curious – in fact, unique status in international relations. There is no similar case of such a sustained assault by one power against another – in this case the greatest superpower against a poor, Third World country – for forty years of terror and economic warfare.” — Noam Chomsky. Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs. 2000.

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[dropcap]CHOMSKY[/dropcap] wrote that more than fourteen years ago. Nothing much has changed since then. The punitive US blockade of Cuba is still in place. In October 2014, for the 23^rd successive year the UN General Assembly voted overwhelmingly in favour of the Cuban draft resolution calling for the lifting of the blockade. Unsurprisingly for the 23^rd year the United States voted against the resolution. Perhaps more surprisingly for those uninformed about this annual event, will be the fact that the US casts its vote against Cuba in almost complete isolation.

Since 1992 no more than three member states have ever voted with the US against the Cuban resolution, but until the late 1990s significant numbers abstained. There were, for example, 71 abstentions with 59 in favour in 1992. In recent years there have been only a handful of abstentions – between 1 and 3 – and since 2012 a consistent voting pattern has emerged: 188 for the Cuban resolution: 2 against: 3 abstentions. The only ally the US now has in its vindictive hostility towards Cuba is Israel. Even lickspittle lackeys such as Albania, Romania and Uzbekistan have deserted. Israel, however, has never faltered, standing steadfast with Goliath against David every year since 1992.

Cuban “balseros” have long provided grist for the American propaganda mills, as they have been portrayed as seeking “freedom” from Communist tyranny instead of being simply escapees from an economy short of consumer goods due to the American embargo and other sordid maneuvers designed to crush their society.

If one needed an object lesson in imperial arrogance, hypocrisy and impunity one need look no further than the US treatment of Cuba since 1959. Actually, the bullying started much earlier than that – as far back as the beginning of the 20^thcentury. But after the triumph of the revolution in 1959 US hostility became remorseless, aimed at the overthrow of the new government and restoration of the status quo ante. The US has never been reconciled to the Cuban revolution. Failure to destroy it by armed intervention and terrorist assassination plots against its leaders during the 1960s and 1970s did not lead to abandonment of the mission. US power has been used relentlessly to impose the most draconian economic blockade, to deny the country its sovereign right to trade freely, and to intimidate and penalise national states, commercial companies and individuals who are deemed to be in breach of the policy of extra-territorial sanctions imposed unilaterally by the US in the 1960s and still in force. The extraterritoriality underpinning the blockade violates the United Nations Charter, the Organization of American States and the fundamentals of international law. All US administrations invoke “The International Community”, in whose interests they claim to act. Yet in this vicious and vindictive exercise of overweening power by one state against another (which is without parallel in modern history) the United States has persistently ignored the wishes of the overwhelming majority of member states of the United Nations. And the allies of the United States who vote to lift the blockade of Cuba, do nothing to take their disagreement with the superpower beyond the politics of pain-free gesture. Annually for the past 47 years US presidents have extended the Trading with the Enemy Act (TWEA) against Cuba. The TWEA dates back to 1917 when it was enacted by President Wilson on the eve of US entry into the First World War, in order to prohibit or regulate trade with a wartime adversary. It is the basis of all the sanctions against Cuba, a country with which the US has never been formally at war. In September of this year President Obama extended TWEA for another year. It is estimated by the Cuban government that over the past 55 years the economic sanctions, measured in current prices, have cost the country US$116.8 billion in lost trade. When the depreciation of the dollar against the price of gold is taken into account, the figure is US$1.11 trillion. This reality reveals the purpose of the economic blockade- to cripple Cuba economically.

Ronald D. Godard, US Senior Area Adviser for Western Hemisphere Affairs, opposing the Cuban draft resolution at the UN, stated bluntly that the Cuban economy would not thrive until the government “permits a free and fair labour market, freely empowers Cuban entrepreneurs….opens state monopolies to private competition and adopts the sound macro-economic policies that have contributed to the success of Cuba’s neighbours in Latin America”. This means that the economic blockade will not be lifted until Cuba abandons its efforts to build a socialist society and submits to the untrammelled operation of the neo-liberal “free market”. In referring to Cuba’s Latin American neighbours, he evidently did not have in mind countries such as Bolivia, Dominica, Ecuador, Nicaragua and Venezuela that have in recent years rejected that model. He must have been referring to those like Cuba’s close neighbours in Central America who have not: Guatemala and Honduras, the two countries suffering from the most extreme social inequality in the hemisphere.

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But in spite of the crippling impact of US sanctions, Cuba, with a population of 11 million has once again provided the world with a glowing example of selfless internationalism. In early October Cuba sent 63 doctors and 102 nurses to Sierra Leone in response to the Ebola crisis. They joined a team of 23 Cuban doctors who were already working there. Another 300 health workers are being trained and will soon join their colleagues. The WHO has praised the Cuban contribution, pointing out that while other countries have offered money, no other country has matched the numbers of health professionals sent from Cuba to work in the most difficult circumstances. Soon the Cubans plan to have an aid presence in Guinea and Liberia. The 461 selected for the task were from a larger group of 15,000 health care workers who volunteered. Cuba’s response to the Ebola crisis is the latest in a long record of aid given to other nations at time of need. 2,465 health workers went to Pakistan to provide emergency care in the wake of the Kashmir earthquake; in 2010 Cuba was the first country to responds to the devastating earthquake that hit Haiti. The Independent reported (26. December 2010) that Cuba’s “doctors and nurses put the US effort to shame.” “A medical brigade of 1,200 Cubans is operating all over earthquake-torn and cholera-infected Haiti as part of Fidel Castro’s international medical mission which has won the socialist state many friends but little international recognition…Amid the fanfare and publicity surrounding the arrival of help from the US and UK, hundreds more Cuban doctors, nurses and therapists arrived with hardly a mention.”

As far as the British media is concerned the same may be said of Cuba’s response to the Ebola epidemic in West Africa. Apart from an early report in the Observer , which echoed the New York Times, there has been almost no mention of Cuba’s involvement. It is difficult to believe that this is not deliberate. Either that or the equally damning conclusion that so deeply ingrained is the anti-Cuban bias in the consciousness of supposedly objective journalists that they do not consider the extraordinary contribution of this small Caribbean island in the face of a humanitarian crisis to be worthy of mention.

Because most of the communications media in Britain, together with the British government, are so subservient to the US government, particularly in matters of foreign policy, it is worth recalling a few of the pivotal episodes in the 55 year history of implacable US hostility towards Cuba. This will draw largely on an account (Cuba and the United States: A Personal Reflection on Thirty-Five years of Conflict) by this writer, published in Monthly Review in February 1996:

“In the distorted account of the breakdown of US-Cuba relations it is suggested that Eisenhower’s administration broke off relations with Cuba as a consequence of Castro’s embracing Marxism-Leninism. This turns the truth on its head. In 1960 Fidel’s ‘26th July Movement’ had no organizational links with the small Communist Party and the members of that movement, formed during the guerrilla war against the Batista dictatorship, explicitly denied that they were communists. But Fidel was branded a communist on his first and only visit to Washington in 1959; a visit undertaken to win US aid. He was snubbed by Eisenhower and virtually ignored by Vice-President Nixon, who, when told about the planned agrarian reform concluded that Castro was ‘obviously a Red.’ Nixon, who a year earlier had warmly embraced the butcher Batista on a visit to Havana to boost US arms supplies to the embattled dictator, thus set the scene for his government’s future relations with Castro.

“The land reform which was the most thorough and the most popular ever undertaken in Latin America, was denounced as ‘Communist.’ In the spring of 1960 the Cubans purchased cheap Soviet crude oil in the teeth of hostility from the Western oil companies. When the Western-owned refineries refused to refine the Soviet oil, Castro, with mass popular support for his actions, took over the refineries. This was the decisive turning point which put Cuba on a collision course with the United States. The Eisenhower administration responded to this exercise of sovereignty by a small, poor country by cancelling the sugar quota, which meant that 70 percent of Cuba’s sugar production was left without a market. The intention was clear: to cripple Cuba economically in the shortest possible time and to bring down Castro.

“I was in Cuba shortly after this episode. The tension was palpable. Khrushchev…agreed to buy the sugar that the US had refused to take. The USSR became very popular overnight, but still, for the majority of Cubans, this didn’t mean that they had chosen Communism, or that they considered that it was being imposed upon them. A popular expression of sentiment in Cuba at the time was ‘Sin Cuota; Sin Amo’ (without quota; without bosses). At the time US newspapers were still available in Havana. I recall in Early August of 1960 reading the most crude distortions of what was happening in Cuba. Most of the US press was claiming that Castro was clamping a Communist dictatorship upon an unwilling, oppressed people.

“One of my most vivid recollections from that time was attending a mass rally on August 6. (1960) in the Havana Sports stadium Fidel addressed a crowd of about 70,000. There was nothing dragooned (or restrained) about the audience. It was composed of people of all ages; workers’ and peasants’ militia, students’ militia, men and women – many armed. The rally marked another decisive stage in the radicalization of the Cuban revolution and in Cuba’s relations with the United States. It was the occasion on which he announced the expropriation of all US companies and assets in Cuba. The crowd went wild with delirious excitement. The next day (or rather, later the same day, as the rally didn’t end until 5 am on August 7), the streets of Havana were thronged with thousands of people celebrating their freedom from ‘Yanqui imperialism.’ Numerous buildings were festooned with banners announcing that ‘this company is the property of the people of Cuba.’ Young militia women, rifles slung over their shoulders, stood guard in front of the buildings. Feeling somewhat apprehensive about how Uncle Sam might react to this demonstration of sovereignty by its small and ‘uppity’ Latin neighbour, we frequently asked people whether they were worried that the marines might come ashore soon. The response was almost always immediate and uniform: ‘Let ‘em come! We’ll deal with them!’

“In late August the United States tightened the screws further. At a conference of the Organization of American States in Costa Rica, the State Department, through its manipulation of many Latin American delegations, secured Cuba’s expulsion from the OAS and demanded in the so-called ‘Declaration of San Jose’ that Castro open his country to an OAS inspection. The Cubans, aware of the debacle that had just occurred in the newly independent Congo, supposedly under the auspices of the U.N., had no intention of complying.

The beauty of Cuban women is legendary. Under Batista, the island had become a gangsters’ fiefdom, filled with illegal gaming, prostitution and other vices Americans could not so easily (and cheaply) obtain at home. Cuba had simply become the whorehouse of the caribbean. Fidel wiped out the gangster problem, and prostitution out of necessity. Women today work in any and all areas that used to be a male prerogative, including medicine, engineering, and the military, as well as science, education, and, naturally, the tourism and hotel industries, vital to obtain foreign currency.

“While working [as members of the first ever international work brigade to visit Cuba] with picks and shovels in the Sierra Maestra [on the construction of the first residential school in that remote area] we read reports in the New York herald Tribune of a State Department document presented to the Cost Rica conference claiming that our work brigade was in fact a Soviet trained international communist guerrilla force, smuggled into Cuba to reinforce the supposedly demoralized Castro militia and help to spread red revolution throughout the hemisphere. It was, the statement claimed, a common Soviet ruse to disguise such contingents as ‘work brigades’. This was the kind of ‘evidence’ the State Department invented in order to swing their Latin American client states into line against Cuba.

“On September 2 the Cuban government answered the accusations emanating from the State Department via the OAS meeting. Fidel spoke at a rally in Havana attended by 1 million people who enthusiastically packed the Plaza Civica [now the Plaza de la Revolution]. From that historic meeting came the first ‘Declaration of Havana’ which was essentially a declaration of independence and an assertion of the right to formulate a foreign policy without pressure or interference from the United States or anyone else. Each clause of the declaration was submitted for the approval of the ‘assembly of the Cuban people.’ In this fashion Cuba’s foreign policy alignment changed overnight. I remember listening to that address, relayed from Havana, in a Cuban army barrack near the top of the highest mountain in the Sierra Maestra. The proceedings went on until the early hours of the morning, depriving us of much needed sleep.

“Our work schedule at the Camilo Cienfuegos site was frequently interrupted whether by invitations to this or that celebration or by visits from this or that delegation. The most memorable of these events was a visit by Che Guevara, who was at that time Minister of Industry. Representatives of a dozen or more countries packed into a fairly small building to listen to him and to ask questions. My impression was that he differed from all the other political leaders I had listened to in Cuba (and by that time I had heard many) in his less volatile delivery, and the cool, completely undemagogic way he dealt with questions. I did not know then that he was an Argentinian and not a Cuban, though whether this in any way accounted for his style, I have no idea.

“We met hundreds of young people, mainly women, from Santiago, Havana and elsewhere, enrolled as ‘agrarian instructors’ in the first stage of the alfabetización campaign, which resulted a few years later in the virtual elimination of illiteracy in Cuba – many years short of the time the UN predicted it would take. It was almost inconceivable that anyone but the most bone-headed reactionary bigot could have failed to be impressed and deeply moved by the Cuban revolution in those early years. But few of its achievements were reported in the western world.

“Successive US administrations, Republican and Democratic, have treated Cuba’s attempts to break free from US tutelage and build a socialist society as a criminal offense to be punished with the utmost severity. The catalogue of real offenses perpetrated against Cuba is endless. Distortions of fact, lies and chicanery have been the commonplace accompaniments of the thirty-five year old vendetta against Castro and his country. In 1961 the Bay of Pigs invasion organized by the CIA was preceded by a clumsy provocation involving the mendacious claim that the Cuban air force had rebelled; CIA terrorism and sabotage against Cuba was routine in the 1960s and the numerous well-documented attempts to assassinate Castro sit uneasily with the US public opposition to terrorism; the so-called missile crisis of 1962 seems to have had its immediate origin in a secret planned invasion of the island that became known to the Cubans; the retention to the present day of the provocative base on Cuban soil at Guantanamo is in blatant violation of Cuban sovereignty and against the expressed demand of the Cuban government for its removal. But worst of all perhaps is the 34 year old blockade of the country, which, until 1990 guaranteed Cuba’s heavy dependence on the Soviet bloc.

“The US treatment of Cuba doesn’t differ in any essentials from its treatment of other cases of radical nationalism in the hemisphere. Guatemala in 1954, the Dominican Republic in 1963, El Salvador and Nicaragua, Chile and Grenada – all examples of what happens when attempts are made to overthrow oppressive puppet regimes. Radical reforming governments or movements in these countries have, like Cuba, been subjected to political and economic destabilization, murderous terrorism by US armed and trained death squads, sabotage, embargo, blockades, US backed military coup and outright invasion. In each case the pretense has been to ‘restore democracy”.

That was written nearly twenty years ago. Much has changed since then. But if the prospects of real, radical change in the Latin America now seem brighter than they were then, it is no thanks to any change of heart on the part of the United States. Changes in the balance of class forces in countries such as Venezuela, Bolivia, Uruguay and Ecuador and less radical, but nonetheless encouraging signs of resistance on the part of countries such as Brazil and Argentina encourage the hope that the tide is turning and that the challenge to the neo-liberal model imposed on so many countries will permanently weaken the economic hegemony of US imperialism in the hemisphere. And, for all the difficulties it still faces, Cuba is no longer alone. Its example has been an important factor in stimulating the determination of millions to fight for the better world which is possible. Viva Cuba!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Senior Contributing Editor Mike Faulkner is a British citizen. He lives in London where for many years he taught history and political science at Barnet College, until his retirement in 2002. He has written a two-weekly column, Letter from the UK, for TPJ Magazine since 2008. Over the years his articles have appeared in such publications as Marxism Today, Monthly Review and China Now. He is a regular visitor to the United States where he has friends and family in New York City. Contact Mike at mikefaulkner@greanvillepost.com

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