- The slow-motion coup d'état continues. Anyone
who compares the Congressional Resolution of September 12, 2001, with the
German Reichstag's Enabling Act of April 1933 might come away with the
impression that, taking the two texts literally, George W. Bush got a bigger
grant of unspecified power than did the Austrian immigrant politician,
Adolf Hitler.
-
- Well maybe it isn't a coup d'état per se. After
all, the imperial process might be expected to raise up succeeding generations
of world-savers and proconsuls who, on returning home, long to use here
the methods which worked so well in the overseas provinces. The English
Manchester liberal Richard Cobden, asked in 1850: "Is it not just
possible that we may become corrupted at home by the reaction of arbitrary
political maxims in the East upon our domestic politics, just as Greece
and Rome were demoralised by their contact with Asia?" Others warned
of such things.
-
- What a gloomy lot - and why should 21st-century Americans,
heirs to that historical exceptionalism, which lifts us above the normal
human condition, worry about such idle warnings? Didn't Cobden realize
that empire improves us, by bringing us new ideas, people, diseases, etc.?
Didn't he know that diversity is strength, or that peace is war?
-
- In the manner of a literary historian, I pose the question,
"Who now listens to Buck Owen's Live at Carnegie Hall album?"
I ask this only because in the course of introducing the band members,
Owens characterized one of them as not only not knowing anything but not
even suspecting anything. This is to the point, if in reverse, because
there are many things one might have suspected of our federal masters,
despite their oft-proclaimed loving kindness, even if we did not know the
details or have proof.
-
- Now comes Mr. James Bamford to confirm, nay, to go beyond,
our wildest suspicions in his biography (so to speak) of the mysterious
National Security Agency, Body of Secrets (New York: Random House, 2002).
I do not propose to review the whole book here, but to notice a few highlights,
chiefly those in chapter four. These alone are worth the price of admission.
-
- While Bamford's earlier book on the NSA, The Puzzle Palace
(New York: Penguin, 1983) was well received, he has come under some fire
for writing the sequel. This is because chapter seven deals with the Israeli
assault on the USS Liberty - an NSA asset - during the 1967 war. In some
quarters, a realistic account of those events is still not welcome.
-
- A general conclusion to be drawn from the book is that
U.S. operatives always pushed the limits and poked their Cold War opponents
with a stick. It was great fun to taunt the commies with their relative
weakness and lack of effective international sovereignty. These deliberate
provocations also led to some famous incidents and disasters, when various
"enemies" - with whom we were not legally at war - reacted rudely
to the violation of their airspace or territorial waters, e.g., the U-2,
the RB-47, the Pueblo, and the Maddox.
-
- These ships and planes were all involved in "Sigint"
(Signal Intelligence) work. Their various tribulations played a role in
making the Cold War hotter. Worse luck, the North Vietnamese attack on
the Maddox was sold to Congress as proof of that power's ruthless "aggression"
on its own shoreline.
-
- DO THE WORST GET ON TOP?
-
- Perhaps the most disturbing revelations in the Body of
Secrets come in chapter four, which deals with the hellbent planning brainstorms
of General Lyman L. Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs from 1961 to 1963. The
outgoing Eisenhower incoming Kennedy administrations, alike, were unhappy
about the revolutionary government in Cuba, which had taken power in1959.
What is truly astounding is the lengths to which highly placed protectors
of the American people were ready to go in order to destabilize and eliminate
a government with which we were not at war.
-
- In the last year of the Eisenhower administration, the
CIA had developed plans to for "sparking an internal revolution"
in Cuba by inserting "a thousand anti-Castro rebels onto the island."
At the same time, "Lemnitzer and the Join Chiefs were pressing for
all-out war - a Pentagon-led overt military invasion of Cuba from the air,
sea, and ground" (Body of Secrets, p. 70). The second line of attack
presented certain political problems.
-
- It just looks bad to invade countries that aren't at
war with you. It would bring the whole notion of the "good neighbor
policy" toward Latin America into doubt. World opinion had to be considered,
as much as the war party derided the concept. Even the High Cold War dogma
that we were "at war" with communism every minute of every day
might not be enough to persuade the American public, much less foreign
nations, of the need to invade Cuba.
-
- Finally, there were still a few sentimentalists around,
who believed that international law and the foreign policies of the United
States might not always be in agreement. The Cold Warriors' automatic response
was, So much the worse for international law. Nevertheless, the doubters
had to be humored. Hence, the need for deceit and subterfuge.
-
- In late January 1961, JFK held a series of meetings with
Lemnitzer and the Joint Chiefs. At one of these meetings, CIA Director
Allen Dulles, a holdover from the Eisenhower administration, pushed the
CIA plan for a small-scale invasion by Cuban exiles, which would spark
an uprising against the Castro regime. This was of course the ill-starred
plan which led to the Bay of Pigs.
-
- The CIA's spectacular failure emboldened those who wanted
a full-bore U.S. invasion of Cuba. But that would run up against all the
problems named above. In November 1961, Kennedy, still "obsess[ed]
with Castro" (p. 78), handed the torch to the Pentagon. The gung-ho
Air Force General Edward G. Lansdale came up with Operation Mongoose, which
is sufficiently well-known - exploding cigars and all that - that Bamford
gives no details on it. He does comment that it was soon seen as "simply
becoming more outrageous and going nowhere" (p. 83).
-
- HIJACKINGS, EXPLOSIONS, FALSE ARRESTS
-
- So in a burst of High Cold War craziness calling to mind
Seven Days in May and Dr. Strangelove, the Joint Chiefs "drew up and
approved plans for the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government.
In the name of anticommunism, they proposed launching a secret and bloody
war of terrorism against their own country in order to trick the American
public into supporting an ill-conceived war they intended to launch against
Cuba" (p. 82).
-
- Better the Chiefs should have smoked a joint, as a famous
rock album cover once suggested....
-
- Anyway, this new plan, code-named Operation Northwoods,
"which had the written approval of the Chairman [Lemnitzer] and every
member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, called for innocent people to be shot
on American streets; for boats carrying refugees fleeing Cuba to be sunk
on the high seas; for a wave of violent terrorism to be launched in Washington,
D.C., Miami, and elsewhere. People would be framed for bombings they did
not commit; planes would be hijacked. Using phony evidence, all of it would
be blamed on Castro...." (p. 82, my italics).
-
- Another gambit suggested by Lemnitzer and the J.C.s,
was to blow up the Mercury spacecraft, with John Glenn in it. This would
slow down the U.S. space program. On the other hand, it could be blamed
on Cuban "electronic interference" (p. 84).
-
- Further, Cubans working for the U.S. could stir up riots
at the U.S. Guantanamo navy base in Cuba and some could be found inside
undertaking "sabotage." My personal favorite is the following
(Bamford is quoting original documents): "'We could blow up a U.S.
ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba'"; "'casualty lists in
U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of national indignation'"
(p. 84).
-
- This last stroke of genius of course alluded to the battleship
Maine, which exploded in 1898. It is nice to see that our protectors actually
study American history. Bamford adds, quoting from the documents, "'Hijacking
attempts against civil air and surface craft could appear to continue as
harassing measures condoned by the Government of Cuba'" (p. 85).
-
- Another proposal involved registering U.S. citizens on
a civil flight and then substituting for it a drone, which would be shot
down over Cuba - the Cubans being touchy about their airspace, unlike normal
countries (p. 86). As late as 1963, U.S. attacks on Caribbean nations like
Jamaica and Trinidad-Tobago, which could be blamed on Cuba, were considered
(p. 89).
-
- QUIS CUSTODIET CUSTODES?
-
- All these efforts, none of them exactly legal, were thought
reasonable in order to establish a bogus casus belli against Cuba. Fortunately,
for once, the civilian higher-ups, including, presumably, the president,
had the good sense to rein in the overheated brass hats. Never let it be
said that an imperial president can never do something good. And even Robert
McNamara deserves credit for rejecting these lunatic notions.
-
- The whole thing seems quite unbelievable. But given other
revelations of Cold War capers - misshapen sheep in Utah, guys jumping
out of hotel windows in Toronto after U.S. operatives made them say "yes"
to LSD without their knowledge, or chemicals sprayed on the civil population
and U.S. soldiers used as unwitting radiation-experiment guinea pigs -
one begins to wonder who our protectors are protecting. One begins to wonder
if they are the least bit sane.
-
- Such incidents might well make one believe that the X-Files
series is just a pale reflection of what actually happened.
-
- Certainly, these all-too-clever exercises in Big Science
put a new angle on empirical studies, as well as on what these great geniuses
saw as the purpose of scientific inquiry. The reader will doubtless remember
other cases, revealed over the last couple of decades. Taken together,
this style of testing and falsification suggests a modification of the
Hippocratic Oath: "Do no harm, unless the U.S. Government sponsors
your research."
-
- So was the entire Cold War a scam? Were we had for over
forty years? It would seem so. Are we now to be had for perhaps another
forty years?
-
- I suppose we could draw sundry lessons from Bamford's
account. One I draw is that we may need to broaden our translation of Quis
custodiet ipsos custodes? into something like, "With protectors like
these, who will protect us from our 'protectors'?" I think this is
worth bringing up now that we are being offered an endless semi-secret
struggle against vaguely outlined enemies, a struggle of the scale and
unforeseeable duration (according to some its advocates) of the much-missed
Cold War itself.
-
- People my age lived through the first damned Cold War.
I don't know why we should sign on for another one, just so that the ruling
elites may be relieved of rethinking their foreign policy. But are they
making us an offer we can't refuse? Maybe the libertarian Space Cadets
can tell us.
-
- ANOTHER CASE OF BIG SCIENCE AND BIG PROTECTORS
-
- Bamford writes that his book was made possible by the
NSA, which, wishing to have a more favorable image, gave him access to
hitherto classified materials. If anything, he is entirely too sympathetic
to the NSA and its mission. Nowhere in his important book does he question
the imperial assumptions on which U.S. policy rests.
-
- Bamford does question the spooks' and policy-makers'
"excesses." Thus, he writes as a member of the critical wing
of the Establishment. There is much to learn from such critics.
-
- The NSA employs the most fantastic array of equipment
and trained scientific personnel to listen to everything. This raises,
once again, the whole problem of naïve empiricism, which I discussed
in another column. Does the endless accumulation of "information"
about everything actually give the perpetrators - I'm sorry "protectors"
- anything useful with which they can do their work, whatever that might
be, and even if we approved of it?
-
- Congress is just now making some small show of looking
into "intelligence failures." Better they should look into epistemological
and moral failures. Meanwhile, in what may be a sign of the demented times,
the national leadership of the Libertarian Party - self-proclaimed "party
of principle" - has altered the LP platform by removing language calling
for the abolition of the CIA and the National Security Agency.
-
- July 23, 2002
-
- Joseph R. Stromberg is holder of the JoAnn B. Rothbard
Chair in History at the Ludwig von Mises Institute and a columnist for
LewRockwell.com and Antiwar.com.
-
- Copyright © 2002
LewRockwell.com
http://www.lewrockwell.com/stromberg/stromberg37.html
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