- 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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