Nemesis: The Last Days of the American Republic

by Chalmers Johnson

  97. Elkins, Imperial Reckoning, pp. xv-xvi.

  98. Ferguson, Empire, p. xv.

  99. Quoted by Andrew Gilmour, “How to Create Insurgents,” Spectator, January 24, 2004.

  100. Ferguson, Colossus, p. 221.

  101. Eric Margolis, “George Bush’s New Imperialism,” Toronto Sun, August 4, 2002. The major work on this subject is Fromkin, A Peace to End All Peace. See also Karl E. Meyer, “Forty Years in the Sand: What Happened the Last Time Freedom Marched on Iraq,” Harper’s Magazine, June 2005, pp. 69-74.

  102. The classic treatment is Khushwant Singh, Mano Majra (New York: Grove Press, 1956). Mano Majra is the name of a Punjabi village where Hindus and Muslims had lived in peace for hundreds of years until partition. Singh’s novel has since been reissued under the title Last Train to Pakistan.

  103. Raychaudhuri, “British Rule in India,” pp. 366-67.

  104. Ferguson, Empire, p. 297.

  105. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, pp. 503-4.

  3: CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY: THE PRESIDENT’S PRIVATE ARMY

  1. Douglas Jehl, “Chief of CIA Tells His Staff to Back Bush,” New York Times, November 17, 2004; David Wise, “Sycophant Spies,” Los Angeles Times, November 21, 2004; Alexander Cockburn, “Politicize the CIA? You’ve Got to Be Kidding,” Nation, December 20, 2004, p. 8.

  2. Thomas Powers, “The Failure,” New York Review of Books, April 29, 2004, p. 4.

  3. Melvin A. Goodman, “Righting the CIA,” Baltimore Sun, November 19, 2004.

  4. See, among several references, the recollections of a CIA officer who actually heard Schlesinger’s remark: Ray McGovern, “Cheney’s Cat’s Paw: Porter Goss as CIA Director,” Counterpunch, July 6, 2004, http://www.counterpunch.org/mcgovern07062004.html.

  5. See James Moore and Wayne Slater, Bush’s Brain: How Karl Rove Made George W. Bush Presidential (New York: Wiley, 2004).

  6. Scott Ritter, “A Silver Lining in Bush’s New CIA Pick?” AlterNet, May 16, 2006, http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/articlel3063.htm.

  7. Loch K. Johnson, America’s Secret Power: The CIA in a Democratic Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 21.

  8. See Willard C. Matthias, “An Assault upon the National Intelligence Process,” in America’s Strategic Blunders: Intelligence Analysis and National Security Policy, 1936-1991 (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2001), pp. 293-314.

  9. Among the recommended books on the agency’s past activities are William Blum, Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions since World War II (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 1995); Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden from the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001 (New York: Penguin, 2004); Frederick H. Gareau, State Terrorism and the United States (Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2003); Greg Grandin, Empire’s Workshop: Latin America, the United States, and the Rise of the New Imperialism (New York: Metropolitan, 2006); Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq (New York: Henry Holt, 2006); John Kenneth Knaus, Orphans of the Cold War: America and the Tibetan Struggle for Survival (New York: Public Affairs, 1999); James Risen, State of War: The Secret History of the CIA and the Bush Administration (New York: Free Press, 2006); Frances Stonor Saunders, The Cultural Cold War: The CIA and the World of Arts and Letters (New York: New Press, 1999); Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala, expanded ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999); Richard H. Schultz Jr., The Secret War Against Hanoi (New York: HarperCollins, 1999); and Paul Todd and Jonathan Bloch, Global Intelligence: The World’s Secret Services Today (London: Zed Books, 2003).

  10. Quoted by Johnson, America’s Secret Power, p. 36.

  11. William M. Arkin, “Secrecy Is the CIAs Stock in Trade, and the Agency’s Hidden Weakness,” Los Angeles Times, July 18, 2004; Nick Schwellenbach, “Government Secrecy Grows Out of Control,” Common Dreams News Center, September 24, 2004, http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0923-05.htm; Dorothy Samuels, “President Bush Is Hard at Work Expanding Government Secrecy,” New York Times, November 1, 2004; Kevin Freking, Associated Press, “Feds Increasingly Classify Documents,” ABC News, July 2, 2005.

  12. See, for example, Admiral Stansfield Turner [DCI, 1977-81 ], Terrorism and Democracy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1991), pp. 27 ff.; Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Secrecy: The American Experience (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), pp. 8-9,168-69; Mark Riebling, Wedge: From Pearl Harbor to 9/11, How the Secret War Between the FBI and CIA Has Endangered National Security (New York: Simon & Schuster Touchstone Books, 2002); Hersh, “Why the Government Didn’t Know What It Knew,” in Chain of Command, pp. 87-103.

  13. For details, see Seymour M. Hersh, “Getting Out the Vote,” New Yorker, July 25, 2005. Also see Hannah Allam and Warren P. Strobel, Knight Ridder News Service, “CIA Keeps Hold of Iraq’s Intelligence Service in Turf War,” San Diego Union Tribune, May 9, 2005; Gareth Porter, “The Coming Shi’ite Showdown,” Antiwar.com, May 13, 2005; Patrick Cockburn, “Americans Accused of Interfering in Iraq Election,” Independent, July 18, 2005.

  14. Johnson, America’s Secret Power, p. 43.

  15. Bob Woodward, Veil: The CIA’s Secret Wars, 1981-87 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987), p. 49.

  16. Johnson, America’s Secret Power, p. 62.

  17. Robert M. Gates, “The CIA and American Foreign Policy,” Foreign Affairs 66 (Winter 1987-88), p. 227.

  18. Johnson, America’s Secret Power, p. 62. See also Harold P. Ford, CIA and Vietnam Policymakers: Three Episodes, 1962-1968 (Washington: Central Intelligence Agency, 1998), pp. 86-104.

  19. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee), Final Report, 94th Cong. 2nd sess. (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1976), 1:78; Johnson, Americas Secret Power, p. 64.

  20. See Federation of American Scientists, Weapons of Mass Destruction, R-36/ SS-9 SCARP, http://wvvw.fas.org/nuke/guide/russia/icbm/r-36.htm; and Fred Kaplan, “The Rumsfeld Intelligence Agency,” Slate, October 28, 2002, http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action-print8dd-2073238.

  21. Coll, Ghost Wars, p. 562.

  22. McGovern, “Cheney’s Cat’s Paw.”

  23. See Clarke, Against All Enemies; Anonymous (Michael Scheuer), Imperial Hubris: Why the West Is Losing the War on Terror (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2004); and Scheuer, “How Not to Catch a Terrorist,” Atlantic Monthly, December 2004, pp. 50-52. See also Scheuer, “Why I Resigned from the CIA,” Los Angeles Times, December 5, 2004.

  24. Karen Kwiatkowski, “The New Pentagon Papers,” March 10, 2004, http://www.salon.com/opinion/feature/2004/03/10/osp_moveon/; “Karen Kwiatkowski: Archives,” http://www.lewrockwell.com/kwiatkowski/kwiatkowski-arch.html; Robert Dreyfuss and Jason Vest, “The Lie Factory,” Mother Jones, January-February 2004, pp. 34-41; Marc Cooper, “Soldier for the Truth: Exposing Bush’s Talking-points War,” LA Weekly, February 20-26, 2004. Colonel Kwiatkowski also made an important contribution to Eugene Jarecki’s documentary film Why We Fight, which won the gold medal at the 2005 Sundance Film Festival.

  25. Joseph C. Wilson, “What I Didn’t Find in Africa,” New York Times, July 6, 2003, http://www.commondreams.org/views03/0706-02.htm; Wilson, “A Right-Wing Smear Is Gathering Steam,” Los Angeles Times, July 21, 2004; Wilson, “Our 27 Months of Hell,” Los Angeles Times, October 29, 2005; Neil Mackay, “Niger and Iraq: The War’s Biggest Lie,” Sunday Herald, July 13, 2003, http://www.sundayherald.com/print35264; Edward Alden, “Naming of Agent was Aimed at Discrediting CIA,” Financial Times, October 25, 2003; James Risen, “How Niger Uranium Story Defied Wide Skepticism,” New York Times, July 14, 2004; Ian Masters, “Who Forged the Niger Documents?” AlterNet, April 7, 2005, http://www.alternet.org/module/printversion/21704; Frank Rich, “Follow the Uranium,” New York Times, July 17, 2005; Tom Hamburger and Peter Wrallsten, “Top Aides Reportedly Set Sights on Wilson,” Los Ang
eles Times, July 18, 2005; Matthew Yglesias, “Follow the Documents,” American Prospect Online, July 19, 2005, http://www.prospect.org/web/printfriendly-view.ww?id=10015.

  26. Gary C. Schroen, First In: An Insider’s Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan (Novato, CA: Presidio Press, 2005).

  27. Melissa Boyle Mahle, Denial and Deception: An Insider’s View of the CIA from Iran-Contra to 9/11 (New York: Nation Books, 2005).

  28. Quoted by Arthur Schlesinger Jr., “The Imperial Presidency Redux,” Washington Post, June 28, 2003. Also see Mark Hubbard and Stephen Fidler, “No Smoking Gun: How Intelligence May Have Been Exaggerated, Misinterpreted, and Manipulated,” Financial Times, June 4, 2003.

  29. Douglas Jehl, “Ex-CIA Chief Nets $500,000 on Talk Circuit,” New York Times, November 11, 2004.

  30. Greg Miller, “Goss Isn’t Done with Housecleaning at CIA,” Los Angeles Times, November 18, 2004; Douglas Jehl, “Director of Analysis at CIA Is the Latest to Be Forced Out,” New York Times, December 29, 2004.

  31. Spencer Ackerman, “Killing the Messenger,” Salon, November 16, 2004.

  32. Walter Pincus and Dana Priest, “Bush Orders the CIA to Hire More Spies,” Washington Post, November 24, 2004.

  33. Johnson, America’s Secret Power, p. 106.

  34. Thomas Powers, “Inside the Department of Dirty Tricks,” Atlantic Monthly, August 1979, pp. 33-64.

  35. Johnson, America’s Secret Power, p. 107.

  36. Powers, “Department of Dirty Tricks.”

  37. Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New York: New Press, 2003, A National Security Archive Book), p. xvi.

  38. The most important source is Kornbluh, Pinochet File. See also Peter Kornbluh, “The Chile Coup—The U.S. Hand,” iF Magazine.com, October 25, 1998; John Dinges, “Pulling Back the Veil on Condor,” Nation, July 24-31, 2000; Peter Kornbluh, “CIA Outrages in Chile,” Nation, October 16, 2000; Diana Jean Schemo, “Kissinger Cool to Criticizing Junta in ’76,” New York Times, October 1, 2004; Associated Press, “Chile Torture Victims to Get Compensation,” New York Times, November 29, 2004. On Kissinger’s attempts to hide his role in the overthrow of Salvador Allende and the promotion of the Pinochet dictatorship, see Scott Sherman, “The Maxwell Affair,” Nation, June 21, 2004; Sherman, “Kissinger’s Shadow Over the Council on Foreign Relations,” Nation, December 27, 2004; and Kenneth Maxwell, “The Case of the Missing Letter in Foreign Affairs: Kissinger, Pinochet, and Operation Condor” (Working Papers on Latin America, no. 04/05-3, David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, Harvard University, 2004).

  39. Kornbluh, Pinochet File, chap. 1, doc. 1.

  40. Quoted by Kornbluh, “CIA Outrages.”

  41. Kornbluh, Pinochet File, pp. 18 and 510, notes 23 and 24; Powers, “Department of Dirty Tricks”; Johnson, America’s Secret Power, p. 22.

  42. Staff report of the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (Church Committee), Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1975), p. 15; Blum, Killing Hope, pp. 206-7.

  43. Paul E. Sigmund, The Overthrow of Allende and the Politics of Chile, 1964-1976 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), pp. 35,297; quoted by Blum, Killing Hope, p. 207.

  44. Kornbluh, “Chile Coup”; Johnson, America’s Secret Power, pp. 186, 197.

  45. Blum, Killing Hope, p. 208.

  46. Powers, “Department of Dirty Tricks”; Kornbluh, Pinochet File, p. 5.

  47. Church Committee, Covert Action in Chile, p. 47; Blum, Killing Hope, p. 214.

  48. NSSM (National Security Study Memorandum) 97, “Regarding Threats to U.S. Interests,” c. August 11, 1970. See Kornbluh, Pinochet File, pp. 8-9.

  49. Kornbluh, Pinochet File, chap. 1, doc. 12.

  50. Ibid., p. 16.

  51. Ibid., chap. 1, doc. 14.

  52. Ibid., p. 30; Seymour M. Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Summit Books, 1983), pp. 289-93.

  53. Kornbluh, Pinochet File, p. 29.

  54. Ibid., p. 113.

  55. Larry Rohter, New York Times, “Report on Torture Forcing Chile to Rethink Its Past,” San Diego Union-Tribune, November 28, 2004; Associated Press, “Chile Torture Victims to Get Compensated,” New York Times, November 29, 2004; Peter Kornbluh, “Letter from Chile,” Nation, January 31, 2005, pp. 22-24.

  56. Kornbluh, Pinochet File, p. 324.

  57. Ibid.

  58. Dinges, “Pulling back the Veil.”

  59. See, inter alia, John Dinges and Saul Landau, Assassination on Embassy Row (New York: Pantheon, 1980); A. J. Langguth, Hidden Terrors: The Truth About U.S. Police Operations in Latin America (New York: Pantheon, 1978); John Dinges, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents (New York: New Press, 2004); Kornbluh, “CIA Outrages”; Francisco Letelier (son of Orlando Letelier), “My Case Against Pinochet,” Los Angeles Times, December 17, 2004.

  60. See, in particular, Philippe Sands, in “Pinochet in London,” in Lawless World: America and the Making and Breaking of Global Rules from FDR’s Atlantic Charter to George W. Bush’s Illegal War (New York: Viking, 2005), pp. 23-45.

  61. Timothy L. O’Brien and Larry Rohter, “U.S. and Others Gave Millions to Pinochet,” New York Times, December 7, 2004; Adam Thomson, “Pinochet Stripped of Political Prestige,” Financial Times, December 15, 2004; Kornbluh, “Letter from Chile.”

  62. George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003), p. 4; Johnson, America’s Secret Power, p. 49.

  63. Robert Michael Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996), pp. 146-47.

  64. Zbigniew Brzezinski, “Les Revelations d’un Ancien Conseiller de Carter: ’Oui, la CIA est Entree en Afghanistan avant les Russes ...,”’ Le Nouvel Observateur (Paris), January 15-21,1998, trans. William Blum and David D. Gibbs in David D. Gibbs, “Afghanistan: The Soviet Invasion in Retrospect,” International Politics, 37 (June 2000), pp. 233-46.

  65. Quoted by Coll, Ghost Wars, p. 55.

  66. Ibid., p. 92.

  67. Ibid., pp. 93, 103–4, 112, 125.

  68. Ibid., p. 60.

  69. Ibid., p. 165.

  70. Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War, p. 338.

  71. Quoted by Eric Konigsberg, “Washington’s Sexual Awakening,” New York Magazine, February 9, 1998.

  72. Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War, pp. 3, 12.

  73. Ibid., pp. 40-42,96.

  74. Marcus Stern and Jerry Kammer, Copley News Service, “Cunningham Case: A View into Political Pork Process,” San Diego Union-Tribune, August 31, 2005. “Cunningham” in the title of this article refers to Randy “Duke” Cunningham, a former Republican congressman from California, who, like Wilson, was a member of both the Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and the Intelligence Oversight Committee of the House of Representatives. In 2006, Cunningham confessed to pocketing $2.4 million, the largest bribeever paid to a member of Congress in U.S. history, and was sentenced to along term in prison.

  75. Richard Whittle and George Kuempel, Dallas Morning News, “Ex-lawmaker Accused of Arms Deal Kickbacks,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, October 23, 1997; Crile, Charlie Wilsons War, pp. 210, 291-92,460.

  76. Quoted by Coll, Ghost Wars, p. 234.

  77. Ibid., pp. 83-84.

  78. Ibid., p. 144.

  79. Ibid., p. 421.

  80. Vernon Loeb, “CIA Fires Officer Over Embassy Bombing,” Washington Post, April 9, 2000.

  81. Quoted by Coll, Ghost Wars, pp. 394,557.

  82. Albert Bandura, “Moral Disengagement in the Perpetration of Inhumanities,” Personality and Social Psychology Review 3, no. 3 (1999), pp. 193-209, at p. 195.

  83. Quoted by lane Mayer, “Outsourcing Torture,” New Yorker, February 14, 20
05, http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/050214fa_fact6.

  84. See Bruce B. Campbell and Arthur D. Brenner, eds., Death Squads in Global Perspective: Murder with Deniability (New York: St. Martin s Press, 2000); Frederick H. Gareau, State Terrorism and the United States: From Counter-insurgency to the War on Terrorism (Atlanta, GA: Clarity Press, 2004).

  85. See Tim Naftali, “Milan Snatch,” Slate, June 30, 2005, http://www.slate.msn.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2121801; Congressional Record, Senate, “International Terrorism,” March 15, 1989, p. S2538; U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agency, Department of Homeland Security, “ICE Deports Terrorist Who Hijacked, Blew Up Airliner,” news release, March 29, 2005.