As U.S. leaders declare war on terrorism, we look beyond their words to the reality of the terror which they have been systematically imposing on humanity around the world. The account quoted in this article has been extracted from a Pacifica Radio Network broadcast, and does contain graphic descriptions which may not be appropriate for children.
President Clinton recently signed into law a bill that tightens airport security against terrorism. At the signing ceremony, he was surrounded by people who had lost loved ones in airline crashes, including the possible terrorist downing of the TWA jet near New York City this past summer. Several of the group of family members were crying as the legislation was signed.
The bill calls for the hiring of dozens of new FBI agents in the war on terrorism, and aims to improve assistance to families of terrorist disasters. "We are stepping up law enforcement efforts," said the President, "and we're sending a message to terrorists that THEY WILL PAY THE FULL PRICE FOR THEIR DEEDS."
Recently Vice President Al Gore stated that "we may never see the end to terrorism, but WE ARE SURE GOING TO DO OUR LEVEL BEST TO COMBAT IT." We are hearing strong condemnation of terrorism from officials at every level of government. It is a topic of apparent concern to world leaders everywhere. The lip service, which governmental leaders give to combating terrorism, begins to appear in its actual false and hypocritical light when one considers some of the highly publicized "terrorist attacks" within our own country in recent years. The incident that claimed the lives of 80 Americans including young children at their home near Waco, Texas, is a prime example of "government sponsored terrorism" which the U.S. so self-righteously condemns Iran, Libya, Syria and others for promoting.
In other less publicized incidents, the United States is no less culpable. Consider the events which occurred during the decade of the 1980's reported by a former leader in the CIA in Central America. John Stockwell spent 13 years with the CIA serving as a case officer, among other duties. "In that job I sat on the subcommittee of the National Security Council. So I was like the Chief of Staff, with GS-18s, like three-star generals, Henry Kissinger, [CIA Director] Bill Colby -- the GS-18s in the CIA making important decisions. My job was to put it all together, make it happen, and run it. It was an interesting place from which to watch a covert action being done."
Describing their activities he says, " We were doing things that seemed sick because we were there --because it was our function. We were bribing people, corrupting people, and not protecting the U.S. in any visible way. I had a chance to go drinking with a well known CIA case leader; I talked with him at length one night, and he was giving me an explanation. I was telling him: 'Frankly, sir, you know, this stuff doesn't make any sense. We're not saving anybody from anything, and we are corrupting people. And everybody knows we're doing it. And that makes the United States look bad.' He said I was getting too big for my britches. He said I was 'trying to think like the people in the NSC back in Washington who have the big picture, who know what is going on in the world, who have all the secret information, and the experience to digest it. If they decide we should have somebody in Bujumbura, Burundi, and that person should be you, then you should do your job. Wait until you have more experience, and work your way up to that point, and then YOU'LL understand national security, and YOU can make the big decisions. Now get to work, and stop this philosophizing.' And I said, 'Aye Aye, sir! Sorry sir. Bit out of line, sir.'
"It's a powerful argument. Our presidents use it on us. President Reagan used it on the American people, saying, 'If you knew what I know about the situation in Central America you would know why it's necessary for us to intervene.' I'm going to give you examples of how our leaders lie. Obviously, I could be lying. The only way you can figure it out for yourselves is to educate yourselves. The French have a saying: 'Them that don't do politics will be done.' If you don't fill your mind eagerly with the truth, then your mind remains blank, and your adrenalin pumps, and you can be excited and mobilized to do things that are not in your interest to do. "To destabilize Nicaragua, we began funding this force of Somoza's ex-National Guardsmen, calling them the Contras, the counter-revolutionaries. We created this force, which did not exist until we allocated money. We armed them. We put uniforms on their backs and boots on their feet, gave them camps in Honduras to live in, medical supplies, doctors, training, leadership, direction, as we sent them in to destabilize Nicaragua. Under our direction, they have been systematically blowing up bridges, sawmills, granaries, government offices, schools, health centers. They ambush trucks so the produce can't get to market. They raid farms and villages. The farmer has to carry a gun while he tries to plow, if he can plow at all.
"If you want one example of hard proof of the CIA's involvement in this and their approach to it, dig up the "Sabotage Manual" that they were circulating throughout Nicaragua: a comic-book type of a paper, with visual explanations of what you can do to bring a society to a halt: how you can gum up typewriters; what you can pour in a gas tank to burn up engines; what you can stuff in a sewer to stop up the sewage so it won't work -- things you can do to make a society simply cease to function.
"Systematically, the Contras have been assassinating religious workers, teachers, health workers, elected officials, government administrators. I don't mean to abuse you with verbal violence, but you have to understand what your government and its agents are doing.
"They go into villages. They haul out families. With the children forced to watch, they castrate the father. They peel the skin off his face. They put a grenade in his mouth and pull the pin. With the children forced to watch, they gang-rape the mother and slash her breasts off. And sometimes, for variety, they make the parents watch while they do these things to the children.
"This is nobody's propaganda! There have been over a hundred thousand American 'Witnesses for Peace' who've gone down there, and they have filmed, photographed and witnessed these atrocities immediately after they've happened, and documented thirteen thousand people killed this way -- mostly women and children.
"These are the activities done by the Contras. The Contras are the people President Reagan called 'freedom fighters.' He said: 'They are the moral equivalent of our founding fathers.'
"In 1960 we came up with a new term, a policy of trying to correct the problems of Central and Latin America -- the economic imbalances-- by addressing them directly. In President Kennedy's famous program he said: 'Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, will make violent revolution inevitable.' However, the millions and millions of dollars that we put into this program inevitably went to the rich, and not to the ordinary people of the countries involved. While we were doing this, or trying -- saying we were trying to correct the problems of Central and Latin America -- the CIA was doing its thing too.
"The CIA was, in fact, forming the police units that are, today, the death squads in El Salvador. The leaders were on the CIA's payroll, trained by the CIA in the United States. We had the public safety program going throughout Central and Latin America for twenty-six years in which we taught them to break up subversion by interrogating people: interrogation, including torture, the way the CIA taught it.
"Dan Mitrione, the exponent of these things, spent seven years in Brazil and three in Uruguay, teaching interrogation; teaching torture. He was supposed to be the master of the business: how to apply the right amount of pain, at just the right times, in order to get the response you want from the individual. They gave them crank generators -- with 'U.S.A.I.D.' written on the side, so the people even knew where these things came from -- and developed a wire that was strong enough to carry the current and fine enough to fit between the teeth, so you could put one wire between the teeth, and the other in or around the genitals. You could crank, and submit the individual to the greatest amount of pain, supposedly, that the human body can register.
"Now, how do you teach torture? Dan Mitrione, I can teach you about torture, but sooner or later you have to get involved. You have to lay on your hands and try it yourself. They would pick up guinea pigs off the streets: beggars, and take them in to use in these torture training classes. Of course, the horror of that is these people wouldn't know why they were being tortured. They couldn't give up. They couldn't say: 'I'm sorry! Stop the pain! I'll tell you the names of everybody involved!' All they could do was lie there and scream!'
"When they would collapse, they would bring in doctors who would shoot them up with Vitamin B and rest them up for the next class. And when they would die, they would mutilate the bodies and throw them out on the streets to terrify the population, so that everybody would be afraid of the police and the government. This is what the CIA was teaching them to do. "One of the women who was in this program for two years -- tortured in Brazil for TWO YEARS -- testified internationally when she eventually got out. She said the most horrible thing about it, in fact, was that the people doing it were not raving psychopaths. She couldn't break mental contact with them the way you could if they were psychopaths. They were very ordinary people.
"She told about being tortured one day. She's on this table, naked in a room full of six men, and they're doing these incredibly painful, degrading things to her body. There's an interruption. The American is called to the telephone, and he's in the next room, and the others take a smoke break. She's lying on this table, and he's saying: 'Oh, hi honey. Yes, I can wrap it up here in another hour or so, and meet you and the kids at the Ambassador's on the way home.'
"There's a lesson in all this. The lesson is: it isn't just the Gestapo maniacs, or KGB maniacs, who do inhuman things to other people. It's PEOPLE who do inhuman things to other people. And we are responsible for doing these things on a massive basis, to people of the world today. We do it in a way that gives us plausible denial to our own consciences. We create a CIA, a secret police, with a vast budget, and let them go and run these programs in our name. We pretend like we don't know what's going on, though the information is there for us to know. And we pretend like it's okay because we're fighting some vague communist threat. We're just as responsible for these ONE TO THREE MILLION PEOPLE we've slaughtered, and for all the people we've tortured and made miserable, as the Gestapo was for the people that they slaughtered and killed. Genocide is genocide !!"
There has been a terrible record accruing in our world. A record of tears and blood and death. A record which is creating its own retribution. In accordance with our own words and deeds will our reckoning come. President Clinton has stated that "TERRORISTS WILL PAY THE FULL PRICE FOR THEIR DEEDS." Does he realize that his words are his own condemnation? "Therefore you have no excuse or defense or justification, because you who judge are habitually practicing the very same things that you censure and denounce. And do you imagine O, man, that you will escape God's judgment and elude His sentence? " Rom. 2:1,3.
"Repay to her what she herself has paid to others and double her doom in accordance with what she has done. Mix a double portion for her in the cup she mixed for others. To the degree that she reveled in her wantonness, to that measure impose on her torment and anguish and tears and mourning. [Hypocrisy always exacts heavier judgment because of its calculated nature]. So shall her plagues, afflictions, and calamities come upon her in a single day, pestilence and anguish and sorrow and famine, and she shall be utterly consumed, for mighty is the Lord God who judges her." Rev. 18:6-8.