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October 31, 2001
Steve
Perry
The
Silent Genocide
October 30, 2001
Rep. Ron Paul
War on Terror
Bad as War on Drugs
Jeffrey
St. Clair
Flying
Blind:
The Predator's Problem
Ali Abunimah
Dear Colin
Powell
St. Clair/Cockburn
Atomic
Trains Grounded
Maud Hurd
We Need a Real
Stimulus Package
Dr. Susan
Block
We're
All Afghans Now
Tariq Ali
Busted in Munich
Francis
Beer
Toward
the Terrorist
Anti-World
October 29, 2001
Alexander Cockburn
The Left
and the Just War
John Pilger
Hidden
Agenda
of the War on Terror
David Krieger
Nukes on
the Loose
Jack McCarthy
Neo-Nazis
and 9/11
Marina Kalashnikova
The Brzezinski
Interview
Richard
Manning
Terrorism:
a definitive history
October 27, 2001
Edward
Said
A
Vision to Lift the Spririt
October 26, 2001
CounterPunch
Wire
Genocide
Scholar Gagged
Over Comments on the
Bombing of Afghanistan
Rahul
Mahajan
Poisoning
the Well
Sen. Russ Feingold
Why I Opposed
the
Anti-Terrorism Bill
John Troyer
Put
the War to a Vote
Norman Madarasz
What It
Means to be
Against the War
Patrick
Cockburn
Northern
Alliance Attacks
US Bombing Strategy
Richard Lloyd Parry
Terrible Images
of a "Just" War
October 25, 2001
Ghassan
Andoni
Raid
on Bethlehem
N.D. Jayaprakash
From
Hiroshima to NYC
Evan Schultz
Memo
to Ashcroft:
Read Marbury
The Sunshine
Project
Assault
on the BioWeapons
Convention
Sarah
Turner
Cashing
In on Patriotism
Latin American Colloquium
on Systemology
The Meridia Manifesto
Noam Chomsky
The
New War on Terror
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Ridge Long Groomed
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Those CIA Killing
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The Not-So-Great
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Crop Duster
Ban
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Madeleine Albright's
Deadly Legacy
How the Bin
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October 31,
2001
When Did They Ever
Stop?
Unleashing the CIA
By William Blum
The old joke goes that in the waning days of the
Second World War, when Hitler was told of yet another defeat
on the battlefield, he slammed his fist into his desk and declared:
"That does it! No more Mr. Nice Guy!"
We've been treated in the past couple
of weeks to one press story after another about how the Bush
administration seeks to "unleash" the CIA from its
restrictions concerning things like political assassination and
dealing with "unsavory" characters. The nature of the
September 11 attack was such, we are told, that we have to remove
our kid gloves and put on depleted-uranium-tipped brass knuckles.
The policies whose "revisions"
are being discussed and leaked are principally a 25-year ban
on the CIA and other agencies of the government from engaging
in assassination, and a policy of the past five years or so of
barring the CIA from employing real nasty killers and torturers
abroad, or at least not without express approval from high up.
Why are they telling us these tales at
this time? Is it to comfort the American public into believing
that the government is holding nothing back in its campaign of
making us more secure? Or can they actually believe that such
announcements will put the fear of Allah in the Taliban leadership?
The fact is that since Gerald Ford signed
a presidential order in 1976, which stated that "No employee
of the United States shall engage in, or conspire to engage in,
political assassination", the United States has plotted,
on more than a dozen occasions, to administer what the CIA at
one time called "suicide involuntarily administered".
The last known attempt was the firing of missiles into the home
of Slobodan Milosevic in 1999; amongst other attempts during
this period was the arranging by the CIA, in 1985, for a car
bomb to kill one sheikh Fadlallah in Beirut; 80 people were killed
in the explosion, the sheikh not being among their number.
Moreover, in 1984, President Reagan cancelled
his own executive order, which had reiterated Ford's, with a
new order which was actually called by the press a "license
to kill" -- a license to kill anyone deemed a "terrorist".
After the Fadlallah travesty, the license to kill was cancelled,
only to be reinstated a few months later following a hijacking
of a TWA plane.
President Bush, the elder, added a new
twist in 1989. He issued a "memorandum of law" that
would allow "accidental" killing if it was a byproduct
of legal action: "A decision by the President to employ
overt military force ... would not constitute assassination if
U.S. forces were employed against the combatant forces of another
nation, a guerrilla force, or a terrorist or other organization
whose actions pose a threat to the security of the United States."
In other words, assassination was okay as long as we said "oops!"
It can thus be seen that all this talk
we are being fed of late about giving the CIA "new"
powers to engage in "targeted killings" is little more
than spin, the native language of politicians.
The same can be said for the public now
being told that because of the terrorist crisis, the CIA is going
to be allowed to revert to the good ol' days when they could
cozy up to the most despicable human rights violators without
getting permission from headquarters. It's hard to imagine that
in recent years that even if an Agency officer felt moved to
ask for such permission that it would have been refused. A CIA
officer could not have set foot in Colombia, Peru, Mexico, Indonesia,
Turkey, Kosovo or Croatia without tripping over an unindicted
war criminal-cum-US ally. As I write this, the Agency is sleeping
with the Northern Alliance of Afghanistan, a band of torturers,
kidnappers and rapists so depraved that the people of Afghanistan
at first welcomed the Taliban as heroes for conquering these
worthies.
To top it all off, we are told that the
finest legal minds of the Justice Department, State Department,
Pentagon, etc. have put their fine minds together and have decided
that the new marching orders are -- will wonders never cease?
-- LEGAL!
All these announcements are designed
not only to make Americans feel safer, but to give us a nice,
warm, fuzzy feeling that our leaders are so honorable that they
engage in protracted debates and soul searching before endorsing
any policies not fit for our children's schoolbooks.
William Blum
is the author of Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions
Since World War II and Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only
Superpower.
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