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Footnotes

Footnotes

1 Does Thornberg’s statement, which sounds so much like Sen. Bob Kerrey’s recent confession about his unpunished massacre of civilians inVietnam, for which he fradulently accepted a gold star, mean that America already does, as a matter of policy, torture its enemies?

2 On behalf of Reagan’s National Security Advisor, Robert McFarlane, likely Mossad agent Ledeen directed Israeli Prime Minister Shimon Peres to illegally sell weapons to Iran in 1985, thus instigating the Iran Contra scandal.

3 In August 1968, a nationwide quota of 1800 “neutralizations” was imposed on the Phoenix Directorate, as a “management-by-objective” tool to promote CIA efficiency. Neutralization statistics were tracked by The Viet Cong Infrastructure Information System. VCIIS had its origins in February 1966, when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara established the Defense Department’s Southeast Asia Programs Division. The process was advanced in Saigon in January 1967, when the joint Vietnamese CIA Combined Intelligence Staff fed the names of 3000 terrorist suspects into the IBM 1401 computer, installed at its “political order of battle” section. The era of the computerized political blacklist had begun. In January 1969 VCIIS was renamed the Phung Hoang Management Information System. It contained the names and biographical information of tens of thousands of confirmed and suspected terrorists. PHMIS was eventually turned over to two CIA proprietary companies: Southeast Asia Computer Associates and the Computer Science Corporation. Researchers, see where they go.

4 The Chicago “Red Squad”, working with the FBI, killed Black Panther Party leader Fred Hampton on 4 December 1969. That night BPP infiltrator William O’Neal slipped Hampton a Mickey Finn., then left the apartment. Around 4:30am the police kicked in the door and shot another BBP member in the chest as he lay in bed. Other bullets ripped through the walls, wounding Hampton; as he lay in bed with his pregnant girlfriend, police entered the room and shot Hampton in the head. It was a typical Phoenix-style assassination. For more information on Hampton see the website COINTELPRO and Government Oppression .

5 Information about Chaos was obtained through the Rockefeller Commission report. See also the parts about Chaos and Ober in Deborah Davis’s, Katherine The Great.

6 The CIA’s Office of Security was infiltrating the anti-war movement through the use of a reserve cadre of trained personnel, like cab drivers, construction workers, and janitors. These “cover assets” reported on demonstrators that threatened CIA facilities. It’s this writer’s belief, not paranoia, that all manner of public employees, from librarians to postmen to Pakistani Seven-Eleven operators have already been recruited.

7 After Salvador Allende was elected president of Chile, Nixon told Helms to “Make the economy scream,” as indicated by Helms’ notes of their September 15, 1970 meeting. Helms lied when he denied to Congress that the CIA was involved in coup, in which Allende was assassinated, and tens of thousands of Chileans were tortured and killed and disappeared. Having had acess to many a politician’s “sex and drugs and rock ‘n’ roll” files, Helms was allowed to plead no contest to two misdemeanors but wore his conviction “like a badge of honor.”

Sullivan was killed in November 1977. He had just acknowledged that the FBI had used “whatever means necessary” to hunt down the Weathermen, and was about to testify as the chief witness in the trial of an FBI agent, John J. Kearney, charged with having employed illegal wiretaps and mail intercepts in the Weathermen investigation. He was killed by a New Hampshire state trooper’s son, who thought Sullivan was a deer, and shot him twice in the neck. The kid lost his hunting license for a year.

8 The age of anti-terrorism can be traced to September 1972, when the last Phoenix coordinator, John Tilton, crossed off the phrase “Phung Hoang Program” (Vietnamese for Phoenix) in an evaluation report, and substituted the phrase “anti-terrorism program” throughout the report.

9 According to McClintock (p. 304-5) “There was a conscientious effort by (CIA and DIA) to shield host country counterterror programs from unwanted attention.” “However strong the signal that.selective counterterror had become mass counterterror, the efforts from within to oppose mass killings were stymied.”

10 One group, led by Leila Khaled tried to hijack an El Al flight from Tel Aviv via Amsterdam. But Khaled and her accomplice were overpowered by an El Al “sky marshal” and several passengers after the pilot made a steep dive. British security forces took Khaled into custody. The second hijacked plane was flown to Cairo where the passengers and crew were ordered off before the plane was blown up. A Swissair DC8 from Zurich and a TWA 707 from Frankfurt were hijacked and flown to Zarqa airstrip in Jordan. The Popular Front described the attacks as the first strike in avenging “the American plot to liquidate the Palestinian cause by supplying arms to Israel.” They demanded that the Swiss and West German governments release several of their jailed comrades. After another hijacking resulted in the release of 360 passengers and crews in exchange for Khaled and six other convicted terrorists. As a final act of revenge, terrorist bombers destroyed the aircraft. King Hussein of Jordan had allowed over fifty terrorist groups into his country, but Israeli attacks forced him to drive the Palestinians out of Jordan. The purge created the “Black September” group. (From the website Crime Library, article “Carlos the Jackal: Trail of Terror.”)

11 See the National Security Archive website for Public Diplomacy and Covert Propaganda: The Declassified Record of Ambassador Otto Juan Reich, by Thomas Blanton, March 2001.

12 Some of the information on Buckley was obtained from Mark Perry’s February 1989 article in Regardies, p. 96

13 Some of the information on the Counter-Terror Network came from Peter Dale Scott’s essay, The CounterTerrorism Network: Bush, North, And The Accumulation of Secret Power.

14 Scott: “Clair George.. testified how.Casey.bypassed him by having Charles Allen, the national Intelligence Officer for Counter-Terrorism, deal with Ledeen and Ghorbanifar on “terrorist” matters.”

15 Emerson, Steve, Secret Warriors, p 24. Shackley, Secord, Hakim, Tom Clines and Ed Wilson were all linked to various moneymaking scams conducted under the aegis of national security.

16 Instruments, p 306.

Douglas Valentine writes frequently for CounterPunch. He is the author of The Phoenix Program, the only comprehensive account of the CIA’s torture and assassination operation in Vietnam, as well as TDY a chilling novel about the CIA and the drug trade.