Chalmers Johnson - The Sorrows of Empire - Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic

The first CINC of the Northern Command is General Ralph E. Eberhart of the air force, another former head of the Space Command. On his appointment, Eberhart said, “We should always be reviewing things like Posse Comitatus and other laws if we think it ties our hands in protecting the American people.” 42It seemed not to have occurred to Eberhart that the Posse Comitatus Act was intended to protect Americans from generals like himself. Several civilian agencies, including the FBI, the Public Health Service, and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, have expressed dismay at the growing role of the military in their spheres of responsibility. The new Department of Homeland Security, created in 2003, combines many formerly civilian agencies and works closely with the Pentagon and the Northern Command. Its first deputy director is Gordon R. England, a former secretary of the navy and a former executive vice president of General Dynamics Corporation of Fort Worth, Texas, the manufacturer of the military’s main fighter plane, the F-16. 43It is not at all obvious which is a greater threat to the safety and integrity of the citizens of the United States: the possibility of a terrorist attack using weapons of mass destruction or an out-of-control military intent on displacing elected officials who stand in their way.

In addition to setting up the Northern Command and trying to undermine the Posse Comitatus Act, the military establishment is expanding its functions and influence on many other fronts. It has, for instance, directly challenged the Treasury Department with a demand that all significant foreign acquisitions of American companies be subjected to a national security review. The Pentagon wants a much larger voice in the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States, including compulsory notification from the CFIUS of all takeovers by foreigners worth more than $100 million. Such a demand may be a thinly disguised form of protectionism, but, as the British Financial Times observed, “The Pentagon’s attempt to extend its influence over inward investment is emblematic of its growing power within the Bush administration.” 44

Equally to the point, during 2003, the administration tucked a surprise proposal into a broader intelligence authorization bill that would give the military (and the CIA) authority to issue subpoenas requiring Internet providers, credit card companies, libraries, and a range of other organizations to produce on-demand materials like phone records, bank transactions, and e-mail logs. This would be a total break with the longstanding requirement that only the FBI can seek such information on American citizens within the United States and then only with judicial authorization, particularly if it plans to use such information in court. The new proposal would allow the military and the CIA to gather intelligence on citizens without ever being subject to judicial oversight. 45

Rumsfeld’s Pentagon has also been active in trying to exempt the military from various environmental protection laws. For example, the Marine Corps has complained that the 1973 Endangered Species Act interferes with its troops’ abilities to dig foxholes wherever they want on the 125,000-acre base at Camp Pendleton, California. The Fish and Wildlife Service wants to designate a small part of the base as “critical habitats” for endangered species of birds, including the Western snowy plover and the California least tern. There is already provision within the Endangered Species Act for a national security exemption, but the marines have never used it. They seem less interested in solving the problems of training marines while protecting the environment than in establishing the principle that the military is a law unto itself. 46

The Pentagon’s priority areas for expansion are the diplomatic functions of the State Department and the intelligence and covert-action functions of the CIA. Both the military’s Special Forces and the posts of regional commanders in chief have their roots in the disastrous attempt between April 24 and 26, 1980, to rescue American hostages captured in the Iranian seizure of our embassy in Teheran. That failure revealed that the Pentagon needed to be much more serious in training and equipping commandos for “low-intensity warfare” and in providing unified commands that could order up the needed resources without having to fight their way through a labyrinthine chain of command and the inevitable interservice rivalries. Colonel Charlie A. Beckwith, the commander of the army’s Delta Force that was destroyed at Desert One, southeast of Teheran, through its own bungling, testified to Congress: “In Iran we had an ad hoc affair. We went out, found bits and pieces, people and equipment, brought them together occasionally and then asked them to perform a highly complex mission. The parts all performed, but they didn’t necessarily perform as a team. Nor did they have the same motivation. My recommendation is to put together an organization that contains everything it will ever need, an organization that would include Delta, the Rangers, Navy SEALs, Air Force pilots, its own staff, its own support people, its own aircraft and helicopters. Make this organization a permanent military unit. Give it a place to call home. Allocate sufficient funds to run it. And give it sufficient time to recruit, assess, and train its people. Otherwise, we are not serious about combatting terrorism.” 47

These recommendations slowly led to the empowerment of the regional commanders and the dramatic enlargement, during the 1990s, of the Special Forces, which were used for the “humanitarian interventions” favored by the Clinton administration. In 1997, responsibility for shaping key foreign political and military strategies was officially given to the regional commanders (called commanders in chief, or CINCs, until October 2002, when Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, apparently feeling threatened by their growing power, rechristened them “combatant commanders”). These semiautonomous generals and admirals perform functions that until the 1990s had been handled primarily by civilian officials.

In the Middle East (CENTCOM), the Pacific (PACOM), Europe (EUCOM), and Latin America (SOUTHCOM), the CINCs oversee such things as intelligence, special operations, space assets, nuclear forces, arms sales, and military bases; and they produce what are called “theater engagement plans.” These are essentially mini-foreign policy statements for each region and include explicit programs to cultivate close relations with local military organizations. 48This is done chiefly by deploying approximately 7,000 Special Forces soldiers in 150 countries to train local militaries in what is called “foreign internal defense” (FID)—in many cases merely a euphemism for the techniques of state terrorism. The training missions allow the United States to spy on these countries, sell them weapons, and encourage their armies to carry out policies the Pentagon favors. Everything is done very quietly and with virtually no political oversight.

Over time, the CINCs have become more influential in their regions than ambassadors. When General Anthony C. Zinni of the marines was head of CENTCOM, he had twenty ambassadors serving under him and a personal political adviser with ambassadorial rank. PACOM (also known as CINCPAC) supervises the affairs of forty-three countries. Each CINC has at his disposal virtually unlimited funds, his own airplanes and helicopters, and numerous staff officers. A CINC reports directly to the president and the secretary of defense, avoiding the service chiefs and the normal chain of command.

When, in October 1999, General Pervez Musharraf carried out a military coup d’état in Pakistan, President Clinton telephoned to protest and asked to be called back. Musharraf instead called General Zinni and reportedly began, “Tony, I want to tell you what I am doing.” 49General Zinni ignored the congressional ban on foreign aid to a country that has undergone a military coup and emerged as one of Musharraf’s strongest supporters before 9/11. It was also Zinni, and not officials of the State Department, who made the decision to refuel warships in the Yemeni port of Aden, where, on October 12, 2000, suicide bombers attacked the destroyer USS Cole, killing seventeen sailors.