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

The CINCs appear more interested in friendly relations with their foreign military colleagues than in a regime’s human rights abuses, regardless of U.S. foreign policy. As CINCPAC, Admiral Dennis Blair was determined to reopen ties with the Indonesian military despite its commanders’ having been involved in the massacre of hundreds of unarmed civilians as well as United Nations officials in East Timor. Although our ambassador to Jakarta explicitly objected to his illegal collaboration with Indonesia’s military, Blair became the first high-ranking American officer to visit Indonesia after Congress imposed sanctions. Thanks to military intelligence, Blair was well informed about conditions on Timor and the likelihood of violence if its citizens voted for independence, but at no time did he seek to restrain his Indonesian colleagues. Five Indonesian officers, all of them products of American military training, were subsequently charged with crimes against humanity. Senator Patrick J. Leahy (D-Vermont) commented, “For as long as I have been in the Senate, the Pentagon has said that U.S. engagement would professionalize the Indonesian army. That has been disproved time and time again, and the final straw was the debacle in East Timor.” 50

Blair’s CINCPAC was not exceptional. The head of CINCSOUTH has gone out of his way to reestablish close ties with the El Salvadoran army, which probably has the worst human rights record of any Latin American military. On October 15, 1979, the United States sponsored a coup by young Salvadoran military officers that led to a vicious war against largely unarmed civilians by army escuadrones de la muerte (death squads). They slaughtered some 38,000 people before the Reagan administration sent then Vice President Bush to tell them to stop. In mid-1986, one Pentagon official boasted, “Every soldier in [El Salvador’s] army has been trained by us in one way or another.” 51As late as 1989, army Special Forces were still “training” El Salvador’s Atlacatl Battalion, which during November of that year murdered six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper, and her young daughter for alleged guerrilla sympathies. It is the officers of El Salvador’s army “who have remained close to the U.S. military in the decade since their civil war ended,” and who are our allies today in that tiny nation. 52No country in the CINCSOUTH theater is threatened by a foreign enemy; therefore the purpose of our military presence is purely imperialist.

Leaving foreign policy in the hands of regional proconsuls advances militarism because they inevitably turn to military assets to achieve foreign policy objectives. Under these circumstances, it is hard to see why anyone would want to work for the State Department. The CIA is also being undercut, but here the assault comes not from the CINCs but directly from the Pentagon and the current darlings of the military—the “special forces.”

Immediately following the terrorist attacks of September 11—once it had been established that al-Qaeda was the probable terrorist organization responsible—Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz ordered Undersecretary of Defense Douglas J. Feith to set up a special intelligence unit within the Pentagon. Its specific purpose was to find links between al-Qaeda and the regime of President Saddam Hussein of Iraq even though the CIA did not believe such links existed. Feith, like his bosses, had held several defense positions in the Reagan administration, including special counsel to then Assistant Secretary of Defense Richard Perle, and was part of a group of officials strongly influenced by Vice President Dick Cheney, the former secretary of defense. From the moment the new Bush administration was formed, this group passionately wanted to go to war with Iraq. Feith had been, in the words of the New York Times, “data mining” to find an al-Qaeda connection to Saddam Hussein that would justify an American war against him. Wolfowitz, Feith, and their associates were “intent on politicizing intelligence to fit their hawkish views.” 53

It soon developed that the chief obstacle to these efforts was the Central Intelligence Agency. Its operatives and analysts could find no connection between Iraq and the attacks of September 11. The agency also believed that the secular regime in Iraq was unlikely to have anything to do with the militantly Islamicist al-Qaeda and doubted that Saddam Hussein would supply terrorists beyond his control with any kind of weaponry that could be traced back to him. 54This difference of opinion soon developed into a full-blown bureaucratic turf war.

In March 2002, a presidential commission led by retired Lieutenant General Brent Scowcroft, the first President Bush’s national security adviser, recommended that three key Pentagon-financed intelligence agencies—the National Security Agency, the National Reconnaissance Office, and the National Imagery and Mapping Agency—be placed under the control of the director of the CIA. This was a serious challenge to Rumsfeld’s empire. On June 21, 2002, Secretary Rumsfeld responded with what U.S. News & World Report called a “brilliant stealth attack.” He quietly inserted in a Senate defense bill the authority to create a new undersecretary of defense for intelligence. “The new undersecretary position is a bureaucratic coup that accomplished many Pentagon goals in one fell swoop.... [Rumsfeld] is creating another DCI [director of central intelligence] for all practical purposes.” 55The new undersecretary is Rumsfeld’s neocon crony Stephen Cambone. He has been given authority over the three nonmilitary intelligence agencies plus the Defense Intelligence Agency. According to Jay Farrar, a former employee in the Defense Department and National Security Council who works with the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a conservative think tank, “It’s one more step in the Defense Department seeking to consolidate major control over the intelligence apparatus of the United States.” The New York Times adds, “Wolfowitz and company disbelieve any analysis that doesn’t support their own preconceived conclusions. The CIA is enemy territory, as far as they are concerned.” 56

Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has also reportedly been “eager to have U.S. special forces usurp the [Central Intelligence] agency’s traditional role” in conducting covert operations. 57There are interlocking reasons for this. The secretary arrived in the Pentagon eager to wean the army away from its commitment to heavy armor and artillery of the sort once aimed at the tank forces of the former Soviet Union. He and other defense planners also believed covert operations were the most logical means of implementing the president’s new National Military Strategy of “preventive war.” Part of this strategy consists of infiltrating covert operatives into target countries to carry out provocative acts that would supposedly flush out terrorists and provide excuses for military intervention. Under the control of the army, such covert operations were would not have to be reported to Congress as do those conducted by the CIA. The United States would then be able to intervene more easily in targeted countries with even less civilian supervision than if such illegal operations were left to the official clandestine services agency. Above all, a stress on special operations expands the functions of the military into new, previously quasi-civilian-run jurisdictions.

Despite press glorification of special forces as an “elite secret army” and the fact that they received the biggest increase in spending in the 2003 defense budget—a rise of some 20 percent, to $3.8 billion—they do not have a good reputation. 58In Vietnam, the army’s Green Berets were notorious for their brutality as well as their ineffectiveness, and the failure of the First Special Forces Detachment-Delta, as it was formally known, in the Teheran hostage rescue operation led to the first major expansion of special forces during the Reagan administration and the 1981 creation of the army’s supersecret Intelligence Support Activity (ISA). As Philadelphia Inquirer journalist Tim Weiner has observed, “[The ISA] set up shop all over Central America—El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama—to support the war against the Sandinistas and their left-wing allies. It created private companies to serve as fronts for espionage, including a butcher shop and a meat warehouse in Panama. It set up safe houses, secret airfields and caches for money and weapons, breaking a trail for future operations against the enemy [namely, the elected Sandinista government] in Nicaragua.” 59Very soon, however, its officers also developed reputations for embezzlement, cocaine trafficking, and obstruction of justice. Although the ISA never went completely out of business, by the mid-1980s $324 million of its funds were missing and secret tribunals sentenced several of its officers to long sentences at Fort Leavenworth. During the same period, members of Delta Force were charged with $200,000 worth of double billings for expenses while traveling overseas to protect U.S. ambassadors. 60