Essay on State Terrorism
by John Bart Gerald

At my desk late one night in 1996 I was running a search engine through the internet for "Operation Phoenix." Born American I will always be interested in the Kennedy assassinations and was pursuing the notion that the JFK as well as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. murders were accomplished by teams of military professionals operating in much the same way and within the same mindset as the people who initiated "Operation Phoenix" during Vietnam.

My understanding was that Operation Phoenix was an ongoing program, involving CIA led and trained teams who went into Vietnamese villages and murdered civilian village chiefs because of their politics, on the premise they might be Viet-Cong or had been designated as such.

The purpose seems to have been twofold, 1. to obliterate the Vietcong ie. communist infra-structure of the country, 2. to terrorize everyone else into accepting US authority.

What happened in that late night foray into my extended mourning for America's murdered leaders was that I found what seemed at first to be a humdrum file in courier regular typeface - the typewriter's bridge to computer fonts, on "Operation Phoenix," which gave me more information than I could deal with. It was a long listing of I think Vietnamese names and Western or other European names with dates and as I remember now - short phrase descriptions of the manner of death of each Vietnamese. The European or Western names appeared to be the person responsible for each death.

The file carried no identification. My understanding of this unlikely file, without military or government heading, logos, or seal, was that it was either misinformation, or a leaked checklist file the CIA might have used to confirm its kills, or an accounting whose score had yet to be settled. Without source or avenues for verification it was of little use, a random piece of posted email bobbing about on the seas of the internet. I saved it, thinking it might prove useful as a source of leads and cross reference as information became available in time, and so tucked it away and continued my searching.

Several years later I found myself preparing for the millennium. I never rule out a possibility that my writings might cause me some difficulty under applications of the emergency management act (currently "Operation Garden Plot" in the US, empowered to relocate to concentration camps or prisons anyone it chooses), so I was and remain careful of my research data. My care increases in proportion to the harm it might cause innocent people. What could cause too much harm and couldn't be reasonably protected from access by others, I deleted.

I've had to do this at various points in life, essentially because I found myself without legal protections - access to a lawyer who could assure my rights as a journalist. In this instance I was fairly sure I could retrieve such a file again through internet searches. Then recently I was talking with a teacher about human rights and we ventured into a discussion of "Operation Phoenix", and then my theory of its effect on the Kennedy's and King assassinations. "Operation Phoenix" still seemed the only established American institution that provided any precedent for the assassinations. For some reason I was fairly sure that Operation Phoenix began back about 1962, even before the Vietnam conflict actively involved the United States. The teacher mused, oh no, Operation Phoenix was much later and didn't even start until '67 or '68. That was four or five years after JFK's death.

So I returned to the Internet search engines to look it up. I found statements affirming Phoenix's inception in 1967, 1968, and after some exhaustive searching found several files to back up my impression that it started earlier, but I couldn't find the particular file I had seen. It was in a sense as though the subject had been sanitized for history's consumption. This interested me.

Operation Phoenix was simply the portion that surfaced officially about 1967 or 68, when it was officially approved by the South Vietnamese government. It had been at work in Asia throughout the Sixties and Seventies under a variety of names. It seemed a logical forerunner of direct involvement and military action and an extension of CIA Asian policies from 1962 on, which sought to identify initially, Communist cadres in Indonesia and throughout South East Asia, all as thoughtfully expressed by the CIA station chief, years later when he became boss of the agency. Colby, in providing some background on the murders of half a million communist Indonesian leaders, by their own Army - a large portion of that army was trained in the United States ⁽¹⁾, stated the CIA operation to collect the names and turn the "shooting lists" over to the Army was basically the same as the Operation Phoenix he set up in Vietnam.⁽²⁾ The same source refers to the detention camps the Indonesian Army set up as holding centres for those to be murdered later.

What I may have had in my possession was a list of persons chargeable eventually for specific war crimes in the illegal deaths of Vietnamese civilians. Since the list was available to the public on the internet, no doubt it will reappear some day with its appropriate source, in evidence against those who put it into effect.

Reigns of Terror

In a discussion of atrocities we have to remember that atrocities don't have to be. They are ordered by very sick minds, to instil fear. They can be stopped. War itself is an atrocity, and even within that there is a code of decency. Within war the human code asserts itself, eventually leading us to peace. ⁽³⁾

When Colby, the former CIA director as station chief for South East Asia, spoke of Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, he compared the early intelligence gathering to census taking. But to repeat, the purpose of his intelligence gathering as early as 1962, was to identify the Communist cadres and leaders, and these lists were turned over to the military. That is how the country's left wing was rounded up and murdered. ⁽⁴⁾ Since 1962 ⁽⁵⁾ throughout South East Asia the names of Communist cadres and leaders were gathered. Before Operation Phoenix in Vietnam there was ICEX where Navy Seals squads went into villages to kill the appointed civilians. ⁽⁶⁾ These and other "Black Operations" were hidden from the US public.

Operation Phoenix occurred in the gap between what the powerful knew and what the US people knew. It required the enforced ignorance of the people and families who gave up their sons to war. How inevitable was the result of identifying and listing South East Asia Communist cadre ? The result was inevitable under the Third Reich in the early thirties when the IBM prototypes of computers sorted Germany's population to specifically note the Jewish people by placement of a punched hole in a card. ⁽⁷⁾ But even the US census requests specific ethnic identification.

The difficulty of data collecting by racial, ethnic, religious or political classification is that historically, it risks creating a target group for persecution or eradication.

What such categorization meant to Germany was the murder of six million Jews. In Croatia the murder of 200,000 Serbs. Throughout Europe the termination of those who might resist or separate themselves from the majority group. Under US intelligence operations in South East Asia - these were entirely intentional political genocides - the excuse given was the Cold War, the nature of Communism. The particularly criminal aspect rises from the fact that the victims were innocent of any crime, but were singled out to be murdered because of what they thought - how they voted, how they hoped to live and raise their families. And this was instigated by a political system championing "Freedom of Expression," while committing genocide against people whose only crime apparently was faith in Communism, their political ideology.

What internet search engines begin to do is group events about certain keywords, juxtaposing histories which provide perspective and insights into patterns of human behaviour, into history as a sum of human experience, which we might be ignorant of. For instance if you consider the US FBI policies concerning surveillance of suspected Communists as early as 1948, with a list of 80,000 ⁽⁸⁾ (this grew to six million known Communists, supporters, sympathizers by 1962 within the States), ⁽⁹⁾ you will find parallels to policies of US intelligence agency data collecting in South East Asia where Colby stated the intention was to identify Communists. So Colby's practices in South East Asia were extensions of FBI domestic US policy. Search engines won't note the more obvious parallels to computer identification of the Jews in Germany of the 1930's ⁽¹⁰⁾, until the relevant articles and essays make the parallel available by including the words "Operation Phoenix".

In 2001 you can still find references to "Operation Phoenix" in Vietnam (which is referred to as an amalgam of previous CIA and military policies which were mostly covert), operating as early as 1962 through Australian implementation. ⁽¹¹⁾ History may declare Operation Phoenix existed between 1968 and 1971. Its operating procedures were probably applied and in effect in Vietnam from 1962 (or earlier) until 1975, with additional prior application by the French.

What this meant to the States domestically was that Americans were not entirely safe. It was within the power groups' consideration to murder large groups of human beings because of their political beliefs, innocent or guilty, and whether they were unfriendly to the US or not. This did not require a declared war to accomplish. It did not require military action by the United States, which had trained portions of the Indonesian military. In Indonesia all that was required was the collection of data, lists, and turning over of these lists to the Indonesian military, to effect such thorough mass murders of suspected Communists. It was a program repeated again and again throughout the late Sixties and Seventies, and subsequently - not only in Indonesia, but by Operation Phoenix in Vietnam, within Cambodia of those suspected of cooperation with the Viet Cong, within Chile of all suspected of Communism or supporters of the democratically elected President Allende. The same thing happened under Operation Condor in surrounding countries. Brazil had its disappeared , Argentina, ⁽¹²⁾ Bolivia, El Salvador - with each, the institutionalization of mass murder, extra-judicial killings, of those on the left.

This is not to mention Guatemala where the genocide of the left and the indigenous Maya was prepared for by the CIA's overthrow of the democratically elected leader in 1952, and continued in synchronic complement to mass murders throughout South and Central America. The one common element to all these crimes against humanity was the commonality of each offending government's policy and military with policies of the CIA that included training portions of the offending militaries at the US School of the Americas.

Each of these reigns of terror was the result of specific Central Intelligence Agency policies and directives.

Genocide as a weapon of terrorism

Consider then if this is still going on. After World War II could the US have initiated an international genocide, with victims specifically those who were not anti-communist ? Foreign policy was entirely anti-communist, but did this CIA/military policy proceed by non-military means as well ?

Cogent arguments have been presented which claim AIDS was developed specifically as a biological weapon with intention to destroy African peoples. ⁽¹³⁾

South African medical warfare experts as revealed by South Africa's Truth Commission were known to have attempted development of racially selective biological warfare weapons for use against native black Africans. ⁽¹⁴⁾ The exposure of the program is at points accompanied by additional phrasing "...continuing biological warfare programs found in the States." There was specific funding of DIA/CIA doctors and laboratories to attempt biological warfare weapons with effects similar to AIDS ⁽¹⁵⁾

The general pattern of these global actions is that each area affected gradually yields to a semblance of peace under corporate rule and service , but this is to say rule relying on and furthering the eradication of entire peoples, and forming survivors with minds that have been partially destroyed. The allowable human awareness is purposefully and unnaturally forced toward the right wing, extinguishing the portion of humanity which supports sharing our human assets. So this becomes a forcing toward extinction of an entire portion of humanity and human nature. I think the only way to understand the criminality of it is within the perspective of laws against genocide.

Fear as a mechanism of control

To understand the Western World since the end of World War II, it helps to understand the programs of mind control, funded by the CIA and military. A study of post World War II mind control programs funded by the CIA or the US military yields primarily projects which further the control of individuals for their uses to covert agency or military tactics. Material on mind control available to the uninitiated, by 2001 suggests a sure potential of either agency to take over individuals and use the individual even against his/her will, for tactical purposes. In the individual's favour, is that such efforts are expensive and apparently hard to keep secret. Even deeply planted hypnotically programmed agents, assassins, "slaves," have increasingly offered the public information about their training.

Very little information is available about group controls. For instance a study might say that sodium fluoride , available in City water supplies, can cause increased susceptibility to orders if ingested over periods of time, - it makes people more pliant, less resistant to authority. Alpha rhythms sometimes started by the flickering of a television set , may increase a person's openness to suggestion, to suggestion masked commands. There are established techniques of subliminal programming in music, movies, television. But these can be "found out" and proven. Considered illegal or at least a break in the code of good faith, they are less likely to be used where the market is legal. There could be public outcry, suits and damages. Extra-legal entertainment such as hard core pornography, or pirated music, would be more likely carriers of subliminal messages.

Population group controls are likely and possibly applied currently. These would include radio wave signals, electromagnetic wave signals, ⁽¹⁶⁾ light carried messages which, some evidence suggests, can be "heard" subliminally, interpreted by the brain and acted upon. ⁽¹⁷⁾ There is as well the host of influences and directions present the minute one enters any commercial environment.

Entire societies seem to require "blind spots" or areas of misperception, in order to function, and at least to give power to the initiated or priest class within. In capitalism, the powerful are the rich and within our own cultural examples who would deny that the rich have their own blind spots ? Such areas of ignorance are necessary to any unequal application of power. In capitalist society, these are commercial environments.

In a sense Americans are born into a large department store. One's usefulness to society is determined by how one contributes to the store and ultimately, sales. This explains anomalies such as a population electing a leader who cuts back the people's social services, medical protection, etc.. It is only to the best interest of the people to vote to increase social services, and for representatives who will further such benefits. People vote for the interests of big business for three reasons. 1. Fear; they are threatened with "enemies"; 2. They are tricked through mind control mechanisms and deceit to vote against their own best interests; 3. They are, within a perspective of being born into a department store, voting for the corporate best interests of "sales," feeling that if the society does well economically, they will.

In western civilization policies of mind control all seem to employ some threat. Fear is the emotional pivot of capitalism, keeping each of us in touch with the primordial within, instead of welcoming us to the mutual sustenance and care of civilization. We are taught by all social institutions not to share, though Christianity stresses treating one's neighbour as oneself. Conservatism, by refusing to relinquish the primitive sense of me-first isolated survival, was so terrified by communism's loyalty to group survival - that it proceeded to destroy the group at every opportunity.

Of individual mind controls there is some evidence that both Kennedy assassinations involved programmed mind controlled assassins and decoy "assassins" who were either entirely innocent or unwitting; the controls were I think, available to the CIA and military agencies. But controls on individuals require a massive coverup of information and withholding of facts and technical data about mind control and what the governments had done in the past and could do. The Kennedy assassinations required a media and communications conspiracy of silence and misinformation, and cooperation from the entire field of psychology. Those trained in mind manipulation, were more likely to recognize it.

Understanding the King assassination

Information on "Operation Mockingbird" online, is increasingly extensive and challenges the myth of freedom of expression in the United States, with claims of five hundred bought journalists as well as half the country's academics, loyal first to the CIA. ⁽¹⁸⁾ This speaks of directly purchased people. What of those who were simply trying to please and succeed ? What chance did honest minds have ? And what of the naturally good intentions of everyone raised in a department store ? And what of all those forced to government support by immigration policies, blackmail, a wish to survive ?

A study of the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. assassination provides for me the break-through in understanding the assassinations of the Sixties - a subject I've personally worked through and confronted quietly since the assassinations occurred. I had met John F. Kennedy before he became President. I had met Dr. King and later was a march marshal for the people in his and our march from Selma to Montgomery. I was part of the ring of people arms locked about him to serve as a body shield to the anger of a white crowd on entering Montgomery.

In the Seventies and then in the Eighties I sat down to write out the answer to the assassination mysteries - and I was in each case defeated through not understanding deeply enough, the answer. So I read more and researched more. I knew and had written back in the Sixties ⁽¹⁹⁾ that the perpetrators of all four assassinations were at the service of a right wing conspiracy well entrenched in law enforcement bureaus and agencies but I couldn't proceed with anything more direct.

In Dr. King's assassination, for years so much misinformation was presented that understanding could be bent from the obvious. James Earl Ray died in jail, without the trial that might prove his innocence. The man that had initially set him up as the guilty person was identified ⁽²⁰⁾ as a former Army Security Agency man. ⁽²¹⁾ Researching the ASA will yield that it was an outgrowth of the Army signal corps - Army Communications - and with a mission of radio communications primarily, but initially encryption. ASA was used extensively in Vietnam - Operation Phoenix and its predecessors relied heavily on radio communications.

Because the FBI's Cointelpro campaign against the Civil Rights Movement specifically targeted Dr. King, and because there is evidence which suggests it tried to force Dr. King to commit suicide ⁽²²⁾, and intentionally illegally damaged Dr. King and his family and supporters, one can't rely on FBI supplied evidence concerning Dr. King's murder. Serious investigation of his death was accomplished by the Congressional Black Caucus Committee, which found a Memphis bar owner guilty of hiring a policeman to shoot Dr. King. Other leads included a racist conspiracy out of a St. Louis Missouri bar which lead back to Ray. The possibility remained that King was shot by a military unit, and Ray presented as the guilty person instead. As evidence against Ray could provably be revealed as false over the years, another civilian "assassin" was appointed to take his place. Whether the military unit was active duty personnel on orders within a covert military chain of command, or a squad operating on orders from the CIA as Operation Phoenix and its predecessors were then operating in Vietnam - is a question. The assassination of King coincides with his open confrontation of the war in Vietnam, while the FBI's Hoover had him listed for years, as a suspected Communist.

The assassination coincided with the emergence of Operation Phoenix and its legitimization as a military tactic of the Vietnam war. The military covered as tactics of war, acts within a CIA chain of command which had permitted the extra-legal murder of foreign civilians, by US civilian order.

It seems increasingly likely that the assassinations were part of a program of continuing psychological warfare operations which were gradually shaping a new world economic order. In trying to find the source of the atrocities in Indonesia and East Timor, Peter Dale Scott finds evidence of what I think of as CIA signatures, where types of atrocity appear in far flung locales where the atrocity is not part of any local custom. There are headless bodies floated down the rivers of East Timor. As there were surprisingly in Chile under Pinochet's coup. Scott doesn't mention the French torture during its war in Algeria, or in Paris in the early Sixties, how the Seine carried the bodies of Algerians thrown from bridges, or the bodies of whites floating down the Congo River when the CIA and Euro-corporate world overthrew Patrice Lumumba's government. But possibly these might be traced to convenience rather than the primary purpose of terrorizing the population. Since its inception at the end of World War II, CIA operations distinguished themselves through psychological warfare operations whose motive was to terrorize people into compliance with extra-judicial killings. Since a general trauma to the people was the purpose of the murders, assassination researchers may have looked in the wrong place for understanding. They have assumed that assassinations were for the tactical gains one expects from a power struggle, rather than a long term plan to mould the people's world view. In the short term, if honest representative leaders were shot, then the people would be less willing to openly identify with / support them. In this way the US was being prepared for increasingly overt fascism.

The FBI's treatment of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was illegal to the degree of being State terrorism. It was under any perspective of international law, criminal. It was under any perspective of American law, criminal. It was also, overtly, baldly, criminal. Through FBI terrorization of him - all people who understood him, and backed him and supported him, were terrorized. The FBI program was therefore a direct attack on nonviolence, on equal rights, on the American Constitution, on Christianity, on black people and the black community. The illegality was perpetuated in the name of anti-communism. It taught a suspension of human rights internationally in the name of anti-communism. There was never any adequate evidence to prove that Dr. King was anything else than what he declared himself to be, a Christian. In this sense, the FBI's program was an American blind spot - a continuing betrayal of its own system of justice, its principles, its people.

The FBI's ongoing program of identifying and levying war against individual American citizens suspected of Communism, was the model and forerunner of Operation Phoenix and its forerunners in Vietnam, Operation Condor in South America and the active genocides in Indonesia, Chile, Guatemala, Bolivia, etc..

The assassination of King seems to be a tactical action of a Seal squad under Navy command or Special Forces squad acting under CIA command, covered domestically by the FBI. But these groups would not have originated the King assassination or the Kennedys'. Tactically, the Army and FBI were allies of King as a patriot who proceeded under law in the South of the USA, while at the time in Africa whole nations were claiming freedom successfully by political or violent overthrow of colonial rulers. FBI harassment of King was either "cover" to protect him (there is a chance that anyone is a government agent) , or a particularly treacherous double-cross of an American hero.

Understanding the JFK assassination

The more we learn of JFK's murder, the more clearly it seems to be the action of a well trained squad. The triangulation of crossfire suggests a standard military tactic. The complexity of silencing so many suggests a military operation. The unanimity with which the press and the media adapted to the official line set by its pacers suggested that there was no conspiracy at all or a conspiracy so deep and prolonged that entire portions of government had to be involved. For this reason above others it was difficult to believe that the assassination of JFK, the first of four, was other than exactly what it appeared to be.

Historically it will look like the people as a group were either evil or embraced the shift of power which the JFK assassination initially brought in. Neither is true. The people of the US were shocked and numbed by the loss of both the leader and source of hope for humanity but also the loss of the people's political power as expressed by voting.

It was I believe so far from the American sensibility to betray the democratic process by murdering a leader, that a domestic conspiracy or act by any other than an insane person, alone, was to most, unthinkable. Then if we think about that we arrive at the extent of psychological controls on Post World War II America. Assassination was so far from the norm that any conspiracy would inevitably be betrayed by some person asserting the norm, and any conspiracy could not have originated within an American people's perspective during the Sixties, with the exception of upper level academia, which in the political, nuclear, medical, and psychological sciences showed a clear dissociation from the common good. And one would except the more obvious dissociations of corporate business and covert intelligence operations.

Even when Lt. Calley caused the horrifying murder of an entire village of women and children in 1968, there was a helicopter pilot and two serving with him who witnessed and reported the massacre from the helicopter, and landed to save the survivors. They betrayed the group's code to stand for civilization. That so many others did not, in an action which mirrored Operation Phoenix tactics so closely, gave some warning of what was happening to the minds of US soldiers in Vietnam under military programming, fear, and the only escape of drugs.

There was no such hero for the Kennedy assassination, at least not among the national journalists on CIA payroll; my own understanding as a writer was that no journalist survived for long without CIA approval. The Army Security Agency would have been necessary as the emergency control on the media and all emergency communications. It was already teamed with death squads operating in Vietnam under CIA command.

Operation Tailwind, a subsequent illegal covert action to kill US deserters and Americans held as prisoners of war in South East Asia, as revealed by Joint Chief of Staff Admiral Moorer's testimony, was under Nixon's authority. It was Kissinger and the President who held direct authority over covert teams, rather than the Army's commanders.

Under Nixon, to effect Seal Squad Covert Operations with teams from South East Asia brought back to the States for specific assassinations, would have required, Kissinger's and or the President's approval. As early as 1963, the control of covert operations teams operating in South East Asia - and specifically the Special Forces, was possibly already routed through this alternate chain of command. The responsibility then for the Kennedy assassination would have been McNamarra's, with Attorney General Ramsey Clark in charge of the hiding the truth. Kissinger had left the National Security Council in disagreement with Kennedy's policies of nuclear proliferation although Kissinger was one of the very few to be in a position to coordinate strands of government. He was in a position to make peace between the military joint chiefs and the CIA and Vice President's forces and JFK's opposition (Nixon and Bush, whom Kissinger later served), to effect the assassination.

What I remember of the days of JFK's assassination was my impression that the military must have been involved. I was a medical specialist in the reserves, and on call for any national emergency. It was strange that my unit wasn't called up that day because there was no way of knowing that the assassination wasn't a direct military attack. Military command knew it wasn't.

Military participation is suggested by the fact that US military preparedness (alert level) was not advanced a single stage as far as I know.

So I concluded at least subconsciously that the military was involved. at its upper levels. My understanding of the media was still primitive though of the Lower Eastside enough to know media was not to be trusted. Some years later I learned of the Office of War Information and Office of Strategic Services where officers of the World War II ministry of propaganda and elite white officers corps, disbanded by Truman, became the CEO's of media communications or the backbone of the newly formed CIA.

Media accession to the first Kennedy assassination as the work of a single assassin became more understandable twenty years later with revelation of the CIA's Operation Mockingbird and program of purchasing journalists. As it becomes clear how the secrecy of the Officer class was maintained, I've never understood how the enlisted men were silenced, other than by criminal organizations. This difficulty in understanding is solved with a bit of thought about drugs. To the good uses of military and mafia, many soldiers with Vietnam experience were oriented to drugs, and through drug use or threat of arrest for lesser substance abuse, vulnerable to criminal organizations cooperating with the CIA's predecessor in World War II. What became clearer some thirty forty years later was that most drug operations to the States fell under CIA protection which was also responsible for all covert actions in South East Asia, a cradle of the poppy and world's heroin trade. For its covert or "Black" operations the CIA gathered Seals from the Navy and Special Forces from the Army, placing these under its command structure. The covert operations known under a variety of code names and designations such as ICEX or for the purposes of a surfaced designation, "Operation Phoenix," all relied heavily on communications, - usually radio encryption for special forces squads. For intelligence gathering they carried their own trained designated radio man for encrypted communications. But the responsibility for this training knowledge and military specialty lay with the Army Security Agency (ASA), responsible for signals, communications. I've already noted the ASA with reference to the King assassination. Historically ASA's role was hidden and covered. It possibly had some link to the U-2 aircraft Oswald had been assigned to guard as a Marine, but in any event there is no reason to believe that it didn't control emergency communications throughout the States, through early emergency preparedness plans, as well as wherever the US maintained a military presence.

Victories of a Nazi elite

For the assassination of JFK, one can suppose a command structure, a CIA effecting structure, Seal or special Forces squads trained in assassination, and communications controls compatible with the first two. What is lacking in all these is a motive strong enough to overthrow a democracy, to overturn the institutions the country was built with, and which each group represented above was part of. A wide spread conspiracy including so many trusted services and requiring the acquiescence of so many others would be unlikely, unless there were some shared secret among all those in power and in service, to justify such a complete betrayal of the people. It would have to be a secret shared by upper echelons of power yet unknown to and denied the people as a whole. A long standing secret. A dangerous secret and a secret so unpleasing to the people at large that keeping the secret would have to involve a conspiracy.

But with all the secrets necessary to the US National Defence, as well as US history and the future, what area of secrets could cross so many professional areas to bind its participants in silence ? So we arrive at the military, scientific, academic, and intelligence communities massive hiring of Nazi war criminals at the end of World War II. ⁽²³⁾ This was accomplished in direct violation of Present Truman's orders, and knowledge, thereby creating an American fascist cadre in opposition to the office of the President.

To scratch this surface lightly, what in fact the victorious Army and Intelligence networks of World War II were doing under US command, was selecting the most talented among the war criminals of the Third Reich to serve the agenda of the victors. The morality or criminality of the human being was rendered inconsequential, compared to his or her usefulness to agendas of further control. From war criminals, the doctors were hired, who had already learned so much from their subjects in the concentration camps. The rocket scientists were hired, simply switching their allegiance from the swastika to the American flag, and their work force from slave labour to government union wages. The atomic scientists were hired, melding easily with the assortment of Manhattan Project nuclear scientists assembled by Vannover Bush. Though Vannover Bush remains a hero to M.I.T. he would probably not be welcome among remaining first peoples around Great Bear Lake in Canada. They were used as porters and loaders of uranium for the first Atomic bombs, and after work found the showers were for Europeans. The new Americans became luminaries of the academic and scientific communities, as if the distinct strain of Nazism, racism, fascism, anti-Semitism, predominant on American soil in the late Thirties, was weakened by the war effort and needed refreshment.

Among so many names of another generation⁽²⁴⁾ the North American Nazis were frightening in the depth of their ignorance and their choices when presented with that question each of us faces when we try to form our lives: where do we draw the line ? At what point do we refuse to accept inhumanity ? We know surely they were there, at the "Third International Congress in Eugenics," (Museum of Natural History, NYC, August 21-23,1932), operating under the "International Federation of Eugenics Societies." To directly quote Tarpley and Chaitkin (the earliest source I know on this), "Averell Harriman personally arranged with the Walker/Bush Hamburg-Amerika Line, to transport Nazi idealogues from Germany to New York for this meeting. The most famous among those transported was Dr. Ernst Rudin, psychiatrist at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Genealogy and Demography in Berlin, where the Rockefeller family paid for Dr. Rudin to occupy an entire floor with his eugenics 'research.' .....At Harriman's 1932 New York Eugenics Congress, Ernst Rudin was unanimously elected president of the International Federation of Eugenics Societies...." Also, "..on a commission by Frick, Dr. Ernst Rudin wrote The Law for the Prevention of Hereditary Diseases in Posterity, the sterilization law modeled on previous US statutes in Virginia and other states....Special courts were soon established for the sterilization of German mental patients, the blind, the deaf and alcoholics. A quarter million people in these categories were sterilized..." ⁽²⁵⁾ American intellectual life in New York City was closer to being Nazi than the future was led to believe.

Starting school in 1945, I was taught everything in the light of a US victory over the Nazis, as though the people of North America were of one mind and one persuasion. In fact, those forming and controlling society were very interested in the uses of the inhumanities which the Nazis taught to the world. They were interested in profit. They were interested in some forms of freedom as an encouragement to their own power. They were interested in their enemy which was not fascism but communism. So they were pleased to turn fascism against communism domestically, as they had in Germany , then internationally and particularly against the Soviet Union. It was as if the West's capitalists had hurled Germany against the Soviet Union in their first strike of open war against Communism.

If you consider the Third Reich's railway stations, each and each death camp relied on IBM punch card machines which required monthly maintenance by IBM employees through its German subsidiary ⁽²⁶⁾IBM maintained expanding operations, and actual control until war was officially declared, which was a relief to its management/owners since under German corporate law the company could be held in Nazi trusteeship during actual war years. US IBM's concern throughout the rise of the Nazis was not the policies of the Third Reich but whether IBM's share of the profits would reach the parent company in New York ⁽²⁷⁾. IBM's role as unearthed by the courageous work of so many working with and in cooperation with Edwin Black, is so outrageous that it should change our awareness of who we are and of the truth and wisdom of our elders, or its absence. Read Edwin Black. Read of Ford Motor company's production lines for the Third Reich. Of General Motors. Read of Standard Oil of New Jersey playing both sides of World War II for profit. Read Chaitkin ⁽²⁸⁾ whose father prosecuted Prescott Bush, George Bush Sr.'s father, as a traitor to his country for profits aiding the Third Reich. Read of the Dulles brothers who set up both the CIA and the post WWII American foreign policy, and how they primed the Nazi war machine for war, and afterwards poured in millions of recovery aid to protect American investments.

While a generation born during World War II was being inculcated in how victoriously destroyed Nazism was, the machinery of the future was proceeding ruthlessly ⁽²⁹⁾ , harvesting the fruits of Nazism stripped from the victims in death camps: advances in management techniques, life triage, medicine, aerospace medicine, information, available to those who would set aside their responsibility to common humanity.

The power structure taught and trained me in one perspective while operating within its opposite, and I was just one among millions.

What this did was allow a fairly thorough mind control of one generation by its predecessor. Our parents' generation knew what it refused to yield or tell us. There are still those of my generation who will insist our parents didn't know, couldn't have known and say this because they loved their parents. But surely mid-Century New Yorkers knew of the Harrimans. The political, academic and economic strength of America's home-grown Nazis was never mentioned after World War II, nor taught the children. The difficulty was not in the little mysteries where honest men and women lost their lives in ongoing objection to fascism, but that the Nazi ethic was so deeply embedded in the American system that the price of power, inclusion, of gaining wealth, of being happy, was silence about how it worked. It was a silence more virulent than racism, and rationalized and supported by anti-communism, but in its partial hold on truth, a criminal silence. Its matrix was the cement of racism. The US Armed Services were largely segregated in World War II, and this was particularly true of the officer class, and therefore the OSS, OWI and other intelligence and special operations services which formed the postwar controls, had little understanding to be anything but racist.

What they knew was the strength of Nazi control mechanisms in the States, which survived World War II. There is no way they couldn't have known. They didn't tell others. It is likely that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was dead the instant he was elected to office.

Information management as terrorism

What became clear in each of the successive assassinations of the Sixties, was the importance of the information that reached the public. As a writer in the early Sixties, I was aware of "controls" on what could be published, but ascribed this to simple codes of anti-communism, class to some degree, and the racism of the day. Aside from the Black community, amid the professional classes there was little objection to strident racism until 1960.

Then the push for civil rights for American Blacks, mild compared to independences in what was once colonial Africa, became a public education in the States. But it was an education parcelled out by the press. Because we lived and grew up under the myth of a free press, I never considered the possibility of serious overriding controls of the media, until the Nineties. When I was excluded from publication myself, I thought I was personally at fault. Eventually, I began to realize that some areas which were necessary for the people to consider, were banned from discussion.

An interest in the first Kennedy assassination reveals one clear point - information which should have been verified and shared with the people, wasn't. The areas of this breakdown in communications, are consistently points of background involving government agencies and particularly mention of CIA programs. By what goes unsaid in the media you can begin to formulate by default, what was being hidden. There would be no certainty that something was intentionally hidden if it weren't for recurring similarities in the four assassinations of leaders. The first was that the assassin of each was either not found and verified as the assassin, or found and convicted by ignoring large areas of information and evidence. Aware at the time of the assassinations, and intensely concerned, over thirty years later I am still not sure who the specific assassins were.

Because in fact the people don't believe the assassins were correctly identified by law enforcement, the assassinations became a threat as a control of the people. The threat says most simply, we can kill and get away with it - look what happened to those much more popular and powerful and better loved than you: JFK, RFK, Martin, Malcolm.

It is classic terrorism.

The information controls rested in the hands of groups created at the end of World War II to manage public thinking by psychological warfare operations. They were in league with the CIA and Defence Department but apparently separate and not responsible to either. Their primary mission at the time was supposed to be anti-communism, which increasingly meant defence of covert fascism.

There was so much to reveal of democracy's glory, but there was so much to hide of capitalism's necessities. How could an army of German war criminals respected in their fields by those who would bring us the crimes of our future, have hidden in the US atomic program, space program, rocket sciences, space medicine, computer sciences, and all attendant university programs and government funded laboratories - without fairly absolute codes and rules requiring silence about them ? Certainly in other areas of academia which employed the Nazi intelligence operatives, the manifestation of Nazi thinking must have been evident. It was possibly most easily covered by a left wing liberal - as far left as one could go without actually being a communist, a political stance which was the keyed in position selected by the CIA for its arts and humanities funding ⁽³⁰⁾.

It was the preferred position of the university professors funded, boasted of as half the US academic community, but funded by an organization prohibited from operating in the United States itself. How great would the percentage be then, for professors beyond its borders ? It was also the preferred mind set for the journalists, bought outright or kept in the CIA pockets by other means. Because these "other means" are the most effective ones they aren't respected by innocents or the young. They become known through participation in crime, or group bonding, or deep consideration over long periods of time. It's probable that Nazi war criminals once in the States, adopted left wing profiles, so the left wing became a treacherous place for Americans who genuinely cared about humanity.

So it was as though our elders - for those of us born American during the years of World War II - were waiting for us to show ourselves as anti-fascists to be manipulated leader after leader and friend after friend, into positions of political declaration which would assure our deaths when the fascists took off their masks. It is as if the machinery of society was itself a steel trap at the sole service of the corporate rich which would kill off their opposition for asserting simple decencies.

Which is why one returns to thoughts of Operation Phoenix, ICEX, or however the offending agency wished to label the programs which were conceptually an extension of Nazi insistence on identifying each and every Jewish person as a prelude to labelling and attempted extermination. It was an extension of the driving force behind the FBI under Hoover with its need to identify all communists when the file numbers went far beyond any membership of the US Communist Party to include people listed for thinking with any freedom.

The entire program of training death squads for intelligence gathering and extermination duties in South and Central America was also Nazi. These were programs within a normal expectable progression of Third Reich military tactics against civilian zones and occupied territories. They were not acceptable under any common US ethic, and particularly when the US wasn't under attack. So knowledge of such operations and the US role instigating them, was withheld from the public, hidden from the people exactly because it was Nazi.

Colby places the inception of extended intelligence gathering to identify communist leaders - the purpose could only have been from the start, for execution, as early as 1962, when the first Australian and US Seal teams moved into the Cambodian Laos Vietnam regions with their "black operations." ⁽³¹⁾ I've pointed out that the covert programs' inception coincides in force with the Kennedy assassination, while its official phase in Vietnam coincides with the other assassinations. What can't be ruled out is killer team tactics in the four assassinations - particularly JFK's, and probably King's. This would explain why four assassinations of leaders of import, have remained essentially unsolved, and clarifies their intention as a psychological warfare control of the American people.

What the Nazis agreed on

Aside from the long list of murdered witnesses who might have testified about aspects of JFK's death, the basic terrorization of the people by the government relied on law enforcement cooperation and civilian media cooperation as well as upper level State Department and military planning. The only pre-assassination common element of those in opposition to the fallen leaders, may have been their secrecy about Nazi inclusion in US military and covert programs, and the scientific, academic, intelligence and medical communities. The common need to hide the extent and depth of Nazi involvement is the one facet of American life large enough to assure the establishment's cooperation in hiding the truth. The conspiracy already existed for another purpose. All four leaders threatened fascism's hold on an unwitting public and so they were killed.

Entire portions of the people they represented were also killed. If the previous generation accepted and welcomed Nazis into its power while teaching its children of Nazism's horrors, those children became the Vietnam generation and were purposefully placed in a criminal war which destroyed the fighters, tried to break its moral purpose, isolated it from international law, murdered its leaders, and selecting out a power group of those who would cooperate, a group of collaborators who would assure continued profits.

Long range planning to avoid revenge

Why would anyone want to cancel out a generation ? It helps to examine the patterns of controls in actions of those trained by the School of the Americas. Throughout South and Central America merciless policies toward children were viewed as a preventative culling out of future guerillas - when the children were of poor or radical families. The School of the Americas policy might be put most baldly as "preventive murder", to assure there would be no communist challenge in the future, or terrorist challenge, or people's challenge. In tactics of omerta or other Western vengeance, the children are at points killed so they cannot avenge deaths or terminal insults to their parents. Was the war baby generation knocked out then, in fear that they would avenge some terrible wrong to their parents ?

In America, these parents were spared invasion, and spared the bombings and deaths of their families. Less fortunate were those in Europe, the Soviet Union, Nazi occupied countries, Germany and England; these lost millions and millions of men, women and children. Those who died weren't simply the six million Jews in the Holocaust, nor the millions of communists and others caught in the Nazi's death machines - but millions of civilian casualties and soldiers of both sides. And what of Japan and China, Vietnam, Burma, civilians and military as well ? The amount of pure death was substantial.

For the Americans who survived there were the benefits of victory. For most this was translated into economic benefits. For North Americans it was a trial of only some of the men, but what if, as the overwhelming victor of World War II, the US power group was responsible (this is, I think, an essential suggestion of Joseph Heller's Catch 22) ? What if World War II was a US elite's attempt to crush communism ? What if World War II were encouraged so Germany could be used as a defence against Communism internationally ? Would a generation raised in anti-fascism, get in the way of the campaign against communism? If those who fought against Nazi Germany were betrayed by the inclusion of the most criminal Nazis within the US institutions - would the next generation have been crippled to be sure there was no vengeance for the double cross ?

One double cross was from the US controllers of big companies who profited from both the German and US Allied war machines. For example if the management of IBM ⁽³²⁾, Ford, General Motors, Standard Oil - the directors of those companies double crossed the US, and its Allies; they double crossed the Axis powers as well, and all of humanity. Yet their efforts were a strong part of the US economic machinery. In one sense the post war double cross by the US military and State Department in hiring upper level Nazi's and known war criminals, covered a primary crime of capitalism. It is an entry level crime. It is precisely because it is not a crime under capitalist code to profit by selling to both sides of a war, that the system shows itself to be criminal. The benefactors of this crime which encouraged the murder of both Europeans and North American men were the ruling groups of North America.

Anti fascism was apparently a threat to be wiped out, on par with communism. By keeping this secret, capitalism encouraged a generation in lessons of anti-fascism - instructing us in the horrors of the Holocaust's six million, to make us overlook the murders of thirty million others who died in the war, to serve the profits of corporations owned by the very rich. Black among others suggests that the German war machine was financed by US investment funnelled by Dulles into Germany to help it recover from ruin in World War I.

Hitler the criminal then, was simply the standard criminal, of a type that has proliferated with the US School of Americas (with its recently changed name). He was a basic trainer for the world. With the entire Nazi machinery he served the profits of others, without understanding fully his own evil, his human failure, which was hidden from him by a philosophy and code formed and defined in service to a single empowered privileged group which would try to gradually gather the world's wealth. It varied from the policies of pure capitalism in that Hitler's concept of an elite was a racist elite, while capitalism forgives racial difference if it pays enough. Neither understands its own selfishness, nor the finality in its self severance from humanity.

Can you imagine how North America's veterans of World War II would have reacted to the deaths of so many millions more than the death camps, if they learned that singular American power elites were profiting from both sides of the carnage ? What if they learned that US owned German corporations were financing the takeover of countries and ultimately the slaughter of US soldiers, among others. There was a secret there, compounded by the outright hiring and protection of the most criminally insane of the losing side, so they and their expertise might be used against yet more peoples. The elite's game plan was unacceptable, so it was hidden.

In writing of Nixon's rise to political power, the brave Mae Brussell, finds a connection between his work for the Navy Bureau of Aeronautics which was said to be concerned with aircraft firm contracts, and another Navy project: "That year was 1945, when importation proceedings began for the 642 nazi rocket and aerospace experts and scientists from Germany to the US. Through the generosity of the Guggenheim Foundation they obtained a suitable site - a huge medieval castle built by financier Jay Gould on a 160-acre estate at Sands Point, Long Island. Here the Germans began work on a secret project for the Navy's Office of Research and Inventions." ⁽³³⁾

My generation couldn't have accepted such deep compromises with nazis. Its fighters were thrown into a useless and self debilitating war in South East Asia. A portion was purposefully wasted by drugs. Another portion was extinguished through poverty and its often blinding anger. Some tried to work within the establishment. Some accepted the privilege of power and have only taught silence. But if everything were as clear as this, remedies would be simple. The difficulty is that many of the rich are innocent of capitalism's ruthless decisions, and only accede through lack of alternative. Alternatives have been extinguished for this reason. Choice is removed so that succeeding generations will believe that the capitalist reality is the only reality - shifting an entire spectrum of political thinking to the right, simply to protect the crimes of a very few.

Operation Phoenix as just another tactical genocide

The central lesson which emerges from the US War Crimes Hearings that Congressman Dellums conducted in 1971, ⁽³⁴⁾ was the corruption at the officer level in the field during Vietnam. Their obsession with body counts was a practical attention to their means of rank and advancement. But because of it they bartered humanity for the deaths of civilians to augment their "kill." They did this knowingly, and their work was directed by policy, enforced by the demand for body count, and buttressed by the training of troops, propaganda, dehumanization of the Vietnamese people, lack of respect for Vietnamese lives, compounded by the lack of respect for US troops, their lives. The avarice for body count, could be converted fairly simply to pay raises but more than that it seems the affirmation of an ethic which may be unique to capitalist structures where responsibility to the group, to the people under one's care, to morals which sustain long term survival, are coined for self advancement as if that is the nature of the game.

What this suggests is that the military created a war machine in Vietnam which would have little resistance to committing atrocities. The need for "body count" encouraged the murder of civilians. So "black operations" and the continuing terrorization of civilians by the US military, could be sustained in the field by a norm that supported inhumanities.

Operation Phoenix then, although it was a program applied specifically to South East Asia, in its manner of operating, in identifying and murdering civilian leaders and civilians, there was a familiar terror. We saw it before in Nazi Germany, in Poland, Austria, France, wherever the Nazi's took over (and as recent excavations in Poland show ⁽³⁵⁾, sometimes to the joy of the local populations). We've seen it since throughout South and Central America, this phenomenon of military or vigilante round up at night or arrests where the victims are tortured, killed, judicially killed or extra-judicially killed, never seen again. We've seen it wherever the School of the Americas extended its trainees' reach. We've seen it in Indonesia, in East Timor, throughout former Yugoslavia as the World Bank asserted its control. It is terror and it is the key to capitalism's expansion. It is an evolved, tuned, relatively evil piece of work. It requires academic dissociation - the break between thought and feeling - so that morally painful things can be rationalized; it manipulates the spiritual need and impulse of humankind into controls for acquisition of capital; it requires Western civilization's codes of loyalty and order, subservience, duty, honour, be manipulated with the tools of modern science. Above all it requires the ignorance of the people.

These reflections present problems I haven't been able to answer for at least thirty years. My interest is what made us this way. If you consider Operation Phoenix an illegal reign of terror, murder, assassination against a third world people, and then consider it within contexts of ongoing CIA policies, and know the lists are still being made and are always made, and consider it within the contexts of the Third Reich, the Holocaust, how is the murder of peoples who are unpopular, or idealistically committed, any different ? How do you differentiate the brutalities of capitalism's Operation Phoenix from other kinds of tribal massacres which we recognize as primitive and criminal, or the Holocaust, or previously the Turkish massacres of Armenians, or King Leopold's decimation of the Congolese peoples which continued with the 20th century's refinements, or the Hutu Tutsi civilian warfare in Rwanda ?

There is a longstanding political crime occurring - a genocide against people with a singular view of humanity and social responsibility which we've called communism. In South and Central America , in Operation Condor, in Pinochet's Chile - crimes against humanity which found their inception in the think tanks and controls of our language group - one did not have to be a communist to qualify for the death list. It was enough to be anti-capitalist or anti-fascist, or in the case of the Chilean Allende's supporters, believers in and proponents of democracy. Whether Operation Phoenix occurs in Vietnam , Malaysia , East Timor or South and Central America, or in masked and Balkanized forms in Central Europe, or conceivably Dealey Plaza, it is all basically Operation Phoenix: a list of known and suspected Communists or other anti-capitalist group with some resistance to international banking. A rounding up of the listed people; their murder; sometimes this is accomplished without rounding up condemned suspects - as shown by former Senator Bob Kerrey's Seal team raid in Vietnam ⁽³⁶⁾; sometimes the victims are simply confined to ghettos, like Palestinians, where it's easier for death squads to enter and assassinate the political cadre; the entire State of Israel presents its own parallel.

It is a durable program: 1, identifying suspects and putting their names on a list; 2, providing the military with the lists; 3, rounding up the listed or assuring military access to them; 4, the murder. Each of these steps along the way is a crime as part of a larger crime. It is the standard pattern of extra-judicial murder, sanctioned, put in place, and activated. Because these steps are part of a program, the outcome is always the same; the outcome is always criminal; it is always a crime against humanity; it is sometimes a genocide; we must realize that any step along the way is part of that process and is implication in a crime, and complicity in a crime, collaboration with a crime, and whether or not it seems possible for justice to ever be restored - eventually it must be understood as a crime. To maintain our humanity we have to commit ourselves to interrupting the crime at its early stages.

Emergency management planning

Different incomes isolate people within specific information groups. US working people and the middle class were not aware of Operation Phoenix until it was discussed by the Church Commission ⁽³⁷⁾. Informed groups of US civilians, ie. university professors, and some were moral people - WWII officers, serious anti-fascists, humanists, if confronted with history's records of Operation Phoenix would have condemned it.

But if errors of policy, the sometimes terrible mistakes of a political system, become institutionalized as an operative crime, then life cannot be business as usual. Once you foresee and expect the crime, you can't simply hope for change. You have to decide your relationship to the ongoing crime.

What we know in 2001 about emergency planning under the US FEMA(Federal Emergency Management Act) and the Civil Disturbances Acts, are A. that if we reveal anything about them we become liable to being put on the list. Under emergency procedures we could conceivably be shot according to the discretion of the local Army commander. ⁽³⁸⁾

Bits and pieces of procedural guidelines are emerging from Freedom of Information Act Requests. As US society has moved surely to the right which I believe was the intention of the assassinations in the Sixties, and as power was more surely transferred to the elites, preparations were made which parallel this stripping of power from the people, with ways to control objections and make claims on what belongs to the people. So the Federal Emergency Management Act and Civil Disturbances Acts provide all means necessary to suppress mass protest by the people. These outlaw Constitutional rights. The acts provide whoever is in charge of the machinery of government, absolute authority, denying all citizens human rights. The Acts permit extra-judicial killing, separation of families, group incarceration, concentration camps, and suspension of habeas corpus. The tools are there for a ruthless suppression of dissent or any attempt to balance unjust authority. The language of the documents as revealed shows a familiar bias against "non-conformists" who can be specifically targeted for arrest and internment, as well as "dissidents," dissenters, and those who question authority. None of these targeted categories suggest that criminal acts are required for arrest or death.

The recent "USA Patriot Act" as part of an ongoing program to strip powers from the judicial system, is possibly providing a way to implement the next stage of what is basically military control.

My understanding of available material on FEMA is that the targeting of emergency management victims is specifically aimed at anti-fascists. It favours right wing forces of law and order. In other words it is a political rather than non-partisan public service. So it suggests a takeover of a democracy by direct threat against necessary positions of opposition within a democracy. It removes "freedom of expression" from the US Constitution, providing the State with a means of retribution against an individual's political beliefs. So the people are afraid to speak out against the Civil Disturbances Acts. They are afraid of being placed on the lists for internment. 2. They are afraid of being murdered outright, as their leaders were. 3. They are conditioned by the U.S. media to be more frightened of dissenting groups or legal political protest, than they are of a total suspension of civil liberties.

Historically what happens is, violent dissent is created and orchestrated by government agents, so the majority of the citizens will say all troublemakers should be arrested. As everyone's normal rights are gradually suspended, the government's power increases to award wealth to its friends.

Under Emergency Management and Civil Disturbances Acts are any legal limits at all placed on those who suspend the peoples' rights ? Why do governments need the right to entirely suspend a civilian population's human rights ? These are rights which were not given by the government.

Emergency management acts are unnecessary for people responding to a natural catastrophe. In a natural disaster people look to their elected government and its authorities, for help. Even in New York City, everyone volunteers to help. If emergency acts are meant to mobilize a population under attack, they would first assure the population of its rights and of the government's first responsibility to its people. But US emergency management and civil disturbances acts seem to have as their sole concern, an imposition of rule by force on a civilian population; in a democracy that is a crime. So no wonder so much of the emergency management materials are kept secret.

Human rights exist whether any particular government tries to strip them away or not. They exist because we are all human beings.

The United Nations compromised itself when government representatives agreed to include provisions in a number of the basic human rights texts, allowing abrogation of some rights which leads to the abrogation of others - in times of a country's national emergency ⁽³⁹⁾. One mistake was in insisting that power is imposed from the top down - rather than rising from the people. Another was in supposing that a government would not create a national emergency in order to effect illegal policies.

Take the issue of forced labour. The United Nations allows this option in civil emergencies. The US FEMA/ Civil Disturbances Acts allow this in declared civil emergencies when these acts come in to play. Yet there is no excuse for it. Any nation which has forced its citizens by law to work as slave labourers, has done something wrong, and by this act would commit a crime against humanity. Most simply if there is a need in an emergency and the people refuse to help or volunteer, it means they are oppressed. If forced, then they are made slaves.

What is conspicuously absent then from US emergency acts is any mention of the rights of the people - the civilians, from whom the power to make such acts was taken. The powerful have the means to pass or interpret some law to say that this power was taken away quite legally, but it is nevertheless a robbery and without reasonable need, except the obvious need of a small elite to oppress. No government in this new century can protect its land and society by forcing its population to slave labour. Or interning its minorities or dissidents because of the way they/we think. In other words the Acts are a purposeful and conscious threat to all the people. I think it is unwise to threaten a people with all the ultimate injustices known to humanity, simply for better business advantage. Particularly when the people founded the government to assure them freedom.

As I understand it, it is a threat that offers no quarter and imposes no limits on the military's actions. It offers no recourse. So it is clearly fascist. I do not know of any system of political power which claims the right to absolute power over its people, that isn't totalitarian. Every other political system has had to factor in the possibility however remote, of revolution - the people's final refusal of unjust rule or policy.

So those who have drawn up emergency acts and placed them into law are mistaken, possibly guilty of taking over the people's power without mandate, and possibly guilty of hiding this from the people. It is hard for us to believe that they intend to harm or frighten the people to the point of terror.

The difficulty is history. And the difficulty is "Operation Phoenix." It is the history of Colby's agents collecting the names of Communist cadre throughout South East Asia so these could be turned in to Army units. What innate racism makes us think that as North Americans we are immune to these terrors ? To repeat, within the US, J. Edgar Hoover began the same procedure of identifying and collecting the names of suspected communists in 1948 and the lists were expanded to include databanks of all people who were outside a fairly strict right wing if not Nazi parameter during Vietnam. Under Nixon, Army units were permitted to spy on civilian citizens within the States. So in fact the same preparedness for identifications, location, internment or covert apprehension and death - which we found in Chile, Operation Phoenix, East Timor, were and are set up within the United States itself and on a path that is currently chosen, would be allowed application under law.

The weakening and possible abrogation of the "United Nations Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide," coincided with the development of the US Emergency Management and/or Civil Disturbances Acts.

The "Reservations" - "Declarations" and "Understandings" made by the US at its ratification of the UN treaty, make legal loopholes by which a nation which wished to commit genocide might be spared the Convention's punishment. Or deflect it. The US has offered the same ambivalence on partnership in the Rome Treaty for the International Criminal Court, and by signing may simply have signalled its commitment to maintaining control of mechanisms of international justice.

What I'm suggesting is that the US State Department has developed a threat against the American people among others, a way for the government to find a portion of its people "missing", and escape repercussions at international law. Why would it want to do that ? Because of its history for forty years of instigating genocides against other countries with minorities, and specifically against people suspected of communism, and because the US has compiled its own lists of its own suspected communists, dissidents, and nonconformists, the possibility of a domestic genocide is there, suggesting the intention of genocide on the part of the political leadership which put it in place. So there it is. I didn't ask to be aware of this. I see no personal gain writing this. Simply it would be wrong to understand what I understand, and not share that, so we all as people might find a way to deal with what threatens us.

The threat of genocide under US emergency management

If society moves ahead as it is, without radically reforming corporate capitalism, without distribution of wealth, without jobs with rights, then the result will be a continued genocide of the poor. That is happening now. It is a continuum, a corollary of capitalism, yet always disguised in other perspectives. Capitalism is simply legalized abuse of humanity at its best, and mass murder/genocide at its worst. As wealth becomes increasingly isolated in a smaller percent of the population, the means of protecting this wealth will become brutal and more and more criminal. If its acquisition is criminal, its maintenance will not suddenly go to church.

Since most people would privately agree that arms sales to both sides of the same war is a crime against humanity, profiteers wouldn't show profit if modern democracies represented the people. So criminally acquired wealth is inherently criminal to protect itself, which might clarify our thinking about the Third Reich. A people's government requires neither storm troopers nor concentration camps. Nor wars nor accumulation of foreign wealth. The Third Reich required heavy machinery of protection - from its own people, it was protecting investments of American wealth - extra-legally in terms of World War I treaties forbidding Germany's rearmament. It was protecting as well its own industrialists' wealth, and portions of Europe's.

What historical example suggests for the future is that the distillation of extreme wealth will be accomplished - 1. by diminishing the actual numbers of people, particularly in the Third World countries; historically that has been accomplished by war, plague, deprival of local production of food; 2. by driving more people into poverty as a prelude to existence without human rights; 3. by increasingly isolating people from each other so they/we can't work toward or protect common interests; 4. by increasingly isolating government from the people; this is done partly by high government salaries, "buying" elected officials into representing the interests of the wealthy rather than constituent poor, and encouraging control of the people for the benefit of trade; 5. by increasing control of information so the sensibilities of the wealthy don't suffer from the effects of their policies.

Within this perspective, race or minority specific diseases such as AIDS or Ebola in Africa, appear to be warfare agents rather than sudden coincidence. Similarly the uses of genetically altered materials in foods without knowing their longterm effect, the exposure to electromagnetic radiation fields, as well as to various kinds of radioactivity , all lessen the number of people which wealth might have to contend with. Where these are knowingly applied against a grouping of humanity - there may be some recourse for humanity in the Convention on Genocide.

The lessons of Operation Phoenix and its fellow CIA programs throughout the past century are that the US can no longer make serious claim to care for anti-fascism. All aspects of the society, as well as the literary, art, cultural, and entertainment worlds are subject to the threats of terminal incarceration without rights - at the discretion of a President who might declare a National Emergency that gives local military commanders absolute authority. You might understand why US Senators and Representatives would vote repressive legislation as an alternative to losing any legal authority.

An immediate difficulty is that current US policies against third world countries weaken domestic defences against genocide. The defences have always been in question or the sterilization of so many First Nations women would never have been accomplished in the Seventies and Eighties. There is and would be at least moral resistance to identifiable genocide, but the ways to legally counter genocide are in doubt. There is technically a law against genocide on the books, but my experience is that it is impossible for individual citizens to bring any laws against genocide to bear on the policies of the United States. It isn't only that you are up against the full force of capitalism but against the fabric of a society formed in part throughout all the Americas by the genocide of its First Peoples.

Individual lawyers can't stand against corrupt police interests, much less government conspiracies to deal arms or drugs, mount covert operations, or commit genocide, which is why international application of the Convention on Genocide is necessary, and why the US has blocked its direct application domestically, except where the US government permits. And even if someone tried to use the US domestic genocide law to limit FEMA procedures, the Army would probably use the legal defence that domestic laws are specifically suspended and replaced with military authority when emergency management procedures are in effect.

Domestic laws against genocide in both the US and Canada, prove to be something of a puzzle, since they are there but everyone pretends they aren't. Under the US Code the law defines the crimes as the United Nations does. ⁽⁴⁰⁾ As far as I know, Canadian extant law on genocide is currently confined to advocating and incitement ⁽⁴¹⁾. However I am not a lawyer. Canada has accepted, signed and ratified the Convention on Genocide without reservation, and I would hope that any direct breach of the Convention, domestically, would be dealt with under domestic law which has a keen sense of international law. Yet in both countries, in practice, the individual's moral defence against genocide finds no representation that I know of.

Domestic laws against genocide, and international law against genocide, have had no effect at all on the United States or Canada's involvement in the documentable offences of genocide, mutually attended in Iraq, or Serbia. The current bombing of Afghanistan at a point when its people need massive humanitarian assistance to survive, may suggest that the Convention on Genocide is being ignored.

Since the machinery for domestic genocide is in place, since information gathering aspects of Operation Phoenix have taken place in the US, since there is some likelihood that the assassinations of the Sixties and betrayal of democracy were accomplished by Operation Phoenix directives, since US military and CIA policy (despite President Truman's direct orders) purposefully recruited Nazi war criminals to serve their own interests in numbers more vast than anyone previously imagined, and since covert war programs throughout the Americas can be provably traced to CIA direction and School of the Americas training, and since these would be declared deeply criminal under international law, the perpetrators will try to find non-legal, non-judicial protections which are likely to involve more war crimes.

Since all these conditions pre-exist, and with a machinery for genocide constructed and enforceable within the US by its Civil Disturbances and Emergency Management Acts, and since application of these is eased by new "anti-terrorist" legislation, and since the minds of the people are increasingly subject to techniques of information warfare which hide the truth and bend democracies to corporate rulers' needs, we should recognize that there is a threat to the entire people, consciously created so that there is no recourse to law, so the threat is specifically the US government's threat of genocide against its own people, if there is overly strong dissent. Acute parallels to this are forming in several NATO countries.

Precedent suggests that it is more than a mechanism of psychological warfare attempting to terrorize dissent in democracy.

I think the United States should be internationally challenged with a Genocide warning, since the first steps of a conspiracy to commit genocide have already occurred. Those who have effected the first steps of emergency management regulations that suspend human rights of any ethnically defined group of civilians, should be prosecuted. Any portions of the laws should be struck down when they permit any military or law enforcement action which deprives people of basic human rights. Every country's defence is its people.

Or to approach this from another angle: North American universities have in a sense ceded the academic field of "History," to the CIA, and its funders at the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation as well as all the foundations funnelling covert intelligence funding into academia that we don't know about. When one thinks of the takeover of Indonesia in 1965, and the murder of either a half or full million Indonesians who were loyal to the people or actual Communists...as an act of madness it would have thrown the country into economic turmoil. But an economic elite to take over in just such an event, had been specifically trained at MIT, Cornell, and Berkeley, through funding of the Ford and Rockefeller foundations at the disposal of the CIA. ⁽⁴²⁾In other words the genocide was the direct result of a US corporate program, orchestrated with US government funding. To give some idea of the scope of this program I quote directly from David Ransom's definitive essay: "Other institutions joined the Ford economists in preparing the military. High-ranking Indonesian officers had begun US training programs in the mid-'50s. By 1965 some four thousand officers had learned big-scale army command at Fort Leavenworth and counterinsurgency at Fort Bragg. Beginning in 1962, hundreds of visiting officers at Harvard and Syracuse gained the skills for maintaining a huge economic, as well as military, establishment, with training in everything from business administration and personnel management to air photography and shipping." ⁽⁴³⁾

There is no moral, ethical, or legal check on corporate planning by the powerful. The terrorization by psychological warfare techniques which Scott has discussed has become an economic weapon, to be used for the profit of the few. The militaries are in service to the corporate ethic.

It would be unwise not to recognize the threat of all emergency management acts and openly discuss them, and subject them as well to the laws of human rights.

**************

Footnotes

1. This is substantiated by the work of Peter Dale Scott,"Using Atrocities: U.S. Responsibility for the Slaughters in Indonesia and East Timor," 1998. http://www.copi.com/deepbook.html (June 2001), who states: "By the time of the 1965 coup, over 4000 Indonesian officers had been trained in the United States; and almost half of the officer corps had received some kind of training from the Americans." Citing footnote #52. Peter Dale Scott, "The United States and the Overthrow of Sukarno, 1965-1967," Pacific Affairs, 58 (Summer 1985), 248.

2. According to an article of May 19, 1990, Spartanburg South Carolina Herald-Journal reprinted May 20, 1990, San Francisco Examiner, and May 21, 1990, Washington Post, and May 23, 1990, Boston Globe.

3. To note here then, exceptional people in uniform: helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson,with Larry Colburn and Glenn Andreotta, who landed to stop Lt. Calley's massacre of villagers at My Lai (Nat Hentoff "The Americans Who Stopped My Lai," Village Voice, posting of May 25, 2001, citing CBS Sixty Minutes, Mike Wallace, May 6, 2001 rebroadcast of March 1998). Also worthy of note, "The Dellums Committee Hearings on War Crimes in Vietnam, April 25-29, 1971, and the veterans and few Congressmen who appeared during the course of the hearings: Capt. Fred Laughlin, Dr.Gordon Livingston, Captain Robert B. Johnson, Capt. Greg Hayward, Capt. Ron Bartek, Capt. Michael O'Mera, Daniel Barnes, Gary Battles, Daniel Notley, John Beitzel, Guadalupe G. Villarreal, Kenneth Campbell, Thomas Cole, Randy Floyd, Charles Locke, Elliot L. Meyrowitz, Terry Mullen, Steve Padoris, William Toffling, a non-veteran writer-John Sack, Congressman Reuss, Congressman Donald W.Riegle from Michigan, Congressman Don Edwards from California, Congressman Herman Badillo from New York, Congressman Frank Ryan of New York, Congresswoman Bella S. Abzug of New York, Congressman Parren Mitchell from Baltimore, Congressman John Conyers, Jr. from Michigan, Congressman John F. Seiberling from Ohio, Congresswoman Mink from Hawaii, Congressman Ed Koch of New York, Congressman James Abourezk, Congressman Phillip Burton, Jr, Congressman Benjamin S. Rosenthal, Congressman Jonathan B. Bingham from NY, Congressswoman Shirley Chisholm, Congressmen Robert W. Kastenmeier of Wisconsin, Congressman Abner J.Mikva, Congresman Don Edwards, Congressman Ronald V. Dellums ( "Vietnam War History files, AOL" http://members.aol.com/warlibrary/vwch1.htm June 2001).

4. Scott. Ibid. and ref. Footnote #131, noting the role of the American Embassy, Jakarta, officials during the massacres, supplying lists of Communist party members marked for death.

5. Peter Dale Scott's essay (ibid.) points out that the CIA's Lansdale instituted a "Civic Action" program in 1955 in Vietnam, to provide cover for Special Forces black operations, citing endnote #145 Valentine, The Phoenix Program, 27.

6. Date: 19 Feb 1996 11:58:48 -0500, "CIA and Operation Phoenix in Vietnam" Ralph McGehee.

7. Ref. Edwin Black. IBM and the Holocaust. (Crown, 2001). passim., notes the transfer of Dehomag, a CTR licensee in Germany, to the American company CTR in 1922. German interests retained only 10%. CTR became IBM in 1924, and Dehomag was its German subsidiary. It became the tool of German statisticians serving the Nazis. Pp.43-44.

8. Jim Huck, "FBI Book 3 Chapter 10" http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/jphuck/BOOK3Ch10.html. As of June, 2001, this material has been reformulated to "Book 3 Chapter 14" at http://www.angelfire.com/ca3/jphuck/rightframe.html

9. Ibid.

10. Edwin Black. IBM and the Holocaust. Crown, 2001. Ibid.

11. Date: 19 Feb 1996 11:58:48 -0500, "CIA and Operation Phoenix in Vietnam," Ralph McGehee's bibliography noting "Toohey, B., & Pinwill, W. (1990). Oyster: The Story of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service 87-88.

12. Recent evidence in French court suggests the role of French military officers in the training of Argentine Army and officials in torture and psywar operations. Susan Bell, "French Taught Torture to Argentines." TheScotsman.co.ukm June 15,2001.

13. "Did Science Create a Genetic Genocide Machine ?" New Dawn Magazine. http://aidsbiowar.com/printpage.htm. Noting in particular the DOD Appropriations Hearings for 1969, Dr. MacArthur's request for development of a virus to destroy the human immune system; Dr. Campbell's report on Africa, considerable other updated evidence on AIDS as an engineered biological warfare disease.

14. "Africa Panel Probes Science Horrors," by Paul Harris, AP-NY-06-11-98 1553EDT

15. Leonard G. Horowitz, Capitol Mall, Washington D.C., Labor Day Weekend, 1996, "Kissinger and Rockefeller Connections to American Central Intelligence and the Origins of AIDS and Ebola." Available through http://www.tetrahedron.org,/ in 1998.

16. US PATENT 4,877,027--HEARING SYSTEM. See Rense.com, "Actual Patents Of Mind Control And Behavior Modification Technology," Compiled by Theresa de Veto, SURFING THE APOCALYPSE, at "http://www.surfingtheapocalypse.com" and "http://www.surfingtheapocalypse.com/intelligence2.html#patentscontrol," 8-25-00.

17. De Veto, ibid. ie. US PATENT 4,858,612 - HEARING DEVICE.

18. "The Depraved Spies and Moguls of the CIA's Operation MOCKINGBIRD," by Alex Constantine. Constantine was on this early and well. An internet classic this work remains currently available through most search engines (June 2001)

19. J.B.Gerald, Dissident Accounts, New York, author published, 1980, "The Dove" p.7.

20. See C.D.Stelzer's, "Reasonable Doubt." Riverfront Times, April 2, 1997; http://home.stlnet.com/~cdstelzer/mlk6.html .

21. According to Huck in "FBI Book 3 Chapter 10," ASA teams were used illegally and extensively to monitor civilian radio waves during Dr. King's "Poor People's Crusade" and "Resurrection City" actions in Washington, of May, 1968.

22. Huck, "FBI Book 3 Chapter 19".

23. One of the best early descriptions of this process is "Population Control, Nazis, and the U.N.!" - by Anton Chaitkin, in "The Omega File." The Omega file, carries a heavy cover of extravagant UFO information which may impede some researchers' consideration. On checking, facts of Chaitkin's observations are continually verified by other sources. Or try current search engine information on "Operation Paperclip."

24. Chaitkin, ibid.

25. Webster G. Tarpley & Anton Chaitkin, George Bush: The Unauthorized Biography. "Chapter III - Race Hygience: Three Bush Family Alliances."

26. Edwin Black, IBM and the Holocaust. Ibid. The thesis succinctly presented on page 22, is established with authority in subsequent pages.

27. Edwin Black. Ibid.

28. Anton Chaitkin, ibid. Many of his works remain online.

29. Edwin Black. Ibid. p.47. "The government of our Fuhrer and Reichschancellor Adolph Hitler is statistics-friendly," Friedrich Zahn, President, Bavarian Statistical Office, 1939.

30. F.S. Saunders. Who Paid the Piper, London, Granta, 1999. Pp 62-63 ("Indeed for the CIA, the strategy of promoting the Non-Communist Left was to become 'the theoretical foundation of the Agency's political operations against Communism over the next two decades.'" c. 1948. Saunders footnotes Michael Warner, "Origins of the Congress for Cultural Freedom," Studies in Intelligence vol.38/5, Summer, 1995).

31. Spartanburg, ibid; others.

32. Edwin Black. Ibid. pp.423-425 notes IBM's reclaiming of inventory and the New York HQ's eventual reclamation of its German affiliate.

33. Mae Brussell, "How Nixon Actually Got Into Power, The Realist, August, 1972.

34. "Dellums Committee Hearings on War Crimes in Vietnam." April 25-29, 1971
Caucus Room, Cannon House Office Bdlg, http://members.aol.com/warlibrary/vwch1.htm; passim.

35. Warsaw Poland, Associated Press. "Mass Polish Grave Probe Continues," by Monika Scislowska,AP-NY-06-04-01 1549EDT.

36. CBS News "Sixty Minutes." May 1, 2001.

37. "Results of the Hearings on CIA misdeeds, 1973 Church Committee." NCOIC (http://pw2.netcom.com/~ncoic/cia_info.htm).

38. See complete and online version 5 August 2000: http://cryptome.org/garden-plot.htm; Frank Morales, "U.S. Military Civil Disturbance Planning: the War at Home. Covert Action Quarterly #68, Spring/Summer 2000.

39. For example, "The International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights," Part III, Article 12, #3 : "The above-mentioned rights shall not be subject to any restrictions except those which are provided by law, are necessary to protect national security, public order (ordre public), public health or morals or the rights and freedoms of others, and are consistent with the other rights recognized in the present Covenant." United Nations Texts: Common Rights and Expectations (Ottawa: Gerald and Maas, 1996). Currently available online at www.nightslantern.ca/01.htm.

40. "The Proxmire Act of 1987." US Code, Title 18, Part 1, Chapter 50A, Section 1091.

41. Department of Justice. Canada - Criminal Code 318 & 319.

42. David Ransom, "Ford Country: Building an Elite for Indonesia." Steve Weissman, ed.,w. Pacific Studies Center and the North American Congress on Latin America, The Trojan Horse: A Radical Look at Foreign Aid. Palo Alto, Ramparts Press, 1975 (rev.). Pp. 93-116 (http://www.cia-on-campus.org).

43. Ransom, Ibid.. With footnote to Michael Max Ehrmann, The Indonesian Military in the Politics of Guided Democracy, 1957-1965, unpublished Masters thesis (Cornell University, Ithaca, New York, September 1967), p. 296, citing Col. George Benson (US Army), US military attachéé in Indonesia 1956-1960.

Copyright © 2001, by John Bart Gerald

First Posted, Gerald and Maas, Night's Lantern, November 13, 2001
Author posted, Dec. 1, 2001
Author corrected, June 16, 2002.

gerald and maas