Holte's corner

Dirty War!

I was at a birthday party for a friend. He's doing pretty well actually. But he told how as a young student he lived in Chile during the Repression. He was lucky actually. He took a song, written by a famous poet and put it to music, and then sang it on the campus. It's a lovely song. But the song was a criticism of oppression, and that was wrong. He was fortunate. All they did was to expell him from school and force him to flee to other countries. He wound up in the United States and eventually married a lady lawyer who fell in love with him. Years later he's alive, and Pinochet is dead. He's fortunate. He survived the ConoSur (Southern Cone States of South America) based "dirty war." He celebrated with a Mexican writer and poet, and we all ate fish and feasted and listened to his songs.

We like to think that we don't oppress, that we are champions of democracy and that we enjoy unique freedoms. And all my life I've known such champions of democracy. Some of them democrats, some democratic socialists, and of course some of them people who once gave their allegience to communism. I learned the discipline of talking to people in the Gakkai. We were trying to do Shakubuku, but I was told the best way to do that was to dialogue with people. After a while I realized that trying to convert people required a level of presumption I couldn't afford spiritually, but I never gave up the spirit of talking to people. And I'm richer for it. My friend sang lovely songs.

Most of these people who I sometimes lamblast as ideologues; left and right, are idealistic and peaceful folks. The folks who had any dreams of acting like Che Guevara or taking up arms, well I've never met and would probably not be willing to have a prolonged conversation with if I did meet. There is a book out there called "the war between academia and capitalism." Most of the lefties I've ever met were academics, or clerics; monks and nuns; devoting to feeding the poor, healing the sick and counseling the unhappy.

But they weren't at war with capitalism. Not most of them and certainly not literally. Most of them wouldn't know what to do with a gun if they held one. They were simply people who had a sense of what is right for society. They wanted things like universal health care, decent education for children and an end to poverty. Some loathed it, the way that Libertarians are at war with Government. Being at war with an idea presents an impossible situation. Idealism usually involves confusing abstracts with realities and framing reality based on impossible standards. You always get a hint when the defense for something not working is that it wasn't a "pure enough" application. These people were harmless cranks at worst.

But various societies have been at war with them. In Chile people like my friend Jose were arrested in the middle of the night and carried off to hidden prisons where they were tortured and killed. Simply for being idealistic. The Government was afraid of 5 day work-weeks, daycare, health care, "nanny state" and took measures to make sure that nobody would be happy or secure in response. The Socialists might have had a theoretical war against capitalism, but the capitalists responed with a real war, a dirty war. They weren't afraid of Communists. They were afraid of worker rights, of 5 day work weeks, of benefits for sick people, of having to keep promises made during advertizing. They killed priests and nuns for trying to help the poor. The rich and powerful were afraid of being generous and sharing.

When I first read articles like the following;
http://www.theatlantic.com/issues/98dec/elsalv.htm, I didn't believe them. But now I see they were all too true.

Dirty war is not just police state, it is official lawlessness. It is where the methods of intelligence collection, of spying, extracting confessions, secret trials, secret evidence, terror, and total control are applied to repress a movement, a set of ideas, or simply people who are different from those in control. It relies on severe, but hidden, ill intentions to be successful. It was / is state terrorism, usually levied against invisible "terrorists" and an invisible "terrorist threat." It is "counter insurgency" as performed by CIA and special forces, under a very brutal and cynical set of strategies:

http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article9308.htm

And when we went into Gitmo, the expression was the "Salvadorean solution" after the dirty war there. Well the advisors for the El Salvador effort came from Argentina and France, and other places, and the El Salvador Effort was also tied to El Salvador's neighbors; Guatemala and Nicaragua. The Salvadorean solution was "dirty warfare." Extralegal detentions. People being shot in the back of the head by lawless police officers working for anonymous "spooks." And this stuff doesn't lead to good "intelligence" or good outcomes:

Cheney said in 2004 Gitmo detainees revealed Iraq-al Qaida link
By Jonathan S. Landay | McClatchy Newspapers

"WASHINGTON — Then-Vice President Dick Cheney, defending the invasion of Iraq, asserted in 2004 that detainees interrogated at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp had revealed that Iraq had trained al Qaida operatives in chemical and biological warfare, an assertion that wasn't true...

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/227/story/68315.html?storylink=omni_popular
Now we know that he was able to make these assertions because people captured in the war on Terror were tortured until they told his interrogators what they wanted to hear.

http://snipurl.com/ic739

We are now learning that much of what we learned from the 9/11 report, from the administration, from various other sources, relied on faulty sources; torture.

http://deepbackground.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2008/01/30/624314.aspx

http://www.houghtonmifflinbooks.com/catalog/titledetail.cfm?titleNumber=1098832

This is profoundly dangerous material. It's not something that we can move on from easily. Once people start breaking the law at the direction of authority, once officials get impunity, the natural progression is for them to exercise it with more and more impunity, and on behalf of their business associates. The danger isn't that we'll have a Government that is suddenly Fascist or ruled by a dictator, but that we will have a Government that serves business leaders and no longer listens to any of us. Judging from Obama's current behavior, we may already have that Government. If so, then this administration could be a mere partial respite from an authoritarian Corporatocratic dictatorship where the President is just a figure-head, Congress an adornment, and the real power lies with others working behind the scenes. When that happens we may find ourselves targeted by the same means that were used against "Communists" in other countries, Moslems in our own country. Is being a "liberal" next on the list?

This has to be prevented, and the only way to stop it is to keep pushing until all the evidence has been released, perpetrators punished, and the policies are changed. And yes I'd like to see Cheney in an Orange Jumpsuit. But even more importantly I'd like to see those officers who practice "counter-insurgency" of this type put to pasture and this sort of machievellian policy ended. It makes me far more nervous to see torture rewarded by Obama. General McChrystal should be the one retired, not General McKierney. Special Ops have a place, but there is no place for sheep dipping and torture in winning wars. And he is famous for the misbehavior of Task force 6-26.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_McChrystal

Chris