The American Emire since world war II
There is nothing at all new or original about this entire debate about whether the United States is a republic or an empire, or indeed a republican empire. During the years of the Vietnam War and for two decades afterward, there was a major historical debate between the revisionists like William Appleman Williams and Gabriel Kolko and realists like John Lewis Gaddis over the exact same questions, and the revisionists in that debate were rephrasing the same ideas as an earlier generation of Progressive historians like Charles Beard. For that matter, people were arguing the republic versus empire question back in the days of Mark twain and William Jennings Bryan—or of Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams for that matter. Given the recent catastrophe of the Bush II presidency, the capitalist meltdown and the ongoing disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, it was inevitable that there would be yet another spate of books about the American Empire and the roots of its foreign policy. All three books used in this essay: Stephen Kinzer’s Overthrow, Chalmers Johnson’s The Sorrows of Empire, and The Secret Histories by John S. Friedman are all unabashedly of the revisionist-Progressive-anti-imperialist school, and uncompromising in the view that the United States is indeed and empire. They have marshaled a tremendous amount of evidence to prove their case, most of it very familiar to students of American history.
Stephen Kinzer’s book Overthrow describes how the U.S. government carried regime change in twelve countries long before the term became popular, starting with Hawaii in1893 and ending with Iraq in 2003. In the first part, “The Imperial Era”, he discusses the America takeover of Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Nicaragua”, when the United States behaved like an old-style empire, no different from Britain, France, Germany or Japan. After World War II, its empire was much larger but its methods of maintaining and expanding changed, which is why he calls the second part of the book “Covert Action”.
In 1963, for example, the Kennedy administration believed that President Ngo Dinh Diem was so corrupt and unpopular that he was about to lose the war in South Vietnam, and might even attempt to negotiate with Ho Chi Minh in the North, so John F. Kennedy approved his overthrew by the South Vietnamese military in November 1963, just three weeks before his own assassination in Dallas (Kinzer, pp.207-10). In recently declassified audio tapes obtained by the National Security Archive, Kennedy was considering a coup against Diem as early as August 1963, and “agreed with other senior U.S. officials that under the existing Saigon leadership there was no chance of success in the Vietnam War.” He stated that “We’re up to our hips in mud out there” and that Congress would be “mad” if he supported a coup by the generals, but “they’ll be madder if Vietnam goes down the drain” (National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 302. 2009).
Another important example was the overthrow or Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 by the CIA in Operation Ajax, after he had angered the British and American governments by nationalizing the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (renamed British Petroleum after the coup). American backing for the Shah for the next twenty-five years had the unintended consequence of stimulating an Islamic Revolution led by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1978-79, and the U.S. is still living with the fallout from Operation Ajax (Kinzer, 117-28; 200-01). In 2000, the National Security Archive received a CIA after-action report of the coup. Written by Donald Wilber in March 1954 which had been “long-sought by historians”, especially as the Agency had claimed to have destroyed most of the records on Operation Ajax in the 1960s—a supposedly “unauthorized” act of destruction. In its lessons learned section, Wilber’s report singled out the Communications and Psychological Warfare (PW) Senior Staff for special commendation, who had worked a great deal of overtime and “displayed commendable zeal”. It also noted that the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) “was quite ready to act as the junior partner in this operation”, and that the CIA operatives were convinced that when faced “with a choice between following the orders of the Shah or those of Mossadeq, the rank and file of the army and its officers would obey the Shah” (National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 28. 2000). James Risen found that “the Shah’s cowardice nearly killed the CIA operation. Fearful of risking his throne, the Shah repeatedly refused to sign CIA-written royal decrees to change the government” and “still fled the country just before the coup succeeded” (Risen, 2000, New York Times Special Report).
After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the U.S. government launched the largest CIA operation in history to support the guerillas and insurgents battling the Red Army. Once again, it did not consider the long-term consequences of its actions, and its ‘allies’ Pakistan and Saudi Arabia used American money to support the Taliban and other jihadists, with results that came back to haunt America on September 11, 2001. This leads to the final part of the book in which he covers direct military action in Grenada, Panama, Iraq and Afghanistan, which resemble a return to the old-style, direct imperialism of 1890-1930, and, except for Grenada in 1983, examples of post-Cold War hubris. For Kinzer, the reasons for this type of foreign policy include the desire of presidents to appear tough and decisive, especially at election time, corporate interests that want to control markets and raw materials overseas, ignorance, arrogance and short-term thinking among policymakers, such as Henry Kissinger saying that nothing of importance ever came out of the Southern Hemisphere in history after the CIA overthrew President Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973 (Kinzer, pp. 173-78).
Chalmers Johnson wrote that the United States today is like the Roman Empire, which was originally a republic but turned into a militaristic dictatorship as it gradually acquired more bases and colonies abroad, and like the Caesar’s, American presidents have the right to wage wars wherever and whenever they want without having to give much thought to the Senate (Congress). Indeed, the U.S has become constantly more aggressive, arrogant and openly imperialistic since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-91 and claimed credit for “winning” the Cold War, even though the real reasons for the demise of the Soviets were internal, especially their failed economy and Mikhail Gorbachev’s desire to end the Cold War and become part of the European Community. In all this, American leaders “did not have either the information or imagination to grasp what was happening” (Johnson, p. 19).
Once the Cold War was over and it no longer had containment of Russia as cover for maintaining its empire, the U.S. had to find new enemies and threats to justify the existence of its empire, such as Iraq, Iran, North Korea, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism. Johnson exaggerates when he writes that in 1989-2002 “there was a revolution in America’s relations with the rest of the world”, since much of its foreign policy was really not all that different from the past fifty or one hundred years (Johnson, p. 22). To be sure, with the USSR gone, its sense of unilateralism increased culminating in the aggressively imperialistic administration of George W. Bush. After September 11, 2001, Bush asserted that the United States would take military action around the world anywhere it deemed necessary and overthrow any government it perceived to be hostile, and would even use nuclear weapons on Iraq, Iran, Syria, and North Korea if they got out of line (Johnson, p. 283). There was nothing particularly new about any of this, apart from the open and brazen way the American president expressed himself on this subject.
In the 19th Century, when it conquered the West, exterminated the Native Americans and annexed half of Mexico, the United States was a traditional empire like every other in history. This changed in the 20th Century, though, especially after World War II. It only had a few outright colonies like Hawaii, Puerto Rica, the Panama Canal Zone, Guam and the Philippines, while most of its empire was informal and indirect, ruling through proxies, client states and friendly dictators. In addition, it built a chain of military bases all over the world, which became American enclaves, insulated from the host countries through Status of Forces Agreements (SOFA’s). These mini-states were “consumerist Sparta’s” that taught “American youth arrogance and racism” for others outside their military caste (Johnson, p. 25). Assorted think tanks, global corporations, high tech companies and bureaucrats all earned their livings from this empire, which is why it has endured for decades.
Johnson agrees with Kinzer that the preventative war against Iraq in 2003 was just a continuation of longstanding American imperial policies, no matter that Americans would prefer to use just about any other term to describe their foreign policy and do not like to think of themselves as imperialists in the old fashioned Roman or European sense. America under the Bush II administration was openly seeking to “dominate the world through absolute military superiority and wage war against any possible competitor” (Johnson, p. 285). He also regarded the empire as a grave threat to democracy at home and abroad, and he was correct to be worried, as the documents in John S. Friedman’s book The Secret Histories demonstrate in great detail.
Eileen Welsome, a journalist in New Mexico, published her information on the plutonium injection experiments in the Albuquerque Tribune in November 1993, and caused President Clinton to appoint an expert panel chaired by Ruth Faden to report on all Cold War radiation experiments. During World War II, doctors with the Manhattan Project feared a cancer epidemic due to plutonium exposure, since it was still a relatively new and unknown element, so they began secretly injecting it into eighteen hospital patients around the country to study its effects. Over 4,000 more such secret radiation experiments followed in the decades ahead, including giving pregnant women radioactive “cocktails” to drink, feeding radioactive oatmeal to children and a school for the developmentally disabled, and subjecting cancer patients to lethal doses of full body radiation, all so the military and scientists could plan and prepare for a nuclear war (Welsome, 2005, in Friedman, pp. 60-90).
John Dinges called Operation Condor “the first war on terrorism” in which the CIA organized the police and intelligence services in Chile, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay to fight a “dirty war” against leftist movements all over South America. Indeed, the U.S. provided “strategic leadership” in this covert war, which led to torture on mass scale and thousands of assassinations and ‘disappearances’. On orders from General Pinochet, Chile’s intelligence agency (DINA) assassinated former foreign minister Orlando Letelier and his assistant Ronnie Mofitt with a car bomb in Washington In September 1976, which Dinges calls “the most egregious act of foreign inspired terrorism ever committed in the U.S. capital” before September 11, 2001. Colonel Manual Contreas, the head of DINA, was on the CIA payroll, and Pinochet himself received millions of dollars from the United States government. In all of this, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s main concern was never human rights, but only maintaining friendly, right-wing governments in South America and stopping any possible electoral swing to the left, as with Allende in Chile. In Argentina, the ruling military junta was “ecstatic” when he told them that they had to “get their terrorism problem under control as soon as possible” (Dinges, “The Condor Years”, in Friedman, ed., pp. 353-67).
John Marks obtained 16,000 pages of CIA documents on its mind control project MK Ultra through a Freedom of Information Act Request in 1978 although the project’s director Dr. Sidney Gottlieb told the Church Committee that he had destroyed most of them. In the program, the CIA conducted a wide variety of experiments in hypnosis, brainwashing, use of mind-altering drugs like LSD, and interrogation methods (Marks, “Manchurian Candidate” in Friedman, 2005, pp. 124-50). CIA Director Allen Dulles was “almost frantic” to find out how the Russians and Chinese had evidently broken the will and morale of America POWs in the Korean War and forced them to sign false confessions, and hired the world-famous neurologist Dr. Harold Wolff to investigate. Wolff and his associate Lawrence Hinkle determined that Russian and Chinese methods were crude but very effective, using a combination of “intense psychological pressure and human weakness.” They did not employ drugs or psychiatrists, but the CIA and the military did in their experiments, often on convicts and mental patients who had no idea what the real nature of the program was and who was really in charge of it. Some researchers attempted to wipe out the human personality through drugs, hypnosis and electric shock and then “reprogram” the individual, but by the time MK Ultra ended in 1963 “agency researchers had found no foolproof way to brainwash another person”. They did manage to make people catatonic or amnesiac, though, not to mention introducing drugs like LSD to wider public (Marks, “Brainwashing” in “Manchurian Candidate”).
Dr. Frank Olson was a scientist working on biological weapons for the Army Chemical Corps’ Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Part of his story came out in the 1970s, when Dr. Gottlieb admitted that he had put LSD in his drink at a cocktail party, supposedly to test its effects, and that Olson later became depressed and suicidal and finally jumped out of a hotel window in New York in 1953. In 1999, Olson’s son Eric had his father’s body exhumed, and an autopsy showed that he had been hit in the head prior to his death and very likely thrown out the window—a method suggested in a CIA assassination manual of the time. As it turned out, Olson was having moral qualms about his work on anthrax and other such weapons, as well as experiments with nerve gas and mind-altering drugs that were causing death and injury to the test subjects. Dr. Gottlieb and other CIA officials were concerned that he was becoming a liability and might even go public with what was then top secret information. In the 1950s, the American public would have been far more shocked by such revelations than today. (Kurtis, 1999, Investigative Reports).
Created by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in the 1950s, COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program) was directed against many groups and individuals that Hoover regarded as a threat to the United States, including the Communist Party, Socialist Workers Party, New Left, Black Nationalists and Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. From 1962-68, the FBI used a wide variety of tactics to “’neutralize’ him as an effective civil rights leader”, such wiretaps, microphones hidden in his hotel rooms, planting informants in SCLC offices, and an active disinformation campaign to discredit him with supporters and donors in the U.S. and abroad. In January 1968, Senator Robert C. Byrd told Catha DeLoach, an senior FBI official, that the time had come for King to “meet his Waterloo”, and in March the FBI included him in its Black Nationalist-Hate Group COINTELPO. So great was Hoover’s personal animus against him, that even after his assassination, the FBI used its influence in Congress to prevent King’s birth day from being declared a national holiday. (Church Committee Report. 1976.)
In 1979, the House Committee on Assassinations found “on the basis or circumstantial evidence available to it, that there is the likelihood that James Earl ray assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King as the result of a conspiracy.” Although the committee cleared the FBI and other government agencies of any direct involvement in the assassination, it went on to say that the FBI “grossly abused and exceeded its legal authority and failed to consider the possibility that actions threatening grievous bodily harm to Dr. King might be encouraged” by COINTELPRO (House Select Committee on Assassinations. 1979).
Moving forward into the post-Cold War Era, Philip Gourevitch discussed the lack of American action to prevent genocide in Rwanda in 1994. In “The Genocide File”, he wrote about how General Romero Dallaire, commander of the United Nations contingent in Rwanda, had informed the UN in advance that the “preparations were underway to carry out the extermination campaign” and pleaded for more troops, but the UN forbade “any preventative action”. Both the members of the General Assembly and the Security Council opposed any intervention, while the Clinton administration wanted no repeat of its recent experience in Somalia, and so over half a million people were killed. In this situation, humanitarian intervention truly was necessary, but it was not in the political or foreign policy interests of the other great powers to become involved (Gourevitch, in Friedman, pp. 437-50).
As Seymour Hersh knows very well, there was plenty of torture and murder going on during the Vietnam War, and he publicized a great deal of it, including the massacre at My Lai. Of all people, he would have had no reason to be shocked or surprised it was all happening again in Iraq, although he did the public a great service by breaking the story of Abu Gharib. For that matter, there was plenty or torture and murder going on in the Korean War or the Philippines War, and wars like these have always stimulated revisionist historians who denounce the policies and methods of the American Empire. Indeed it is an empire, and the evidence for that is absolutely overwhelming. There are no great or surprising revelations in this essay or in the primary and secondary sources used as evidence, and most of it has been known for decades: the coups in Iran, Chile, Guatemala, the CIA’s Operation Condor, MK Ultra, Olson’s very probable murder, secret medical experiments, the military-industrial complex, COINTELPRO, Hoover, the FBI’s likely complicity in the King assassination, all of it is very well-documented, and even has an ‘old hat’ quality. For this reasons, the recent policies of the Bush II administration are part of a continuity going back a hundred years or more, about the only difference being that his administration was far more blatant about what it was up to than most of the others. None of this is ever going to change until some other empire like China finally supplants the United States as global hegemon. Indeed, that is already happening.
Stephen Kinzer’s book Overthrow describes how the U.S. government carried regime change in twelve countries long before the term became popular, starting with Hawaii in1893 and ending with Iraq in 2003. In the first part, “The Imperial Era”, he discusses the America takeover of Hawaii, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and Nicaragua”, when the United States behaved like an old-style empire, no different from Britain, France, Germany or Japan. After World War II, its empire was much larger but its methods of maintaining and expanding changed, which is why he calls the second part of the book “Covert Action”.
In 1963, for example, the Kennedy administration believed that President Ngo Dinh Diem was so corrupt and unpopular that he was about to lose the war in South Vietnam, and might even attempt to negotiate with Ho Chi Minh in the North, so John F. Kennedy approved his overthrew by the South Vietnamese military in November 1963, just three weeks before his own assassination in Dallas (Kinzer, pp.207-10). In recently declassified audio tapes obtained by the National Security Archive, Kennedy was considering a coup against Diem as early as August 1963, and “agreed with other senior U.S. officials that under the existing Saigon leadership there was no chance of success in the Vietnam War.” He stated that “We’re up to our hips in mud out there” and that Congress would be “mad” if he supported a coup by the generals, but “they’ll be madder if Vietnam goes down the drain” (National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 302. 2009).
Another important example was the overthrow or Iranian Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh in 1953 by the CIA in Operation Ajax, after he had angered the British and American governments by nationalizing the Anglo-Persian Oil Company (renamed British Petroleum after the coup). American backing for the Shah for the next twenty-five years had the unintended consequence of stimulating an Islamic Revolution led by the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1978-79, and the U.S. is still living with the fallout from Operation Ajax (Kinzer, 117-28; 200-01). In 2000, the National Security Archive received a CIA after-action report of the coup. Written by Donald Wilber in March 1954 which had been “long-sought by historians”, especially as the Agency had claimed to have destroyed most of the records on Operation Ajax in the 1960s—a supposedly “unauthorized” act of destruction. In its lessons learned section, Wilber’s report singled out the Communications and Psychological Warfare (PW) Senior Staff for special commendation, who had worked a great deal of overtime and “displayed commendable zeal”. It also noted that the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS) “was quite ready to act as the junior partner in this operation”, and that the CIA operatives were convinced that when faced “with a choice between following the orders of the Shah or those of Mossadeq, the rank and file of the army and its officers would obey the Shah” (National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 28. 2000). James Risen found that “the Shah’s cowardice nearly killed the CIA operation. Fearful of risking his throne, the Shah repeatedly refused to sign CIA-written royal decrees to change the government” and “still fled the country just before the coup succeeded” (Risen, 2000, New York Times Special Report).
After the Soviets invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the U.S. government launched the largest CIA operation in history to support the guerillas and insurgents battling the Red Army. Once again, it did not consider the long-term consequences of its actions, and its ‘allies’ Pakistan and Saudi Arabia used American money to support the Taliban and other jihadists, with results that came back to haunt America on September 11, 2001. This leads to the final part of the book in which he covers direct military action in Grenada, Panama, Iraq and Afghanistan, which resemble a return to the old-style, direct imperialism of 1890-1930, and, except for Grenada in 1983, examples of post-Cold War hubris. For Kinzer, the reasons for this type of foreign policy include the desire of presidents to appear tough and decisive, especially at election time, corporate interests that want to control markets and raw materials overseas, ignorance, arrogance and short-term thinking among policymakers, such as Henry Kissinger saying that nothing of importance ever came out of the Southern Hemisphere in history after the CIA overthrew President Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973 (Kinzer, pp. 173-78).
Chalmers Johnson wrote that the United States today is like the Roman Empire, which was originally a republic but turned into a militaristic dictatorship as it gradually acquired more bases and colonies abroad, and like the Caesar’s, American presidents have the right to wage wars wherever and whenever they want without having to give much thought to the Senate (Congress). Indeed, the U.S has become constantly more aggressive, arrogant and openly imperialistic since the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989-91 and claimed credit for “winning” the Cold War, even though the real reasons for the demise of the Soviets were internal, especially their failed economy and Mikhail Gorbachev’s desire to end the Cold War and become part of the European Community. In all this, American leaders “did not have either the information or imagination to grasp what was happening” (Johnson, p. 19).
Once the Cold War was over and it no longer had containment of Russia as cover for maintaining its empire, the U.S. had to find new enemies and threats to justify the existence of its empire, such as Iraq, Iran, North Korea, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism. Johnson exaggerates when he writes that in 1989-2002 “there was a revolution in America’s relations with the rest of the world”, since much of its foreign policy was really not all that different from the past fifty or one hundred years (Johnson, p. 22). To be sure, with the USSR gone, its sense of unilateralism increased culminating in the aggressively imperialistic administration of George W. Bush. After September 11, 2001, Bush asserted that the United States would take military action around the world anywhere it deemed necessary and overthrow any government it perceived to be hostile, and would even use nuclear weapons on Iraq, Iran, Syria, and North Korea if they got out of line (Johnson, p. 283). There was nothing particularly new about any of this, apart from the open and brazen way the American president expressed himself on this subject.
In the 19th Century, when it conquered the West, exterminated the Native Americans and annexed half of Mexico, the United States was a traditional empire like every other in history. This changed in the 20th Century, though, especially after World War II. It only had a few outright colonies like Hawaii, Puerto Rica, the Panama Canal Zone, Guam and the Philippines, while most of its empire was informal and indirect, ruling through proxies, client states and friendly dictators. In addition, it built a chain of military bases all over the world, which became American enclaves, insulated from the host countries through Status of Forces Agreements (SOFA’s). These mini-states were “consumerist Sparta’s” that taught “American youth arrogance and racism” for others outside their military caste (Johnson, p. 25). Assorted think tanks, global corporations, high tech companies and bureaucrats all earned their livings from this empire, which is why it has endured for decades.
Johnson agrees with Kinzer that the preventative war against Iraq in 2003 was just a continuation of longstanding American imperial policies, no matter that Americans would prefer to use just about any other term to describe their foreign policy and do not like to think of themselves as imperialists in the old fashioned Roman or European sense. America under the Bush II administration was openly seeking to “dominate the world through absolute military superiority and wage war against any possible competitor” (Johnson, p. 285). He also regarded the empire as a grave threat to democracy at home and abroad, and he was correct to be worried, as the documents in John S. Friedman’s book The Secret Histories demonstrate in great detail.
Eileen Welsome, a journalist in New Mexico, published her information on the plutonium injection experiments in the Albuquerque Tribune in November 1993, and caused President Clinton to appoint an expert panel chaired by Ruth Faden to report on all Cold War radiation experiments. During World War II, doctors with the Manhattan Project feared a cancer epidemic due to plutonium exposure, since it was still a relatively new and unknown element, so they began secretly injecting it into eighteen hospital patients around the country to study its effects. Over 4,000 more such secret radiation experiments followed in the decades ahead, including giving pregnant women radioactive “cocktails” to drink, feeding radioactive oatmeal to children and a school for the developmentally disabled, and subjecting cancer patients to lethal doses of full body radiation, all so the military and scientists could plan and prepare for a nuclear war (Welsome, 2005, in Friedman, pp. 60-90).
John Dinges called Operation Condor “the first war on terrorism” in which the CIA organized the police and intelligence services in Chile, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay to fight a “dirty war” against leftist movements all over South America. Indeed, the U.S. provided “strategic leadership” in this covert war, which led to torture on mass scale and thousands of assassinations and ‘disappearances’. On orders from General Pinochet, Chile’s intelligence agency (DINA) assassinated former foreign minister Orlando Letelier and his assistant Ronnie Mofitt with a car bomb in Washington In September 1976, which Dinges calls “the most egregious act of foreign inspired terrorism ever committed in the U.S. capital” before September 11, 2001. Colonel Manual Contreas, the head of DINA, was on the CIA payroll, and Pinochet himself received millions of dollars from the United States government. In all of this, Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s main concern was never human rights, but only maintaining friendly, right-wing governments in South America and stopping any possible electoral swing to the left, as with Allende in Chile. In Argentina, the ruling military junta was “ecstatic” when he told them that they had to “get their terrorism problem under control as soon as possible” (Dinges, “The Condor Years”, in Friedman, ed., pp. 353-67).
John Marks obtained 16,000 pages of CIA documents on its mind control project MK Ultra through a Freedom of Information Act Request in 1978 although the project’s director Dr. Sidney Gottlieb told the Church Committee that he had destroyed most of them. In the program, the CIA conducted a wide variety of experiments in hypnosis, brainwashing, use of mind-altering drugs like LSD, and interrogation methods (Marks, “Manchurian Candidate” in Friedman, 2005, pp. 124-50). CIA Director Allen Dulles was “almost frantic” to find out how the Russians and Chinese had evidently broken the will and morale of America POWs in the Korean War and forced them to sign false confessions, and hired the world-famous neurologist Dr. Harold Wolff to investigate. Wolff and his associate Lawrence Hinkle determined that Russian and Chinese methods were crude but very effective, using a combination of “intense psychological pressure and human weakness.” They did not employ drugs or psychiatrists, but the CIA and the military did in their experiments, often on convicts and mental patients who had no idea what the real nature of the program was and who was really in charge of it. Some researchers attempted to wipe out the human personality through drugs, hypnosis and electric shock and then “reprogram” the individual, but by the time MK Ultra ended in 1963 “agency researchers had found no foolproof way to brainwash another person”. They did manage to make people catatonic or amnesiac, though, not to mention introducing drugs like LSD to wider public (Marks, “Brainwashing” in “Manchurian Candidate”).
Dr. Frank Olson was a scientist working on biological weapons for the Army Chemical Corps’ Special Operations Division at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Part of his story came out in the 1970s, when Dr. Gottlieb admitted that he had put LSD in his drink at a cocktail party, supposedly to test its effects, and that Olson later became depressed and suicidal and finally jumped out of a hotel window in New York in 1953. In 1999, Olson’s son Eric had his father’s body exhumed, and an autopsy showed that he had been hit in the head prior to his death and very likely thrown out the window—a method suggested in a CIA assassination manual of the time. As it turned out, Olson was having moral qualms about his work on anthrax and other such weapons, as well as experiments with nerve gas and mind-altering drugs that were causing death and injury to the test subjects. Dr. Gottlieb and other CIA officials were concerned that he was becoming a liability and might even go public with what was then top secret information. In the 1950s, the American public would have been far more shocked by such revelations than today. (Kurtis, 1999, Investigative Reports).
Created by FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover in the 1950s, COINTELPRO (Counter-Intelligence Program) was directed against many groups and individuals that Hoover regarded as a threat to the United States, including the Communist Party, Socialist Workers Party, New Left, Black Nationalists and Martin Luther King and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. From 1962-68, the FBI used a wide variety of tactics to “’neutralize’ him as an effective civil rights leader”, such wiretaps, microphones hidden in his hotel rooms, planting informants in SCLC offices, and an active disinformation campaign to discredit him with supporters and donors in the U.S. and abroad. In January 1968, Senator Robert C. Byrd told Catha DeLoach, an senior FBI official, that the time had come for King to “meet his Waterloo”, and in March the FBI included him in its Black Nationalist-Hate Group COINTELPO. So great was Hoover’s personal animus against him, that even after his assassination, the FBI used its influence in Congress to prevent King’s birth day from being declared a national holiday. (Church Committee Report. 1976.)
In 1979, the House Committee on Assassinations found “on the basis or circumstantial evidence available to it, that there is the likelihood that James Earl ray assassinated Dr. Martin Luther King as the result of a conspiracy.” Although the committee cleared the FBI and other government agencies of any direct involvement in the assassination, it went on to say that the FBI “grossly abused and exceeded its legal authority and failed to consider the possibility that actions threatening grievous bodily harm to Dr. King might be encouraged” by COINTELPRO (House Select Committee on Assassinations. 1979).
Moving forward into the post-Cold War Era, Philip Gourevitch discussed the lack of American action to prevent genocide in Rwanda in 1994. In “The Genocide File”, he wrote about how General Romero Dallaire, commander of the United Nations contingent in Rwanda, had informed the UN in advance that the “preparations were underway to carry out the extermination campaign” and pleaded for more troops, but the UN forbade “any preventative action”. Both the members of the General Assembly and the Security Council opposed any intervention, while the Clinton administration wanted no repeat of its recent experience in Somalia, and so over half a million people were killed. In this situation, humanitarian intervention truly was necessary, but it was not in the political or foreign policy interests of the other great powers to become involved (Gourevitch, in Friedman, pp. 437-50).
As Seymour Hersh knows very well, there was plenty of torture and murder going on during the Vietnam War, and he publicized a great deal of it, including the massacre at My Lai. Of all people, he would have had no reason to be shocked or surprised it was all happening again in Iraq, although he did the public a great service by breaking the story of Abu Gharib. For that matter, there was plenty or torture and murder going on in the Korean War or the Philippines War, and wars like these have always stimulated revisionist historians who denounce the policies and methods of the American Empire. Indeed it is an empire, and the evidence for that is absolutely overwhelming. There are no great or surprising revelations in this essay or in the primary and secondary sources used as evidence, and most of it has been known for decades: the coups in Iran, Chile, Guatemala, the CIA’s Operation Condor, MK Ultra, Olson’s very probable murder, secret medical experiments, the military-industrial complex, COINTELPRO, Hoover, the FBI’s likely complicity in the King assassination, all of it is very well-documented, and even has an ‘old hat’ quality. For this reasons, the recent policies of the Bush II administration are part of a continuity going back a hundred years or more, about the only difference being that his administration was far more blatant about what it was up to than most of the others. None of this is ever going to change until some other empire like China finally supplants the United States as global hegemon. Indeed, that is already happening.
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