A N T I F A I N F O - B U L L E T I N
News * Analysis * Research * Action
Volume 1, Number 5 ***** March 7, 1996
A Small Circle of Friends:
Larry Pratt, the Council for Inter-American Security and International Fascist Networksby Tom Burghardt
Bay Area Coalition for Our Reproductive Rights IntroductionRecent allegations of anti-Semitism and racism levelled against Larry Pratt, a national co-chairman of the Buchanan for President campaign committee, is an intriguing example of media obfuscation and "truth" on the half-shell. That Pratt addressed the 1992 "Christian Men's Meeting," organized by notorious Christian Identity racist, Pete Peters, is an established fact. That Pratt shared the platform with Aryan Nations fuhrer , Richard Butler and "former" Klan "Grand Dragon," Louis Beam, the neo-Nazi architect of "leaderless resistance," is incontestable. That he gave a speech at the 1993 Jubilation Conference in Sacramento, California, an annual gathering of far-rightists' sponsored by the anti-Semitic publisher of Jubilee, the flagship tabloid of the Christian Identity movement, is true and has been accurately reported by the bourgeois press.
What should be of equal concern to the media is information about Mr. Pratt which is far more damaging -- his close collaboration over a 20 year period with an international network of war criminals, neo-Nazi terrorists, and the organizers of Asian, European and Latin American death squads. But because such activities advanced the geopolitical and military goals of the United States, Pratt's actual record is passed over in silence ; a facet of media self-censorship that has been well- documented elsewhere.[1]
At the outset of this report I will emphasize, Pratt is a reactionary whose political orientation can aptly be described as clerical-fascist. On numerous occasions, he has expressed disdain for democracy and the economic, political and social rights of the oppressed. His ideological and personal links to the theocratic wing of the Christian Right, the anti-abortion movement and "Patriot" militias, though of interest, will be explored in another report currently in preparation.
This edition of AFIB however, will explore at some length, the dimensions of Larry Pratt's ties to the national security state. I will demonstrate that Pratt, Buchanan and a host of other "respectable conservatives," far from being "outsiders" or "populists" are active agents and apologists for the global crimes of U.S. imperialism.
The Council for Inter-American Security:
Intellectuals in the Service of Global TerrorThe Council for Inter-American Security (CIS) is a rightist outfit that played a pivotal role formulating Washington's program for counter-revolutionary war and mass murder in Central America during the 1980s. Larry Pratt, was a central figure within the CIS hierarchy as was Patrick Buchanan; Pratt was secretary to the group while Buchanan functioned as an organizational director (see Appendix for complete list of board members and principle players).
But CIS was more than a New Right think-tank researching and formulating foreign policy for the Reagan administration. The group functioned in a dual-capacity; as an alarmist "public policy institute" and as a domestic spy ring, a "privatized" version of the FBI's infamous COINTELPRO operations. Having staked-out Latin America as their geopolitical niche, CIS targeted Central America solidarity activists, progressive clergy, and the Salvadoran exile community. The group gathered intelligence and disseminated disinformation, funneling data on foreign policy opponents to the FBI and the intelligence service of the Salvadoran death squad state.
The domestic side to illegal CIA-Contra operations were aided by a broad spectrum of domestic and international reactionaries. Many of the state-sanctioned criminals who sought to subvert democratic processes in the U.S. and overseas were connected to a network which included, among others: the John Birch Society (JBS); the World Anti-Communist League (WACL); Christian fundamentalist and Catholic theocrats; anti-Castro terrorists grouped in Alpha 66/Brigade 2506; the LaRouche organization and the Unification Movement of South Korean fascist, Rev. Sun Myung Moon.[2]
While such groups operated secretly, they did so with the knowledge, financial backing and encouragement of powerful American corporate and political interests. According to journalist Ross Gelbspan:
A...private group which flourished during the Reagan era was the Washington-based Council for Inter-American Security. The group disseminated reams of material during the 1980s purporting to prove linkages between a Soviet-inspired global terror network and liberal and left-wing American groups opposed to US foreign policies. CIS also expended considerable effort to improve the public image of the reputed Salvadoran death squad leader Roberto D'Aubuisson. When the FBI's CISPES files were pried open in 1988 by a lawsuit brought by the Center for Constitutional Rights they were found to contain several reports written by J. Michael Waller, a researcher whose work has been sponsored by the nongovernmental Council for Inter-American Security. But Waller's work to connect American political dissenters to an international communist-terrorist plot was part of a public- private partnership.[3]
By 1984, FBI "active measures" against CISPES and the Sanctuary Movement were in full-swing. Fifteen Bureau field offices, dozens of agents and hundreds of "private" right-wing intelligence "assets" were involved in these illegal operations. More than 200 incidents of harassment and intimidation against activists were documented. Many incidents involved church and office break-ins, theft of files and the infiltration of local CISPES chapters by Bureau informants. Peaceful public rallies and demonstrations were disrupted by goons affiliated with Rev. Moon's Collegiate Association for the Research of Principles (CARP).
One case that had particularly ominous implications was that of Yanira Corea, a 24 year old Salvadoran exile active in the Los Angeles CISPES chapter. In June 1987, the young woman was kidnapped, sexually assaulted, tortured and threatened with death if her "subversive" activities didn't stop. Corea's brother was a union activist in El Salvador. Prior to her abduction she received a threatening letter containing dried flower petals a photo of her three year old son and the notation -- "Flowers in the desert die," a traditional warning of the death squads.[4]
Though Bureau informants could not produce a shred of evidence linking these groups to "terrorism," the FBI actually increased the level of their attacks. According to the logic of Bureau red hunters, the lack of criminal activity in and of itself was demonstrable evidence of a broad "conspiracy" hatched by shrewd agents linked to the KGB. This was an illusion that the Council for Inter-American Security helped to create.
Throughout the period, the FBI were fed reports alleging that CISPES was a "terrorist" organization. Waller, a research director and editor of the CIS journal, West Watch , wrote a text with the fanciful title, "CISPES: A Terrorist Propaganda Network," that was given wide play by the media.[5] However, because Mr. Waller's services produced the desired propaganda effect intended by his handlers, he secured several generous grants from the State Department's Latin American Office of Public Diplomacy (OPD).[6] Recent American history is replete with examples of the profitability of lying in order to advance State interests; Elliot Abrams and Oliver North are but the tip of the iceberg in this regard.
Prior to Reagan's 1980 election, CIS was the principle organization leading the charge for an "activist" foreign policy to "defeat communism" in Central America. In 1980, they published the influential, A New Inter-American Policy for the Eighties , generally known as the "Santa Fe Document."
Lewis Tambs, "Sante Fe's" principle editor, would be appointed by Reagan as ambassador, first to Columbia and then to Costa Rica, the launching pad for Contra attacks into Nicaragua along the "Southern front."[7] Other Committee of Sante Fe members included Roger Fontaine, a National Security Council (NSC) adviser on Latin American affairs; retired Lt. General Gordon Sumner, who became a special assistant to the Secretary of State for Latin American affairs; and Lynn Francis Bouchey, an active organizer for the Unification Church's CAUSA operations in Central and South America.[8]
Bouchey, the co-author of The Strategy of Terror (written with Stefan Possony), was a former member of the Young Americans for Freedom employed by the American-Chilean Council, a front for the murderous Pinochet regime.[9] Possony, a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institute, long-time WACL operative and board member of Lyndon LaRouche's, Fusion Energy Foundation, was a founding member of the Council, as was Dr. Anthony Bouscaren, a right-wing operative who had worked for the racist Pioneer Fund (see below).[10]
The Committee of Sante Fe alleged among other things, that the U.S. "must seize the initiative or perish. World War III is almost over." CIS viewed the Soviet Union as an "aggressor" that was "strangling the Western industrialized nations."[11]
Central America was described as "the soft underbelly of the United States." The authors called for the "restoration" of the Monroe Doctrine as the linchpin of U.S. regional strategy. In other words, the United States was free to pursue its regional interests unhindered. Bluntly, this meant that the internal politics of the Central American states were subject to "review" by the U.S.: "correctives" -- dictated from Washington -- would be applied as needed.
As a practical necessity, such "correctives" included the destruction of the Cuban, Grenadian and Nicaraguan Revolutions and the maintenance of "the fundamental order of things" in Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador. The Committee wrote:
America is everywhere in retreat. The impending loss of the petroleum of the Middle East and potential interdiction of sea routes spanning the Indian Ocean, along with the Soviet satellization of the mineral zone of Southern Africa, foreshadow the Findlandization of Western Europe and the alienation of Japan.
Even the Caribbean, America's maritime crossroad and petroleum refining center is becoming a Marxist-Leninist lake. Never before has the Republic been in such jeopardy from its exposed southern flank. Never before has American foreign policy abused, abandoned and betrayed its allies to the south in Latin America.
...It is time to sound a clarion call for freedom, dignity and national self-interest which will echo the spirit of the American people. Either a Pax Sovietica or a world-wide counter-projection of American power is in the offing. The hour of decision can no longer be postponed.[12]
Though the authors freely employed alarmist rhetoric with little regard to the actual history of U.S. regional domination, "Sante Fe" was not the production of marginal right-wing "kooks" obsessed by the "red menace." According to the Interhemispheric Resource Center,
In the early years of the Reagan administration, the organization was one of the more influential think tanks of the New Right, providing both policy and policymakers to the new administration. In the heyday of its influence, one observer noted, top officials of CIS "shuttle[d] to and from key policy-making and advisory roles in the administration...." Among those tapped for administration positions were Patrick Buchanan, who became President Reagan's communications director...[13]
Today, Buchanan markets himself as an "outsider" standing up for the "workin' man," against a godless, secular humanist cabal of multinational corporations, abortionists, feminists, homosexuals, immigrants and socialistic "one-worlders" intent on imposing a New World Order on the American people. His project has been assisted by the media who have tossed his actual record down the Orwellian memory-hole.
As noted above, CIS was engaged in a covert war against U.S. leftists, progressive clergy and the Salvadoran exile community, channeling information gleaned by its operatives, to the FBI and the Salvadoran national security apparatus. This too, has a long history in the United States.[14]
Col. Samuel Dickens, a former intelligence officer and CIS board member, was the executive director for inter-hemispheric affairs for the American Security Council (ASC), an outfit founded by ex-FBI agents. ASC was an instrumental group which targeted leftists during the 1950s, the period of the McCarthyite witch-hunts. Founded in 1955, ASC funding has been provided by Motorola, Lockheed, Boeing and General Dynamics, among others.[15] The information they collected, much of it bogus, was then sold to ASC's dues-paying corporate members. At the height of their domestic operations ASC red hunters, including the sinister Roy Cohn, Senator McCarthy's chief inquisitor, were gathering the names of alleged "subversives" at the staggering rate of 20,000 per month. [16] One analyst has said that the ASC is "not just the representative of the military-industrial complex, it is the personification of the military-industrial complex."[17]
Another significant source of support for the Council and a host of other "conservative" organizations, was Rev. Moon's Unification Church. Bouchey helped organize two conferences for CAUSA, led by another retired general, E. David Woellner.[18] He was also a board member of the United States Global Strategy Council, identified by researchers, Louis Wolf and Frederick Clarkson as "another CAUSA operation."[19] In 1981, Bouchey was "specially commissioned" by Moon's World Media Institute to prepare and present a "content analysis" of media coverage of U.S. policy in El Salvador.[20]
Active chapters of Moon's organization existed throughout the region; the largest affiliates were centered in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Paraguay. In Brazil, the director of CAUSA said, "we are forming the future base for a large political party, though at present we are still apolitical...we want to form a movement like Le Pen's in France." Needless to say, French fascist, Jean Le Pen, has done just that with the National Front, with significant financial backing from the Moon network.[21]
But Moon's extensive Latin American operations had a dual- purpose: the construction of an anti-communist "armed church" and as a "unofficial" link among CIA intelligence assets and the leaders of the death-squad states.
In Bolivia, Thomas Ward was a liaison between the CIA, Nazi war criminal Klaus Barbie, Barbie's organization, the "Fiances of Death" and the regime of "cocaine general" Luiz Garcia Meza, prior to Bolivia's bloody 1980 putsch. Ward and Barbie "were often seen together;" the introspective Ward was described as an individual "who always seemed to be absorbed in prayer." According to Col. Bo Hi Pak, Moon's chief lieutenant: "God has chosen the Bolivian people in the heart of South America as theones to conquer communism." This during a period when Bolivian narco-operations were greatly expanding -- with the knowledge of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency.[22]
Other CIS board members or advisors who have had close ties to the Moon organization:
Roger Fontaine: a former member of the National Security Council. After leaving the NSC, Fontaine became a reporter and political analyst for the Washington Times , a newspaper owned by a subsidiary of the Moon network. Salvadoran death-squad leader, Roberto D'Aubuisson bragged of his ties to the Reagan administration, particularly Roger Fontaine, to the New York Times during a 1981 interview.[23]
Lt. General Gordon Sumner: a CIS director and advisor; Sumner was also a board member of the International Security Council (ISC), described by Herman and O'Sullivan as the "main U.S. agency of the Moon system in the field of terrorism propaganda." An international conference organized by ISC and CAUSA was held in January 1986 in Tel Aviv; speakers included Bo Hi Pak and Arnaud de Borchgrave, the publisher of the Washington Times. [24]
These were neither incidental nor marginal connections. CIS served both as an intelligence conduit from "private" sources such as the American Security Council and CAUSA, and as an informal employment agency which provided analysts to the Reagan administration at the inception of Washington's murderous counter-insurgency wars in Central America.
As CIS secretary, Larry Pratt was a well-placed "asset" in his own right, serving as a link between the public policy/research arms of the organization, the interventionist wing of the theocratic Christian Right and as an "informal" public relations spokesperson for Washington's Central American agenda via Gun Owners of America and the CIS-affiliated, North-South Institute.
But in order to fully appreciate the sinister nature of the Council for Inter-American Security, Pratt's involvement and his broader links to international fascist networks, there is another organization, also little explored by "mainstream" media, which deserves our attention, the World Anti-Communist League.
CIS and WACL: A Marriage Made in HellThe World Anti-Communist League was founded in 1966 by two close Asian allies of the United States, Taiwan and South Korea, and a third organization, the Nazi-dominated, Anti-Bolshevik Block of Nations (ABN), led by the Ukrainian war criminal Yaroslav Stetsko.[25] As we have seen above with CIS, Rev. Moon's Unification network was an instrumental force operating behind the scenes. Moon assets were closely linked to the Korean Central Intelligence Agency and Japanese yakuza crime syndicates, many of whose leaders were convicted war criminals let off the hook by U.S. occupation forces at the war's end.
ABN was a organizational bridge linking Eastern and Western European fascists to the intelligence services of Britain and the United States. Indeed, ABN was formed with U.S. funds and was a model frequently employed by future anti-communist emigre groups. Washington's unflagging commitment to the destruction of the Soviet Union was a continuation of the Third Reich's "Operation Barbarossa" -- by other means. Christopher Simpson's description of the group provides a chilling glimpse into the modus operandi of "containment:"
The ABN was dominated by Ukrainian nationalist veterans of the OUN/UPA (Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists/Ukrainian Insurgent Army), and it included a half dozen open Nazi collaborators on its executive board. Its newspaper, ABN Correspondence , published praises of wartime genocidalists such as Ustachi _Fuhrer_ Ante Pavelic and Slovakian quisling Premier Monsignor Jozef Tiso. Alfreds Berzins, whom the U.S. government once termed a "fanatic Nazi" responsible for sending innocent people to concentration camps, was the president of the ABN "People's Council." Berzins was simultaneously a Latvian leader of the Assembly of Captive European Nations. His vice- president at the ABN was the Belorussian quisling Radislaw Ostrowsky.[26]
If such anti-communist "patriots" were serviceable as "democrats" abroad, why not at home? In the United States, WACL's first chairman was Roger Pearson, a white supremacist, eugenicist and neo-Nazi. Pearson was the editor of Willis Carto's anti-Semitic rag, Western Destiny , the forerunner of the Liberty Lobby's Spotlight tabloid. By the mid 1970s, Pearson served on the editorial boards of both the Heritage Foundation and the American Security Council.[27]
Last Fall, Mr. Pratt addressed a Liberty Lobby testimonial banquet in honor of the 20th anniversary of Spotlight . Though Larry Pratt has stated publicly he "loathes" groups such as Aryan Nations and other Nazis, it would appear his oft-quoted protestations of "innocence" are less than credible given Mr. Carto's documented history of bigotry and racism.
Pearson, who has described himself as a "mainstream conservative," boasted to an associate about his alleged role in hiding Nazi doctor Josef Mengele, the "Angel of Death" who directed Nazi "medical experiments" at the Auschwitz extermination camp. With degrees in anthropology and economics, Pearson is the author several books on eugenics. His most "popular" are Eugenics and Race and Race and Civilization . He credits Professor Hans F. K. Gunther, a Nazi racial theoretician, as the inspiration behind the latter volume.[28]
Under Pearson's tutelage, WACL added Western European chapters that were drawn from the ranks of Nazi war criminals, Third Reich collaborators, neo-Nazis and right-wing terrorists. Western European affiliates included the racist British League of Rights and Italy's Italian Social Movement (MSI). Pino Rauti, the founder of the outlawed group, Ordine Nuovo was a key WACL Western European contact.[29] Rauti and countless other Italian fascists including the war criminal, June Valerio "Black Prince" Borghese, and key members of the Italian general staff, were "rehabilitated" Nazi collaborators recruited by the CIA into NATO's "stay behind" anti-communist terror network, also known as "Gladio."[30]
An off-shoot of Ordine Nuovo was the terrorist group, the Armed Revolutionary Nuclei (ARN), responsible for the 1980 bombing of the Bologna train station which killed 85 people. The notorious neo-fascist killer, Stefano delle Chiaie, the ARN architect of the Bologna massacre, attended the pivotal 1980 conference of the WACL-affiliated, Latin American Anti-Communist Confederation (CAL), held in Buenos Aires at the height of the "dirty war" against the Argentine left.[31]
CAL was the organizational expression of a little-known group of Mexican neo-Nazis, the Tecos or "owls," centered at the Autonomous University of Guadalajara. Founded by Third Reich collaborator, Carlos Cuesta Gallardo, the Tecos have created several anti-communist front groups which include the Mexican Anti-Communist Federation (FEMACO) and the Inter-American Confederation of Continental Defense (IACCD). These "men of action" were drawn from the ranks of the Mexican secret police, military officers, wealthy landowners and industrialists.[32]
Tecos leader, Raimundo Guerrero, was recruited into the organization by Gallardo. According to Anderson and Anderson, the Tecos have close links with the remnants of the Romanian Iron Guard fascists of Horia Sima in Spain. The group publishes the anti-Semitic magazine, Replica . Serving as a liaison among right-wing death squads throughout Latin America, the Tecos joined WACL in 1972. But the Tecos are more than a collection of aging Nazis; investigative journalist Manuel Buendia, was assassinated in Mexico City after publishing a three-part series exposing "Los Tecos" in 1984.[33]
The 1980 CAL conclave was hosted by members of the military junta and the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance (AAA) death squad. Delle Chiaie journeyed to Buenos Aires from Bolivia where he had forged a murder-for-hire and cocaine smuggling partnership with CIA asset, Klaus Barbie.[34]
Others who attended the CAL conference included, John Carbaugh, an aide to North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms and Mario Sandoval Alarcon, the "godfather" of the Guatemalan death squads. Sandoval brought along a protege to Buenos Aires, the cashiered Salvadoran army major, Roberto D'Aubuisson. In 1981, Sandoval was an invited guest at the Reagan inaugural ball.[35]
Another individual who was an honored guest at the Reagan fete was Adolpho Cuellar, the chairman of WACL's branch in El Salvador; that is, until he was permanently "removed from service" by the FMLN. According to Holly Sklar, "Cuellar is remembered by former Salvadoran army officers 'as a man who used to appear at interrogation centers and beg permission to torture the prisoners.'"[36]
Shortly after the CAL conference, 50 Argentine "military advisors" and unconventional warfare "specialists" arrived in El Salvador and began training the military junta in advanced counter-insurgency "techniques," much as their Israeli counterparts were doing in Guatemala and Honduras.[37] They were joining CIA and U.S. Army Special Forces operatives already in place. Massacres and "disappearances" escalated at an alarming rate.[38]
Such developments were greeted with enthusiasm by CIS and their fellow-travellers. Board member, Andy Messing, a close personal friend of Lt. Col. North and the president of the National Defense Council said at the time, "going to war is [my] favorite pastime."[39]
When Pearson became too hot to handle he was forced to resign in 1980, temporarily replaced as WACL's North American chairman by Elmer D. Greaves, an organizer of the segregationist Citizens Council.[40] But did Pearson leave in disgrace, discredited as a fascist, a racist and an apologist for the Nazi Holocaust? Hardly. Hanging on the wall of Pearson's Washington, D.C. office is a letter from then President, Ronald Reagan:
You are performing a valuable service in bringing to a wide audience the work of leading scholars who are supportive of a free enterprise economy, a firm and consistent foreign policy and a strong national defense.
Your substantial contributions to promoting and upholding those ideals and principles that we value at home and abroad are greatly appreciated.[41]
With Pearson's departure, WACL was in crisis and in danger of disbanding. It is during this period, that John K. Singlaub came to the rescue, reorganizing WACL's American chapter.
Retired U.S. Army General and CIS board member, John K. Singlaub, has a long, bloody history of involvement with the formulation and execution of U.S. counter-insurgency strategy and covert operations around the world. A member of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) at the end of World War II, Singlaub moved up the ladder, becoming CIA desk officer for China in 1949 and deputy station chief in Korea during the war. During the Vietnam war he commanded the Special Operations Group, which implemented the CIA's Phoenix Operation, responsible for the cold-blooded murder of some 40,000 Vietnamese and the imprisonment of hundreds of thousands of other Vietnamese in "strategic hamlets." Singlaub was appointed head of the U.S command in South Korea in 1976, but was removed in 1978 when he publicly disagreed with President Carter's plans to withdraw U.S. troops.[42]
A significant figure, within the national security apparatus and the far-right, Singlaub was well-placed to serve as a contact who could network neo-fascist killers, drug peddlers and state- sanctioned terrorist "assets" employed by the national security state itself. Herman and O'Sullivan write:
Singlaub was...close to the Reagan White House. From April 1983 until October 1984 he chaired an official Pentagon panel established to design U.S. policies toward developing countries. The panel also included Brigadier General Heine Anderholt, a contributing editor to _Soldier of Fortune_, and another half dozen extreme right-wing military officers and academicians. In April 1984, Singlaub met with President Reagan and National Security Advisor Robert McFarlane and was named "the chief fund-raising contact" to the contra army in Central America. With this choice, the president plucked from the world of the paramilitary/neo- Nazi fringe a man who had spent six years since his forced retirement from the army in some of the most powerful and dangerous organizations on the U.S. and international extreme right, where his associates included former Nazis, Nazi collaborators, anti-Semites, leaders of death squads, and a motley crew of mercenaries. Reagan honored these with a warm greeting to WACL at its 1984 gathering, asserting that the organization was playing a "leadership role" in the "gallant struggle being waged by the true freedom fighters of our day." Within a year at Bitburg, Reagan would pay his respects to the Waffen-SS.[43]
It is within this context as well, that Patrick Buchanan, then Reagan's communications director, echoed calls issued by the Nazi-linked, Captive Nations Committee (CNC), to abolish the Justice Department's Office for Special Investigations (OSI), responsible for prosecuting war criminals still at large. This should not come as a shock to anyone, since many members of CNC held dual membership in WACL.
Andy Messing, as well as Howard Phillips, chairman of The Conservative Caucus and current leader of the United States Taxpayers Party (USTP), were key figures within WACL's American branch. Larry Pratt shares Phillips' ideological commitment to the clerical-fascist doctrine of Christian Reconstructionism; indeed, Pratt is a national committee member of Phillips' USTP.
Phillips and other American far-rightists, including Black "pro-life" Republican Party presidential candidate, Alan Keyes, were members of the South Africa lobby. The International Freedom Foundation (IFF), an organization founded by "conservative" activist, Jack Abramhoff, was recently exposed by senior South African military personnel as a cut-out of the South African military and Special Branch. IFF functioned as a propaganda arm for South African STRATCOM (strategic communications) counter-insurgency operations directed against the African National Congress and the trade union confederation.[44]
These are some of the individuals found within Mr. Pratt's small circle of friends, but for "reasons of state," the bourgeois media has tended to "forget" the invaluable services rendered to imperialism by such "extremist" representatives of the "radical religious right."
Larry Pratt, the Council for Inter-American Security and the War Against ImmigrantsFighting communism at home and abroad were not the only missions undertaken by the Council for Inter-American Security and their stalwart secretary, Larry Pratt. With the collapse of the degenerated workers' states in the USSR and Eastern Europe, crowned by the annexation of the German Democratic Republic by West German Capital, new "enemies" appeared on the horizon -- both in Europe and the United States.
By 1990, the "Culture Wars," the assault on the basic rights of people of color, the organized proletariat, immigrants, women, queers and the left had come to replace the mythological significance of the "Red Menace" for the far-right. Mr. Pratt, this time in the guise of "defender" of "traditional family values," and "America's Godly heritage," was equal to the task, "protecting" white Christians from a "flood" of "illegal" immigrants. Pratt would use his skills as a propagandist and his position as president of Gun Owners of America, to launch a new campaign -- to make English the official language of the United States.
Under the auspices of CIS, Pratt was the president of a racist, anti-immigration outfit, English First. Officers of Pratt's group are also leaders of the alarmist, United States Border Control (USBC). The Denver-based, North-South Institute (NSI) is a non-profit arm of the Council for Inter-American Security. NSI vice president and director, Lt. General Gordon Sumner, also a CIS director as we have seen, is an officer of USBC and NSI.[45]
A close ally of Pratt's in this enterprise is Anthony Bouscaren. A CIS advisor along with Singlaub and Sumner, Bouscaren was a board member of WACL's American branch. During the l960s, Bouscaren worked for Wycliffe Draper's Pioneer Fund, a racist organization which has bankrolled pseudoscientific "research" which allegedly proves that blacks are genetically inferior to whites. The Pioneer Fund has been an instrumental force behind the scenes, funding neo-eugenicist research such as that of Phillipe Rushton, as well as many anti-immigration groups, including the "mainstream" Federation for American Immigration Reform, whose oxymoronic acronym is "FAIR."[46]
During the 1970s, Bouscaren was a board member of the American-Chilean Council, a group which served as a public relations arm of the Pinochet death squad state. There Bouscaren worked with Ronald Docksai, the founder of the Council for Inter- American Security and L. Francis Bouchey, who would lead the organization during the 1980s.[47]
Well after his stint with the Pioneer Fund, Bouscaren published numerous articles in Roger Pearson's Journal for Social, Political and Economic Studies -- that is, after Pearson had been exposed as a Nazi by the Washington Post. [48]
Bouscaren signed the "Declaration of San Salvador," as a proxy for John Singlaub. The declaration was the result of a right-wing conference held in San Salvador in 1985; it included many WACL members and focused on ways to involve civilians in anti-communist efforts. The document announced the formation of the Central American Anti-Communist Defense Accord, intended to create a combat group known as the Central American Civilian Military Alliance (CACMA).[49]
But CACMA was more than a WACL propaganda project. Drawing on the experiences of Guatemala's notorious "Program of Assistance to Areas in Conflict" (PAAC), inspired by the CIA's Phoenix Operation in Vietnam, PAAC's "civic action" program included forced relocation of Mayan peasants into "model villages" and the creation of hated "civilian self-defense patrols." WACL, CACMA and their CIA handlers viewed these operations as a means of generalizing and standardizing the "Guatemalan experience" throughout the region. In this near- genocidal enterprise against the Mayan people, the death squad regime was offered much assistance by Israeli as well as domestic "assets" within the U.S. Christian Right, especially from the clerical-fascist Reconstructionist wing of the movement.[50]
The counter-insurgency doctrine of "low-intensity conflict" (LIC), became a significant factor on the home front. Beginning in the early 1990s, veterans of CIA-Contra operations and their intellectual architects, began propagandizing for a systematic application of LIC methodology within the imperialist heartland itself. The "war on drugs" and the Immigration and Naturalization Service's brutal border sweeps, detention and deportation of so-called "illegals," many of whom are political refugees, are but the tip of the iceberg in this regard.
Echoing the xenophobic campaign already in full-swing within the reunified Germany, CIS and English First issued a paper, Creating a Hispanic America: Nation Within a Nation? This racist diatribe virtually equates bilingual education with "terrorism." "Bilingual education has national security implications," its authors inform us. Given CIS's role in support of the CIA-Contra wars, their equation -- Latino = Terrorist -- certainly comes as no surprise. According to anti- racist researcher and activist, Michael Novick:
The paper compares the U.S. southwest to French-speaking Quebec, with its potential for separatism. It sees the Chicano and Spanish-speaking population as in themselves a threat to U.S. national security and unity.
The paper also indulges in more blatant racism. It describes the Indian ancestors of Latinos as "uncivilized barbaric squatters" with "a penchant for grotesque human sacrifices, cannibalism, and kidnapping women." This is the ideology that guides English First leader Pratt in his fund- raising appeals for the English Only cause. In one letter soliciting potential donors, Pratt claimed, "many immigrants these days are encouraged not to learn English. They remain stuck in a linguistic...ghetto, living off welfare and costing working Americans billions of tax dollars."[51]
Larry Pratt is a key leader of the reactionary U.S. Taxpayers Party (USTP). As touched upon briefly, Pratt is a national committee member of Howard Phillips' outfit, as well as a national co-chairman of Patrick Buchanan's campaign committee. A central plank of the USTP's platform is the requirement that English become the "official" language of the United States. The USTP is opposed both to bilingual education and the use of multilingual ballots for U.S. elections.
But buried within the USTP's 1992 platform is the bland phrase: the USTP "reject[s] the practice of bestowing U.S. citizenship on children born to illegal alien parents while in this country." This is an attack on the 13th and 14th amendments to the U.S. Constitution. The 13th amendment abolished slavery, while the 14th amendment granted full citizenship rights to former slaves as well as to the children of non-citizen immigrants born in the U.S., legal or otherwise. In fact, Pratt and his cohorts within the "Patriot" movement seek to repeal these amendments as part of their drive to create a "Christian Republic."
The origins of "Patriot" thinking regarding constitutional "revisions" of citizenship rights, is the little known but virulently racist, League of Pace Amendment Advocates. Daniel Johnson, the author of the so-called Pace Amendment is a far- rightist with close ties to many neo-Nazis, including Richard Barrett's Mississippi-based Nationalist Movement and the Populist Party, founded by arch anti-Semite, Willis Carto, the leader of the Liberty Lobby.[52]
Mr. Pratt and his cohorts within the Council for Inter- American Security have much to answer for in their service to U.S. imperialism. Their role as active agents for murderous policies designed to bring the Central American people "in line" with the "rule of law" and the "civilized norms of the Western democracies," have had very grave consequences indeed.
Their close collaboration with the FBI and the Salvadoran intelligence service unquestionably resulted in the deaths of hundreds of refugees after their forced deportation to El Salvador. According to the Political Asylum Project of the American Civil Liberties Union, out of 154 refugees deported in 1983 and 1984, 42 returnees were killed, seven were arrested, five were jailed, 47 were "disappeared" and an additional 43 others "disappeared" under violent circumstances. Certainly an admirable record Mr. Pratt and his "Patriot" companions can reminisce over during Bible study, perhaps.[53]
ConclusionFar from being an innocent wrongly accused of anti-Semitism and racism, Larry Pratt is an individual committed to a world- view which begins and ends with global economic-political- cultural-military domination by U.S. imperialism; this is the context and ideology behind Patrick Buchanan's allegiance to xenophobic "America First" nationalism.
Mr. Pratt's 1990 book,
Armed People Victorious, touted by the bourgeois press as a "passionate defense" of gun rights and the militia movement, is a volume inspired by the anti-communist death squads which operated so "efficiently" in Guatemala and the Philippines.
Pratt's close working relationship with the Council for Inter-American Security and the World Anti-Communist League provided him both with the theoretical and practical knowledge necessary to forge effective links among a host of individuals and organizations who actively sympathized with U.S.-sponsored terror and mass murder in Central America.
It should come as no surprise, least of all to a mendacious press that remained silent while imperialism implemented a policy of extermination , that fascists such as Pratt would recommend the creation of the domestic equivalent of Central American
death squads in the United States to deal with troublesome enemies of today's "Culture Wars."
What is significant is not that individuals such as Mr. Pratt are "extremists" or the "enemies" of a supposedly "pluralist democracy." Of far greater significance is that this "public-private partnership" among a host of reactionary organizations and the national security state, is the
norm; an enduring legacy of settler-colonialism grounded in white supremacist ideologies -- and ideologues -- who are hell-bent on maintaining imperialism's global domination
by any means necessary.
American Dream » Mon Oct 13, 2014 5:39 pm wrote:excerpted from the bookThe Iran-Contra Connection
Secret Teams and Covert Operations in the Reagan Eraby Jonathan Marshall, Peter Dale Scott , Jane Hunter
South End Press, 1987The Strategy of Tension: CAL, P-2, Drugs, and the Mafia
Reports linking WACL to drugs became particularly flagrant in the period 1976-80, as the rift between WACL and Carter's CIA widened, and as a new Argentine-dominated affiliate of WACL in Latin America (the Confederacion Anticomunista Latina, or CAL) plotted to extirpate radical Roman Catholic priests and prelates fostering liberation theology.
A high-point or low-point of the CAL plotting was reached in 1980, when Argentine officers, bankrolled by the lords of Bolivia's cocaine traffic, installed the Bolivian drug dictatorship of Luis Garcia Meza. Two of the Argentine officers involved turned out to be wanted Italian terrorists, Stefano delle Chiaie and Pierluigi Pagliai; together with the veteran Nazi fugitive and drug trafficker Klaus Barbie, the neo-fascists seized the radio station as a signal to launch the coup.
Barbie and delle Chiaie were both deeply involved in the CAL project to identify and exterminate leftists and radical priests. Through this project delle Chiaie had advised d'Aubuisson by 1979; and at the September 1980 meeting of CAL in Argentina, delle Chiaie and d'Aubuisson met and arranged for weapons and money to be sent to d'Aubuisson in El Salvador.
That 1980 CAL Conference was presided over by Argentine General Suarez Mason, today a fugitive wanted on charges arising from the Argentine junta's death squads. In attendance were Bolivia's dictator, Garcia Meza, wanted by U.S. drug authorities for his involvement in cocaine trafficking, and Argentine President Videla, today serving a life sentence for his policies of mass murder and torture. A featured speaker at the conference was Mario Sandoval Alarcon, who had brought his protege d'Aubuisson and arranged for him to be put in touch with delle Chiaie.
What was being brokered at the September 1980 CAL Conference was nothing less than an "Argentine solution" of death squad dictatorships from Buenos Aires to Guatemala City. The inspiration and direction of this scheme was however not just Argentine, but truly international, involving the Italo-Argentine secret Masonic Lodge P-2 (of which General Suarez Mason was a member), and possibly through them the financial manipulations by insiders of the Milan Banco Ambrosiano and Vatican Bank.
P-2 has come under considerable scrutiny in Italy, where it began, because of its on-going involvement in intelligence-tolerated coup attempts, bank manipulations, and terrorist bombings. All of this has contributed to a right-wing "strategy of tension," a tactic of developing a popular case for right-wing order, by fomenting violence and disruption, and blaming this when possible on the left. Stefano delle Chiaie was perhaps the master activist for P-2's strategy of tension, assisted by a group of French intelligence veterans working out of Portugal as the so-called press agency Aginter-Presse. The Aginter group had their own connections to WACL in Latin America before delle Chiaie did, especially to the Mexican chapter (the so-called "Tecos") and to Sandoval's WACL chapter in Guatemala.
According to the Italian Parliamentary Report on P-2:
P-2 contributed to the strategy of tension, that was pursued by right-wing extremist groups in Italy during those years when the purpose was to destabilize Italian politics, creating a situation that such groups might be able to exploit in their own interest to bring about an authoritarian solution to Italy's problems.
Del'e Chiaie was a principal organizer for three of the most famous of these incidents, the 1969 bomb in the crowded Piazza Fontana of Milan (16 deaths, 90 injuries), the 1970 coup attempt of Prince Valerio Borghese (a CIA client since 1945), and the Bologna station bombing of August 2, 1980 (85 deaths, 200 injuries). In December 1985 magistrates in Bologna issued 16 arrest warrants, including at least three to P-2 members, accusing members of the Italian intelligence service SISMI of first planning and then covering up the Bologna bombing. One of these 16 was P-2's leader Licio Gelli, who had spent most of the post-war years in Argentina.
A small group of anarchists, penetrated by delle Chiaie's man Mario Merlino, were blamed at first for the Piazza Fontana bombing, even though Sismi knew within six days that delle Chiaie was responsible, and Merlino had planted the bomb.
After 1974, when the right-wing "strategists of tension" lost critical support with the ending of the Greek, Portuguese, and Spanish dictatorships, they appear to have looked increasingly for new friendly governments in Latin America. Delle Chiaie began to work for Chile's service DINA in 1975, the first contacts having been made through Aginter by Michael Townley, who would later murder Letelier with the help of CORU Cubans for DINA. (Delle Chiaie is said to have come from South America to Miami in 1982, with a Turkish leader of the fascist Grey Wolves who was a friend of the Pope's assassin Mehmet Agca.)
The P-2's support for Latin American terror seems to have been in part a matter of internal Roman Catholic politics: an attempt by one faction to use right-wing death squads to eliminate the Church's liberation theologians and moderate Christian Democrats. Both the contras and Mario Sandoval Alarcon were part of the anti-liberationist campaign: the contra radio maintained a steady propaganda campaign against the Maryknoll Sisters in Nicaragua; Lau of the contras murdered Archbishop Romero of El Salvador; and Lau's patron Sandoval, at the 11th WACL Conference in 1978, denounced the "intense Marxist penetration...acting within the highest echelons of the Catholic hierarchy." During the two years after the CAL adopted the Banzer Plan in 1978, "at least twenty-eight bishops, priests, and lay persons were killed in Latin America; most of their murders were attributed to government security forces or rightist death squads. That number multiplied after 1980 as civil war spread through Guatemala and El Salvador." We have already seen how Reagan's termination of the Carter "human rights" policies was followed by the decimation of the Guatemalan Christian Democrats.
The CAL/P-2 connection was and remains a drug connection as well. The terrorist delle Chiaie has been accused of ties to some of the French Connection heroin merchants who had relocated to Italy; while CAL Chairman Suarez Mason, according to the Italian magazine Panorama, became "one of Latin America's chief drug traffickers."
This Latin American WACL drug connection appears to have been originally put together by former Argentine Interior Minister Jose Lopez Rega, a P-2 member and Gelli intimate who was responsible for restoring Peron to power in 1973 and arranging for European experts in "dirty war" tactics to launch death squad tactics against the terrorist left. Lopez-Rega was later said to have been directly involved with other P-2 members in the Argentine-Paraguayan cocaine traffic, and to have used French members of the Ricord drug network as terrorists for his underground AAA (Alianza Argentina Anticomunista). Ex-CIA Cuban exile terrorists involved in the drug traffic also worked with the AAA, as well as for Somoza.
Paraguayan Intelligence Chief Pastor Coronel, a CAL participant and death squad co-ordinator, was also a smuggling partner of the Corsican drug kingpin in Latin America, Auguste Ricord, whose network trafficked with the Gambino Mafia family in New York. Michele Sindona, the author of the Ambrosiano-Vatican Bank connection to P-2, had his own connections to the Gambino family, which surfaced when in 1979 he used them to stage his own "abduction" to avoid a New York court appearance. According to Penny Lernoux, "the P-2 crowd obtained money from the kidnappings of well-to-do businessmen in Europe and from the drug traffic in South America. Sindona's bank laundered money from the notorious [Italian] Mafia kidnappers of Anonima Sequestri, who worked with ... Ordine Nuovo." Significantly, Mario Sandoval Alarcon has also been accused of resorting to the kidnapping of rich coffee-growers in Guatemala to get financing for his political faction. Since the fall of the Argentine junta and Suarez Mason in 1982-83, the AAA, abetted by delle Chiaie, has also taken to bank robberies and kidnapping.
