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http://www.lewrockwell.com/2013/07/jaco ... er-of-jfk/The Evil of the National-Security State
By Jacob G. Hornberger
Future of Freedom Foundation
July 25, 2013
The two most important words in the lives of the American people for the past 60 years have been “national security.” The term has transformed American society for the worse. It has warped the morals and values of the American people. It has stultified conscience. It has altered the constitutional order. It has produced a democratically elected government that wields totalitarian powers.
We now live in a country whose government wields the legal authority to round up people, including citizens, and take them to concentration camps, detention centers, or military dungeons where the government can torture them, incarcerate them indefinitely, and even execute them as suspected terrorists.
We now live in a country whose government wields the legal authority to send its military and intelligence forces into any country anywhere in the world, kidnap people residing there, and transport them to a prison for the purpose of torture, indefinite detention, and even execution. We now live in a country whose government wields the legal authority to sneak and peek into people’s homes or businesses without warrants; to monitor their emails, telephone calls, and financial transactions; and to spy on the citizenry.
We now live in a country whose government wields the legal authority to support, with money and armaments, totalitarian regimes all over the world and to enter into partnerships with them for the purpose of torturing people whom the U.S. government has kidnapped.
We now live in a country whose government wields the legal authority to assassinate anyone it wants, including American citizens, anywhere in the world, including here in the United States. We now live in a country whose government wields the legal authority to impose sanctions and embargoes on any other nation and to severely punish the American people and foreign citizens and foreign companies who violate them.
We now live in a country whose government wields the legal authority to invade and occupy any country on earth, without a congressional declaration of war, for any purpose whatever, including regime change and the securing of resources.
And it’s all justified under the rubric “national security.”
Most people would concede that that’s not the kind of country that America is supposed to be. The nation was founded as a constitutional republic, one whose governmental powers were extremely limited. In fact, the whole idea of using the Constitution to bring the federal government into existence was to make clear that the government’s powers were limited to those enumerated in the Constitution itself. To make certain that everyone got the point, the American people secured the passage of the Bill of Rights, which further clarified the extreme restrictions on government power.
Four separate amendments in the Bill of Rights address the power of the federal government to take people, both Americans and foreigners, into custody and to inflict harm on them: the Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, and Eighth Amendments. Due process of law, right to counsel, grand-jury indictments, trial by jury, search and seizure, cruel and unusual punishments, bail, speedy trial — they are all expressly addressed, reflecting how important they were to our American ancestors and to their concept of a free society.
In the age of national security, all of those protections have been rendered moot. They have all been trumped by the concept of national security.
Ironically, the term isn’t even found in the Constitution. One searches in vain for some grant of power anywhere in that document relating to “national security.” It isn’t there. Nonetheless, the government now wields omnipotent powers — powers that the greatest totalitarian dictatorships in history have wielded — under the rubric of “national security.”
With the exception of libertarians, hardly anyone questions or challenges it, including those who profess an ardent allegiance to the Constitution. Consider, for example, the Constitution’s Interstate Commerce Clause. For decades, both libertarians and conservatives have complained that the meaning of that clause has been so expanded as to transform it into a general grant of power enabling the federal government to regulate the most minute, localized aspects of economic activity.
Yet here’s a phrase — “national security” — that isn’t even found in the Constitution, which has been interpreted to grant omnipotent, totalitarian-like powers to the federal government, and conservatives have been rendered mute.
It would be one thing if there had been an amendment to the Constitution stating, “The federal government shall have the power to do whatever it deems necessary in the interests of national security.” At least then one could argue that such totalitarian measures were constitutional.
But that’s not the situation we have here. We have the government coming up with a concept known as “national security,” which it has then used to adopt powers that would otherwise violate the Constitution. It’s as if national security has been made the foundation of the nation. Everything else — the Constitution, society, the citizenry, freedom, prosperity — are then based on that foundation.
The goodness of national security
What is “national security”? No one really knows. There is certainly no precise definition of the term. It’s actually whatever the government says it is. National security is one of the most meaningless, nebulous, nonsensical terms in the English language, but, at the same time, the most important term in the lives of the American people.
All the government has to do is say “national security,” and all discussion and debate shuts down. If the government says that national security is at stake, that’s the end of the story. Federal judges will immediately dismiss lawsuits as soon as the government claims, “The case is a threat to national security, your honor.” Congress will immediately suspend investigations when the government claims that national security is at stake. The Justice Department will defer to the national-security establishment when it raises the issue of national security.
National security, a term not even in the Constitution, trumps everything. It trumps the judiciary. It trumps the legislative branch of government. It trumps federal criminal investigations. This nebulous term, whose meaning is whatever the government wants it be at any particular time, has been made the foundation of American society.
What is the national-security establishment? It is composed of several agencies, two of the main ones being the vast military-industrial establishment and the CIA. Those two entities have done more to transform American life than anything else, even more than the welfare state. They are the entities that enforce the sanctions and embargoes and engage in the invasions, occupations, regime-change operations, coups, assassinations, torture, indefinite incarcerations, renditions, partnerships with totalitarian regimes, and executions — all in the name of “national security.”
One of the most fascinating aspects of all this is how successful the government has been in convincing Americans of two things: that all this is necessary to keep them safe and, at the same time, that America has continued to be a free country notwithstanding the fact that the government has acquired and has exercised totalitarian powers in order to preserve national security.
When Americans see the governments of such countries as the Soviet Union or North Korea wield such powers, they can easily recognize them as being totalitarian in nature. When Americans read that the Soviet government rounded up its own people and sent them into the Gulag, they recoil against the exercise of such totalitarian powers. They have the same reaction when they hear that the North Korean government has tortured people within its prison system. It’s the same when Americans hear that the Chinese government has arrested and incarcerated people for years without charges or trial.
But when the U.S. government does such things or even just claims the authority to do them — in the name of national security — the mindset of the average American automatically shifts. It can’t be evil for the U.S. government to wield such powers because the agents who are wielding them are Americans, not communists. They have an American flag on their lapel. They have children in America’s public schools. They’re doing it to keep us safe. They’re on our side. We wouldn’t be free without them. They’re preserving our national security. In fact, another fascinating aspect to all this is the mindset of those within the national-security establishment itself. Even though they are wielding the same kinds of powers that are wielded by totalitarian regimes, the last thing in their minds is that they’re doing anything evil or immoral. In their mind, they’re fighting evil in order to preserve security and freedom. Sure, they have to do some unsavory things, but those things are necessary to preserve the nation. Americans are safe and free because of things they’re doing, and we’re supposed to be grateful that they’re doing them.
After all, as advocates of the national-security state often remind us, the Constitution is not a suicide pact. If measures have to be taken to preserve the nation — or the security of the nation — that are inconsistent with the Constitution, then so be it. What good would it do to adhere strictly to the Constitution if, by doing so, the nation were to fall to the terrorists or the communists?
Thus, when officials in totalitarian regimes round people up without charges, incarcerate them indefinitely, torture them, and execute them, what they are doing is evil. But when officials within the U.S. national security state do those same things — and more — they look upon themselves as good and the citizenry look upon them in the same way, simply because they are doing it to advance freedom and to preserve the national security of the United States.
And even then, things are not so clear, at least not when it comes to national security. For example, some foreign totalitarian regimes are considered evil while others are considered good. Consider, for example, Iran and North Korea. In the mindset of the U.S. national-security establishment, they are considered to be evil totalitarian regimes.
But then consider, say, Egypt, which has been ruled by a brutal military dictatorship for nearly 30 years, a totalitarian regime that wields the same kind of totalitarian powers that the U.S. government now wields. For decades, Egyptian military and intelligence forces have rounded people up, taken them to prison camps for indefinite detention, tortured them, and executed them, without formal charges and trial.
Nonetheless, the U.S. national-security establishment has long looked on the Egyptian military dictatorship as good, because of its close relationship with the U.S. national-security state. In fact, during the past several decades the U.S. government has sent hundreds of millions of dollars in money and armaments to Egypt to help fund its totalitarian military dictatorship, and there has been close cooperation between the national-security apparatuses of both nations. In fact, Egypt’s national-security state even agreed to serve as one of the U.S. empire’s rendition-torture partners, a relationship that enables U.S. officials to send a kidnapped victim to Egypt for the purpose of torture.
Good regime, bad regime
Sometimes, the nether world of national security becomes even more clouded, with some nations shifting back and forth from good to evil. Consider Iran and Iraq, for example. In 1953, Iran was considered a threat to U.S. national security. Thus, the CIA, one of the principal components of the U.S. national-security establishment, engaged in its first regime-change operation, one that succeeded in ousting Iran’s democratically elected prime minister, Mohammad Mossadegh, from power and installing the shah of Iran into power.
For the next 25 years, Iran was considered good, notwithstanding the fact that the shah’s regime was totalitarian in nature. In fact, the CIA even helped him and his national-security establishment to oppress the Iranian people. When Iranians finally revolted against the domestic tyranny that the U.S. national-security state had foisted upon them, Iran immediately became an evil regime in the eyes of the U.S. national-security establishment, notwithstanding the fact that the new regime wasn’t doing anything different than the shah’s regime had done. During the 1980s, Iraq had a brutal totalitarian regime headed by Saddam Hussein. Nonetheless, it was considered a good regime because it was friendly to the U.S. national-security state. In fact, during that time the relationship was so solid that the United States even sent Iraq biological and chemical weapons of mass destruction so that Saddam could use them to attack Iran (which was considered evil).
Later, when Iraq invaded Kuwait, the U.S. national-security establishment reclassified Iraq as an evil regime. Today, Iraq is headed by a democratically elected regime that exercises the same totalitarian powers that Saddam exercised, but it’s considered to be a good regime because it’s perceived to be on the side of the U.S. national-security state. If it ultimately formally aligns itself with Iran, as many suspect it will, it will find itself back in the ranks of the evil.
How did it all come to this? How did the United States become transformed from a constitutional republic into a national-security state? How did the concept of national security become the guiding star of American life, without even the semblance of a constitutional amendment? How did the national-security establishment — the vast, permanent military-industrial complex and the CIA — come to be the foundation of American society?
More important, is a national-security state truly compatible with the principles of a free society? Did Americans delude themselves into thinking that they could retain a free and safe society with a government that wields totalitarian powers? Did Americans sacrifice their freedom, their security, their values, and their consciences on the altar of national security?
Perhaps most important, has the time come to dismantle the national-security state in order to restore a free, prosperous, peaceful, normal, and harmonious society to our land? Is it time to restore a limited-government, constitutional republic, the type of government that was clearly envisioned by the Founding Fathers?
Let’s examine those questions. Let’s start by focusing on Cuba.
One of the most demonstrable examples of the turn that America took toward empire, militarism, and the national-security state has involved Cuba. That small nation 90 miles from American shores encapsulates the effect that such a turn had on the values and principles of the American people.
Consider the economic embargo that the U.S. government has maintained against Cuba for more than half a century. It has brought untold economic suffering to the Cuban people, especially in combination with the complete socialist economic system under which they have suffered during that same time.
What has been the purpose of the embargo? The answer: the preservation of national security through regime change — the ouster of Fidel Castro and his communist regime and its replacement with a regime that would be subservient to the U.S. government.
What role was the embargo expected to play in that process? The aim was to cause massive economic suffering to the Cuban citizenry — privation, poverty, and even starvation. Then, as a result of that suffering, the idea was that Castro would be removed from power either by a citizens’ revolt, a military coup, or abdication by Castro himself.
Obviously, the plan has never succeeded, although undoubtedly U.S. officials, 50 years after the embargo was instituted, are still hoping that it will succeed.
The embargo is also a classic example of how the turn toward empire, militarism, and the national-security state has warped the values and principles of the American people. While there have been those who have objected to the embargo, even from its beginning, by and large the American people have deferred to the authority of their government. If U.S. officials believed that an embargo against Cuba was necessary to protect the “national security” of the United States, that was all that Americans needed to salve their conscience over the harm that their government was inflicting on the Cuban people.
Ironically, a few years after the Cuban embargo was instituted, the U.S. government, under the regime of Lyndon Johnson, declared its “war on poverty,” a domestic war whose purported rationale was a deep concern for the poor in society. But the Cuban people were among the poorest people in the world, and the same government that was supposedly concerned about poverty was doing its best to bring more suffering to the poor in Cuba.
The Cuban embargo demonstrated one of the core principles of the national-security state: that the end, which was the preservation of “national security,” justified whatever means were necessary to achieve it. If national security required the government to inflict great suffering on the Cuban people, then that’s just what would have to be done. Nothing could be permitted to stand in the way of protecting national security, whatever that term meant. What mattered was that the national-security establishment — i.e., the military and the CIA — knew what national security meant and had the ultimate responsibility for protecting it.
For their part, Americans were expected to remain silent. They were expected to defer to the authority of their government. National security was everything.
Conscience, the casualty
What about conscience? What if Americans, whose traditional values encompassed compassion for the poor and empathy for the suffering of others, objected to the embargo? What about the Christian principle of loving thy neighbor as thyself?
Americans were expected to ditch all that, and most did. Conscience was abandoned in favor of national security. No matter how much suffering the Cuban embargo inflicted on the Cuban people, it wasn’t something over which most Americans troubled themselves. Given that U.S. officials had determined that national security necessitated the imposition of the embargo, that was all that mattered.
Conscience wasn’t all that Americans ditched with the Cuban embargo. They also abandoned traditional American values of private property, free enterprise, and limited government.
After all, while the embargo was ostensibly an attack on the economic well-being of the Cuban people, it was, at the same time, an infringement on the economic liberty of the American people. Under the principles of economic liberty, people have a fundamental, God-given right to travel wherever they want and to dispose of their money any way they choose.
But the embargo made it a federal criminal offense to spend money in Cuba without a license from the U.S. government, which, for all practical purposes, operated as a prohibition against traveling to Cuba. If an American was caught violating the embargo — say, by traveling to Cuba as a tourist — the U.S. government would prosecute him criminally or sue him civilly or both.
The irony was that that was precisely the sort of economic control that Castro was wielding in Cuba as part of his embrace of socialism. In the attempt to oust Castro from power, U.S. officials were imposing the same kinds of socialist controls on the American people that Castro was imposing on the Cuban people.
Most Americans remained silent. All that mattered was national security. If U.S. officials determined that it was necessary to adopt socialist methods in order to protect national security, that was sufficient justification to surrender an important part of economic liberty. The end justified the means.
In fact, the American mindset throughout the Cold War was even worse than that. It wasn’t as though Americans viewed their government as adopting evil or immoral means to protect national security. Instead, the viewpoint was that whatever was being done by U.S. officials to protect national security wasn’t evil or immoral at all. Instead, the mindset, both in and out of the U.S. government, was that even if the U.S. government was employing the same methods being employed by the communists, such methods were good when employed by U.S. officials and bad when employed by the communists.
Assassination
A good example of that mindset involved assassination. Ordinarily, in an objective sense, assassination is something bad. Assassination is murder, an act that is considered a grave sin under Judeo-Christian principles. Assassination is something that our American ancestors recoiled from as something objectively bad. When the Constitution called the federal government into existence, the power to assassinate was not among the enumerated powers delegated to it. Moreover, to eliminate any doubt on the matter, the American people, as a condition for accepting the federal government, demanded the enactment of the Fifth Amendment, which expressly prohibited the government from depriving people of life without due process of law.
All those principles went out the window when it came to Cuba and the Cold War. The national-security establishment engaged in numerous assassination attempts against Cuba’s president, Fidel Castro. The CIA repeatedly tried to murder him, in a variety of ways.
It shouldn’t surprise anyone that U.S. officials justified their assassination attempts under the rationale of national security. The end — the preservation of national security — justified the means — assassination.
Meanwhile, Americans were expected to not question or challenge what the CIA or the military was doing in the name of national security. If they did, they themselves would come under close scrutiny by the national-security establishment.
Americans, for their part, understood that the national-security state was doing things that had to be kept secret from them — unsavory things but unfortunately necessary to protect national security.
It was as if a pact had been implicitly entered into between the American people and the officials of the U.S. national-security state. Under the pact, U.S. officials would have the omnipotent power to do whatever they felt was necessary to protect national security, such as assassinate foreign officials. Such things would be kept secret from the American people so that their conscience wouldn’t be troubled over the unsavory things that U.S. officials were doing to protect national security.
Americans, for their part, wouldn’t ask questions and would defer to the authority of their government. What mattered, first and foremost, was the preservation of national security, a concept whose ever-shifting meaning would be subjectively determined by officials of the national-security state.
Equally important, people both within the government and within the private sector convinced themselves that even if U.S. officials were doing unsavory things, such as assassinating people, such things were not evil because they were being done by U.S. officials to protect national security. That is, when the communists assassinated people, that was something bad. But when the CIA assassinated people, that was something good because it was being done by U.S. officials to protect the national security of the United States.
The CIA’s assassination attempts against Fidel Castro involved something even more unsavory — the secret partnership that the CIA entered into with the Mafia as part of its attempts to assassinate Castro.
Under objective standards of morality and just conduct, people would consider the Mafia to be a bad organization, given the bad things that it’s engaged in, such as murder, extortion, and bribery.
But objective standards were cast out the window when it came to the Cold War. If CIA officials determined that it was necessary, on grounds of national security, to partner with the Mafia to assassinate Fidel Castro, then it was considered okay from a moral standpoint. Moreover, while the other things the Mafia was doing were considered bad, once the Mafia united with the CIA to assassinate Castro that action was considered to be good. The end — the preservation of national security — justified the means—the CIA’s partnership with a murderous, law-breaking organization to assassinate Castro.
Let’s take a moment to remind ourselves that the aim of the CIA’s assassination attempts on the life of Fidel Castro was the same as that of the embargo: the preservation of U.S. national security through regime change in Cuba. The hope was that the assassination of Castro would bring into power a ruler who would be subservient to the U.S. government.
Other attempts
The assassination attempts on Castro’s life weren’t the only way that the CIA was trying to effect regime change in Cuba. The efforts at replacing Castro with a pro-U.S. ruler began with the CIA’s invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, an action that took place a few months after John Kennedy assumed office as president.
The Bay of Pigs invasion was a CIA project that had originated under the Eisenhower administration. From the very beginning, the operation was based on a lie, one that the national-security state intended to sell to the American people. Even though the CIA was orchestrating the invasion, the plan called for U.S. officials, including Kennedy, the military, and the CIA, to lie to the American people about the role the CIA played in the operation. U.S. officials intended to falsely tell everyone that the invasion was carried out solely by Cuban exiles who just wanted to free their country from the communist tyranny of Fidel Castro.
Even though the deception was revealed in the aftermath of the invasion, official lying became an established principle under the national-security state. The end justified the means. If U.S. officials had to lie to protect national security, so be it. In such a case, the lying would not be considered bad. Since it was the U.S. government that was doing it for the sake of national security, deception by U.S. officials was considered something necessary and good. It was only deception on the part of others, such as the communists, that was considered bad.
There were also the numerous U.S.-sponsored terrorist attacks in Cuba, in which CIA-supported operatives would bomb or sabotage Cuban businesses, farms, and industries. Again, the end justified the means. National security was all that mattered.
One of the most tragic events during the Cold War period involved the terrorist downing of a Cuban airliner over Venezuelan skies. Dozens of people were killed, including the members of Cuba’s national fencing team. While there isn’t any direct evidence that the CIA was behind the attack, there is no doubt that the people who did commit the attack had the same mindset as the CIA — that the end justified the means.
Moreover, it is somewhat interesting that the U.S. government, to the present date, has steadfastly continued to harbor a man who has been accused of orchestrating the attack, a CIA operative named Luis Posada Carriles. For years, the Venezuelan government, with whom the United States has an extradition treaty, has sought the extradition of Posada to Venezuela to stand trial for the murder of the people on that plane. The U.S. government has continually refused to honor the extradition request. It should also be noted that Posada was convicted in Panama of trying to assassinate Fidel Castro, an act that Panama considered to be a criminal offense. He was later pardoned by Panama’s outgoing president, enabling him to immigrate to the United States, where the U.S. government has provided him with safe harbor, preventing his extradition to Venezuela.
Of course, the CIA wasn’t the only branch of the national-security state that was committed to effecting regime change in Cuba. The U.S. military establishment was also committed to achieving that goal. In fact, one of the most fascinating — and revealing — aspects of the military mindset during the Cold War involved a Pentagon plan known as Operation Northwoods.
The purpose of Operation Northwoods was to provide a justification for U.S. forces to effect regime change in Cuba through a military invasion of the country. The plan, which was unanimously approved by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, was presented to Kennedy after the failure of the CIA’s Bay of Pigs invasion and before the Cuban Missile Crisis.
The plan called for U.S. agents to disguise themselves as agents of the Cuban government and “attack” the U.S. facility at Guantanamo Bay. It also called for fake Cuban agents to commit terrorist attacks within the United States, possibly involving the loss of innocent American lives to make it look good. The plan also called for the hijacking of an American airliner that would fall off the radar screens and be replaced by a pilotless drone that would be crashed into the sea, making it look as though the airliner itself had crashed. The plane would then be secretly flown back to a base in the United States. Ominously, the plan didn’t explain how the passengers would be released back to their families if they were thought dead.
The point of all this deception was to provide an excuse for ordering a military invasion of Cuba. The idea was that the United States would simply be responding to a Cuban attack rather than aggressing against Cuba with an unprovoked invasion of the island.
Under the plan, the Pentagon was obviously calling on the president to deceive the American people and the people of the world, just as the CIA had called on Kennedy to lie to Americans about its role in the Bay of Pigs invasion. The Pentagon expected Kennedy to go on national television, look straight into the cameras, and falsely tell the American people that America had been attacked by Cuban terrorists, thereby necessitating a U.S. invasion of the country.
To Kennedy’s everlasting credit, he rejected Operation Northwoods. He simply considered it wrong, in an objective sense. But it wasn’t wrong to the military establishment, just as the Bay of Pigs invasion, the assassination attempts, the partnership with the Mafia, and numerous terrorist actions against Cuba weren’t considered wrong by the CIA. Keep in mind that under the principles of the national-security state, the end justified the means, and whatever the U.S. government did to protect U.S. national security was automatically considered good.
Needless to say, however, Kennedy’s sense of moral propriety with respect to Operation Northwoods did not extend to the cruel economic embargo against Cuba, which Kennedy himself instigated, but not before he ordered a large quantity of Cuban cigars to be brought into the country and delivered to him at the White House.
The cause
So what was it that Fidel Castro did to justify the U.S. government’s invasion of Cuba, the numerous assassination attempts on his life, the terrorist actions against Cuba, and the 50-year-old embargo that has contributed to the deep economic suffering of the Cuban people? That truly is a fascinating question, one that I’d say very few Americans have ever pondered.
Did Castro ever attack the United States? Did he attempt to assassinate Dwight Eisenhower or John Kennedy or any other U.S. official? Did he ever engage in terrorist attacks within the United States?
No, Castro has never done any of those things — the things that the U.S. national security-state has done to Cuba.
So the question remains: Why? Why the long-time efforts at effecting regime change in Cuba? Why the embrace of all those unsavory actions? Why the abandonment of objective moral principles? Why the infringements on economic liberty? Why the abandonment of conscience?
The answer lies in what was the driving force of the entire national-security state after World War II and even before: the fear — the horrible, irrepressible fear — of communism.
In 2009 a retired U.S. State Department official, Walter Kendall Myers, 73, who is a grandson of Alexander Graham Bell, and his wife, Gwendolyn, 72, pled guilty to spying for Cuba for 30 years. Their crime entailed the transmission of U.S. “national defense” secrets to Cuba. As part of a plea bargain, he received a life sentence and she received a prison sentence of 81 months.
At their sentencing, the presiding judge, U.S. District Judge Reggie B. Walton, berated the Myerses for what they had done. Walton said to them, “If someone despises the American government to the extent that appears to be the case, you can pack your bags and leave and it doesn’t seem to me you continue to bear the benefits this country manages to provide and seek to undermine it.”
What had motivated the Myerses to spy for Cuba? It wasn’t money because they didn’t get paid for what they did. They told the judge that long ago, they embraced the philosophy of communism and socialism and the principles of the Cuban revolution. They said,
We did not act out of anger toward the United States or from any thought of anti-Americanism. We did not intend to hurt any individual American. Our only objective was to help the Cuban people defend their revolution. We only hoped to forestall conflict.
U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton ordered a comprehensive damage assessment to determine how U.S. national security may have been harmed by the Myerses’ action.
There are several fascinating aspects to this case, all of which shed light on U.S. foreign policy under the national-security state for the past 70 years. For one thing, the judge never seemed to question or challenge the U.S. government’s conduct towards Cuba since the 1959 Cuban revolution. It’s as if that thought just never even entered his mind. He seemed to have just automatically concluded that since the Myerses had delivered classified “national defense” secrets to Cuba, that was the end of the matter. For the judge, that meant that the Myerses obviously hated the U.S. government and that they should have just moved to Cuba instead of undermining America.
Actually, however, the matter is more much complex than that, and if Walton had done his job properly as a judge, he would have taken into account U.S. foreign policy towards Cuba in determining whether to accept the length of the Myerses prison sentences under the plea bargain.
What was the specific information that the Myerses delivered to Cuba? Unfortunately, under principles of “national security,” the U.S. government won’t disclose that information to the American people, which seems odd, given that Cuban officials already have the information. But whatever the information was, it couldn’t have had anything to do with “national defense” simply because Cuba has never taken any aggressive actions against the United States. Instead, the information that the Myerses transmitted to Cuba had to be in the nature of “national offense” or “national aggression” because for the past 50 years it has always been the U.S. government that has attacked Cuba, not the other way around.
What has been the nature of the U.S. government’s program of aggression against Cuba for the past half century? Assassination, terrorism, sabotage, military invasion, and, of course, the continued maintenance of a brutal embargo, which, in combination with Cuba’s socialist economic system, has squeezed the lifeblood out of the Cuban people for more than 50 years.
Even the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, which brought the United States and the Soviet Union to the brink of nuclear war, was brought about not by an act of aggression by Cuba and the Soviet Union, as Americans are taught from the first grade on up. Instead, the truth is that it was the U.S. national-security state, and specifically its determination to invade Cuba, that precipitated the crisis. Here’s what really happened.
After the Bay of Pigs disaster, the Pentagon and the CIA became more determined than ever to get rid of Fidel Castro and replace him with a pro-U.S. stooge. The Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously presented a plan to invade Cuba to John Kennedy. The plan was called Operation Northwoods. It is one of the most shocking proposals in the history of the U.S. national-security state.
Operation Northwoods
Operation Northwoods called for U.S. officials to initiate terrorist attacks on U.S. soil, on refugee boats leaving Cuba, and on the U.S. military facility at Guantánamo Bay. The plan also called for plane hijackings. Under the plan, the terrorists would seem to be Cuban agents. In actuality, however, they would be U.S. personnel falsely portraying themselves as Cuban agents.
Under Operation Northwoods, real people were to be killed, including Americans. The president, who, of course, would be in on the scheme, would go on national television, look into the camera, and inform the American people that Cuba had attacked the United States. In other words, he would lie to Americans and to the world. He would then announce that as a matter of national security, he was ordering a military invasion of Cuba.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Operation Northwoods was the belief among the Joint Chiefs of Staff that such a wide-ranging conspiracy, which obviously would involve many personnel in both the military and CIA, could and would be kept secret from the American people and the people of the world — and for a very long time. As it was, no one who was privy to the plan, including the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, ever talked. The U.S. government succeeded in keeping the proposal itself secret for more than 30 years, until the JFK Records Act of 1992, which was enacted in the wake of Oliver Stone’s movie JFK, caused the plan to be disclosed to the public.
Another fascinating aspect of Operation Northwoods was the willingness of the Pentagon to sacrifice the lives of innocent people, including American citizens, as part of fake terrorist attacks to justify an invasion of Cuba. The idea, which has always been a guiding principle for the national-security state, especially within both the military and the CIA, was that the end justified the means.
To his credit, Kennedy rejected Operation Northwoods. But that didn’t dissuade the Pentagon and the CIA from continuing to support an invasion of Cuba. As it turned out, the chatter about invading Cuba reached both Cuba and the Soviet Union.
While Castro’s forces could defeat a small force of Cuban exiles, as it did at the Bay of Pigs, resisting a full-fledged military invasion of Cuba was another thing altogether. Castro knew that he didn’t stand a chance. If the U.S. military invaded the island, his forces would be easily defeated and he would be ousted or, more likely, killed in the operation.
The missile crisis
That’s what motivated Castro to approach the Soviet Union about installing nuclear missiles in Cuba, not as a way to initiate a nuclear war on the United States but instead as a way to deter a U.S. invasion of Cuba, an invasion that the military and the CIA were discussing, planning, and proposing from the time of the Bay of Pigs disaster in 1961 to the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962.
In the end, Castro’s strategy succeeded. While it appeared that Kennedy had caused the Soviets to back down and withdraw their nuclear missiles from Cuba, the price for doing that was twofold: one, Kennedy promised that the United States would not invade Cuba, a promise that earned him the deep enmity of the Pentagon, the CIA, and Cuban exiles; and, two, Kennedy promised to remove nuclear missiles aimed at the Soviet Union that were installed in Turkey, which bordered the Soviet Union.
Throughout the Cuban Missile Crisis, the military and the CIA were exhorting Kennedy to bomb and invade Cuba. In their minds, the missile crisis was proof positive that the president should have accepted their proposals for invading Cuba in the months preceding the crisis. Moreover, the military and the CIA viewed the missile crisis as an opportunity — the perfect excuse to effect regime change in Cuba through force. The CIA even sent sabotage teams into Cuba in preparation for the invasion without the knowledge or approval of the president. The military, for its part, raised the nuclear-alert level to the second-highest possible level and let the Soviets know about it, again without the consent of the president.
Fortunately, Kennedy and the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, were able to extricate themselves from the crisis. As Soviet records later documented, nuclear missiles had already been installed and made operational, with authority given to commanders in Cuba to fire them in the event of a U.S. invasion of the island. If Kennedy had done what the Pentagon and the CIA wanted him to do — bomb and invade Cuba — there is no doubt that full nuclear war would have been the result.
That’s how close the U.S. national-security state brought America and the Soviet Union to a nuclear holocaust.
In any event, the classified information that the Myerses were delivering to Cuba during the past 30 years couldn’t have had anything to do with “defense,” as Secretary of State Clinton intimated. It had to do with the acts of aggression that the U.S. government was committing against a sovereign and independent regime that has never engaged in any acts of aggression against the United States.
That’s what Americans so easily forget — that in the 50 years of “conflict” between Cuba and the United States, it has always been the U.S. government that has been the aggressor, and it has always been Cuba that has had to defend itself from the U.S. government’s aggression.
Let’s keep in mind some important facts here: Cuba has never attacked the United States. Cuba has never invaded the United States. It has never engaged in terrorist attacks or acts of sabotage either in the United States or against U.S. installations overseas, not even at the U.S. military installation at Guantánamo Bay. It has never attempted to assassinate U.S. officials or anyone else on American soil, either in partnership with the Mafia or anyone else. It has never implemented an economic embargo against the United States. It has never tried to effect regime change in the United States.
Instead, it has been the U.S. government that has done all those things to Cuba. It has invaded the island. It has engaged in terrorist attacks and acts of sabotage in Cuba. It has repeatedly tried to assassinate Fidel Castro and other Cuban officials, even going so far as to enter into an assassination partnership with the Mafia to do so. It has maintained a brutal economic embargo against Cuba for more than half a century. And it has consistently maintained a policy of regime change on the island, with the intent of ousting Castro from power and replacing him with a pro-U.S. dictator.
It should be noted as well that Congress has never declared war on Cuba, which is the constitutionally required prerequisite to the president’s waging of war against other nations.
That’s what Judge Walton failed to take into account at the Myerses’ sentencing hearing — that the classified information that the Myerses delivered to Cuba during the past 30 years couldn’t have had anything to do with “national defense” because the United States never has had to defend itself from any acts of aggression from Cuba. The information that the Myerses transmitted to Cuba had to have pertained, instead, to the U.S. government’s acts of aggression toward Cuba, that is, to plans relating to assassination, invasion, terrorism, sabotage, or embargo.
How Americans should think
That’s why the Myerses said that they hadn’t acted out of anger towards the United States or from any thought of anti-Americanism. In their minds, they were simply giving information to Cuba to enable it to defend itself from U.S. aggression. In their minds, the U.S. government should simply have left Cuba alone.
But, you see, for Judge Walton and for officials in the U.S. national-security state, American citizens are never supposed to think like that. Under the principles of the national-security state, Americans are not supposed to make judgments on right and wrong when it comes to the actions of their government. They’re supposed to defer to the authority of their national-security state officials and to support them unconditionally, without question or challenge.
After all, the job of the national-security state is to keep Americans safe. U.S. officials are the guardians of national security. They are the ultimate judges both of what “national security” means and of what must be done to protect it. If they say that it’s necessary to invade a sovereign and independent country, to assassinate its officials, to
enter into an assassination partnership with organized crime, to engage in terrorism and sabotage within the country, and to squeeze the lifeblood out of foreign citizens with an embargo, then that’s just the way it is.
All Americans are expected to get on board. And whoever questions or challenges what the government is doing to protect their “national security” is considered suspect or, even worse, a bad person, or, worst of all, an enemy of the state or a “terrorist sympathizer” — a person who obviously hates his government and his country, especially given that under the principles of the national-security state, government and country are conflated into one entity.
The mistake the Myerses made was in delivering the information to Cuba, which placed them in violation of U.S. laws against spying and treason. If they had instead delivered the information to the New York Times, it would have made for an entirely different situation, similar to that of Daniel Ellsberg, the Pentagon official who released the Pentagon Papers to the Times during the Vietnam War, or to that of Bradley Manning, the U.S. soldier who is accused of having delivered classified information disclosing embarrassing matters relating to U.S. foreign policy to WikiLeaks.
Yes, the government would have nonetheless indicted and prosecuted the Myerses as it did Ellsberg and is doing to Manning. Moreover, Judge Walton would undoubtedly have still berated them if they had been convicted. But at least the information would have reached the American people, which might have caused more Americans to exercise some independence of thought and personal conscience, which in turn might have brought a change in U.S. foreign policy towards Cuba.
More examples
Another example of this phenomenon is the case of the Cuban Five. That case involves five agents of the Cuban government who were arrested by federal officials in the United States, prosecuted for spying, convicted, and sentenced to long prison terms by a federal court in Florida. Their crime? They came to the United States with the aim of ferreting out terrorist plots against Cuba.
For that, those five Cuban agents were considered bad people by U.S. officials — criminals! Imagine the audacity of those five men in trying to protect their country from terrorism. Don’t they know by now that Cuba is not supposed to defend itself against such things?
Consider Cubana Flight 455, which took off from Venezuela on October 6, 1976, and was returning to Cuba. It was downed by a terrorist bomb that had been planted on the plane. All 78 people on board were killed, including all 24 members of the 1975 Cuban fencing team, which had just won gold medals in Latin American competitions.
The prime suspect in the bombing was a man named Luis Posada Carriles, an agent of the CIA. Was Posada operating on behalf of the CIA when he supposedly orchestrated the attack? It’s impossible to know. We do know that he and the CIA claimed that he was no longer working for the CIA during that time. But the problem is that they would say that anyway, so there really is no way to know for sure. What we do know is that the U.S. government has steadfastly harbored Posada by refusing to honor an extradition request from Venezuela, notwithstanding an extradition treaty between the two countries. We also know that Congress has steadfastly refused to conduct a formal investigation into whether the CIA was behind the attack.
Let’s suppose that the CIA was behind the terrorist attack on Cubana Flight 455 and that the Myerses had discovered the plot when it was being planned. If they had delivered such information to Cuba, there is no doubt that they would have been treated in the same way they were treated for transmitting the “national defense” information that they actually transmitted to Cuba. Under America’s national-security state, any citizen, either inside or outside the government, who would disclose such information to a nation being targeted by the CIA is obviously a hater of the U.S. government and anti-American.
What has been the justification for the U.S. government’s actions towards Cuba? The justifications have been twofold: Fidel Castro’s refusal to submit to the control of the U.S. government and the fact that Castro was a communist who turned Cuba into a communist state.
Those two concepts — U.S. imperialism and the U.S. national-security state’s excessive and unreasonable fear of communism — have been driving principles of U.S. foreign policy towards Cuba and the rest of the world through much of the 20th and 21st centuries. They have also wreaked untold damage on our nation, our values, our economic well-being, and our freedom.
The day after Japanese forces attacked Pearl Harbor in December 1941, they invaded the Philippines, where they killed or captured tens of thousands of American soldiers. The obvious question arises: What in the world was such a large contingent of U.S. soldiers doing in a land thousands of miles away from American shores? The answer lies in the turn towards empire that the United States took during the Spanish-American War in 1898. When Cuba and the Philippines revolted against the rule of the Spanish Empire, the United States intervened in the conflict, promising to help the revolutionaries to achieve independence.
America’s intervention succeeded and the Spanish Empire lost the war. Nonetheless, Cuba and the Philippines failed to secure their independence. The reason? The U.S. government insisted on replacing the rule of the Spanish Empire with the rule of what was to become the U.S. empire.
The result was another brutal war of independence in the Philippines, in which U.S. forces killed, maimed, or tortured hundreds of thousands of Filipinos in their successful quest to quell the rebellion.
Thus, the U.S. soldiers who were killed or captured by Japan at the inception of World War II were on U.S. territory that had been captured almost 50 years before as part of America’s turn away from a constitutional republic to a worldwide empire.
The U.S. government also treated Cuba as its colony, just as the Spanish Empire had done, effectively ruling the country for decades through a succession of brutal and corrupt dictators who would do the bidding of the U.S. empire.
Thus, the Spanish-American War was a watershed event for the United States, one that would ultimately lead to an empire with hundreds of military bases all over the world, along with an endless series of invasions, occupations, coups, assassinations, sanctions, embargoes, and regime-change operations, all intended to expand the reach of the U.S. empire around the world.
In fact, the corrupt dictator who ruled Cuba prior to Fidel Castro’s revolution, Fulgencio Batista, was one of the U.S. empire’s approved rulers, one who brutalized and plundered the Cuban people while doing whatever the U.S. empire requested of him. When the Cuban people revolted against Batista and replaced him with Castro, U.S. officials initially hoped that Castro would continue the tradition and place Cuba and himself under U.S. control. That hope, however, was soon dashed, as Castro made it clear to the U.S. empire and to the Cuban people that Cuba was, for the first time in history, to be a sovereign and independent country.
It is not a surprise that Castro’s position did not sit well with U.S. officials. The empire placed him squarely in its sights for a regime-change operation that would ultimately consist of an economic embargo, an invasion, assassination attempts, terrorism, sabotage, and almost nuclear war.
But there was another critically important factor that guaranteed that Castro would become the target of the U.S. empire. After seizing power, he revealed himself to be a communist, one who quickly began converting Cuba’s economic system to communism.
Those two factors — U.S. imperialism and U.S. anti-communism — became the twin driving forces of the U.S. government in the second half of the 20th century. More than anything else, those two forces would corrupt, warp, and pervert the principles and values of the American people.
From the first grade on up, American students are taught that “we” won World War II. Actually, the truth of that statement depends on how one defines the pronoun “we.” When “we” is defined to include the Soviet Union, then it is true that “we” won World War II. But when “we” is defined to mean the United States, Great Britain, France, and other non-Soviet Allied powers, then “we” did not win the war. It was the Soviet Union that won the war.
Recall, after all, the ostensible reason that Great Britain declared war on Nazi Germany. It was to free the Polish people from Nazi tyranny. What was the situation at the end of the war? Well, the Polish people were indeed freed from Nazi tyranny, only to have to suffer for the next 50 years under Soviet communist tyranny. From the standpoint of the Poles and, for that matter, other Eastern Europeans in the Soviet bloc, that was no victory.
But it was also no victory for the American people because almost immediately U.S. officials converted the Soviet Union from World War II partner and ally (and Hitler’s enemy) into a giant new enemy for the United States, a situation that would bring a half-century of crisis, chaos, conflict, and hostility during the Cold War and massive death and destruction in such hot wars as Korea and Vietnam.
Equally important, that new enemy would provide the justification for maintaining and expanding a massive and permanent military-industrial complex and for initiating a massive national-security state, both of whose policies and practices would end up looking strikingly similar to those of the totalitarian regimes that the United States had opposed during the war and was now opposing in the Cold War.
Anti-communist fervor
It is impossible to overstate the depth of the anti-communist fervor that characterized the Cold War. For those who were born after that era, the best way to describe it is that the fear of communism was about 1,000 times greater than the fear of terrorism is today. What was different, however, was that while terrorism involves a physical act of force, communism involved more than that. Communism also involved an idea, one that absolutely scared U.S. officials and much of the American populace to death. There were several aspects to the anti-communist fervor.
One aspect was the notion that the Soviet Union intended to initiate a war against the United States in which America would be conquered by the communists. Under that scenario, the American people would end up living their lives much like the people of Eastern Europe — under the iron boot of the Soviet Union.
A second aspect was the notion that communism would spread beyond Cuba, into other Latin American nations, which would enable them to mobilize military forces that would invade Florida and Texas and sweep up the Eastern seaboard, ultimately defeating U.S. forces and taking over Washington. Under this scenario, the Latin American communist forces would be serving as agents of the Soviet Union and would do its bidding after conquering the United States.
A third aspect was that communists would take control over European countries and Asian countries, causing the “dominoes” to continue falling until the final domino — the United States — would be toppled.
A fourth aspect was communist infiltration in the federal government and the public schools, where politicians, bureaucrats, and teachers would be serving effectively as moles of the Soviet Union, who would be indoctrinating the American people with communist ideas and, even worse, taking control of the reins of power and surrendering America to the communists.
A fifth aspect, which perhaps was the scariest for U.S. officials, was that communism would operate as a Sirens song, infecting the minds of the American people and seducing them into wanting and desiring a communist way of life, one in which people would eagerly and enthusiastically surrender their freedom in return for being taken care of from the cradle to the grave by the state. Under this scenario, communists would begin winning elections all across the land and gradually begin to seep into the federal bureaucracies, enabling them to bring communism to America in a purely democratic fashion.
All five of those aspects of the anti-communism mindset combined to produce a climate of constant preparation for war and a long, dark era of deeply seated fear that pervaded the United States and the American psyche. It was an era that was so frightening that Americans learned to defer to authority, to trust their government officials, and to place unwavering faith in them to protect “national security” and defend them from communism.
What was this thing that frightened people so much? Communism is an economic doctrine in which the state owns the means of production. In its purest sense, it means that the state owns everything in society. Since the state is the sole employer, everyone works for the state. The state guarantees that everyone will be taken care of with housing, food, employment, health care, education, and other important things. No more worries about losing one’s home, starving to death, being fired, or being unable to pay for medical expenses or for an education. Everyone’s needs are taken care of, from the day they are born to the day they die.
Needless to say, all that is a very attractive notion to many people.
The rise of socialism
What’s the alternative to communism or, to employ a similar term, socialism?
The alternative is a private-property, free-market way of life, one in which the means of production and most everything else are privately owned. People are free to engage in economic enterprise free of government regulation, to engage freely in mutually beneficial economic transactions with others, to accumulate unlimited amounts of wealth, and to decide what to do with it. In a system based on private property and economic liberty, which some might label as “capitalism,” the role of government is simply to protect people from the violence or fraud of others, to defend the nation in the event of an attack, and to provide a judicial forum by which disputes can be resolved peacefully.
Notwithstanding slavery and other exceptions, the United States had been founded on principles of private property and the free market. Despite the many exceptions, it was, in common parlance, a capitalist country. In fact, America’s free-enterprise economic system was one of the major things that distinguished the United States from all other nations in history.
Throughout the late 1800s and into the early 1900s, however, communism was becoming increasingly popular all over the world. Near the end of World War I, the Russian Revolution brought a communist regime to power in Russia. Moreover, socialistic ideas were percolating throughout Europe and Asia. By the time that World War II broke out, the United States itself had embraced a variation of socialism with its welfare-state way of life, one in which the federal government was expected to take care of people by means of certain important programs, such as Social Security.
Moreover, communist parties were playing active roles in the political process, including the U.S. political process.
All of that was too much for U.S. officials, who were convinced that unless the United States took a leading role battling communism around the world, it would end up being a communist nation. Thus, at the end of World War II, the Pentagon and a gigantic wartime military establishment became permanent fixtures in American life. Two years later, in 1947, Harry Truman signed into law the National Security Act, which brought the CIA into existence. Together, that permanent military establishment and the CIA would form the core units of America’s national-security state, which would, over time, effectively become a fourth branch of government having unbelievable powers of invasion, assassination, torture, and fomenting coups and regime-change operations. And the legislative and judicial branches and even the executive branch would not and could not touch it because of the overriding principle of “national security.”
What should the United States have done at the end of World War II? It should have come home and dismantled its wartime military machine. The war was over. Nazi Germany and Japan had been defeated. Sure, the Eastern Europeans were now under the iron boot of the Soviet Union but U.S. officials were partly responsible for that, not only in partnering with the Soviet communists during the war and relinquishing control over such countries to them, but also in their “unconditional surrender” demand by which they declined to enter into separate peace negotiations with the Germans that could have kept Eastern Europe free of Soviet control.
The U.S. government instead chose to maintain a massive level of military force in Germany to protect Western Europe from an attack by its World War II partner and ally, the Soviet Union. That’s what NATO was all about. Even worse, the U.S. government promised to defend nations all over the world from communist aggression, an open-ended commitment that would transform America into a militarist, garrison state.
War with the USSR?
What were the chances that the Soviet Union would start a new war against its former World War II allies? Virtually nil. After all, the Soviets had just lost more than 20 million people in the war. The entire nation, including its economy, was devastated Moreover, the U.S. government had sent a powerful message to the Soviets regarding U.S. military might with the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
What about the continued Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe? The reasoning was no different in principle from that of the U.S. government, which fiercely opposed any communist regimes in Latin America. After two world wars, the Soviets wanted puppet regimes in Eastern Europe to serve as a buffer against future invasions by Germany. The rationale was no more justifiable than the U.S. rationale for installing pro-U.S. puppet regimes in Latin America, but it certainly did not mean that the Soviet Union was embarking on a worldwide campaign of military conquest.
The national-security state’s fear of communism in Latin America went deep. Consider Guatemala. When a socialist named Jacobo Arbenz was democratically elected president in Guatemala in 1950, the Pentagon and the CIA went ballistic. They were convinced that with Arbenz’s election, the communists had established a beachhead in the Western hemisphere. Apparently, in the minds of the military and CIA, Guatemalan forces would cross into Mexico, ford the Rio Grande, conquer Houston and Dallas, sweep northeasterly, conquer Georgia and the rest of the South, take Washington, D.C, and then hand the keys to the capital to the Soviet Union. Oh, if they waited until after 1959, Castro’s communist army would invade and conquer Florida and then move north, conquering everything in its path before joining with Arbenz’s army outside Washington, D.C., to jointly accept the surrender of U.S. officials in Washington.
It was obviously a ridiculous, inane notion. But nothing was beyond the communist-possessed imagination of officials in the U.S. national-security state. In fact, when Pentagon and CIA officials learned that Arbenz had purchased a shipload of arms from Czechoslovakia, which was under Soviet control, that transaction was positive confirmation that the communists were planning a military takeover of the United States. Never mind that the Czechs had taken the Guatemalans to the cleaners by selling them a bunch of military junk. Some giant, worldwide, monolithic communist threat!
The national-security mindset was the same in Southeast Asia. The communists would take over in Vietnam, which would cause the Southeast Asian dominoes to start falling, ultimately resulting in a communist takeover of the United States.
That mindset turned out to be as ridiculous and inane as the one that related to Latin America. The best proof, of course, is what happened at the end of the Vietnam War. The dominoes didn’t fall and the Vietnamese communists didn’t invade and conquer the United States. In fact, soon after the reunification of the country, the Vietnamese communists got into a war with the Chinese communists. Today, Vietnam has friendly relations with the United States.
In fact, let’s return to Latin America for a moment. Today, Cuba, Venezuela, Bolivia, and Nicaragua have socialist-communist regimes. So what? What American feels threatened by that? Is anyone worrying that communist armies are about to cross the southern border of the United States or invade Florida? Like I say, the fear of communism and communists was inane, overblown, exaggerated, and irrational.
What about the Communist Party and American communists — that is, people in the United States who were committed to converting its system to a communist economic one?
In a genuinely free society, people are free to expound any ideas they want, no matter how despicable or unpopular. The American Communist Party should have been free to participate in the political process to its heart’s content, doing everything it wanted to peacefully persuade people to embrace communism and socialism. It was the duty of the government to protect them in the exercise of their rights and freedom. After all, the best way to combat a bad idea like communism or socialism is to promulgate a better idea, such as libertarianism, i.e., a free-market, private-property system.
Unfortunately, that’s not the way the Pentagon, the CIA, and the FBI, another important part of the U.S. national-security state, viewed things. In their eyes, people who advocated communism were bad people and, even worse, grave threats to the “national security” of the United States.
Thus, to protect “national security” from communism, the U.S. national-security state adopted policies and practices that in some ways mirrored the policies and practices of the very regime they had defeated in World War II — the Nazi regime — and the regime that they had partnered with in World War II and against which they were now waging the Cold War — the Soviet regime. Of course, U.S. officials justified the evil and immoral means they adopted to combat communism under the rubric of protecting “national security.”
Americans should have suspected that something was amiss when, after the end of World War II, U.S. officials began enlisting former Nazis into the service of the U.S. government. Given the massive death and destruction of World War II and the Holocaust, Nazi Germany was obviously one of the most evil regimes in history. That’s in fact one of the major justifications given for America’s entry into World War II — to bring an end to that evil regime.
Yet here were U.S. officials recruiting and employing Nazis. The reason? The Cold War had started! While the Allies had vanquished Nazi Germany, they simultaneously acquired a new official enemy — the Soviet Union, which had served as their ally and partner during the war.
The U.S. embrace of Nazi functionaries signaled what would become a guiding motif for the U.S. national-security state: The end justifies the means. Whatever needed to be done to defeat communism — as represented primarily by the Soviet Union but also by Red China and North Korea — was considered morally justified. It was a motif that would ultimately lead to the embrace of policies that, ironically, characterized totalitarian regimes, including Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Consider, for example, the CIA’s highly secret drug experiments, a program known as MKULTRA. Under that program, the CIA subjected unsuspecting Americans to LSD and other mind-altering substances. They did it to people in hospitals, to people in prisons, and to others, with the knowledge and cooperation of officials in those facilities, always under a vow of secrecy. What they didn’t have was the consent of many of the people to whom they were administering the drugs.
What was the justification for those drug experiments, which somewhat resembled the medical experimentation that had been undertaken by the Nazis? Why, national security, of course. Pentagon and CIA officials had learned that the Soviet Union was conducting LSD experiments on people. Therefore, U.S. officials concluded that in order to keep up with the communists and ultimately defeat them, it was necessary to do the same thing. In war, sometimes people have to be sacrificed. The end justifies the means.
It is impossible to know how many people’s minds were damaged or destroyed or, indeed, how many people were killed, by the CIA’s drug experiments. When information about the program became public, the CIA destroyed most of its MKULTRA files, no doubt on the grounds of national security. After all, if the public and the world were to learn the details of MKULTRA, including the identities of the victims, the CIA could be damaged, which, in the minds of national-security-state officials, would logically threaten national security.
One of the best accounts of MKULTRA is found in the book A Terrible Mistake: The Murder of Frank Olson and the CIA’s Secret Cold War Experiments, by H.P. Albarelli Jr. (2011). This fascinating and gripping book recounts the life and death of a CIA agent named Frank Olson.
For years, the CIA’s official story was that Olson had taken his own life while suffering the throes of depression. It was all a lie. Many years after Olson’s death, it was discovered that the CIA had actually subjected him to an LSD experiment, without telling him or asking him.
Once that truth came out, the CIA’s official story changed. Under its new story, it acknowledged that it had in fact drugged Olson without his knowledge or consent. Thus, it said that Olson was suffering from both hallucinations and depression as a result of the LSD experiment on him, which supposedly led to his jumping out of a window from an upper floor of a New York City hotel. Under the new official story, the CIA deeply regretted what it had done and apologized profusely to Olson’s widow.
Why would the CIA subject one of its own employees to an LSD experiment? Why, national security, of course. The CIA wanted to see how someone would react if he ingested LSD without being told in advance, information that could enable the United States to defeat the Soviet Union in the Cold War.
The natural question arises: Why would the CIA feel the need to do that to one of its agents, when that was precisely what it was doing to patients and prisoners in hospitals and prisons?
In his carefully researched book, one that relies on confidential sources within the CIA, Albarelli provides a convincing case showing that the CIA’s new official story was also a lie and that, in fact, it was a fallback position to disguise the CIA’s murder of Frank Olson.
Why would the CIA murder one of its own agents? Why, national security, of course. Albarelli’s research disclosed that Americans were not the only ones who were the subject of the CIA’s LSD experiments. He points to a small village in France, Pont St. Esprit, that in 1951 became a target of the CIA’s LSD experiments. The experiment resulted in the death of five people and in the need for 300 people to seek medical care or to be placed in treatment facilities.
According to Albarelli, Frank Olson had participated in that horrifying LSD experiment and was deeply troubled about it. Ultimately, in a crisis of conscience, he disclosed the highly classified secret to an unauthorized person.
In other words, Olson knew too much and talked too much. He had become a threat to national security. If people were to find out about the CIA’s LSD experiment on an entire village in France, that would damage the CIA, which in turn would threaten national security. There was no effective choice. In order to protect national security, Olson had to be eliminated. Albarelli’s sources revealed that Olson didn’t jump out of a window. He was thrown out of it, by two men working for the CIA.
Undeclared war
There were also several regime-change operations in different parts of the world, where agents of the national-security state initiated what can be described only as undeclared attacks on foreign regimes, with the goal of ousting their rulers from power and replacing them with U.S.-approved rulers — all under the notion that national security required that such operations be conducted.
In 1953, the CIA instigated a coup in Iran that succeeded in ousting the democratically elected prime minister, Mohammed Mossadegh, from power and replacing him with the brutal dictatorial regime of the shah of Iran. Needless to say, in justifying its coup, the CIA cited national security, saying that Mossadegh had been leaning toward communism and the Soviet Union. Never mind that British officials had asked the CIA to oust Mossadegh owing to his nationalization of British oil interests.
One year later, 1954, the CIA ousted the democratically elected president of Guatemala, Jacobo Arbenz, and installed a brutal unelected military dictatorship in his stead. The justification? National security, of course. U.S. national-security- state officials maintained that Arbenz was a communist, as reflected by his socialist economic policies and his sympathies for Guatemalan communists, some of whom were serving in his administration. Never mind that some high CIA officials and some members of Congress owned stock in the United Fruit Company, some of whose land in Guatemala was being seized and redistributed to the poor. U.S. officials were convinced that the national security of the United States would be severely threatened if a communist regime were permitted to exist in the Western hemisphere. When Arbenz was caught purchasing weaponry from the Soviet satellite state of Czechoslovakia, his fate was sealed.
It is interesting that defenders of the national-security state justify the CIA’s Guatemala coup by claiming not only that it protected U.S. national security but also that it saved Guatemala from tyranny and destruction at the hands of a communist regime. Their argument is that a country’s laws and constitution are not a suicide pact. Moreover, voters make mistakes, and if illegal means are necessary to save a country from such mistakes, then it is right and proper that such means be employed. The end justifies the means.
Arbenz was lucky. By fleeing the country early in the coup, he saved his life. It later turned out that among the CIA’s contingency plans were his assassination and those of other Guatemalan officials.
There were the countless regime-change operations against Cuba, a country that had never attacked the United States, including the Bay of Pigs invasion, terrorist attacks on Cuban soil, the U.S. embargo against Cuba, and, of course, the many assassination attempts against Fidel Castro and other Cuban officials.
In fact, there is every reason to believe that the CIA was behind the 1967 extrajudicial execution of Che Guevara, one of Castro’s fellow communist revolutionaries. After he was taken into custody by the Bolivian military, Guevara’s captors executed him on orders from above. The killing was a grave violation of international law. While the CIA has always denied any role in the illegal execution, the fact is that a CIA agent was present during the execution. Given the subservient nature of most Latin American regimes to the U.S. military, which has long supported and trained Latin American troops, the chances that the Bolivian military would have executed Guevara in the face of ardent opposition by the CIA are nil. Moreover, given that Guevara was on the CIA’s assassination list, the chances that it would have objected to his extrajudicial execution are also nil. Finally, soon after the execution the CIA issued a report detailing the benefits of Guevara’s death.
The CIA’s participation in another extrajudicial execution had occurred in South Vietnam a few years previous to the Che Guevara execution. A few weeks before the John Kennedy assassination, a CIA-supported military coup succeeded in ousting the South Vietnamese president, Ngo Dinh Diem, from power. Soon after Diem was taken into custody, South Vietnamese military forces executed him. While the CIA denied any role in the assassination, there is little doubt that the South Vietnamese military would never have done it if the CIA had fiercely opposed it.
It is not surprising that the CIA-supported regime-change operation in South Vietnam was justified by the claim of national security. Diem’s authoritarian regime — a regime that was long supported by the U.S. government — was so brutal and corrupt that it increased the odds of a communist takeover of South Vietnam. If the communists took over South Vietnam, that presumably would cause Southeast Asian “dominoes” to start falling, which would ultimately mean a communist takeover of the United States. Thus, the idea was that national security required Diem’s ouster.
Support for dictatorships
Support for brutal Latin American dictatorships, especially military ones, was another policy of the U.S. national-security state. Often pro-U.S. dictatorships were more brutal than communist ones. Like the shah’s pro-U.S. regime in Iran, the pro-U.S. dictatorships in Latin America, especially the military dictatorships, brutalized their own people — torturing them, “disappearing” them, and killing them with U.S.-trained military and intelligence forces. Whenever citizens who were suffering under such brutal dictatorships resisted the U.S.-supported tyranny under which they were suffering, they were considered communists and terrorists who needed to be captured, tortured, executed, or otherwise suppressed. National security required it.
U.S. officials didn’t care what their puppet regimes did to people within their own countries. After all, national security requires order and stability, which is, in fact, why the U.S. national-security state has always leaned toward pro-U.S. military dictatorships.
In fact, when American citizens became the victims of torture at the hands of U.S.-trained military or intelligence goons in Latin America, U.S. officials were noteworthy for their lack of interest. One example involved the torture and rape of an American nun, Sister Dianna Ortiz, who stated that present during her ordeal was a man who spoke Spanish with an American accent. Needless to say, no subpoena was ever served by Congress or the Justice Department on the CIA demanding the production of all CIA agents operating in Guatemala during the time that Sister Dianna was tortured and raped. Obviously, revealing the identities of such agents would have threatened national security; therefore Sister Dianna was simply left to adjust to her unfortunate experience without any expectation of justice from the U.S. government.
A similar example involved an American woman named Jennifer Harbury, who married a Guatemalan insurgent, Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, who was resisting the tyranny of the U.S.-supported military dictatorship in Guatemala. Bamaca was captured by Guatemalan forces and was “disappeared.” Harbury attempted to locate him and save his life through a series of hunger strikes and legal actions.
Through it all, the CIA claimed to have no information about Bamaca’s whereabouts. It turned out to be a lie. A U.S. State Department official blew the whistle and disclosed not only that the CIA knew where Bamaca was but also that it had a close working relationship with his torturers and killers. By the time Harbury acquired that information, Bamaca had been killed by his captors, another grave violation of international law. The CIA retaliated against the whistleblower by ensuring that he lost his security clearance, which was essential to his position at the State Department.
And at home …
In the United States itself, the preoccupation with communism and communists caused the national-security state to take extraordinary actions against the American people, actions that constituted severe violations of the principles of freedom.
First of all, there were investigations and accusations of Americans who were suspected of having connections to communism and the Communist Party. Reputations and careers were ruined on the supposition that anyone who believed in communism or had believed in communism during some part of his life was obviously a threat to national security.
Only a few people had the courage to point out that a free society protects the rights of people to believe anything they want, associate with whomever they want, and to promote anything they want, no matter how despicable such beliefs and associations might be to others. After all, to defend the right of people to be communists subjected the defender to the charge of being a communist.
Both the FBI and the CIA illegally spied on and closely monitored the activities of American citizens. Secret files were kept on people, often detailing nothing more than their sexual activity or other personal matters, with the aim of blackmailing them, embarrassing them, or destroying them.
Of course, those were the sorts of things that were done by the Gestapo and that were being done by the KGB. In the mind of the ordinary national-security-state official, however, such practices were evil only when committed by Nazis or communists, not when they were committed by U.S. officials, who were charged with the difficult and dangerous task of protecting national security from people like the Nazis and the communists. The end justified the means.
In fact, the communist scare started long before the formal advent of the national-security state. As Americans were later to find out, the federal government was keeping secret files on Americans suspected of being communists as far back as World War I, when U.S. officials were raiding, busting, and prosecuting communist-socialist organizations and deporting foreign residents for having communist views.
Among the most famous of the victims during that time was a Russian immigrant named Emma Goldman, who was arrested and deported for advocating anarchy and communism. She described her thoughts as she was involuntarily departing New York harbor: “It was my beloved city, the metropolis of the New World. It was America, indeed America repeating the terrible scenes of tsarist Russia! I glanced up — the Statue of Liberty!”
Among the national-security state’s favorite tactics during the Cold War was to plant “moles” within communist organizations, with the goal of getting their membership lists, spying on them, and looking for evidence of subversion and treason. If a person were caught doing something illegal, sometimes he’d be promised leniency if he agreed to become a spy for the national-security state.
Hardly anyone noticed the totalitarian nature of those extraordinary “national security” measures. That didn’t matter. What mattered was the defeat of communism. Anything that had to be done to achieve victory was justified. The end justified the means. If the United States was doing it, it had to be good, since it was being done to defeat communism.
Two organizations that the U.S. national-security state was determined to destroy were the U.S. Communist Party and an organization called the Fair Play for Cuba Committee, an organization that included many mainstream Americans who were sympathetic to the communist-socialist revolution in Cuba. U.S. officials successfully planted moles in both organizations. Such moles were trained by the national-security state to falsely portray themselves as communists. They were so well-trained that they successfully fooled people in those organizations into believing that they were genuine communists.
Meanwhile, at the height of the Cold War, as the U.S. national-security state was doing everything it could to destroy communists, one of the most mysterious episodes in the history of the national-security state occurred, an event that can be described as a Cold War miracle.
An American man who supposedly attempted to defect to the Soviet Union and promised to divulge to the Soviet communist regime all the information that he had acquired during his time in the U.S. military — a man who later returned to the United States and then openly started a chapter of the Fair Play for Cuba Committee — a man who openly corresponded with the U.S. Communist Party — a man who was a self-described Marxist — a man who supposedly visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico with the intent to re-defect to the Soviet Union — sauntered across the Cold War stage with not even a single grand-jury subpoena, much less arrest, torture, incarceration, or criminal prosecution at the hands of the U.S. national-security state. That man was a former U.S. Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald.
At the height of the Cold War in the early 1960s, when the U.S. government was doing everything to defeat communism and destroy communists, one of the most remarkable series of events in the history of the U.S. national-security state took place. An American claiming to love communists, communism, and Marxism — a man who ostensibly did everything he could to join America’s official enemy the Soviet Union — a man who supposedly delivered top-secret information relating to national security to the Soviets — a man who campaigned openly here in the United States in favor of Cuba and communism — a man who may have visited the Soviet and Cuban embassies in Mexico with the ostensible aim of returning to the Soviet Union — sauntered across the Cold War stage with virtual immunity from adverse action at the hands of the national-security state. This phenomenal matter could well be described as a Cold War miracle. That man was a former U.S. Marine named Lee Harvey Oswald.
The official story: Oswald joined the Marines and became an avowed communist. Somehow during his time in the Marines, he taught himself Russian, a foreign language that many would agree is very difficult to learn, especially without the benefit of a language school or a tutor.
nation, took out their own president.
