Part 10: The CIA as Organized Crime...M.General B.Lawlor CIA to HLS Honcho....The Phoenix comes Home to Roost

The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt 
America and the World
By Douglas Valentine
Chapter 16  

MAJOR GENERAL BRUCE LAWLOR: 

FROM CIA OFFICER IN VIETNAM 

TO HOMELAND SECURITY HONCHO 

In August, 2002, I wrote an “Open Letter” to Major General Bruce Lawlor at the Office of Homeland Security. Lawlor had recently been named as Homeland Security’s Senior Director for protection and prevention. By coincidence, he was a former CIA officer whom I had interviewed at length for The Phoenix Program. 

Given that Lawlor had been involved in Phoenix operations in Vietnam, it seemed fitting that he would get a job at Homeland Security, which is modeled on Phoenix. But I was still surprised; when I met him in 1988, Lawlor was a small town lawyer in Vermont, feeling unappreciated and resentful of his former bosses at the CIA. 

He was still mad at the left, too. He’d run for attorney general in Vermont’s 1984 Democratic primary; and in the spirit of full disclosure, he had listed his CIA service in the Phoenix program on the resume his campaign staff handed out to the press. Then the unexpected happened; a small radical magazine published a scathing article about Lawlor and Phoenix. Soon thereafter the state’s anti-imperialist and pacifist groups produced briefs for delegates at the Democratic convention that said, “No Assassins for Attorney General.” 

Lawlor lost the primary, even though William Colby, a native of Vermont, visited the state during the campaign to speak on Lawlor’s behalf. 

How times have changed. A decade after the Vietnam War ended, it was still possible to persuade voters that a former member of a covert torture and assassination program wasn’t suitable to be a state’s chief law enforcement officer. Since 9/11, it has become a badge of honor. 

In any event, four years after he lost in the primary, Lawlor still held a grudge against the peaceniks who, in his opinion, had smeared him. When I wrote my “Open Letter” in 2002, I wondered exactly what he had in store for people like me, now that he was in charge of the homeland’s Protection and Prevention. 

Here We Go Again 

Having former CIA officers in important government positions is nothing new. I refer you to the previous chapter about former Congressman Rob Simmons, who ran a torture chamber in Vietnam. Another example, Yale graduate and Bush family insider Porter Goss served in the CIA’s operations division for over ten years, attacking Cuba, handling agents in Mexico, and eventually serving in London. None of what Goss actually did is known, but he had tons of campaign money and was elected to Congress in 1988. He served the neocon cause until 2006 when Bush named him Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Goss was in Pakistan in early 2001, just prior to the 9/11 attacks, having lunch with the head of Pakistan’s version of the CIA, General Mahmud Ahmed, whose agent network “had ties to Osama bin Laden and directly funded, supported, and trained the Taliban.” 1 

Other slimy CIA spooks walk the halls of Congress, like William Hurd, who slithered around Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India. Like Simmons and Goss, the CIA apparently greased his slide into Congress, so it could more effectively repress American society the way it does foreign nations. 

The question needs to be asked: is having people who are in actuality war criminals in positions of legislative and executive authority in America an expression of a free society? Or is the CIA antithetical to democratic institutions, given that it is a secretive organization whose modus operandi is similar to that of an organized crime outfit and corrupts everyone it comes in contact with? Should CIA officers be disqualified from holding public office? What is to prevent them from treating their domestic enemies the same way they treat their foreign enemies? 

I admit, it was frightening to learn that “Bruce” was now a major general and a top-ranking official in the ominous Office of Homeland Security. Suddenly he had access to whatever political blacklists the Bush regime had assembled, as well as control over any covert action teams that might be used to neutralize dissidents. As a replica of the Phoenix “coordination” program, the Homeland Security apparatus is a perfect cover for all manner of clandestine blackmail and extortion operations. 

My fear was that Lawlor was still working for the CIA – and even if not, still had that mentality – and thus posed a threat to democracy in America. One reason for that concern was that nowhere in Lawlor’s online biographies was there any mention of his CIA service. That omission indicated intent to deceive. 

The Executive Session on Domestic Preparedness, “a standing task force of leading practitioners and academic specialists concerned with terrorism and emergency management” (sponsored by Harvard and the Departments of Defense and Justice) posted a biography of Lawlor. It mentioned that he’d been the first commanding general of the Joint Task Force - Civil Support (JTS-CS) at Fort Monroe. The JTS-CS, it explained, had been formed to provide “command and control over Department of Defense consequence management forces in support of a civilian Lead Federal Agency following a weapon of mass destruction incident in the United States, its territories or possessions.” 

Could that civilian Lead Federal Agency be the CIA, I wondered? 

The JTF-CS’s mission sounded like a self-fulfilling prophesy, in view of the fact that it was founded a mere two years before the 9/11 terror attacks. In its 2000 policy paper “Rebuilding America’s Defenses,” the neocon Project for a New American Century worried that the transformation of American armed forces through “new technologies and operational concepts” was likely to take too long, “absent some catastrophic and catalyzing event – like a new Pearl Harbor.” 

Many people felt this too was a self-fulfilling prophesy. And, of course, Lawlor commanded the JTF-CS through 9/11 until October 2001, when it was merged with Northcom. 

Nowhere in the Executive Session’s biography did Lawlor’s patrons at Harvard (he’s a graduate of its National Security Fellows Program), say that he had once been a CIA officer. 

Why not? 

In another biography that at one time was posted on the internet but has since been removed (the Wikipedia link goes nowhere), Lawlor was said to have been “assigned as the Deputy Director, Operations, Readiness and Mobilization within the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans in May 1998. As Deputy Director, he monitors Army operations worldwide and oversees National Guard and Reserve Forces Integration efforts.” 2 

This is significant too, in so far as National Guard and Reserve forces are, like JTF-CS, integral parts of Northcom, the military component of the Homeland Security apparatus. Northcom was formed after 9/11 specifically to enhance the military’s ability to coordinate with civilian law enforcement agencies. Since then, the military has steadily expanded its influence over domestic law enforcement, with eerily predictable results. The most drastic effect has been the militarization of police forces across the nation, and the intimidating presence of soldiers in airports and train stations. Over time, the American people have accepted their subordination to this systematic expression of state omnipotence and violence. They’ve been pacified. 

Police departments nationwide are given “gee whiz” gadgets developed by the military, like the Stingray cell-site simulator and the IMSI catcher. Such surveillance technologies chip away at our Fourth Amendment right to privacy. They’re often deployed in secret, and cops who use them are compelled to sign nondisclosure agreements with the FBI. Such gadgets are used to identify every person at a Black Lives Matter demonstration or meetings to boycott Israel. 

Many cops have military experience. They return from overseas duty and still consider themselves heroes protecting the empire. Then the FBI or CIA comes along and recruits them into the secret boys club and they think they’re above the law. They’re perfectly willing to use the same extra-legal tactics they learned in the colonies on dissidents at home. 

Their sensibilities are informed by the crimes they participated in overseas. In the colonies, they got to bust into the homes of Iraqi and Afghan civilians, guns blazing. When they return and become cops, they automatically know who to target: the poor, blacks, leftists, environmentalists, and anti-war activists who disrespect their sacrifices on behalf of the nation. 

Political cadres own and control cops in America like they own and control special policemen in occupied countries. A favorite “gee whiz” gadget they dispense is PredPol software for “predictive” policing. “PredPol was designed for ‘tracking insurgents and forecasting casualties in Iraq,’ and was financed by the Pentagon. One of the company’s advisors, Harsh Patel, used to work for In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s venture capital firm. If, for instance, the software depends on historical crime data from a racially biased police force, then it’s just going to send a flood of officers into the very same neighborhoods they’ve always overpoliced. And if that happens, of course, more personnel will find more crime — and presto, you have the potential for a perfect feedback loop of prejudice, arrests, and high-tech ‘success.’ To understand what that means, keep in mind that, without a computer in sight, nearly four times as many blacks as whites are arrested for marijuana possession, even though usage among the two groups is about the same.” 3 

I’ll expand on the CIA/FBI/Pentagon infiltration of law enforcement in the next chapter. Meanwhile, let’s address one more problem with Lawlor’s official biography, which states that, “The General’s military service began in 1967. After service in Vietnam from 1971 to 1973, he received a Direct Commission in 1974 as an Intelligence Officer.” 4 

Again, the information is intentionally misleading with no mention that Lawlor was a CIA officer. In fact, the unsuspecting reader is led to believe he was in the military. 

Might Lawlor have consented to this subterfuge, because he was still serving the CIA undercover as a military officer when he took the job at Homeland Security? 

Bruce Lawlor in Vietnam 

I first read about Lawlor in Everything We Had by Al Santoli. The interview was provocative, to say the least. In a section of his book titled “The Phoenix,” Santoli identified Lawlor as having been a CIA case officer in I Corps from November 1971 through December 1973. He quoted Lawlor as saying that in order to win the war, “what we had to do was get in and eliminate the ability of the VC to control or influence the people. That’s what pacification was all about. The buzzword was ’root out.’ We tried to go in and neutralize their political structure.” 5 

For anyone unfamiliar with Phoenix jargon, “neutralize” meant to assassinate, imprison, or turn someone into a defector or double agent. Political control, of course, is the name of the game. 

Lawlor made some other provocative statements, including this zinger which echoes my own conclusions about the CIA: “We permitted the Vietnamese to corrupt the system and we did it because we basically were corrupt ourselves.” 

In an effort to find out how Lawlor came to the conclusion that the CIA was corrupt, I wrote to him and requested an interview. He agreed, and what he told me confirmed everything Santoli had attributed to him, along with some additional, startling details. 

Lawlor told me that he joined the CIA (not the military) in 1967, while he was getting his BA at George Washington University. After he graduated, the CIA sent him to its training school. He took the paramilitary course in weapons and military tactics, and was trained as an intelligence officer, the kind who manages interrogation centers and secret agents. After that he was assigned to the Vietnam Desk at Langley headquarters, where he received specialized training in agent operations in Vietnam. He also took a language course in Vietnamese.

While at CIA headquarters, Lawlor formed a rapport with the Vietnam Desk officer, Al Seal, and when Seal was assigned as the base chief in Da Nang, he invited Lawlor to go along. 

Lawlor arrived in Saigon in November 1971 and joined the Embassy’s translation section. He transferred to Da Nang a few weeks later and was assigned to the CIA’s counterintelligence office. He worked at that job through the Easter Offensive of 1972, during which time he developed a friendship with Patry Loomis, who would later achieve notoriety as an associate of Ed Wilson. 6 

In the summer of 1972, Loomis was made the Region’s PRU advisor. Just as a reminder, the CIA’s PRU program was staffed by blood-thirsty mercenaries. Their job was to go into VC areas, in CIA jargon, “to do unto them what they were doing to us.” This is a reference to “selective terrorism”, the Viet Minh guerrilla tactic of murdering low-ranking colonial officials (and collaborators) who worked closely with the people; policemen, mailmen, teachers, etc. The murders were gruesome – a bullet in the belly or a grenade lobbed into a café – and were designed to achieve maximum publicity and demonstrate to the people the power of the nationalists to strike crippling blows against their oppressors. For the CIA, this tactic meant kidnapping, killing and mutilating political, i.e. civilian cadres, along with their families and neighbors. 

When Loomis was promoted to head the PRU in Region I, Lawlor replaced him as the Quang Nam Province officer in charge and liaison to the Special Police. In that capacity, Lawlor did what Simmons had done in Phu Yen Province; with his Special Branch counterpart, Captain Lam Minh Son, he organized the most aggressive Special Branch officers into a Special Intelligence Force Unit that hunted members of the Viet Cong Infrastructure in the hamlets and villages. 

“Lam recognized that his own people could not run paramilitary operations in rural villages,” Lawlor explained. “So we trained a unit of Special Branch guys – taught them infantry formations.” They did this in anticipation of the pending ceasefire, at which point the PRU were to be placed under the control of Special Branch and integrated within Lam’s Special Police paramilitary unit. 

Bored with filing reports, Lawlor started going out on PRU operations with Loomis. He dressed in tiger fatigues and went on ambushes and traditional “snuff and snatch” operations. By then the PRU had become, Lawlor recalled, “an adjunct duty of the Special Branch advisor in each province. The CIA funneled PRU salaries in I Corps through the Special Branch to the region PRU commander, Major Vinh, who then doled it out to the province PRU chiefs.” 

In his Congressional testimony in 1971, Colby described the PRU as “special groups which were not included in the normal government structure. Since that time, this has been more and more integrated into the normal government structure, and correspondingly conducted under the government’s rules of behavior.” 

In her article “The CIA’s Hired Killers,” Georgie Anne Geyer told how, “In the absence of an American or South Vietnamese ideology, it was said in the early days, why not borrow the most workable tenets of the enemy’s. After all,” she quoted Dan Ellsberg’s friend Frank Scotton as saying, ‘they stole the atomic bomb secrets and all from us’.” 7 

As a result, Geyer wrote, “Scotton and a few other Americans started a counter-guerrilla movement in northern Quang Ngai Province. Terror and assassination were included in their bag of tricks. At one point, [Scotton’s parent agency, the US Information Service] printed 50,000 leaflets showing sinister black eyes. These were left on bodies after assassination or even - ‘our terrorists’ are playful - nailed to doors to make people think they were marked for future efforts. 8 

“But,” Geyer said, “whereas Scotton’s original counter-guerrillas were both assassins in the night and goodwill organizers of the people, the PRUs are exclusively assassins in the night.” Furthermore, she said, “the PRUs are excellent torturers. Torture has now come to be so indiscriminately used that the VC warn their men to beware of any released prisoner if he has not been tortured.” 

“Sometimes we have to kill one suspect to get another to talk,” Geyer quoted a CIA PRU advisor as saying. Another PRU advisor told her that “he ate supper with his PRUs on the hearts and livers of their slain enemies.” Another one said, “I’ve been doing this for 22 years all over the world.” He cited Egypt when Nasser was coming to power and the Congo “when we were trying to get rid of Tshombe.” Geyer said about the PRU advisor: “His job, like that of many Americans in South Vietnam, was terror.” 

Geyer called American PRU advisors “really the leaders,” a view that contradicted Colby’s claim that Americans were limited to “advice and assistance.” 

Things changed dramatically for Lawlor after the ceasefire in January 1973. Prior to that, his “easy, striped pants” job as Special Branch advisor amounted to coordinating with Captain Lam and getting reports from the Hoi An PIC. He had no dealings with the US military or the province senior advisor and “rarely acted on Phoenix information – just PRU and unilateral sources. There was little Special Branch input, because no one talked to anyone.” 

One big problem concerned the PRU. Although the PRU were placed under the jurisdiction of the Special Branch after the ceasefire, the CIA still controlled the purse strings. But it wasn’t providing as much money as before and had lost control over the PRU leadership. According to Lawlor, top ranking PRU officers turned to graft, drug dealing and shakedowns to make up the differential. Bad things started happening. Region l PRU Chief Vinh began putting the arm on the Quang Nam PRU chief, Phan Van Liem, who in turn began changing money for the VC. 

Eventually one member of the Quang Nam PRU team went to Lawlor and said, “It’s getting out of hand.” Ever the idealist, Lawlor investigated. The investigation ended when he walked into the Hoi An PIC and saw that a woman, who knew about the region PRU chief’s dirty dealings, had been raped and murdered. Her body was stretched over a table. 

“All of a sudden,” Lawlor told me, “Mr Liem wants me to go on a [one-way] mission with him, and the other PRU guys are telling me, ‘Don’t go!’” 

After the Easter Offensive of 1972, according to Lawlor, the North Vietnamese Army concentrated on repairing its infiltration routes in preparation for the next offensive. Then came the ceasefire, at which point each village identified itself as controlled by the GVN or by the VC. As Lawlor recalled, “all of a sudden there was a lot of business, because as soon as someone put a VC flag on their roof, they’re gone. Not in the sense that they were killed, but we could pick them up and interrogate them. And we basically were flooded.” 

It was also after the ceasefire that “the country club set” took over. Tom Flores, a veteran of the CIA’s Western Hemisphere Division, replaced Al Seal as the Region Officer in Charge. Flores brought his own deputy and chief of operations, and the entire CIA contingent moved into the Da Nang Consulate under State Department cover. Their involvement in PIC and PRU operations was now thoroughly illegal. 

Lawlor described Flores as “a very senior officer on his last tour” whose objective “was to live well, not rock the boat, and take advantage of the amenities that were readily available.” That attitude was prevalent. Lawlor, as an example, cited the Public Safety advisor to the Field Forces as “one of the guys who used to set up the shakedowns of merchants. He came out of that war wealthier than you or I will ever be. But you can’t prove it.” 

When Lawlor brought the matter to the attention of his bosses, he was told, “Don’t bother me,” or asked, “What do you want me to do?” 

As with the Homeland Security boondoggle, many Americans went along for the profitable ride. “The Special Branch liaison in Hue became the Thua Thien Province Observer,” Lawlor recalled. “He had been a retired cop and he liked the good life. But he had no enthusiasm. He thought it was a joke. He wanted to stay over there when his contract was up, so he became the Province Observer. He liaised.” 

Contributing to the decline in morale after the ceasefire was the fact that the Special Intelligence Force Units were disbanded and the PRU were placed under the National Police Command within the Special Branch. “This caused many problems,” Lawlor explained. “We started seeing more ghost soldiers, more extortion, and more protection money. We couldn’t pay them at all, so we lost control.” 

The PRU had the same mission as before and maintained their agents in field, “but because the CIA advisor was no longer a participant, there were fewer operations and more excuses for not going.” 

Lawlor tried to maintain control by providing “gee whiz” gadgets like Night Hawk helicopters with mini-guns and spotlights, and by being able to get wounded PRU into the hospital in Da Nang. 

“Phoenix coordination,” according to Lawlor, “was dead. There was nothing left. The Vietnamese gave it lip service but there was no coordination with the Special Police. When the MSS and Special Branch got together, they tried to take away rather than share information.” 

As soon as the Special Branch began paying PRU teams at province level, “Major Vinh got concerned. Now he has to answer to Saigon. He has to give them a cut. That resulted in Vinh cheating somebody out of his cut, and that fractured what had been a unified unit.” 

So it was that the PRU program devolved into a criminal enterprise, like Frankenstein’s monster, beyond the control of its criminally insane creator. 

The last straw for Lawlor occurred just before the end of his tour in November 1973. Having worked in Da Nang’s counterintelligence office, he knew that an NVA spy ring existed in the area, and that the Special Branch had sacrificed a number of low-level cadres instead of flushing out the most important spies. “It was a great deception operation,” Lawlor said. “The high level people continued to operate.” 

One of the NVA agents was the girlfriend of Tom Flores’s operations chief. But when Lawlor reported this to Flores, he did nothing but accuse Lawlor of having “gone native.” 

Lawlor then committed the cardinal sin: he defiled the sacred chain of command by slipping a copy of his report to the CIA station’s security chief in Saigon. The operations officer was sent home, but Lawlor was finished; security teams visited his office, confiscated his furniture, and presented him with a ticket back home. 

“After that I became disillusioned,” Lawlor confessed. He returned to Langley headquarters, where Ted Shackley – then chief of the Far East Division – accepted his resignation. 

Lawlor was embittered. “The Agency betrayed us,” he said. “To go after the VCI, we had to believe it was okay. But we were too young to understand what happens when idealism cracks up against reality. We risked our lives to get information on the VCI, information we were told the President was going to read. Then guys who didn’t care gave it to superiors more interested in booze and broads.” 

Reprisal Is the Name of the 

Homeland Security Game 

But there’s something weird about Lawlor that keeps him coming back for more, despite whatever scruples he may have manifested above. After his bid to be the Democratic Party’s nominee for attorney general failed in 1984, Colby intervened and got him a job interview at Langley. He was interviewed by Rudy Enders, the chief of the CIA’s paramilitary Special Operations Division. However, despite his willingness to return to the fold and help do the CIA’s dirty work in Central America, details of the Da Nang incident surfaced during the interview, and Lawlor was not rehired; at least, not officially. 

People look for vindication in different ways. Take, for example, the reaction of the militant right wing to America’s humiliating defeat at the hands of the Vietnamese. Phoenix creator Nelson Brickham compared it to the frustration and bitterness of the German nation after the First World War. As we all know, that frustration and bitterness (plus the financial support of fascist sympathizers like Henry Ford) enabled Hitler to rise from the ashes of the Weimar Republic.

The same thing happened in America after the preordained terror attacks of 9/11. Symbolically, 9/11 wiped the slate clean. All the moral prohibitions on the rabid right were lifted, and all the rage they had cultivated during the degenerate Clinton regime was unleashed, under the aegis of counterterrorism, on nations sitting on vast oil reserves, as well as suspected terrorists, domestic dissidents, and the flag-waving American public as well. 

Lawlor, like Simmons, resembled a bitter man looking for revenge. They probably subscribe to the fascist theories of Michael Ledeen, who blamed the 9/11 terror attacks on Clinton, “for failing to properly organize our nation’s security apparatus.” 9 

Others blamed 9/11 on a conspiracy between the MOSSAD, Saudi Arabia, and those members of The Project for the New American Century who landed in the Bush regime’s Office of Special Plans. But, according to Ledeen, the problem was Clinton’s “sneering lack of respect for security.” 

“New times require new people with new standards,” Ledeen asserted. “The entire political world will understand it and applaud it. And it will give [Office of Homeland Security chief] Tom Ridge a chance to succeed, and us to prevail.” 

A lot of people with an axe to grind were jumping on the Homeland Security bandwagon, hoping to help Ridge succeed in crushing the left, and paving the way for neocons to prevail. Knowing this, and fearing that Lawlor was of the Ledeen reprisal persuasion, I tried to get an interview with him. I called his office and spoke with his secretary. She said he would call me back, but he never did. 

Knowing, from personal experience, that the macho men of the CIA never forget an insult, I was concerned for everyone who had fought to end the Vietnam War, as well as those who, in 2002, were lining up to oppose the Bush regime’s police state policies at home and imperialism abroad. 

So in 2002 I wrote my Open Letter in Counterpunch to Bruce Lawlor. Here it is. 

As far as I know, General Lawlor, we still live in a democracy. Although the Bush regime seems hell bent on using the uninvestigated terror attacks of 11 September as a pretext to turn America into a military dictatorship, we are not yet (as far as I know) under martial law. Public officials, like you, still have a responsibility to respond to our concerns. Speaking on behalf of people concerned by the opportunity for the abuse of human rights and civil liberties presented by the corrupt Bush regime, through its Homeland Security apparatus, here are the questions that need to be answered: 

1) What happened in July 1995 to make you leave your law practice and go to the Army War College? Did the CIA have a role in that decision? 

2) How did your education at the War College pave the way for your assignment as Special Assistant to the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe from June to October 1996? CIA officers often go by the term “Special Assistant.” Were you serving as the CIA’s liaison to the Supreme Commander? 

3) In May 1998 you became Deputy Director of Readiness and Mobilization within the office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations and Plans. Your job was managing National Guard and Army Reserve units around the world. The job had international functions and fell under the CIA’s cognizance. Did the CIA help you get this job? How were you involved with the CIA in this position? 

4) You were the first commander of the Joint Task Force, Civil Support. Your job was to work with civilians. Was this a CIA assignment? Did you liaise with the CIA? Was this assignment based in any way on your experiences as a CIA officer in Vietnam, and was your main qualification the Phoenix sensibility that you brought to the job? What are your other qualifications? 

5) In a 24 March 2000 statement to Congress, you seemed to be preparing for the Homeland Security job you have now. In a way you even predicted the calamitous events of 9/11. Did you, in fact, have any foreknowledge of those attacks? 

6) In your statement you said that as commander of the JTF-CS, you created Civil Support Teams (CSTs) to assist in case of a weapon of mass destruction incident. The CSTs, you said, were “National Guard assets, and thus can function under state or federal authority. They are equipped with sophisticated communications systems that will enable local first responders to talk with neighboring jurisdictions or link up with federal centers of expertise. CSTs are also being equipped with state of the art detection equipment that will enable them to help local first responders quickly identify potential WMD agents.” 

That’s what you told Congress. Would you now please tell us what role the CIA plays in CST operations? It sounds like a great CIA cover to me. Is there a Civil Support Team near me? Will you allow me to observe how it functions? 

7) What is your relationship with the CIA in your role as Senior Director for Protection and Prevention at the Office of Homeland Security? What do you do? Is it true that the Office of Homeland Security will be the strategy-making part of the apparatus, and that the forthcoming Department of Homeland Security will be the tactical and operational part? What is the function of the Homeland Security Council, and what is your relationship with it? Can we have organization charts of these entities, including ones that show where the CIA is hiding its covert assets? 

8) Last but not least, please explain the conspicuous absence of any reference to your CIA background in your official biographies. This seems to suggest that you are still CIA. Are you? And tell us, please, if you and others like you intend to use your power to seek revenge against your ideological opponents? 

Bruce Lawlor never responded. 

But then, I hadn’t expected him to. The point of the (admittedly rhetorical) Open Letter was not just to expose the CIA connection and its ramifications, but to broadcast this possibility of revenge and hopefully thereby forestall it. 

Red Squads and Red Herrings 

Where the CIA is involved, there are always trap doors and deadly deceptions. Recall Operation Twofold and how the CIA hid a hit squad within the DEA’s internal security unit. 

The CIA does nothing unless it can be assured of plausible deniability, and the Homeland Security apparatus is an infinitely large space in which the CIA can hide operations aimed at manipulating society and managing the political control of the American people. 

Twofold isn’t the only example of the hidden dangers of such a setup. In its 1970 End of Year Report, the Phoenix Directorate quoted from a captured VC circular titled “On the Establishment of the Enemy’s Phung Hoang Intelligence Organization in Villages.” 

The VC circular was referring to the fact that the CIA had instructed each Special Branch case officer to organize and maintain ten People’s Intelligence Organization (PIO) cells. Each cell consisted of three agents in a hamlet. Apart from fingering VCI, the PIO agents engaged in psywar, “to jeopardize the prestige of the revolutionary families, create dissension between them and the people, and destroy the people’s confidence in the revolution.” 

PIO agents also made lists of the VCI cadres to be murdered when the ceasefire took place. “Their prescribed criteria are to kill five cadres in each village in order to change the balance between enemy and friendly forces in the village,” the circular said. In doing so, the primary task of GVN village chiefs was to “assign Phoenix intelligence organization and security assistants to develop and take charge of the People’s Self-Defense Force and select a number of tyrants in this force to activate ‘invisible’ armed teams which are composed of three to six well trained members each. These teams are to assassinate our [Viet Cong civilian infrastructure] key cadre, as in Vinh Long Province.” 

Throughout this book I’ve given examples of how the CIA uses “civic actions” as a cover for “invisible” armed teams aimed at political enemies. Ensuring deniability is the first step, and to that end Phoenix employed the motto “Protecting the People from Terrorism” to present itself as goodness and light. And yet the CIA was inserting secret hit teams inside the Self-Defense Force that were ostensibly “Protecting the People from Terrorism” in order to kill (without trial and based on all the flawed sources we have discussed) those whom they presumed might be aiding the Viet Cong in some way – people who were civilians and had rights as such. 

It is exactly this type of duplicity that informs the Homeland Security apparatus. The DHS has even adopted the Phoenix motto, “Protecting the People from Terrorism,” and for the same exculpatory purposes. The big question is: will these security forces conduct Phoenix-style paramilitary and psywar operations against dissident Americans in a crisis? 

Consider Bruce Lawlor. He reported the rape and murder of a woman at the PIC and when nothing happened, went about his business. Rob Simmons spent 18 months inside a PIC and never saw anything inappropriate. Bob Kerrey, as will be discussed in a forthcoming chapter, led a team of Navy SEALs into a Vietnamese village and murdered its men, women and children. 

They did these things, came home, uttered the magic words “God and country” and all was forgiven. What have they proven but their intense commitment to kill? And as a result, they have again been inducted into the gang of the Protected Few, and can get away with murder, like cops killing blacks. 

They crossed the line and lost perspective. Lawlor was aware that CIA officers systematically corrupt entire societies and, in the process, become corrupt. He even admitted it. Yet he still desired to take his place among the Protected Few. Why? Was it the chance to get revenge? But paradoxically, on whom? 

The brother of Frank Scotton’s mentor, Dick Noone, manipulated the dreams of a peaceful tribe of people in Malaysia for the purpose of turning them into a police unit “noted for its ruthless slaughter of captured Communist guerillas.” Scotton did the same thing to Mountain tribes in Vietnam. 

Americans’ dreams are being shaped too. Hollywood producers make billions extolling the violent virtues of the ruling warrior class. Video games make killing and mutilating Muslims a consummation every young American man desires. It makes them feel powerful, and provides an antidote to their social alienation. 

The CIA shapes our dreams of democracy by controlling the information we receive. The Senate’s 6,000 page report on CIA torture was whittled down to a 525 page summary, with redactions. The summary nonetheless told how CIA officials tortured more suspects than acknowledged and in more gruesome fashion than imagined, misled Congress and the media, and jerry-rigged the program for deniability. It said that torture served no purpose other than making CIA officers feel good. 

We aren’t allowed to know the details and the names of the victims. The evidence is concealed and no CIA officers were indicted. But at least we know why CIA officers commit crimes. They do it because they like it and it is how they become rich and powerful and protected. 

John Kiriakou, the CIA officer who revealed waterboarding in 2007, was one of two CIA officers sent to prison for the empire’s post 9/11 crime spree. His crime was telling the truth. His conviction and imprisonment was a blunt warning to other CIA officers: in the underworld of organized CIA crime, omerta is the only law that matters. 

Epilogue 

Why be concerned with button men like Lawlor and Simmons when Mafia generals like George H. W. Bush are giving the orders? As DCI, Bush laid the groundwork for the off-the-shelf counterterror network that facilitated the Enterprise and the illegal selling of arms to Iran to finance the illegal Contra war in Nicaragua. He laid the basis for the global Phoenix program. 

As lame duck president in December 1992, Bush invaded Panama and killed hundreds of innocent people in order to kidnap former CIA asset Manuel Noriega; and he pardoned six loyal Republican officials involved in the Iran/Contra scandal, in one of the greatest criminal cover-ups in history. 10 

As David Johnston said in The New York Times, “Bush swept away one conviction, three guilty pleas and two pending cases, virtually decapitating what was left of [Iran-Contra prosecutor] Walsh’s effort, which began in 1986.” He added that there was “evidence of a conspiracy among the highest ranking Reagan Administration officials to lie to Congress and the American public.” 11 

Bush’s idiot son, W, honored the family tradition of mass murder by launching the illegal war on Iraq and the global War on Terror with all its horrors. Like his father, he is venerated among the Ultras who profited as a result of his militancy and disdain for international law. 

Bruce Lawlor wasn’t quite that powerful, but he was influential at a decisive moment. According to the Washington Post, his boss at Homeland Security, Tom Ridge, delegated most tasks to him. 12 The Post described Lawlor as having “alienated many people in the White House and in the department with a brusque and secretive manner.” 

Perhaps Lawlor was “secretive” because he was a CIA agent. When he left in 2003, the Post described the six-month-old Department of Homeland Security as “hobbled by money woes, disorganization, turf battles and unsteady support from the White House, and has made only halting progress toward its goals, according to administration officials and independent experts.” 

The Post blamed Lawlor for the problems, saying he “at times helped lead Ridge in the wrong direction,” and “was involved in perhaps the most bitter dispute in the department’s short history.” 

Lawlor had reviewed and approved an agreement that Ridge signed with Attorney General John Ashcroft that made the Justice Department – not the DHS – the lead agency investigating the financing of terrorism. The memo enraged the Secret Service, “which was required to halt hundreds of probes and forego its tradition of financial investigations. Ridge apologized (but) the rift took months to heal…” 

As a result of Lawlor’s actions, real power remained centered in Bush’s 50- member Homeland Security Council, which is ruled by the CIA. Jerry-rigged like Phoenix, DHS lacked “a political infrastructure at the top of the department.” 

“The department’s roles and missions are still being defined,” one official said. 

Lawlor won’t say if he accomplished his mission, stated and unstated, or even what it was. My guess is that his job was to keep the organization off balance so the CIA could step into the vacuum and assert control in its formative stage. 

In any event, Lawlor stayed in Washington and became a Beltway bandit, capitalizing on his contacts to serve on various security-related boards and academic posts, including the Homeland Security Advisory Council. He achieved his personal ambitions, but at what price? 

How the DHS advanced secret CIA missions is the subject of the next chapter.

Chapter 17 

HOMELAND SECURITY: 

THE PHOENIX COMES 

HOME TO ROOST 

In the articles I wrote about Homeland Security between 2001-2003, I said that America has been in an ideological state of siege since 9/11, when the Twin Towers came crashing down and all the moral and psychological prohibitions on the Ultra conservatives were lifted forever. All the anger and frustration they had nurtured during the Vietnam War and the Carter and Clinton administrations was unleashed in a torrent of war mongering. The anthrax-challenged Democrats climbed on the war wagon; on 15 September 2001, Congress, save for one glorious dissenter, gave Bush $40 billion and the authority to use “all necessary and appropriate force” against those who could be said to have been involved in what would remain largely uninvestigated terrorist attacks. 

Bush embarked on his Holy Crusade against Islam, but directed at Afghanistan and Iraq, not at Saudi Arabia where his family’s business partners and the majority of those officially blamed for the 9/11 attacks came from. To protect this misadventure into neo-colonialism in the Middle East, Bush on 8 October 2001 signed into law the Office of Homeland Security to detect, prevent, and recover from terrorist attacks, and/or “weapons of mass destruction” attacks on American soil. The Homeland Security juggernaut was born. 

Less than three weeks later, again with overwhelming Congressional support, Bush signed the Patriot Act, vastly expanding the government’s domestic intelligence gathering and law enforcement powers, while rolling back individual rights and protections from government intrusions.

The stigma of public accusations of his having stolen the 2000 election was replaced with a popular war of revenge against Afghanistan. Bush’s approval ratings doubled in polls. 

In the absence of political opposition, the Bush regime’s rationale for neocolonial aggression was set in stone in September 2002 with the promulgation of The National Security Strategy of the United States. Through this manifesto, the National Security Establishment effectively conferred upon itself the divine right to launch murderous, preemptive attacks on any Muslim nation with valuable natural resources. Russia and China were long range strategic targets. 

A first-degree murder strategy may make many Americans feel safer because US terror is directed at the Islamic “Other”. But there are hidden clauses in the manifesto’s fine print. As an exercise in neocolonialism disguised as “protecting the American people”, the eternal War on Terror constantly recreates the urgent need for its existence; 1 and by destroying the lives and livelihoods of millions of innocent people, it automatically fuels more terrorism – though within the United States itself terror attacks are few and far between, and most of what passes for terrorism derives from FBI incitement and entrapment. Of 508 defendants prosecuted in federal terrorism-related cases in the decade after 9/11, 243 were involved with an FBI informant, while 158 were the targets of sting operations. 2 This is to say nothing of what many people regard as false flag operations. 

Moreover, neo-colonialism constantly fuels political dissent within the United States. There are, after all, enlightened Americans who recoil in horror at their government’s aggression. But increased dissent is what the National Security Establishment wants. You can call it a vicious cycle or a self-fulfilled prophesy, but dissent provides the ruling elite with the pretext it needs to impose the repressive measures required to maintain and expand its political dominance. It’s a “win-win” for the capitalists, in so far as a police state delivers a wide range of economic benefits to those who invest in its requirements. 

And make no mistake: homeland security is a euphemism for “internal security”, a term that cannot be used (along with “separate but equal”) because it has the nasty ring of McCarthyism and the anti-Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s. 

In this overarching sense, the War on Terror and homeland security are flip sides of the same class warfare coin. It is the same voracious, capitalist ideology applied to foreign and domestic policy, especially as the upper class in “class warfare” itself becomes a smaller and proportionately more powerful ruling elite, the omnipotent one percent, forever pitting the middle classes against the lower classes. 

Psychologically, the homeland security phenomena is the culmination of the right wing’s obsession to overcome the Vietnam Syndrome and reassert “white” America’s dominance not just abroad but at home. Since America’s ignoble defeat in 1975, each successive act of US aggression abroad and repression at home has brought the architects and participants of the Vietnam War closer to redemption. 

For those who participated in war crimes in Vietnam, 9/11 was a cathartic event. For their leaders it was an apotheosis. All the crimes they were despised for committing, were suddenly the magic tricks that would make them and ambiguous America, as Trump promised, “great again.” 

The psychological warfare campaign blossomed on 9/11; the warmongers saturated the airwaves and editorial columns with propaganda calling anti-war protesters “un-American” and equating them with terrorist sympathizers. The propaganda has never stopped. As it was during the Vietnam War, peace protests and civil rights activists have become enemies of the state and, hence, targets of the Homeland Security infrastructure. 

The Bureaucratic Method 
in Their Madness 
High level bureaucrats like Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld understand that political, economic and military power is harnessed through complex organizational structures. Their staffs are packed with people like Phoenix program creator Nelson Brickham, who know exactly how to do it. 

After 9/11, the Ultras began implementing their long-range plans to consolidate power. Bush signed the Homeland Security Act on 25 November 2002, creating the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to coordinate the anti-terror elements of dozens of federal agencies. The Act created the policymaking Homeland Security Council with four standing members: the president as chairman, along with the vice president, secretary of defense and attorney general. The Homeland Security Council is the National Security Council applied domestically. 

The Homeland Security Council can be understood as grander version of the Phoenix Committee in Vietnam, which consisted of the Deputy for CORDS (William Colby) as chairman, plus the CIA’s station chief, MACV’s assistant chiefs of staff for intelligence and operations, and the CIA chief of Revolutionary Development. 

The homeland security apparatus further evolved in May 2003 when, as part of the White House coordinating mechanism, Bush created the Terrorist Threat Integration Center (TTIC) under future DCI John O. Brennan. Based at CIA headquarters, the TTIC was staffed by counterterrorism experts from the CIA, FBI, DOD and DHS. It reported directly to the White House political staff, beyond public and congressional scrutiny. 

The apparatus congealed in late 2004, when the TTIC was renamed the National Counterterrorism Center (NCTC) and placed under the newly created position of Director of National Intelligence (DNI). 3 Operating like a global Phoenix Directorate with a computerized blacklist of suspects, the NCTC has access to all military and law enforcement databases, foreign as well as domestic, which it skims for High Value targets. High Value targets are captured and incarcerated, and if possible, recruited as penetration agents at home and abroad. Failing that, they are placed on Obama’s “kill list” and “neutralized” by the all-seeing “predator” drone or some CIA/Special Forces hit team packed with psycho killers. 

Instruments like the NCTC facilitate the merging of foreign and domestic counterterror operations. The NCTC collects, stores, and analyzes data on US citizens from every available surveillance data base as a “pre-crime” pacification effort. The CIA manages the NCTC Operations Center, and if a suspected threat emerges, it is able to direct every homeland component, the same way it used Phoenix to coordinate every cooperating agency in Vietnam. The network extends from the White House into America’s tiniest villages, and includes everyone from Congresspersons and corporate executives, to cops shooting black teenagers or chasing homeless veterans off the streets. 

Parallel Mechanisms 
Within the federal bureaucracy, the Department of Justice (DOJ), CIA and military have their own separate chains of command, jealously guarded “parallel mechanisms” that exist apart from their “coordinated” homeland security functions. 

With 800 military bases around the world, its own legal system, and a budget that devours the highest percentage of federal taxpayer dollars, the military is the elephant in the room. Apart from a mutiny by the lower ranks, as happened in Vietnam, the military and its arms industry sidekicks will continue to be the driving force behind US aggression abroad and mass surveillance at home. The military’s Northcom component is the backbone of the homeland security apparatus, alternately intimidating, assisting, and spying on its civilian counterparts. 

The National Security Agency (NSA) is the apparatus eyes and ears. Instituted by Bush after 9/11, the NSA’s Terrorist Surveillance Program was ruled unconstitutional in 2006, but the lawsuit was dismissed on appeal and a similar program called PRISM now exists in its place. As revealed by whistleblower Edward Snowden, PRISM collects communications from major US internet companies. 4 

The DOJ operates its back-channel through the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF). Based in over 100 cities and at 56 FBI field offices, these Phoenix-style coordination centers focus on “upper tier” targets that cross state lines. The FBI defines the task forces on its website as “small cells of highly trained, locally based, passionately committed investigators, analysts, linguists, SWAT experts, and other specialists from dozens of U.S. law enforcement and intelligence agencies.” 

The FBI has had “internal security” as its mandate since its inception, and in 1996 it launched its InfraGard program in Cleveland. InfraGard is a “non-profit” organization serving as a public-private partnership between businesses and the FBI. It’s a private sector Phoenix in which business people, college presidents, state and local law enforcement agencies, and other civil guardians funnel tips to the FBI to prevent hostile acts against America’s “critical infrastructure”. It operates in secret and has over 50,000 members. The ACLU described InfraGard as “a corporate TIPS program” and “surrogate eyes and ears for the FBI.” 5 

Since 2003, the DHS – under FBI supervision – has shared responsibility for InfraGard assets. 

It is important to note that the FBI has no jurisdiction over the CIA, which, like the military, exists above and beyond the laws the rest of us must obey. But while the military is an elephant trampling on everyone, the CIA is the serpent in the garden. 

The CIA’s back-channel is its Counterterrorism Center (CTC) network. Formed in 1986, it is a direct descendent of Operation Chaos (as outlined in Chapter 11: New Games, Same Aims). The CTC network operates globally through Phoenix-style Counterterrorist Intelligence Centers, in collaboration with the suborned military, police and intelligence services of infected nations. The unilateral CTC network has its own communications system and is used to bypass the DOJ, State Department and Pentagon, as well as the regular CIA bureaucracy. It has its own paramilitary Special Operations Unit that functions like a global PRU team.

The CTC works with the CIA’s Crime and Narcotics Center (CNC) to manage strategic aspects of the international arms and drug trade out of drug producing nations like Bolivia and Afghanistan. 

Supposedly there is a legal firewall between the CIA and domestic law enforcement organizations, just as Posse Comitatus laws once banned the military. The CIA, however, infiltrates officers within the FBI’s Joint Terrorism Task Forces, and within the DHS. I’ve described elsewhere how the CIA infiltrated the DEA. CIA officers are not listed on anyone’s organizational charts, in accordance with their status as the Protected Few; but they’re there. 

For example, four months after 9/11, DCI George Tenet personally arranged with New York City’s Muslim-hating Mayor Michael Bloomberg to slip senior CIA officer David Cohen inside the NYPD as its deputy commissioner for intelligence. The New York Times and Daily News dutifully buried the story. As Matt Apuzzo noted, “Nobody questioned the wisdom of taking someone trained to break the laws of foreign nations and putting him in a department responsible for upholding the rule of law [my italics]. Nobody even checked out Cohen’s hand-prepared résumé, which said he had a master’s degree in international relations from Boston University. 6 The misstatement itself was inconsequential. That it went entirely unquestioned was indicative of the lack of media scrutiny Cohen could expect in his new job.” 7 

An expert on Israeli methods of repressing Palestinians, Cohen launched a private, Bloomberg-approved jihad against Muslims in New York City. As he explained: “In the case of terrorism, to wait for an indication of crime before investigating is to wait far too long.” 8 

Concepts and Programs 
Phoenix is the conceptual model for the DHS. Both are based on the principle that governments can manage societies through implicit and explicit terror. The strategic goal is to widen the gap between the elites and the mass of the citizenry, while expunging anyone who cannot be ideologically assimilated. 

Phoenix, like the DHS, was an organization that evolved. At the top was the Phoenix Committee. Under the Committee was a Directorate in Saigon, managed by a senior CIA officer with a staff of CIA, military, and State Department personnel. The Directorate coordinated intelligence gathering agencies and anti-terror operations in Vietnam’s provinces (equivalent to states in America) and districts (counties). 

The DHS executive management team operates like the Phoenix Directorate, overseeing a jerry-rigged labyrinth of overlapping offices and directorates most Congresspersons can’t unravel. Put another way, central power is held by the senior bureaucrats who run federal agencies. The bureaucrats in Washington are held in check by the states, which, as part of a republic, traditionally resist federal intrusion. As a result, the bureaucrats running the DHS (and their White House and Congressional sponsors) are constantly suborning acquisitive state legislators, governors and business leaders with federal pork. 

Briefly, the DHS has a deputy undersecretary for intelligence and analysis. This deputy reports to the DHS Secretary and manages the Office of Intelligence and Analysis (I&A), which consists of about 1000 analysts, many from contributing agencies. I&A coordinates intelligence with appropriate officials in state, local, tribal and territorial governments. More importantly, it runs vast agent networks like InfraGard with the private sector through what is called, without irony, the Homeland Security Enterprise. 

Complementing the Office of Intelligence is an Office of Operations Coordination and Planning which oversees the DHS National Operations Center (NOC). The NOC collects and “fuses” information from the same federal, state, territorial, tribal, local, social media, and private sector agencies as I&A. The DHS intelligence and operations offices work together to issue advisories and bulletins relating to perceived or provoked threats. They also organize specific but classified protective measures you have no right to know about. 

DHS has an Emergency Operations Center (EOC). The EOC is the culmination of decades of devolution, originally manifested as Civil Defense (famous for building bomb shelters and teaching grade school kids how to duck under their chairs in case the Russians nuked America) and later as the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). Absorbed within the DHS in 2003, FEMA and its predecessor outfits created “continuity of government” plans for press censorship and internment of suspected radicals in times of national crisis. The EOC’s tentacles can be found in gentrified bomb shelters and corporate offices everywhere, secretly ingesting rumors about “security risks” by word of mouth and encrypted emails. 

The DHS has over 250,000 employees, including detectives it deploys within its own departments, every agency it coordinates, and every branch of the military. These DHS employees have vast discretionary powers, including the authority to open mail coming to US citizens from foreign nations whenever it’s deemed necessary – another internal security measure once considered illegal. 

The DHS has another investigations unit that oversees international operations and intelligence functions. This unit has about 7,000 special agents operating in 200 US cities and 60 countries around the world. It works with the CIA and assigns agents to the FBI’s Field Intelligence Groups, through which they jointly run vast informant networks. Several DHS investigation units maintain paramilitary Special Response Teams, which are very likely trained and managed by CIA paramilitary officers. 

The DHS has its very own counterterrorism unit, and a war crimes unit that assiduously avoids the CIA. When an Italian court indicted a group of CIA officers for kidnaping an innocent man in Milan and sending him to Egypt to be tortured, DHS agents looked away. Like FBI agents, DHS agents have no authority over the CIA, which is free to terrorize anyone, anywhere. 

Last but not least, the DHS has fusion centers which operate in every state and major city, just like Phoenix intelligence and operations coordinating centers were set up in Vietnam. Every law enforcement entity in a state or city sends a representative to the local fusion center, which tries to anticipate threats through analysis of shared intelligence. State and local police provide space and resources (including snitches) for the majority of the fusion centers. There is even a fusion center in Mexico City. 

The ACLU compared fusion centers with the corporate TIPS program because of the involvement of private Terrorism Liaison Officers (TLO). A TLO is a citizen trained to detect and report suspicious activities. TLOs function like the People’s Intelligence Organization cadres mentioned in Chapter 16, paying close attention to what customers, passers-by and neighbors say, and then reporting “suspicious utterances” (or, when bored or nervous, inventing them) for entry into the proper database. 9 

By 2014, California had more than 14,000 TLOs. Some are cops, others are wannabe cops; paramedics, utility workers, railroad employees, etc. 10 TLOs have been used to monitor Occupy Wall Street and Black Lives Matter protests and activists. 11 

Fusion center employees occupy themselves by playing video war games and fantasizing about being armor-clad super heroes. When bored, they target political activists and despised minorities. The Missouri fusion center targeted supporters of Ron Paul, pro-life activists, and so-called conspiracy theorists. Anti-war activists and Islamic lobby groups were targeted in Texas. A DHS analyst in Wisconsin targeted antiabortion activists; a Pennsylvania DHS contractor spied on environmental activists and a Second Amendment rally; the Maryland state police put anti-death penalty and anti-war activists in the FBI’s database; and in 2009, the Virginia fusion center published a terrorism threat assessment identifying historically black colleges as potential hubs for terror related activity. It also identified hacktivism as a form of terrorism. [yeah and some fusion centers choose to attempt to 'fix' an election DC]

Along with the FBI’s task forces, fusion centers serve as cover for domestic CIA operations. This is nothing new, as the CIA has always placed officers inside state police forces and the Special Services (aka “Red Squad”) units of police forces in major cities. CIA Chaos-style officers specialize in the recruitment of American citizens who travel abroad, as well as foreign students, diplomats, scientists and businesspeople willing to sell out their countries for an SUV or a pat on the back. 

Homeland Security as 
Implicit Terrorism 
Ultimately, the DHS is about protecting the haves from the have-nots, just like Phoenix coordinators were protecting large landowners from VCI revolutionaries fighting for agrarian reform. 

“It’s the problem of supporting personalities rather than democratic institutions,” Colonel Stan Fulcher explained when we spoke in 1987, “The Vietnamese were victims of our corruption. We smothered them with money. It’s the same thing you see in Central America today. You can’t take a Salvadoran colonel in a patron army without the corruption he brings along.” 

The billions of dollars pouring from your pay checks into the DHS “internal security” boondoggle are smothering America in corruption too. 

Given the dearth of actual terrorist acts in America, the Homeland Security Enterprise exists primarily to protect critical infrastructure assets in the private sector from disenfranchised citizens seeking justice and accountability from government and corporations. In this capitalist sense, DHS is the key component in the state-sponsored legal criminality Johan Galtung spoke about. 

“Personal violence is for the amateur in dominance,” Galtung said, “structural violence is the tool of the professional. The amateur who wants to dominate uses guns; the professional uses social structure. The legal criminality of the social system and its institutions, of government, and of individuals at the interpersonal level, is tacit violence. Structural violence is a structure of exploitation and social injustice.” 

Indeed, the stated goal of the Homeland Security Enterprise is the protection of critical infrastructure assets in the public and private sectors. Not the protection of people. To that end, the DHS assigns Intelligence Officers and Protective Security Advisors to fusion centers. This operation is run out of the DHS National Protection and Programs Directorate and focuses on physical (concrete blocks around buildings) and cyber security. 

Given that your chance of being killed by a terrorist is less than dying from a bee sting, this joint business venture has achieved nothing in terms of saving lives. Instead, fusion centers and their DHS managers function as political police enforcing the ultra-conservative, freewheeling capitalist ideology that drives corporate America. In advancing this ideology, DHS managers seek to promote public support for, and indeed, reverence toward, cops, soldiers and the Homeland Security Enterprise. They also generate the attendant apprehension within the general public that persons with contrarian views are suspect. You can count on DHS cadres not to support the Constitutional right of anyone, like pro football player Colin Kaepernick, who refuses to stand during the National Anthem. 

Like the Phoenix program it was modeled on, the DHS helps coordinate the systematic corruption and repression of grassroots American society on behalf of the rich political elite. Consider this: the Act that created the DHS stripped 180,000 government employees of their union rights – because there “might be” an emergency. On behalf of its private sector patrons, Congress eliminated civil service and labor protections for DHS employees, who can be reassigned or dismissed without notifying their union representatives. Emboldened by Congress, DHS executive management sought the power to override any provision in a union contract, but for some reason the federal courts blocked that attempt at union busting. 

The key stakeholders in the Enterprise are the owners of the private businesses that comprise the critical infrastructure of the National Security Establishment: anything related to war and law enforcement. Their intellectual partners occupy vastly overpaid management positions in elite law firms, hospitals, universities, nongovernmental organizations, and nonprofit groups looking to advance their careers while eliminating the competition. 

What CIA officer Lucian Conein said to me about Phoenix applies to Homeland Security: it’s a great blackmail scheme for the central government: “If you don’t do what I want, you’re VC.” 

This is what homeland security has become: a protection racket. At the strategic political level it consists of bankers and corporate lobbyists paying elected officials to create tax loop-holes for the rich, blanket domestic surveillance that compels working people to live in terror of being fired if they make suspicious utterances, and corrupt officials rewarding their arms industry contributors by laundering taxpayer dollars into the war machine.

For stakeholders in the National Security Establishment, the Enterprise is the biggest boondoggle ever: and not just for the lavish public spending devoted to their military-defense projects; it is a dream come true for their cadres, too – people like Bruce Lawlor and Rob Simmons (see Chapters 15 and 16) who sold their souls to the CIA’s Cult of Death, and also understand the arcane mechanics of internal security. 

Remember, the CIA believed that the US could win the Vietnam War through military force. But the Communists represented the interests of the people and for this reason, the people sided with them. In response, operators like Lawlor, Simmons and Frank Scotton recruited spies to map out the VCI’s organization, and then targeted its “upper tier” leaders for neutralization. In the process of going after the enemy’s political leadership, they terrorized the leadership’s friends and families and supporters as well – the “lower tier” they sought to pacify through psychological warfare. 

The same pattern is unfolding in America. Homeland Security cadres, through the DHS and the various parallel mechanisms, are identifying and targeting the National Security Establishment’s “political and administrative” opponents in America for neutralization. For upper tier dissidents it means being the target of “compromise and discreditation” campaigns launched by Ultras, often through deniable assets like the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) and other Swift Boat-style organizations. 

Since the creation of the Homeland Security protection racket, over eight trillion taxpayer dollars has been moved from social programs into “internal security” programs that have provided the National Security Establishment with over 250,000 cadres to pacify the flag-waving American public. For the average American this means eternal debt and subservience, as their tax dollars are given to their “protectors”. The psychological warfare aspect of the pacification program is handled by network news and Hollywood, which erase historical memory and with it, any moral imperative on the part of average Americans to pretend they don’t live in segregated communities; all that matters is dominance over some Other, and anyone can dominate others by becoming a spy for homeland security. 

The methods for doing so are as ancient as language, and the myth of Cronus overthrowing Uranus. Since the dawn of civilization, effete old men have created gods and religions to organize young men into warrior clans. They indoctrinate the youths with patriotic slogans, make them feel special, and then send them to rape and pillage their neighbors. Organizing society in this fashion protects the old men, and their wives and wealth and power, from those young men who have the urge to kill them and take everything they own. 

Within America, cops are organized and indoctrinated to function like a warrior clan that uses “explicit violence” to pacify the public. They execute teenagers for wearing baggy pants or casting disrespectful looks at them while they’re on safari in black communities. They shower tear gas and rubber bullets on heretical white anti-war protesters, and then happily rough them up during arrest. Everyone knows the cops will never be punished for excessive use of explicit force, and therein lies the power of “implicit terror”: cops enforce the law, they do not obey it. 

DHS cadres in mufti serve the same “armed propaganda” purpose. They understand that terror, whether explicit or implicit, is an organizing principle of society. Many are veterans who learned pacification techniques while conducting the house-to-house searches that turned Afghanistan and Iraq into human catastrophes unreported in the US press. They even refer to themselves as “door kickers”. 

Their managers take a broader view and study the collective terror Israel dishes out to crush the Palestinian soul. At the highest levels of government, they wage the feudalistic “economic warfare” sieges that drive entire nations into poverty. Madeleine Albright as US Ambassador to the United Nations acknowledged that US sanctions on Iraq had led to the death of half-a-million children. “We think the price is worth it,” she said. 

Our monstrous rulers know how to justify their disastrous interventions by demonizing foreign leaders in the media. If fear of straw dogs like Saddam or Qaddafi or Kim doesn’t win the hearts and minds of American citizens, they issue color-coded warnings of attacks that never occur. Network news reports that behind the scenes, without your knowledge, secret agents saved the day. 

As Guy Debord famously said, “Yet the highest ambition of the integrated spectacle is still to turn secret agents into revolutionaries, and revolutionaries into secret agents.” 

The Homeland Security cadres are expert in implicit as well as explicit terror – of jack-booted Guardsman eyeballing travelers in airports, and Keystone Cops hanging onto armored vehicles, buffed up in bullet proof vests and swinging machine guns while searching cars and homes without probable cause in an entire city on lockdown after the Boston Marathon bombing, or after some deranged white kid on Prozac slaughters his suburban classmates. 

Earlier I mentioned the manipulation of social forces to quell the type of protests Colin Kaepernick initiated when he refused to stand for the National Anthem. The same phenomena occurred in July 2016, when police arrested people for criticizing cops on Facebook and Twitter, after the shooting of Dallas cops. 12 In a similar assault on Constitutional rights, the chair of the Oklahoma’s public safety committee introduced the bill that would make “it unlawful to wear a mask, hood or covering during the commission of a crime or to intentionally conceal a person’s identity in a public place.” 13 [I strongly disagree with Valentine on his thought that this is an assault on our Constitutional rights.We are NOT guaranteed the right to commit violence and mayhem against fellow countrymen,as we have seen the last three years in this country by leftist activists DC] 

The message is clear to the friends and families of the targeted and arrested people: you are free, up to the point you actually express your freedoms. 

The purpose of such psyops is to make you believe the authorities know everything about you and will use that information to destroy you. To that end they have established in America the four programs that imbued the all-seeing Phoenix with omnipotence: surveillance and informant networks that identify suspects; interrogation centers that torture them; counterterror teams that kidnap and kill them; and administrative detention laws that make it all possible. 

The domestic version of the CIA’s Hamlet Informant Program in Vietnam began when Bush’s attorney general John Ashcroft laid the groundwork for the Terrorism Information Program (TIP). Check it out online to see its many features of mass surveillance. 

The counterterror teams created in Vietnam have been perfected and expanded; military veterans populate DHS and police SWAT teams. Many of these vets can’t wait to relive their heroic experiences rousting Muslim families in their homes in Iraq and Afghanistan. 

The PIC program is the model for the network of black sites, detention centers, prisons and jails America builds in every nation it occupies. At the Guantanamo facility in Cuba, the CIA has perfected torture and now punishes suspects by slowly driving them insane. 

Same thing here. The DHS operates detention centers for illegal immigrants, but not their employers. Empty detention centers on military reservations await the sort of national crisis the CIA routinely provokes overseas to justify military intervention – at which point thousands of citizen suspects on dozens of blacklists shall be rounded up and interned. 

Administrative detention is the legal nail upon which the pacification of America hangs. In Vietnam, suspects were carted between interrogation centers, detention centers and jails until they confessed, died or defected. Survivors were sent to a military tribunal or a CIA-advised, Stalinist security committee for disposition; for High Value convicts that meant imprisonment on Con Son Island, ninety miles off the southern tip of South Vietnam. Con Son with its tiger cages was the model for Gitmo. 

In September 1969, the CIA formed the Central Security Committee (CSC) in Saigon to dispose of citizens arrested under the administrative detention laws. The Central Security Committee was chaired by the Prime Minister and included the Director of Corrections, the director general of the National Police, and five prison wardens. It reviewed cases of Communist offenders considered for conditional or early release. Unless a substantial bribe was paid, the Committee always recommended further detention. It is noteworthy that the National Assembly tried to abolish the CSC in December 1970 – without success. 

If you don’t think it can happen here, think again. Donald Bordenkircher headed the CORDS prison system in Vietnam and served as chief advisor to the Director of Corrections. Bordenkircher began his career in 1957 as a correctional officer at San Quentin State Prison. By 1967 he was an assistant warden. Recruited that year by the Agency for International Development’s Office of Public Safety (a frequent cover for the CIA), he spent five years “improving” conditions in Vietnam’s prisons and jails. “We were doing a magnificent job with the prisoners and the rest of the war,” he claimed. 14 

The problem, he said, was that liberal politicians in Washington “handcuffed” the military. 

After Bush invaded Iraq, Bordenkircher at age 69 volunteered to help bring that benighted nation under American rule. As with many Vietnam veterans, he was dying to win one. He became a contractor with the Department of Justice and, as National Director of Operations for all prisons in Iraq, got the job of shutting down Abu Ghraib. “I was in charge of a team that went into the prison often,” he said. “After reading and looking at everything and talking to a hell of a lot of people, I came to the conclusion there wasn’t a lot of brutality caused by American troops at Abu Ghraib.” 

Today, the penal system in America resembles the prison regimes it imposed upon Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. The same jailers with the same Ultra attitudes are in charge here, and they are doing well; like the War on Terror, incarceration is a growth industry. Since Nixon declared war on drugs in 1970, the prison population has grown from several hundred thousand to several million, mostly blacks. According to the ACLU, one in 31 adults is in prison or jail, on parole or probation. With only 5% of the world’s population, America has 25% of the world’s prison population. 

Ask yourself, how can we be the land of the free and simultaneously the world’s largest jailer with its highest per capita incarceration rate? 

Private as well as publicly-owned prisons are a cornerstone of the critical infrastructure industry of domestic repression, as well as a boundless source of wealth for investors in the legally criminal Homeland Security apparatus. Seen from this pro-business perspective, administrative detention is the growth industry of the future; along with the plea-bargain boondoggle, it is how the National Security Establishment will keep jails packed with people who aren’t guilty of any crime. [This is by far the most informative piece on prison's for profit,that I have found on the Interest, I was also disappointed by reader reception when I posted the 3 parts earlier this year,so those who passed or missed,here is another chance to take a look.DC]
https://exploringrealhistory.blogspot.com/2019/09/part-1-of-2-dillon-read-co-inc-and.html

For a glimpse into the future look at Israel, which has had a leading role in teaching Americans “how to do it”. There, administrative detention makes it okay to round up civilians, detain and torture them indefinitely, destroy their homes with bulldozers, cast them to the four winds, and steal everything they own simply because they are Palestinians. 

Being a stateless Palestinian is a crime of status. In America, being a pacifist is a crime of status. The key is loosely defining what a terrorist suspect is. 

The Patriot, Homeland Security, and Domestic Security Enhancement Acts set in place the elements of administration detention. Americans captured on foreign soil like John Lindh, or said to be involved in terrorist activities overseas, can be held indefinitely in a military prison and denied access to lawyers and family members. No federal court can review the reason for the detention. They can be executed if found guilty by the President. Meanwhile, America’s version of the Central Security Committee at Guantanamo Bay is still conducting secret Stalinist tribunals in 2016, seven years after Obama bragged, in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, that he had ordered the facility closed. 

Detention laws apply domestically too. To say nothing of having the same name, if you even resemble someone on the “no-fly” list you can be detained. DHS routinely detains suspects without charge or having to disclose their names or location. DHS agents posing as cops can punish protestors and coerce them into becoming informants by holding them indefinitely as “material witnesses” when there is no basis to charge them with a crime. 

Secret subpoenas used by DHS to obtain information can’t be refused or disclosed, making it impossible to defend against false charges. People arrested for unknown crimes uncovered as a result of secret surveillance are not entitled to judicial review of the warrant or the evidence obtained as a result. Detentions, evidence, trials, deportations and executions are now conducted in secret. 

Administrative detention is structural violence for the professionals. It works in tandem with informant and surveillance programs that identify “terrorist surrogates” at the grassroots level of society. In this manner the jerry-rigged justice system, always biased against the poor, becomes the ultimate form of Ultra terrorism. It is the greatest blackmail scheme ever invented: if you didn’t do what the homeland gangsters want, your name appears on the blacklist and into the Black Hole you go. 

Check out what happened to Jose Padilla.

Political and Psychological Warfare 
Capitalism is America’s ideology and business its dominant party, controlling both political parties. Its Democratic wing works with labor’s management class and has been responsible for some of the recent key anti-labor policies, such as off-shoring; the Republican wing always supports business over labor, landlords over renters. The Business Party’s strategic goal is the political control of people at home and abroad – and the subsequent acquisition of their property, wealth and resources – through the centralization of power in multinational corporations and giant financial institutions exempt from anyone’s laws, as well as through psychological operations. 

Myths about democracy are used along with Rotary Club-style front organizations to disguise the Business Party “infrastructure” in America, just as they were in Vietnam, where the only rule of the psyops game was post your own score. Blessed with limitless resources, and using sales techniques perfected by its private sector instructors in the advertising industry, the Americans distributed millions of leaflets stressing traditional Confucian values of obedience to authority, while portraying the Communists as a socially disruptive force that must be eliminated – the way Rudy Giuliani stigmatizes Black Lives Matter. 

But the Americans were out of touch with the reality of life in rural villages and could only reach the people through “media” like leaflets. And while Americans relied on cartoon books to sell “democracy” and “free enterprise” to a largely illiterate people, VCI cadres went from person to person talking into ears, connecting on a human level. 

Unable to sell its product through media, the CIA resorted to coercion, and drastically expanded the Hamlet Informant Program. Village chiefs were instructed to conduct classes on government ideology for villagers with revolutionary thoughts or relatives who had them. Attendance was mandatory. There was a one-week course “with extensions for problem individuals.” Day care and lunch were made available in “vacated” homes. Creating defectors was emphasized, counseling was provided, and “the populace was encouraged to report the activities of the VCI by dropping a note addressed to the police in local mailboxes.” This method was credited with approximately 40% of the information used in Phoenix operations in one province. 

Psyops in support of Phoenix proved to be such a potent weapon in the attack on the VCI that in August 1970, the Pentagon’s Special Assistant for Counterinsurgency and Special Activities described Phoenix as “the number one MACV PSYOPS priority.” 

At the same time, Congressional investigators revealed that the CIA used the Phoenix program as “an instrument of mass political murder” to neutralize politicians and activists who opposed the puppet regime or espoused peace. 15 

Five years later, the Church Committee revealed the extent of the FBI’s similar attempts to suppress the Communist Party in the United States, which it claimed controlled the anti-war and civil rights movements. The FBI used the same kind of illegal operations Phoenix used in Vietnam: spreading lies and using forged documents to break up marriages and otherwise harass people into submission. FBI agents were able to persuade college administrators to prevent dissidents from giving public addresses. There was no evidence that any of them were Soviet agents fomenting armed rebellion; it was their ideas about a just society the FBI was trying to stamp out, along with the First Amendment. 

The military was at the forefront of the repression of the antiwar movement, and is leading the charge again. As noted in Chapter 4, Sid Towle was a lieutenant with the 116th MIG in Washington, DC, in 1970. As chief of a counterintelligence team, Towle investigated the anti-war activities of army personnel and conducted “offensive counterintelligence operations” in the nation’s capital. One job was disrupting antiwar demonstrations by building bonfires and inciting people to riot, so the capital police could be called in to bash heads. 

As Ed Murphy recalled in the same chapter, the 116th MIG targeted specific leaders of the anti-war movement. Photos of the targets were posted at headquarters. 

That’s what DHS agents are prepared to do in the US. And with advances in technology and 40 years to learn from mistakes, political neutralizations are easier than ever. Consider the anthrax letters mailed to Democratic senators after 9/11, now recognized as an inside job. 16 It took only a few “black propaganda” terror operations to silence the political opposition’s leadership and its resistance to the Patriot Act. 

Information management – including official secrecy and false accusations – is the key to pacifying the people through implicit terror, while making the internal security apparatus appear legal, moral and popular. This is being done against American citizens through the most ambitious psywar campaign ever waged on planet Earth. 

Another essential ingredient of psychological warfare is properly indoctrinating and organizing political cadres. As Michael Ledeen, former employee of the Pentagon, the State Department and the National Security Council (and involved in the transfer of arms to Iran during the Iran-Contra affair), stated in the days after 9/11, “New times require new people” with the will power to “stamp out” the “corrupt habits of mind” manifest in the thoughts or actions of anyone who can’t be assimilated into the Business Party or opposes its aggression disguised as the War on Terror. 

The military has a lot of experience training political cadres. Soldiers slated to participate in Phoenix were given the CIA’s patented “motivational indoctrination” course at Fort Bragg. They were the first political cadres to infiltrate the American military. In return for adopting the Business Party line and violating the laws of warfare by targeting civilians, a successful career was guaranteed. As noted, several CIA and military Phoenix veterans have held important DHS posts. The first chief of DHS counter narcotic operations, CIA officer Roger Mackin, ran Special Police operations in Da Nang. 

At Fort Bragg, CIA psywar experts taught Phoenix advisors how to wage political warfare. In the early 1980s CIA officer Duane Clarridge had the training manual translated into Spanish and reprinted for use in the Reagan régime’s illegal Contra War. Titled “Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare”, it stated that “the human being should be considered the priority objective in a political war. And conceived as the military target of guerrilla war, the human being has his most critical point in his mind. Once his mind has been reached, the ‘political animal’ has been defeated, without necessarily receiving bullets.” 

DHS cadres pass through the same motivational indoctrination courses before they hit the streets. DHS cadres in turn instruct civilian “critical infrastructure” personnel on how to spy and report on colleagues who serve as “terrorist surrogates” by even inadvertently revealing information on infrastructure vulnerabilities. DHS spies monitor private sector terror suspects until it comes time to expose them in the media as being under investigation. The most intimate details of a person’s private life, all of which are known through blanket surveillance, become his or her greatest liability. Extramarital affairs, medical marijuana use, or mental health care are revealed, leading to a target being neutralized. 

In the absence of vulnerabilities, the CIA’s Dark Army of computer hackers can create them. 

Through highly refined motivational indoctrination methods, complacent Americans are converted into Ledeen’s “new people” who idolize the CIA, FBI, NSA and DHS. People who aren’t DHS cadres but wish to serve the Ultra cause join “front” organizations like the Citizen Corps, or the Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, or Community Emergency Response Teams. The ever popular Neighborhood Watch Program supplies overly-aggressive cops at fusion centers with the false rumors they need to detain activists as terrorist surrogates. The Medical Reserve Corps gives overpaid doctors working in hospital emergency rooms the chance to identify suspects among the masses of poor people falling through the safety net at the bottom of the jerry-rigged health care system. 

The pressure to join the new legions is irresistible. When Bush announced the DHS on 6 June 2002, he stressed that its primary mission was to “mobilize and focus” the American people “to accomplish the mission of attacking the enemy where he hides and plans.” By which he meant having Ledeen’s “new people” root out the enemy within, just as the CIA roots out insurgents in the colonies. 

The most highly motivated cadres are trained “in techniques of persuasion over control of target groups” as outlined in “Psychological Operations in Guerrilla Warfare”. In the next national emergency, these cadres will be mobilized, attend mass meetings, carry placards, shout the proper slogans and, if necessary, grab ropes and form lynch mobs. 

Theoretically, only five percent of the population needs to be organized in this fashion in order to wield control over the indifferent 90% and defeat the five percent that form the resistance. 

Waging this type of psywar is the maximum danger posed by the Homeland Security apparatus. Blackmail is the key. Hundreds of businesses and institutions across the country have already been placed on the consolidated Terrorist Watch List. One Bush official said that merely being on the list “could destroy the livelihood of all those organizations … without a bomb being thrown or a spore of anthrax being released.” 17 

Blacklists abound: the TIPOFF blacklist; the No-Fly blacklist; the CAPPS II blacklist which uses credit card information and secret databases to assess a person’s security risk level; and local blacklists like the one kept by the Denver police department. 18 

And the secret ones you don’t know about. 

Initially, the proliferation of blacklists had “the leaders of many federal departments and agencies scrambling to figure out how they could influence [Homeland Security] without appearing disloyal.” 19 

Writing for USA Today in 2002, James Bamford cited a Knight Ridder report saying that, “A growing number of military officers, intelligence professionals and diplomats privately…charge that the administration squelches dissenting views and that intelligence analysts are under intense pressure to produce reports supporting the White House’s argument that Saddam poses such an immediate threat to the United States that pre-emptive military action is necessary.” 20 

If a dissident or resistant bureaucrat has no past indiscretions, forged documents are used. One political opponent jailed in Vietnam by President Thieu revealed the existence of “a systematic campaign of vilification by use of forged documents.” Forged documents used to justify false arrests or conceal illegal operations often emerged as “captured documents.” A legislative aide working for the Senate committee investigating Phoenix in 1970 wryly observed that, “There seems to be captured documents to prove any point or to support, retrospectively, almost any conclusion.” 21 

If what’s past is prologue, in the forthcoming national emergency, the paranoia that currently infects the Muslim American community will spread nationwide until no one is sure who is a spy for the Thought Police. Midnight arrests and disappearances into detention centers will be commonplace, as the definition of a terrorist surrogate expands to include people deemed dangerous to the Public Order. As Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker wrote in 1972 about a secret emergency decree issued by the GVN: “This means that virtually any person arrested can now be held on criminal instead of political charges.” 22 

No specific charge is required: a DHS spy will accuse his neighbor, the one whose dog poops on his lawn, of disturbing the public order; off the unlucky fellow goes into the local Gitmo. 

Last but not least, the crime of sedition will be resurrected and expanded to include disseminating information about government corruption and undermining the will of the State by challenging its authority. Calling for civil disobedience will be equated with threatening Homeland Security. Cadres in the Office of Cyberspace Security will expose you as a terrorist surrogate for sending sarcastic or satirical emails blaming Bush and Israel for 9/11. In the absence of actual “utterances”, cadres will manufacture them. [Well what do get call them Doug, when they run a national PSYOP to undo an election through hoaxes and bullshit impeachment hearings,huh Doug? DC]

Don’t laugh. Anti-terror legislation passed by Congress allows for secret searches of the homes of people who meet the nebulous criteria of “suspected terrorist.” Because these secret searches violate the Fourth Amendment, the government is devising “new tools that ease administrative burdens.” 23 

Remember, CIA legal experts argued that Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies “only to sentencing for crimes, and does not prohibit a state from interning civilians or subjecting them to emergency detention when such measures are necessary for the security or safety of the state.”

In this way indefinite detention, torture and summary execution, all carried out without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, are perfectly legal in the criminal Homeland Security state, because they result from “administrative procedures.”

This is Phoenix, and this is what the National Security Establishment has in store for America.

next
PART IV MANUFACTURING COMPLICITY: SHAPING THE AMERICAN WORLDVIEW

FRAGGING BOB KERREY: THE CIA AND THE NEED FOR A WAR CRIMES TRIBUNAL

Notes
Chapter 16 
1 “Afghanistan: Crisis of Impunity: The Role of Pakistan, Russia, and Iran in Fueling the Civil War”, Human Rights Watch, July 2001. 
2 I quoted from this source in my Counterpunch article, “An Open Letter to Maj. Gen. Bruce Lawlor.” 
3 Matthew Harwood and Jan Stanley, “American military technology has come home to your local police force”, The Nation, 19 May 2016. 
4 <http://www.dkv.columbia.edu/demo/ethics-in-america/site/war_stories/participants.html> 
5 Al Santoli, Everything We Had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War, 1985. 
6 Seymour M. Hersh, “The Qaddafi Connection”, The New York Times, 14 June 1981. Loomis in 1976 went to work under cover of an aircraft company in the Far East as part of the CIA’s off-the-shelf counter-terror network. 
7 Georgie-Ann Geyer, “The CIA’s Hired Killers”, True magazine, 1970. 
8 Robin Moore referenced this card trick in his 1966 book The Country Team. The book features Mike Forrester, a privateer who’d been chased out of Cuba and then purchased a rubber plantation in mythic Mituyan. The CIA asks Forrester to buy the local poppy crop before the Communists can grab it and sell it to the Mafia. Forrester takes the job after the CIA promises to sell the opium to US pharmaceutical companies. He keeps half the profits to keep his private army “oiled.” Forrester buys the harvest from a tribal chief, who resembled the real one in Houei Sai, Laos, near where the CIA had its 118A base I referenced in Chapter 2. He brings along a CIA-supplied press to squeeze the opium into bricks. The vengeful MitComs descend on his plantation, but waiting for them is a hit team managed by a CIA officer named “Scott” working undercover for the USIS. When Scott(on) meets Forrester, he produces a deck of cards. Each card is black “with a hideous white eye in the center.” As Scott explains, the USIS printed 20,000 of them in Vietnam. “When we discovered who the Communist agents in a city or village were, we assassinated them and put this eye on the body”, Scott cheerfully explains. 
9 Michael Ledeen, The National Review Online, 1 October 2001 . 
10 Casper Weinberger, Robert McFarlane, Elliott Abrams, Clair E. George, Duane R. Clarridge, and Alan D. Fiers Jr. 
11 David Johnston, “Bush Pardons 6 in Iran Affair, Aborting a Weinberger Trial; Prosecutor Assails ‘Cover-Up’, Bush Diary At Issue”, The New York Times, 25 December 1992. 
12 Washington Post, “Homeland Security struggles toward goals”, 7 September, 2003. 
Chapter 17 
1 On the Homeland Security website, the threat of terrorism is said to be “a permanent condition.” 
2 Trevor Aaronson, “The Sting”, The Intercept, 16 March 2015. 
3 Since October 2012, the Director of National Intelligence has responsibility for neutralizing whistleblowers. 
4 Timothy B. Lee, “Here’s everything we know about PRISM to date”, Washington Post, June 12, 2013. 
5 Jay Stanley, “The Surveillance Industrial Complex: How the American Government Is Conscripting Businesses and Individuals in the Construction of a Surveillance Society”, ACLU, August 2004. 
6 See the previous essay for how Bruce Lawlor’s résumé conceals his CIA service. 
7 Matt Apuzzo and Adam Goldman, “How A Former CIA Official Turned the NYPD Into A Spying Powerhouse”, Business Insider, 6 September 2013. 
8 Ibid.
9 In July 2016 a hotel desk clerk in Ohio accused a Muslim man of pledging allegiance to ISIS. The cops arrested him. But he’d never said anything. He was in the US for medical attention. “U.S. apologizes for Arab man’s ‘unfortunate incident’” in Ohio” CBS News, 4 July 2016. 
10 Herb Brown, “California’s Terrorism Liaison Officer Program Modeled Nationwide”, California Peace Officers Association, 27 October, 2014. 
11 Beau Hodai,“Dissent or Terror: How the Nation’s Counter Terrorism Apparatus, In Partnership With Corporate America, Turned on Occupy Wall Street”, Center for Media and Democracy, May 2013. Darwin Bond Graham, “Counter-Terrorism Officials Helped Track Black Lives Matter Protesters”, East Bay Express, 15 April 2015.
12 Naomi LaChance, “After Dallas Shootings, Police Arrest People for Criticizing Cops on Facebook and Twitter”, 12 July 2016. 
13 Counter Current News Editorial Team, “Opposition Grows To Bill That Would Jail and Fine Protesters Who Wear Masks and ‘Hoodies’”, 4 February 2015. 
14 Don Moore, “The man who closed down Abu Ghraib Prison talks about conditions in Iraq”, War Tales online. 
15 Vietnam Policy and Prospects 1970 (Hearings Before The Committee On Foreign Relations, U.S. Senate, February 17-20, March 3, 14, 17, 19, 970), Statement for the Record On The Security Aspects of Pacification And Development by Ambassador William E. Colby. 
16 Graeme MacQueen, The 2001 Anthrax Attacks, Clarity Press, 2014. 
17 Bob Woodward, “CIA Told to Do ‘Whatever Necessary’ to Kill Bin Laden”, Washington Post, 21 October 2001. 
18 Matthew Rothschild, “More Anti-War Activists Snagged by ‘No Fly’ List,” The Progressive, 16 October 2002. See also Unisys News Report, Blue Bell, Pa., August 19, 2002 
19 David Firestone and Elizabeth Becker, “Traces of Terror: The Reorganization Plan; House Leadership Bows to President on Security Dept.”, The New York Times, 19 January 2002. 
20 Bamford, James, “Maintain CIA’s Independence”, 24 October 2002, USA Today. 
21 Senate Committee on Foreign Relations: Cambodia, May 1970 Staff Report, p. 5. 
22 “Presidential Decree Law on Administrative Detention and An Tri Proceedings” (State Department Telegram 050556Z, January 1973, Ambassador Ellsworth Bunker). 
23 Attorney General John Ashcroft, Prepared Remarks for the US Mayors Conference, October 25, 2001.

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