Part 13 of 13:The CIA as Organized Crime..Parallels of Conquest Past & Present...Propaganda as Terrorism

The CIA as Organized Crime: How Illegal Operations Corrupt 
America and the World

By Douglas Valentine
| Chapter 22 | 

PARALLELS OF CONQUEST, 

PAST AND PRESENT 

After the bloody Battle of Hastings in 1066, William the Conqueror’s army of Norman invaders buried its fallen comrades, but left the mangled corpses of the Anglo-Saxon defenders to rot in the fields. Wounded defenders were mutilated. 

William’s “Shock and Awe” invasion quickly turned into a brutal occupation. The pacification strategy, like America’s today, was to eliminate the enemy’s leadership and terrorize the civilian population into submission. Colonization is murderous work. 

Anglo-Saxon lords had their eyes plucked out and their hands and feet cut off, and were left in chains in front of their castles for the peasants to behold. Others were castrated and thrown into the dungeon in one of the hundreds of castles William built across the countryside to defend Norman interests. 

The pacification campaign took 20 years. During that period, an estimated 300,000 indigenous peoples were murdered and starved to death (one fifth of the population) and an equal number of French and Norman entrepreneurs and bureaucrats were planted in England in vacant positions of authority. 

The entire Anglo-Saxon nobility was exterminated. William took all their property and gave it to the Norman upper class. By the time William repented his sins on his deathbed in 1087, England had been totally transformed. 

Such is the beastly nature of colonial war: the victor inflicts all manner of suffering and humiliation on the vanquished, and steals everything they own. 

Nearly a millennium later, the United States is doing the same thing in Iraq and Afghanistan. The only difference is that William the Conqueror bragged about his brutal theft of another nation and its wealth, while America’s ruling class cloaks its barbarism and plunder under a veil of good intentions and self- defense. 

When accepting his Nobel Peace Prize, President Obama put on the Don Vito act and said with a straight face: “I believe the United States of America must remain a standard bearer in the conduct of war. That is what makes us different from those whom we fight. That is a source of our strength. That is why I prohibited torture. That is why I ordered the prison at Guantanamo Bay closed. And that is why I have reaffirmed America’s commitment to abide by the Geneva Conventions.” 

All lies. From Thanh Phong to Ghazi Khan and a thousand villages in between, American “boys” have been slaughtering Muslim civilians as part of vicious pacification campaigns in nations that pose no threat to the United States. Guantanamo remains open, and CIA officers continue to torture Muslims there and in dozens of dungeons around the globe, hidden in CIA compounds on military bases, in secret police safe houses, and on US Navy vessels. Boasting like William the Conqueror, Ultras in the United States trumpet their disdain for international laws, the United Nations, and the Geneva Conventions. Due process for citizens in American colonies is non-existent, and will soon evaporate in the US too. 

While the US-led occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are different in minor details, there are disturbing parallels in the extent of the carnage and the strategy of coercion, in the innocent blood that has flowed and the number of survivors who have been tormented, tortured and terrorized. 

Just as William the Conqueror ignored the English battlefield dead, the US government has not publicly identified – nor even estimated – the number of Iraqis, Afghanis, Libyans and Syrians it has killed, or caused to be killed, during its invasions, occupations, and CIA-led insurgencies. Neither is anyone in the media publicly counting the number of Muslims the US has killed, crippled, rendered homeless, starved, driven into poverty and despair, and/or condemned to disease and insanity. 

US government officials say they are “looking away” as a means of avoiding the “body count” mindset that incentivized ambitious CIA and military personnel to commit mass murder during the Vietnam War. But “looking away” also makes it impossible to quantitatively measure the amount of misery US policymakers are wreaking on civilian populations in nations they have ravaged since 9/11. 

The lack of official numbers also enables the US government to cast doubt on unofficial estimates that put the number of Iraqi dead alone in the hundreds of thousands or possibly over one million. Most reports in the mainstream US news media cite much lower estimates, to avoid offending the powers-that-be in Washington. 

Out of the Press 

As much as possible, US leaders have sought to keep the ugliness of these wars – the mangled bodies, the burned-off faces, the squalid refugee camps, the abused captives – out of the press and away from the public’s consciousness, in order to preserve the pretense of moral superiority that defines American “exceptionalism.” 

One advantage of having no official casualty estimates and few photos of atrocities in Muslim nations is that the American people aren’t reminded of the horrendous consequences of the wars of aggression launched by Presidents Bush and Obama. Making Americans feel good about their wars is a top priority of American politicians. By suppressing the human toll and censoring the press, the Bush regime was able to sell the wars against Afghanistan and Iraq as benefiting the Afghani and Iraqi people. 

That fiction has been thoroughly dispelled by the rise of ISIS from the heap of ashes that once was Iraqi and Syrian culture. Raised in America’s gulag archipelago of detention and torture centers, many young Muslim men know nothing about the world they have inherited except oppression and injustice. No wonder they are filled with rage. 

However manipulated or “protected” by the West insofar as its actions further unstated US goals, ISIS remains a manifestation of the intense suffering America has visited upon the Muslim peoples of North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia. And yet the American media is able to shield our criminal leaders and allow them to avoid “residual responsibility” by blaming the rage of Muslim men on the nature of Islam, while always casting American methods and motives in a positive light. 

That is one big difference between the slaughter of Englishmen by William the Conqueror and the carnage unleashed by Bush and Obama and Hillary Clinton, our modern-day conquistadors. William’s cruelty was done in the light of day. Our brave leaders rely on prevarication, stealth, and manufacturing complicity. 

Truth be told, the US government does keep tabs on those it kills, maims, and renders as orphans. It simply doesn’t want the American people to know the quantity or the specifics, as a way of stripping the human dimensions from its actual war against Islam. 

In Afghanistan, for example, the CIA and military have conducted a census of every village, town and city in the country – much like William’s infamous Domesday Book, which assessed the property (including tenant farmers) of every English landowner for the purpose of levying taxes or confiscation. And don’t forget the extensive corporate studies on profitable Afghan resources. As reported in the 14 June 2010 New York Times, “The previously unknown deposits — including huge veins of iron, copper, cobalt, gold and critical industrial metals like lithium — are so big and include so many minerals that are essential to modern industry that Afghanistan could eventually be transformed into one of the most important mining centers in the world, the United States officials believe. 

“An internal Pentagon memo, for example, states that Afghanistan could become the ‘Saudi Arabia of lithium,’ a key raw material in the manufacture of batteries for laptops and BlackBerrys. 

“The vast scale of Afghanistan’s mineral wealth was discovered by a small team of Pentagon officials and American geologists. The Afghan government and President Hamid Karzai were recently briefed, American officials said.” 1 

Likewise, the commanders of the US occupation armies know the name of every Afghan, Iraqi, Libyan, and Syrian property owner, so their analysts can decide who is a collaborator and might be spared, and who, in the vague vernacular favored by Hollywood-obsessed Americans, are the “bad guys.” The bad guys are invariably robbed and their businesses plundered. US businessmen wait in the wings, like Joe Biden’s son in Ukraine, to gobble up the spoils. 

The facts are all there; but one needs to dig deeper than network news. 

Tracking the Taliban 

Through their ongoing surveys, American war managers determine where each man lives, how many people are in his family, who his wife and children and relatives are, where he works and where his property is. In places like Marjah, a Taliban stronghold in Afghanistan where a US-led offensive unfolded in 2010, the CIA and military obtain actionable intelligence through their dubious networks of spies, as well as via electronic surveillance, including satellites. This biographical information about Afghanis is entered into a computer at occupation headquarters, where the material is painstakingly monitored by the CIA and military special operations units for High Value targets and targets of opportunity, including business opportunity. 

Within a separate folder for suspected Taliban, every man is categorized by his rank and position within the organization. His valuable possessions are also known. 

Low-level fighters are left to the blue-collar Marines, while High Value targets are handled by CIA and military special operations forces, and their acquisitive collaborators in Afghanistan’s warlord upper class. High Value targets get the kind of special attention William the Conqueror reserved for English noblemen, whose possessions the Normans coveted. 

Make no mistake about it: High Value targets in Afghanistan own the property (intellectual as well as material, including opium fields) that America’s colonial administrators wish to own and share with their collaborators. As a result, much more biographical information is gathered about property owners than non-property owners, and their movements are tracked 24 hours a day, seven days a week. 

Through their spies and sophisticated electronic surveillance devices, CIA and military commanders have a very good idea when “High Value” targets are leaving one safe house and traveling to another. The jets are fueled, the drones are in the sky, and the black choppers are fueled and waiting. 

This is how and why 27 Afghan civilians were slaughtered on 21 February 2010, while traveling between remote provinces in a caravan of minibuses. The CIA and military special operations forces were alerted that some “High Value” target was traveling with his family, and General Stanley McChrystal seized the opportunity to kill them all. 

For despite their alleged disinterest in “body count”, the CIA exists solely to start wars, and military commanders like McChrystal solely to kill in them, so American businessmen can steal everything they own. The only way for individual CIA and military officers to succeed, and become wealthy warlords, is to show piles of dead bodies, like the English corpses laid out at Hastings. 

In dirty wars like the ones in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria, killing “High Value” targets almost always means murdering them while they are at home or while traveling with their families. Despite the spin, it is official if unstated policy, for the killing of a nation’s leaders, along with their entire families, has a devastating psychological-warfare impact on the rest of society. 

The mainstream US news media plays along by never citing this central fact of US dirty wars. The killing of civilians is always dismissed as accidental, and is always accompanied by a routine apology from some anonymous US spokesperson whose facts cannot be challenged because they are classified, and, it is said, to release them might put Americans at risk (of being tried for war crimes). 

Most of all, killing important leaders along with their families makes it easier to buy their vacated property at ten percent of its value – always a perk for American geologists and the US occupation army’s corporate camp followers. 

Savagery, Past and Present 

Though US media propagandists treat CIA and military commanders as honorable “warriors” doing the hard work necessary to protect America, the truth is that they are no less savage than William the Conqueror or the ISIS militants demonized for atrocities. Both spread terror by killing their enemies, dismembering bodies and inflicting death and cruelty on non-combatants as well. One needs only to see the bodies mutilated by missiles fired from drones or helicopter gunships. 

Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed, patron of Textron Systems and the senior Democrat on the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence committees, is a typical American businessman in his blue suit and red tie, with his manicured finger nails and distinguished white hair, selling 15,000 pound Daisy Cutters to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen. Daisy Cutters were perfected in Vietnam and Afghanistan, and brought huge profits to many members of Reed’s enterprising class. 

The only difference between them and William the Conqueror, is that the Norman leaders actually fought alongside their men, unlike American chickenhawk politicians. William and his army did their killing up close with battle axes and swords for everyone to see, while American politicians and their high-tech killing machines inflict their carnage from far away with 2,000-pound bombs – and then cloak the horror behind censorship and propaganda. 

These cover-ups are essential; otherwise the American public might resist Washington’s imperial adventures, which often end up with working-class American soldiers dead or maimed while invisible US corporate bosses slither away with valuable resources from the conquered countries or otherwise use them for economic or geopolitical ends. 

This strategy works because most Americans don’t know – and many don’t care to know – the names and biographies of their victims. 

| Chapter 23 | 

PROPAGANDA AS TERRORISM 

Interviewer’s Note: Author Douglas Valentine says that the United States does not abide by any of its international obligations and its calls for war against Syria violate international law and the UN Charter. 

“The US has threatened about 50 nations with military attack. Warmongers on the left and right claim this right on the basis that America is an ‘exceptional’ nation. That means the US is an exception to all laws. It is the policeman of the world and policemen don’t obey laws; they enforce them on others,” said Douglas Valentine in an exclusive interview with the Fars News Agency. 

What follows is the text of FNA’s October 2013 interview with Mr. Valentine on the ongoing crisis in Syria and the US war threats against it. The interview has been updated, but is meant as a general overview, not a comprehensive review of all events. 

KOUROSH ZIABARI: The US war rhetoric on Syria looms large these days, and despite the agreement between the United States and Russia to bring Syria’s chemical weapons under the UN safeguards (as well as the ceasefire agreement arranged by Secretary of State John Kerry and Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov in September 2016), some extremist neo-cons in the US Congress and administration are continuing to call for a military strike against Syria. (Indeed, on 17-18 September, US and British military forces sought to undermine the ceasefire agreement by bombing Syrian army forces against US and Israeli backed ISIS forces.) Why does the United States persist on its hawkish policies? Hasn’t it learned a lesson from its previous military adventures in Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya? 

VALENTINE: America’s greatest strength is its vast military forces and intelligence services. This is what makes America the dominant world power, not its diplomatic corps, which serves primarily as a stalking horse. Americans identify with and celebrate their military prowess, their many wars, and their honored war dead. The extremist neo-cons were the group most associated with this militant ethic in America, but the Democratic Party under hawkish Hillary Clinton has adopted the same ethic. In order to win the support of the thoroughly brainwashed American public, this protected group of war profiteers portrays themselves as the guardians of America’s prestige, which is symbolized by the military, which in turn is always viewed as heroic. 

For its part, the military’s inclination is to always call for action, in high hopes of accommodating its financial backers and prospective employers in the US arms industry, which needs to expend ammunition and constantly develop new weapons in order to make profits. There are always vocal exceptions, but the policy has been in place for generations and advances on a specific course like an aircraft carrier fleet, which can only be tweaked and never driven off course. 

It is more complex than that, of course. There are also the dynamics of American culture to consider – the sense many Americans have that they are “exceptional” and destined to rule with an iron fist a world that is hostile to the “American Way.” Donald Trump is the popular manifestation of this “America as victim” delusion. It is the “lie in the soul” that enables America to project its collective “shadow” on “the other.” 

This has been recognized for decades. On 4 April 1967, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. delivered his famous “Beyond Vietnam” speech at the Riverside Church. Citing a “very obvious and almost facile connection between the war in Vietnam and the struggle I and others have been waging in America,” King said he had moved into “an even deeper level of awareness,” through which he realized that he “could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.” 

The speech was considered treachery by America’s Ultras, and a year later King was dead – assassinated allegedly by a petty criminal, a “lone gunman” who had been paid by a cabal of Mafioso and Southern racists, while under 24 hour a day surveillance by the FBI, military intelligence and local police forces. 

On 7 May 1970, the eminent British historian Arnold Toynbee put his life on the line when he said in The New York Times: “For the whole world, the CIA has now become the bogey that Communism has been for America. Wherever there is trouble, violence, suffering, tragedy, the rest of us are now quick to suspect the CIA had a hand in it.” Toynbee was responding to Henry Kissinger’s barbaric invasion of Cambodia. “In fact,” Toynbee continued, “the roles of America and Russia have been reversed in the world’s eye. Today America has become the world’s nightmare.” 

For many years even the so-called left believed America was in a life and death struggle with the Soviet Union. This Cold War was fought largely in the Third World, though the Americans were conducting all manner of covert political actions in Europe as well, to assure that no industrial state would emerge as a threat to its economic interests there. Average Americans believed they were fighting “totalitarian” communism in Africa, for example, while in reality, the capitalist elite was suppressing nationalism and independent economic policies of emerging states that favored their domestic development. We were stealing their wealth and resources, but it had to be done in way that assuaged the public. So the job was given to the CIA. The CIA, covered by complicit media, still and in greater force operates in the shadows as a projection of the dark, rapacious side of the American psyche. 

With the rise of the “fundamentalists” in Iran in 1979, and the demise of the Soviet Union ten years later, America’s ruling elite has been able to redirect the energies of the American people away from Communist and Socialist nations toward Muslim nations – all of which are stigmatized as inscrutable, inferior and hostile. 

The Holy Crusade against Islam, and the attendant wave of manufactured hatred sweeping America, began when Richard Perle and a cabal of pro-Israeli neocons in the Bush Administration’s Office of Special Plans grabbed control of the Mighty Wurlitzer, the CIA’s propaganda machine (see Chapter 20), after 9/11. They created the conditions for neo-colonial imperialism, in order to ensure Israel’s ability to appropriate Palestinian land, and to prevent the Russians and Iranians from exerting any influence in the Middle East. Through a carefully orchestrated propaganda campaign, assisted by the Israeli Lobby and other ideologically attuned organizations, they trained the American people to love the song Trump is singing out loud: ban Muslims and Mexican immigrants. This nativist call to arms against “the Other” encompasses black Americans, whose struggles for equality are still resented by a large percentage of Americans. Sixty years after King brought the Civil Rights movement into mainstream American politics, blacks are still being gunned down by cops and confined to segregated communities.[Bias pouring out,warning chapter has been weaponized for political purposes,and it continues DC] 

The hatred is visceral and ubiquitous. Trump symbolizes the imbedded racism within America. Make America Great Again means make America white again. The racists are proud of it. In order for an individual to lead America, he or she must represent this supremacist “might is right” ethic. It is part of the irreversible strategic course I referred to early in my aircraft carrier fleet allusion; National Security in the United States is equated with white supremacy. It always will be. 

The entire strategy is wrapped in lies and deceptions and double standards. During an address to Dartmouth College in May 2015, Hillary Clinton defined Iran as an “existential” threat to Israel and promised that as president she would happily “obliterate” Iran if Israel’s protection required it. She made this statement despite the fact that Iran has no nuclear weapons and Israel has 200, all of which, as former secretary of state Colin Powell observed, are pointed at Iran. If that isn’t an existential threat, nothing is. 

Clinton has also expressed her willingness to use cluster bombs and toxic agents as well as nuclear weapons. She is also a proponent of Bush’s “first strike” policy. As Secretary of State she proved her militancy by destroying Libya and chiding Obama for not doing likewise to Syria. She is truly vicious, but that’s what Americans want in a leader.[newsflash Doug...Donald Trump is President, not that wicked itch with a B. Stop telling me, you know how I think, clearly you do not!DC] 

I’ll give you an example. While having my teeth cleaned recently, I asked the hygienist how her son was doing. She said he was in the Air Force repairing fighter planes in Saudi Arabia. I asked her how she felt about that. With no compunctions or self-awareness, she said, “Better to kill them over there before they kill us here.” 

She represents the prevailing sentiment. Only a very few enlightened individuals are aware of the problem, and they are incapable of preventing the rich political elite from seeking a military solution to every problem the CIA provokes. As our strutting leaders love to proclaim, they rule the world and there’s nothing anyone can do about it. 

As President Putin said in an Op-Ed for The New York Times, America’s elite increasingly relies on brute force to get what it wants. And what it wants is to assert its power and to control all other nations of the world. The political elite must also accommodate its financial backers in the Israeli Lobby and arms industry. There is certainly a lot of outside pressure on America from various nations. But most of the so-called left has been assimilated and is as dedicated to these supremacist ends as the Ultras are, as the achievement of these ends validates their sense of superiority and enables them to prosper. 

Seen from this perspective, the wars in Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Somalia, Sudan and Syria are going just fine. America has destroyed any significant progress those nations had made in education, healthcare, infrastructure such as water treatment and electricity, postal services, courts. By degrading the standards of living for people in perceived “hostile” nations, America’s ruling elite empowers itself, while claiming that it has ensured the safety and prestige of the American people. Sometimes it is even able to convince the public that its criminal actions are “humanitarian” and designed to liberate the people in nations it destroys. 

ZIABARI: In recent days, and especially after the United States discarded its plans for attacking Syria following its agreement with Russia concerning chemical weapons (this occurred in September 2013), more attention has been paid to the role of Iran in resolving the crisis in Syria and bringing to an end the almost three-year civil war in the Arab country. The United States has so far refused to accept that Iran should be included in the comprehensive international talks about Syria, but a number of American newspapers and TV channels are suggesting that Iran needs to be part of the talks for finding a solution to the Syrian dilemma. What’s your viewpoint about the role Iran can play in ending the violence and unrest in Syria? 

VALENTINE: The US has not discarded its plans to destabilize Syria and oust Assad. It never will. The equation changed when Russia interceded and began attacking ISIS. That led to a tenuous ceasefire in early 2016, in which Iran and other regional players had a voice. But it was an exercise in futility, as Obama was by then a lame duck, and John Kerry was viewed as giving away the store by the entrenched National Security Establishment, which will never accept any Russian influence in the region. Russia still attacked ISIS, and the CIA and America’s client Arab states still armed and supported anti-Assad forces. Ultimately the US military took matters into its own hands, as it tends to do when a new administration is waiting in the wings, and it bombed Syrian army forces, killing and wounding dozens. 

As it always does, the US propaganda machine characterized this terrorist attack as “a mistake,” but the results speak for themselves. The US National Security Establishment does not follow international law and reserves the right to kill as many people as it wants, without any consequences, and without acknowledging it is policy. Having said that, I’m unaware of the plans and strategies of Iran’s ruling elite. I assume there are conflicting forces in determining those plans and strategies. It’s my understanding that Iran publicly backs Assad, as does Russia, and that Iran seeks to help Assad defeat the rebels, many of whom are foreign mercenaries trained and financed by the CIA, Israel, Jordan, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. I assume Iran will impose its will on the situation to whatever extent it can, whether through direct negotiations, indirect negotiations, or in the absence of negotiations.

In view of its having sabotaged Kerry’s ceasefire, it is obvious that the National Security Establishment is unwilling to negotiate an end to the crisis. It created the crisis as part of a long term strategy to defend Israel and help effectuate its racist, expansionist policies, while gobbling up the region’s resources and countering Russian influence. America does not recognize Syria’s sovereignty, and has violated that sovereignty for years through covert action and its support for the mercenary armies attacking Syria. 

Iran ought to be officially involved in negotiations around Syria’s fate. But if history is any indicator, the US is an unreliable negotiating partner. Some American national security officials and politicians might accept Iranian participation in negotiations, but only as window dressing and a cover for more covert political actions. It’s hard to know what Trump would do, but I suspect he would become a willing captive of the National Security Establishment. 

We know Hillary Clinton won’t deal honestly with Iran and will only accept a deal that leaves Syria in the same hellhole the Palestinians inhabit. Trump said he didn’t want to create more refugees, but Clinton keeps calling for regime change in Syria. Her policies created the conditions that sent Syrian refugees pouring into Europe, with the result that certain European nations are destabilized and Syria no longer poses a threat to Israel, which has pretty much annexed the Golan Heights. Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry are marginalized, and Syria has been totally destabilized as Hillary Clinton intended when she started the insurgency. 

We have seen the US and Iran reach an agreement. Iran agreed to abandon its nuclear weapons program and the US agreed in return not to “obliterate” Iran as Clinton threatened. But Iran has still not agreed to the partition of Syria and that could sweep the old agreements away. To that end the US and its regional allies continue to engage in covert actions and maintain sanctions against Iran, in hopes of provoking a response that will give the Ultras, under Trump or Clinton, a “green light” to attack Iran in one way or another. 

Remember, the US elites do not consider Iran to be a sovereign nation. It was an American colony from the CIA’s 1953 coup d’état and installation of the Shah until 1979, when students, leftists and Islamists tossed him out. But the US National Security Establishment hasn’t forgiven that blow to its prestige; and prestige, as I mentioned earlier, is the ambiguous measure for all policy decisions. It will never forgive Russia for the same reason. It still thinks Iran is a colony, like a slave that temporarily escaped into Mexico. The US won’t negotiate honestly with a former colony, so what purpose would negotiations serve? 

ZIABARI: There have been extensive reports indicating that Saudi Arabia, Israel, Jordan and Qatar were involved in supplying chemical weapons and illicit materials to the rebels in Damascus and other Syrian cities. With such weapons, the rebels would be able to destabilize Syria and sponsor insecurity and unrest there. Why don’t the international organizations take action to stop them and their dangerous actions? 

VALENTINE: By “international organizations,” I assume you mean the UN and Human Rights Watch. I’m not sure why these organizations adhere to the American “line” that Assad’s forces are responsible, when even Ultra pundits like Rush Limbaugh accused Obama of staging the chemical attacks as a provocation. The simple answer, I suppose, is that the CIA has suborned top officials in these international organizations. We know the NSA spies on everyone, and that the NSA passes information to the CIA. Perhaps these officials have been bribed or blackmailed. There is certainly enough corruption to go around. Others may have aligned with the US for ideological reasons. There is certainly no objectivity, or even a pretense of objectivity. The World Court and ICC don’t do anything against the US for the same reasons. To look to international organizations for relief is ridiculous. 

ZIABARI: According to the French Interior Minister Manuel Valls, in 2013 there were 110 French terrorists fighting the government of President Bashar al Assad in Syria. This meant that half of the European combatants taking part in the civil war in Syria, at the time, came from France. Some commentators suggest that France is looking for ways to regain its colonial dominance over Syria, and that is why President Francois Hollande continually pushed for a war against Syria. What’s your viewpoint on that? 

VALENTINE: If history is any indicator, that is correct. A century ago, France persuaded the Czar to mobilize against Germany, after Germany had finally reached an agreement with Russia. It was this action taken with the consent of the British government that ultimately triggered the Great War. 

France’s elite are economically and ideologically aligned with the US and UK elites, against socialism anywhere, and against nationalism in other nations seeking sovereignty. And that includes the Socialist Party. It is a major colonial power. France wants its colonies (along with the wealth that colonialism entails) and prestige back. It has never given up control of the Algerian army, just like the US continues to control the South Korean military. The UK was the primary fighter in Libya. 

Hollande is a socialist when he runs for office, but like every other French president, governs like an imperialist. On 17 July 2016, using CIA intelligence, France slaughtered 120 civilians in Syria. 1 It was a symbolic gesture done to avenge the killing of dozens of people in Nice by a non-practicing Muslim from Tunisia. There was no other reason to attack Syria. 

The flood of Syrian refuges into Europe, the attack on the Charlie cartoonists in Paris in 2015, the bombings in Brussels in 2016, and finally Nice, have been used by French and American propagandists as an excuse for imperial aggression. Islamophobia is reaching a crescendo in France. “French Minister Bernard Cazeneuve said they will start shutting down mosques that preach hate and violence. They will check all the mosques and imams in France.” 2 

Trump and his nativist faction want to do the same thing in America. 

ZIABARI: According to the UN Charter and the General Treaty for Renunciation of War as an Instrument of National Policy, to which the US is a signatory, the unilateral use of military force, or threatening to use force against a sovereign nation is illegal and a violation of international law. However, the US has repeatedly threatened Syria with a military strike, and no international organization has raised its voice to protest the US calls for war. What do you think in this regard? 

VALENTINE: The US has threatened about 50 nations with military attack. American militants on the left and right claim this right on the basis that America is an “exceptional” nation. Meaning international laws don’t apply to it. It is the policeman of the world and, as everyone knows, policemen don’t obey laws; they enforce them on others. 

There is nothing anyone can do about it. The US has a monopoly on force. Sovereignty is the key issue from the standpoint of international organizations and international law. But it is impossible for the UN to acknowledge that America engages in aggression within the meaning of the act because 1) the US can intimidate enough UN members and 2) the UN itself has a long history of intervention, going back to Korea and the Congo. The UN is largely an instrument of US foreign policy. 

ZIABARI: If you look at what many former US officials and intelligence executives say, you’ll find that many of them are opposed to a US military strike against Syria. They argue that the United States does not have the legal or political authority; that it’s not Washington’s business to do the tasks of an international policeman. Do you agree? 

VALENTINE: What does it matter what I think, or they think, or what the laws say? If it wishes, the United States can rain death and destruction down on Syria, simply through its air and naval power. It can do to Syria what was done to Libya. It can do what Israel did in 2009 in Gaza, and did again in 2014. Sure, the US regime has no legal authority to do anything in Syria. But it is already violating international law by giving weapons to the so-called rebels. 

The US military and the CIA will do what they are told to do. The job of CIA officers is to follow illegal orders, to provoke a crisis. I don’t trust anything former military or intelligence officers say – even when I agree with them – because they tend to couch subtle deceptions and ulterior motives in their statements. They say one thing and secretly do another. 

ZIABARI: Some analysts and critics of the US foreign policy say that the US is adopting a hypocritical attitude toward the concept of terrorism by supporting and arming the al Qaeda and ISIS-aligned mercenaries fighting in Syria, while it has launched its project of War on Terror with the purported aim of dismantling the same al Qaeda and ISIS organizations which the United States considers a threat to global peace. Why is the United States behaving in such an insincere manner? 

VALENTINE: The “War on Terror” is a monumental fraud, the greatest covert operation ever. As recently reported in Russia Today, Obama waived America’s own anti-terrorism provisions to arm its mercenaries in Syria, a process the CIA has been managing for five years anyway, the way it manages the international trade in illicit drugs. Reagan called CIA-backed terrorists in Nicaragua “Freedom Fighters.” It just goes on and on. 

Al Qaeda and ISIS provide America with a pretext to intervene in every Muslim nation in the world, and to wage preemptive wars, as promulgated on 20 September 2002 in the “National Security Strategy of the United States.” That’s the imperial “first strike” strategy Hillary Clinton has embraced. 

Al Qaeda and ISIS also provide mercenaries to topple governments, like Syria’s, that the US does not like. 

The US has really never been “against” al Qaeda. The CIA created al Qaeda in Afghanistan as a against the Soviets, and has used factions of al Qaeda to fight in Chechnya, Kosovo, Bosnia, and other places. The US has created a colonial army of mercenaries much like the British did with their Nepalese Gurkhas. The US mercenaries are from all over the Muslim world. They are fighting in Africa right now. This is the US proxy army worldwide, trained by US Special Ops under CIA control. 

Ultimately, the term al Qaeda is an empty vessel used to tell whatever story the US government needs to tell to justify its wars to its own people. Orwell described the phenomenon very well: 1984 is full of war reporting where the allies and enemies are constantly changing from day to day. The terms friend and foe ceased to have any recognizable meaning for those watching the TV screen. That’s where we are today. 

ZIABARI: Iran and Russia say that diplomacy is the best way to deal with the crisis in Syria and eradicate extremism and fanaticism in the Arab country, but the United States hasn’t so far allowed diplomacy and dialogue to work. Why is it insisting on a military solution to the crisis in Syria while a negotiated solution through a comprehensive national dialogue can solve all the problems? 

VALENTINE: The US does not negotiate unless a preponderance of compels it to do so. Consider the events at the US Embassy in Tehran in 1980. Reagan famously refused to negotiate with terrorists, even while secretly selling arms to Iran, as part of a policy to destabilize Iraq and Iran on behalf of Israel. The reality of CIA and MOSSAD support for SAVAK, or the fact that the Shah allowed the CIA to use Iranian nationals and territory to spy in Russia was never mentioned. All that mattered were the photographs of Americans bound and blindfolded and being held as hostages. 

All that matters is that Americans have died in Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya. When pushed into a corner as to why she was instrumental in and celebrated the murder of Qaddafi, Hillary Clinton forgets all about the “humanitarian intervention” cover story. All that mattered was that Qaddafi, she said, had blood on his hands. As if she doesn’t. 

Reconciliation and negotiations are impossible when a nation is committed solely to dominance and vengeance. They are merely tactical maneuvers in a bigger game. 

The American war against Syria and its covert actions against Iran are part of a larger strategy to weaken and encircle Russia. The US is insisting on a military solution because it believes that Iran and Russia will ultimately sacrifice Syria to avoid war with the US. Syria is just another domino about to fall. 

The goal of the American elite is to make Syria, and then Iran, and then Russia join the ranks of Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, Libya and Iraq. The plan is to smash it into ethnic and religious lines, and to fuel fighting between these groups for many years. 

Time will tell if I’m right.

| Chapter 24 | 

THE WAR ON TERROR AS 

THE GREATEST COVERT OP EVER 

The War on Terror is the greatest covert operation ever. In explaining why, I’ll begin by defining some terms, because, when discussing business, politics and terrorism, word management is all important. 

The FBI defines terrorism as “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives.” 

Clearly, this ambiguous definition begs the question, when is terrorism lawful? 

The US Government’s stated policy regarding terrorism is well known. It always condemns terrorism, and accordingly, America is never a perpetrator of terrorism, but always a victim of it. The War on Terror is the ultimate expression of this stated policy: it is lawful violence in self-defense – not unlawful violence by a non-state actor – for a political or social purpose. 

That is the stated policy, incessantly hammered into the dim American collective consciousness by Pentagon and State Department saturation ad campaigns. But if one looks behind the suffocating cloak of secrecy, censorship and propaganda that surrounds the government’s unstated policies, an entirely different story emerges about deliberate war crimes against humanity, committed on a massive scale. 

Like Diogenes with his lantern held high, I visited the FBI office in Springfield, Massachusetts on 21 November 2012. I didn’t have an appointment, but one of the resident agents agreed to listen to me. My intent was to make him respond to evidence of the CIA’s engagement in and support for terrorism in Syria. To that end, I cited a 21 June 2012 New York Times article stating that, “A small number of C.I.A. officers are operating secretly in southern Turkey, helping allies decide which Syrian opposition fighters across the border will receive arms to fight the Syrian government, according to American officials and Arab intelligence officers.” 1 

I asked the FBI agent if the article wasn’t proof that CIA officers were engaged in terrorism. Not only was CIA violence designed to overthrow the Syrian government, it was driving thousands of civilians into poverty, ruin, early graves, and the despair of exile. And while the President and Congress undoubtedly gave the CIA legal authority to overthrow the Syrian government, its violence against innocent Syrian civilians was certainly illegal, yes? 

I added that, according to The Times, CIA officers arranged for tons of weapons to be smuggled across the Turkish border “by way of a shadowy network of intermediaries” that included “jihadists” the US government itself identified as terrorists. Apart from managing a criminal conspiracy within the illegal arms and drugs smuggling network, I said, the CIA’s arming of al Qaeda constituted support for terrorism, even if the US media kindly refers to CIAsponsored terrorists in Syria as “rebels”. 

The flabbergasted FBI agent referred me to FBI headquarters, and after a lot of artful dodging, FBI spokeswoman Kathleen Wright threw in the towel and said, “With regarding to questions about the CIA, or USG policy related to the CIA, that is not within our lane [my italics] to answer.” 

In other words, the nation’s premier law enforcement entity has no legal authority over the CIA. And only within the context of this institutionalized double-standard can the profitable business of American terrorism be properly understood. 

As I hope to show in this chapter, the CIA is the preferred weapon in this international criminal enterprise, because it conducts its terrorism secretly and you never know about it. And when revealed accidentally (like in the recent Gülen “flap”, or for propaganda purposes), CIA terrorism is always equated with national security. When defined as extra-legal self-defense, it is called counterterrorism. 

The CIA manages the international arms trade like it manages the drug trade, through a covert army of mercenaries from every nation, all of whom are homicidal maniacs with combat experience and a thirst for more of it. During the Vietnam War, the CIA paramilitary officers in charge of this army were called “knuckle-draggers.” The mercenary army is supported by “deep cover” CIA finance officers operating offshore banks like Nugan Hand; “deep cover” logistics officers like Ed Wilson running proprietary and deniable shipping companies; and foreign intelligence staff officers within the CIA’s back-channel counterterror network corrupting strategically placed military officers and special policemen (often trained at American schools) as well as politicians who then provide safe passage for drug traffickers and black sites for torture as needed – all compartmentalized and managed by the big bosses at CIA Central. 

CIA officers and their political bosses are never punished for engaging in terrorism. As we recently learned, they even get away with planting plastic explosives in a Virginia school bus. It was a “training” exercise we are told. But why are CIA officers trained to plant explosives in school buses? 2 

Because once you enter the CIA, the rest of us, even school kids, are either lab rats or cannon fodder, as far as the CIA is concerned. 

Psychological Warfare 
and Covert Operations 
Politics is said to be the process by which people make collective decisions. But who really makes the overarching political decisions in America? Who makes terrorism policy? 

America is ostensibly a nation of laws, but our elected officials in Congress, the nation’s premier law making body, have exempted CIA officers engaged in terrorism from federal laws aimed at terrorists. When CIA officers are revealed to be engaged in terrorism, as in Syria, the media does its job and follows the script. It never reveals the contradictions that permit state-sponsored terrorism. 

The continued existence of this Big Lie is truly phenomenal, given the mass of available evidence exposing it. Yet it is applied systematically, without exception, as the essential feature of spectacular domination, with the desired effect: a majority of Americans not only believe it, they applaud it. They believe that CIA officers engage in terrorism to protect them. Convincing them of this is the greatest covert operation ever. 

As Carl Jung said, “Everyone carries a shadow, and the less it is embodied in the individual’s conscious life, the blacker and denser it is.” 

The Business Party that rules America has helped to impose this mass psychosis on its customers and consumers. It is essential to perpetuating the capitalist system, in which one percent of the population possesses most of the nation’s wealth. Should the people emerge from the shadows of self-deception, and stop projecting their irrationality onto others, the house of cards would collapse. 

In order to maintain the fiction that America does not engage in terrorism, the government and media, on behalf of big business, deceive the public in a variety of practiced ways that can best be discerned and understood if viewed as a standard covert action program. 

The CIA will only launch a covert action if it meets two criteria. First it must have “intelligence potential”. It must be able to gain knowledge that allows it to shape events that advance its plans and objectives. For example, smuggling arms to terrorists in Syria allows CIA officers to gather intelligence on military and criminal activity in the region. Other times the “intelligence potential” involves knowing things that allow CIA officers to influence masses of people psychologically as a means of managing political and social movements at home and, like ISIS, abroad. 

The second criterion of a covert action program is “plausible deniability”. In 1975, during Senate hearings into CIA assassination plots against foreign leaders, “plausible denial” was defined by the CIA’s deputy director of operations as the use of circumlocution and euphemism in discussions where precise definitions would expose covert actions and bring them to an end. Legalized double standards fall into this category, as does the entire range of government disinformation and propaganda. 

A standard covert action program is buried in layers of cover stories. As Winston Churchill (and later Joe Pesci) famously said, “it’s a mystery wrapped in a riddle inside an enigma.” Churchill also said that, “In wartime, truth is so precious that she should always be attended by a bodyguard of lies.” 

As I’ve explained elsewhere, CIA operations are often disguised as “civic action programs” designed to help people, like the vaccination program in Pakistan that led to the assassination of Osama bin Laden, or the CIA’s Phoenix program in Vietnam, which advertised itself as “protecting the people from terrorism.” 

Covert actions directed against the American people also meet these two criteria: they advance the government’s unstated plans and can be plausibly denied. They are largely psychological, although “accidental” deaths have been known to occur. They occur in the realm of consciousness, and are simultaneously abstract and determinant. 

The government wages psywar against the American public in various ways for various purposes. The CIA plants deceptive articles in foreign newspapers, like the recent Panama Papers leak. Domestic media are notified and dutifully report the stories. Such disinformation, or “black propaganda” when the stories are false, creates false perceptions that generate public support for military actions or economic sanctions against foreign governments the US government wishes to subvert. Other times, it assures Americans that abusive regimes like Israel, Egypt and Saudi Arabia are worthy of massive tax-funded aid programs. In either case, language is the key to creating perceptions and assumptions that justify immoral or illegal policies the American public would otherwise repudiate as state terrorism. 

Through language that deceives, intimidates and coerces, the US government’s covert action programs are ultimately designed to terrorize Americans – to make them feel inferior, infantile and powerless. This is the shadow side of the propaganda that makes them feel exceptional, of their vicarious enjoyment of being Number One; they are also made to feel victimized, and the resulting confusion makes them governable in detrimental ways they would not choose, if they knew the truth.” 

The CIA, of course, is not the only branch of government that engages in disinformation. It happens across the board. What is important is to be able to recognize the modus operandi and, in particular, the language used to conceal bad intent. What is not said is often more telling than what is said. 

The war on Iraq is the premier example. Needing a pretext to launch a war of aggression to seize Iraq’s oil and destabilize the region on behalf of Israel, the Bush regime launched a disinformation campaign to convince Americans that Iraq posed an existential threat. To this end it planted false stories such as the one that Iraq possessed a stockpile of “yellow cake” uranium that would result in an imminent “mushroom cloud” in America. 

The Bush administration’s “mushroom cloud” descriptor terrorized the public, as did a New York Times article by Chris Hedges citing claims by defectors that Iraq was training terrorists to attack America. The defectors were fabricating, of course, on behalf of their CIA masters, just as there was no “yellow cake” being made into nuclear weapons for use against America. 

What actually happened was that a group of corrupt officials used the covert mechanisms of government to conduct a massive war of aggression, the ultimate form of terrorism, for personal gain, while throwing the world into chaos and the American public into debt and confusion. And even when the public does intermittently discern and understand that it was fooled, the social and bureaucratic systems put in place since World War Two guarantee that the public is powerless to resist or effect any meaningful change. 

This is no secret. Especially since 9/11, the invisible hands guiding our official rulers boast about their ability to shape perceptions of reality. Ron Suskind reported about this problem in a 17 October 2004 article for The New York Times Magazine titled “Faith, Certainty and the Presidency of George W. Bush”. In the article, Suskind quoted Bush political advisor Karl Rove as saying, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality – judiciously, as you will – we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors … and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” 3 

This imperial arrogance has been the nation’s driving force since 1945, when America emerged unscathed from the ashes of World War Two as the world’s only superpower. Since then, those who secretly rule the US have ruthlessly used the nation’s military might and economic clout to punish foreign nations that impede its plans for global hegemony. They have succeeded in this business venture by waging the greatest covert operation ever, one that has thoroughly conditioned the American public to believe it is a perpetual victim of foreign powers, when in fact it is victimized by its unnamed rulers with their own secret interests. 

The plan for world hegemony is rooted in language. The anti-Communist discourse put in place after World War Two evolved through the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism into the current discourse of terrorism, the new bête noire. Anyone operating outside the realm of pseudocritique could discern this sea change in stated policy after the terror attacks of 11 September 2001. It was explicitly articulated in the days after 9/11. Republican Party stalwart Kenneth W. Starr, who served as President Bill Clinton’s impeachment inquisitor, said the danger of terrorism required “deference to the judgments of the political branches with respect to matters of national security.” 4 

In other words, national security, which had been non-partisan, would henceforth be controlled by the Ultra conservative business branch of American politics. According to Richard Thornburgh, who served as attorney general under Presidents Reagan and George W. H. Bush, America should also henceforth stop abiding by the law. Thornburgh said that due process sometimes “strangles us.” When it comes to counter-terrorism, the former attorney general said, legally admissible evidence “may not be the be-all and end-all.” 5 

It is no coincidence that, when Thornburgh and Starr made these carefully choreographed pronouncements, government officials had already drafted administrative detention laws aimed at Americans while establishing the torture chamber at Guantanamo.

In the wake of 9/11, America’s reactionary Ultra clique claimed ownership of the national security apparatus, which it used to impose its ideology on the America people. Anyone who did not adopt their doctrine was considered an enemy of the state. “This is time for the old motto, ‘kill them all, let God sort ‘em out’,” purported terrorism expert Michael Ledeen asserted. “The entire political world will understand it and applaud it. And it will give us a chance to prevail.” 6 

This is where the symbolic meaning of words prevails. By the “political world” Ledeen meant those who really understand the deep underside of how the whole war process works: the owners of the burgeoning terrorism business, the secret rulers and capitalist looters who’ve been manipulating American political and social movements since its inception. Taken together, Starr, Thornburg and Ledeen’s rhetoric is emblematic of the false perceptions that Americans traditionally embrace about their victimhood and exceptionalism. The rhetoric of the Ultras paved the way for the reorganization of American society to fight an eternal one-size-fits-whatever War on Terror, which in turn was used to justify disastrous, neo-colonial wars against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya and Syria. And it was all a Big Lie designed to enrich a few protected individuals. 

It doesn’t matter that an American is more likely to be killed by a bee sting than a terrorist attack. It doesn’t matter that, in comparison, 30,000 people die every year in automobile accidents. They climb into their SUVs and hurtle down the highway at 80 MPH, heedless of the danger. But it’s terrorism they fear. A survey conducted in December 2015 “found that about 79 percent of respondents believe a terrorist attack is somewhat likely or very likely in the next few months. Around 19 percent of respondents said they believe terrorism is the most important national issue – up from the 4 percent last month.” 7 

This irrational fear is both the instigator and result of the War on Terror, the greatest covert operation ever devised, in which America’s secret rulers manipulate the information industry to enrich themselves and enslave the nation’s citizens while cutting a swath of righteous savagery around the world. 

Which begs the question: Who are these secret rulers? 

The National Security Establishment 
Through their control of the media, political and bureaucratic systems, America’s secret rulers engage in terrorism abroad and at home for economic purposes. This foreign-domestic symmetry was articulated by Marx and Engels, when they demonstrated how capitalists wage imperial wars abroad for the exact same reasons they create systems to oppress labor at home. The objective is to maximize profits and concentrate wealth and political power in fewer and fewer hands. 

The global War on Terror and its domestic homeland security counterpart are flip sides of the same counterfeit coin. They are the capitalist ideology applied to foreign and domestic security policy. And like the capitalist system it serves, an unstated national security policy is consolidated in fewer and fewer ideologically correct hands as the empire expands and its contradictions become more apparent. 

This consolidation of power is antithetical to democratic institutions and results not in greater security for American citizens, but in the loss of legal protections like due process. The consolidation of national security policy also means the deterioration of the two-party electoral system. 

In theory, America’s two major political parties represent opposing ideologies. Democrats are pro-labor but divided into a Socialist Left which wishes to smash the big banks, and the Compatible Left of Hillary Clinton, which is aligned to Goldman Sachs, Israel, and the imperial war machine. Joe Biden’s evolution illustrates how a labor boss was co-opted, but continues to serve as a spectacular representation of what he no longer is. If one believes Biden’s rhetoric, the Democratic Party elite seek to end income inequality and racial injustice, and to enfranchise minorities rather than subvert Ukraine, take over its government and civic institutions, and steal its wealth. The Republican Party is openly racist, militant and business-oriented. Trump’s populist appeal seemed like a departure from Reagan elitism, but that was a result of shifting demographics, not establishment policies. The Republican base voted for Trump because of his outspoken racism. Trump didn’t use code words like the Party leadership. 

Either party may control the government for a period of time but, in theory, their open and honest dialectic resolves their ideological conflicts and pulls them inexorably to the center, thus creating the democracy that benefits everyone. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, “the state” endures and, in times of crisis, prevails without debate. Leaders in both political parties champion the state’s preeminence. They rally round the flag and claim to do what’s best for the country. 

The problem is that, with the War on Terror, America is constantly in crisis. When the state is revealed (sometimes accidentally, more often by the state itself for propaganda purposes) to have created the crisis, it is more important than ever for elected politicians to affirm that the state transcends politics and represents the nation’s enduring interests. That’s why, during the campaign, Clinton studiously avoided her role in destroying Iraq, Libya, and Syria, and instead presented herself as a dispassionate bureaucrat who understands the intricacies of the system and can make the tough decisions as the first female chair of what can be understood as the national Phoenix Committee. 

In Europe, the state is acknowledged as “industry” and is comprised of the people with the largest financial stake in any particular nation. Given their wealth and influence, these industrial elites, like the ancient nobility, are understood to have the experience and independence to engage in politics. Industry is ownership; it excludes wage earners, immigrants, refugees and disenfranchised minorities. 

In America the state is referred to as the Establishment. As defined in the American Heritage dictionary, an Establishment with a capital E is “An exclusive group of powerful people who rule a government or society by means of private agreements and decisions.” 

The Establishment owns, equips and operates the instruments of state, and conspires to use them to its advantage, to keep wages low and maximize profits. 8 The CIA is the organized crime branch of this criminal conspiracy to “rule a government or society by means of private agreements and decisions.” 

The state’s private, commercial interests are protected by its military, judicial, law enforcement, intelligence and security services – a.k.a., the National Security Establishment. We are taught that the bureaucrats and technocrats who administer these services are nonpartisan and dedicated solely to protecting all the citizens of the United States. Ensconced in top management jobs in the private and public sectors, these apparatchiks claim they can only serve “the sacred trust” by placing themselves above the law. Cops, as everyone knows, do not follow the law, they enforce it. 

The state’s terrorism – the needless destruction of Iraq, Libya and Syria, and before them Vietnam and dozens of other nations – is based upon the premise that its National Security Establishment is above politics. But that’s just a cover story for the greatest covert operation ever. 

Here’s how it works. Members of each party’s hierarchy cultivate ideologically qualified candidates to run for public office. When elected, these officials appoint members of their party to top management jobs in the various bureaucracies. But when it comes to national security, no actual leftists are allowed. This is the determinant factor in the War on Terror. After generations of propaganda – from the Red Terror through the loyalty oaths of the McCarthy Era, up until the “eternal present” of the War on Terror – being a leftist automatically disqualifies a candidate from serving in the National Security Establishment, which is dedicated to capitalism. 

Since 9/11, the commitment to fight Islamic terrorism, and absolve America of any hint of engaging in terrorism, is as stringent a requirement as anticommunism. 

No one who writes a book like this one will ever belong. One cannot belong if one understands and disapproves of the reality that the state conducts terrorism, as its unstated policy, against working people at home, as well as foreign nations sitting on coveted natural resources. One cannot seek to hold office while denying the existence of an anthropomorphic god, America’s righteousness, or the prevailing assumptions about the blessings of capitalism, for these myths describe the philosophical and psychological context in which the state’s illegal operations are possible. They are the ultimate cover story, embodied in and embraced by the true believer. 

Conversely, the state’s covert operations can only be discerned and understood by transcending these beliefs and assumptions. 

Transcending these self-destructive beliefs and assumptions is the most difficult challenge facing Americans. It is also the first step in an objective analysis of the components of the National Security Establishment. Such an analysis is not easily achieved, however, for the National Security Establishment is not accountable to the citizenry. One cannot make a citizen’s arrest of a CIA officer, an FBI agent, or a cop for criminal activity, let alone a corporate executive or American president. 

Apart from the deliberately confusing “pseudo-critiques” that define the spectacle in which we flounder, the National Security Establishment has built a labyrinth of thoroughly anti-democratic moats around itself (just as Rove, Starr, Thornburgh and Ledeen advocated) precisely to keep enquiring citizens out of its dirty business. They’ve destroyed as much evidence as possible. 

The military is the most obvious example. Barricaded on bases at home and around the world, and fortified with its own judicial system, the military is divided into an upper class of highly indoctrinated officers who do not fraternize with the lower ranks. Officers are trained to send the lower ranks into battle to be maimed and killed. The lower ranks are trained to obey without question; and when they lose limbs and die, they are glorified as heroes who died for their country, not to advance the interests of the likes of Dick Cheney and Halliburton – what we loosely identify today as the One Percent. 

The US military machine is the world’s biggest consumer of energy and its biggest polluter. It manages the foreign policy mechanisms of the government for self-serving purposes, gobbling up the nation’s tax dollars in order to maintain a global protection racket that exists solely to keep shipping lanes open so American businesses can exploit foreign markets. Dominated by fascists, the military is the pillar of the state and is never said to be connected to business or politics. And that illusion is the Establishment’s greatest achievement. 

Unlike the military, the CIA operates under cover, provoking conflicts in Russia and China, in nations surrounding them, and in Muslim nations surrounding Israel, so the military has a pretext to intervene. Military intervention and intimidation assure that the military’s corporate sponsors control the resources the military needs to maintain the empire. 

The FBI, as noted, has no legal mandate or ideological inclination to interfere in the CIA’s illegal actions. Its “lane” is to infiltrate Muslim groups in America and sometimes prevent and other times provoke terror incidents here, while blurring “the lanes” between organized crime and the Establishment. 

Based on the Phoenix program model developed in Vietnam and perfected in Latin America, the Department of Homeland Security (which is totally dependent on the War on Terror) coordinates the lower tier members of the National Security Establishment for the purpose of suppressing dissent in America. It does so through implicit violence. 

Top bureaucrats and technocrats like Nelson Brickham, who created the Phoenix program, coordinate the systems of repression from within invisible “intelligence and operations centers” like the National Security Council, in league with trusted senators and congressmen, as well as representatives of big business, the media and academia. The bureaucrats and technocrats organize the chains of command to focus power in certain areas for specific goals. The primary goal is to assure that the CIA enjoys plausible deniability in its criminal pursuit of the Establishment’s unstated policies. It’s a shell game that allows elected representatives to claim they didn’t know. The system is structured so that true power flows off the organizational charts presented to the public; all evidence leading back to the Establishment is concealed, and no one is ever held accountable. 

To be invited into the National Security Establishment, and to rise to a position to organize and manage American society, one must be to the manor born, make billions of dollars like Trump, or submit to years of indoctrination calibrated to a series of increasingly restrictive security clearances designed to reject anyone who can’t be ideologically assimilated. Endlessly proving one has embraced doctrine on various issues (Israel, Islam, terrorism, Black Lives, Mexican immigrants, etc.), is the drawbridge an individual like Hillary Clinton must cross to enter the self-regulating National Security Establishment. The capacity to recite doctrine and engage in massive war crimes is what enables a person to rise to a position of authority within the ruling Cult of Death. 

The National Security Establishment’s stated job is to defend the nation from foreign and domestic enemies, while expanding its economic and military influence abroad and preserving its freedoms at home. Its unstated job, conducted clandestinely, is to keep the lower classes from exerting any political control, publicly or privately, that might possibly result in the just and equitable redistribution of the Establishment’s wealth. It is to this unstated end that the ruling Cult of Death covertly engages in massive terrorism against the people it pretends to protect. 

Capitalism and State Terrorism 
The disenfranchised have no voice in making policy in America. Wolf Blizter avoids acknowledging them and their viewpoints as assiduously as he stigmatizes Palestinians. They are Galeano’s “Nobodies”. They are not quoted in The New York Times. They have no access and cannot change conventions or alter basic assumptions about America, all of which are perpetuated in well designed symbolic ways. 

But when the Establishment exerts its overarching influence on government, the media does not define it as politics; it is the neutral, non-partisan status quo. 

As with the financial crisis of 2008, Big Bankers were said to be “too big to fail.” They were credited with creating jobs and dutifully accommodated with trillion dollar bailouts, paid for by workers losing pension funds and furloughs. No questions asked. No need for Trump to release his tax returns or Clinton to release her speeches to Goldman Sachs. 

Politicians representing liberal causes must accommodate the Establishment and keep the system afloat in times of state manufactured crises, such as the invasion of Iraq in 2003. If they don’t, they are labeled un-American – which is how ownership is equated with national security. 

It has been this way since the wealthy landowners and merchants who organized the American Revolution raised and paid for armies out of their pockets. The Founding Fathers wrote the Constitution to preserve the prerogatives they purchased. That is why the media never identifies, let alone exposes or even investigates, wealthy individuals who benefit from tax breaks and offshore tax havens. The rich are never said to play the business card the way blacks are said to play the race card. 

According to conventional American assumptions, capitalism is not based on political power, but on ideologically neutral profits and the economic “growth” that provides for the common good. And even when the scandal of tax breaks and tax havens affects some unscrupulous politician or industrialist, there is no legal penalty imposed on the offender. Obscene wealth is not illegal or, increasingly, immoral. 

As part of the greatest covert operation ever, the National Security Establishment’s unstated job is to preserve the systems that ensure inequality and obscene wealth in the face of needless poverty and suffering. Similar to the class divisions in the military, which is held aloft as the model of free American society, the lower classes cannot be allowed to enjoy the same degree of privilege and security as the upper classes. Workers are forced to live from paycheck to paycheck, on minimum wages, in perpetual fear of losing their jobs, homes and medical benefits. 

The rich are not said to be sadistic for enjoying their lavish lifestyles while the poor are paralyzed by the fear that their children will be condemned to the hopelessness of eternal indebtedness, or, if they’re a despised minority or immigrant, to rot in prison. The rich could easily share their wealth and power, and relieve the suffering of the poor, but they don’t, because instilling terror in the poor keeps them politically suppressed. Some of the lower classes have given up hope entirely; some cling to rainmakers like Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton, and others are content to live in the fantasy world of potential and limitless commodities. In either case, voter turnout in the land of the free is kept around 54 percent – whether through complacency, curtailment of voter lists, incarceration, or the lack of candidates who inspire hope of change. 

Feelings of alienation and desperation, on the one hand, and beliefs in popular myths on the other, are so pervasive that political disenfranchisement has become the reality Karl Rove chortled about above. 

Terrorism as Business as Usual 
State-sponsored terrorism – colonization abroad and repression at home – is the Establishment’s primary means of extracting profits and maintaining ownership. It has been this way since slave owner and serial rapist Thomas Jefferson declared “all men are created equal,” except Africans, women, and, as he wrote in the Declaration of Independence, the “merciless Indian savages, whose known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”

Not surprisingly, Jefferson and his co-conspirators soon came to own all the Indians’ land. The Founding Fathers built the nation on stolen land and the free labor of African slaves. Likewise, the prospect of free land propelled settlers from sea to shining sea, culminating in the Horatio Alger myth of the exceptional American, pulling himself up by his bootstraps. 

The greatest covert operation ever symbolically transforms these traditional values into the myth of the great, exceptional American. It does so through the telling, retelling and selling of its cover story; the John Wayne cowboys and Indians movie morphing into good American snipers fighting bad Muslim terrorists. 

The purpose of the story is not just to create and glorify American heroes; it is intended to make you afraid of not embracing the story. This is the terrorism part. As every security company knows, the fear of surveillance is as effective as surveillance itself. They have only to suggest that the burglar is waiting to break into your house to sell you an ADT system. Likewise, fear of massive internet surveillance suppresses people from expressing their true feelings. There is no fear of Big Brother watching you, unless you believe that he is watching. 

Once they make you afraid – which, as I’ve explained in this book, is achieved through an endless series of CIA provocations abroad, which in turn enables an endless series of FBI, DHS, and police provocations at home – they sell you the things that make you feel safe. Suggestion and salesmanship are all it takes. Trump’s wall will protect you from Mexican rapists and drug-crazed black teenagers, and Hillary’s regime change wars will protect you from demons like Saddam and Qaddafi and Assad. Forget that her regime-change wars created ISIS; she has proved she’s capable of killing Muslims and she will again. She’ll be glad to slay the demons she creates for you. 

Selling the great American myth is as easy as selling the war on Iraq, or candidate Clinton, or Pepsi Cola. It’s the same bill of goods in every case, the promise of something better. It is capitalism. 

Capitalism tells us to be optimistic, to believe in a brighter future through things you can buy. The orgiastic future can be yours for no money down. It tells you to forget that Clinton sent your jobs overseas so her corporate sponsors could pay lower wages; if you vote for her, she’ll bring those jobs home, and you’ll have more money to buy more things. Forget that your austerity is her prosperity. Vote for Hillary! 

The Bill of Goods 
I’ve explained the CIA’s role in the process, but I want to explain why the process exists. 

The greatest covert operation ever is illustrated by the sweetheart scam in which the Pentagon bribed the billionaire owners of a dozen professional football teams with up to one million dollars each of your federal taxpayer money, to glorify their city’s “hometown heroes” who serve in the military and wage the War on Terror. 

You are taught to believe the War on Terror is waged by people like you, for you. But the greatest covert operation ever, aka the War on Terror, is a business enterprise that exploits people like you, especially if you are poor. 

Telling the Homeric cover story not only enables this criminal enterprise, it is indistinguishable from it. It is the immensely profitable icing on the cake of the world’s greatest weapon of mass destruction ever; it disenfranchises workers and then channels them into an army that is all too happy to brutalize entire nations. In return, they are glorified at football games. 

Go Team! Number One! 

Selling the story of the American hero is a profitable business not just for the Pentagon and its business partners in network news, it is a boondoggle for the National Security Establishment’s strategic intelligence network of corrupted Hollywood and TV production companies that shape our spectacular dreams. 

Advertising executives, public relations experts, spooks and generals, TV news and movie producers, and politicians read from the same script. They conduct surveys and map out demographics. Like highly indoctrinated Phoenix coordinators motivated to meet sales quotas, they target selected groups of consumers and sell them commodities that reinforce the myths they believe about themselves. 

Trump the billionaire sold himself as an anti-establishment agent of change to a precariat convinced by Fox News that immigrants and minorities were stealing their jobs. Clinton labeled that message, as well as its messenger and its audience, as “deplorable.” But her political supporters at MSNBC also skew the reality of our common predicament in order to deliver messages and commodities that its target audience of liberals wants. The messages may seem different, but they are both selling a bill of goods. 

That’s capitalism. Whether it’s Tucker Carlson at Fox News or Chris Matthews at MSNBC, the person delivering the news is a salesman making a pitch. They cut to a commercial break, and you are sold a product that appeals to your demographic. 

While the Republican Party and Democratic Party elites keep the lower classes at each other’s throats, they are sharing drinks at the Country Club. It’s a game for them. It’s fun. When they get together, like the Clintons and Trumps do occasionally at high society charity events, they laugh at the working classes, which are locked out. The people they exploit have no alternatives. There is no third way. 

The Clintons and Trumps, and the talking heads at Fox News and MSNBC, think the Green Party exists to mow their lawns for pennies. 

Every minute of every day, through the national security mechanisms outlined in this book, the oligarchs that own America and through it seek to own the world symbolically transform themselves from murderous beasts into a force for good that protects us from them. 

They call it “America”, but what does that word represent: a shining city on a hill above a fruited plain, or a segregated oligarchy with a murderous dark side?

The answer is obvious. You are the victim of a massive criminal enterprise, and the key to its success is its ability to keep its crimes and corruption secret. The secret rulers have made it illegal to blow the whistle on what they are up to. There is no freedom of speech or public right to know. 

The billionaire owners of professional football teams, and the talking heads they and their network news partners hire to shape the story and sell their merchandise, are appalled when a black player like Colin Kaepernick kneels during the National Anthem. They try to make the spectators feel that such behavior is “disrespectful” of America. They try to make the spectators feel like they should not sympathize with the endless series of black kids shot dead by a cop for selling cigarettes outside grocery stores. They reinforce their message like a candidate running for office, by wrapping themselves and their product – a football game – with the trappings of militarism and law enforcement. 

It doesn’t matter that the top cops have an accommodation with the bosses of organized crime, or that the CIA runs the world’s illicit arms for drug business, or that the Pentagon illegally invades and destroys foreign nations so corporations can steal everything the people in those nations own. It doesn’t matter that the corporate crime bosses get away with savaging your environment for profit. 

As Guy Debord said, “The Mafia is not an outsider in this world; it is perfectly at home. Indeed, in the integrated spectacle it stands as the model of all advanced commercial enterprises.” 

You’ll never hear a media button man like Wolf Blitzer speak honestly about Palestinians as outlawed victims of oppression in their homeland. You’ll never hear him criticize ReMax for selling and renting homes on stolen Palestinian land. Criticizing Israel, like criticizing “America” is not in the script. It’s a story told in a foreign language, if at all. 

You’ll never hear Blitzer portray America’s financial policies as state sponsored terrorism designed to prevent people from making a decent living, so they have no choice but to become soldiers or cops. You won’t hear this because state sponsored censorship – especially in regard to the CIA’s illegal deeds – is indistinguishable from state sponsored terrorism. 

Only the “selective” style of terrorism employed by the poor and dispossessed “non-state actor” is ever portrayed as terrorism. The state’s systematic and extra-legal terrorism is simply regarded as business as usual, which it is. 

Wolf Blitzer is free to say that America has no political prisoners, because the war on drugs provides profits as well as security for elites like him. Disenfranchising and imprisoning blacks is good business that helps keeps wages low for all workers. It’s not a problem, it’s business. Women earn less than men and the minimum wage is kept below poverty levels, we are told, for reasons that have nothing to do politics. And that is true: it is business as usual. 

The Establishment and its security chiefs know what they are doing. It is worth repeating, as Johan Galtung said, that “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.” 

Politics and business are said to be mutually exclusive, and that Big Lie enables the greatest covert operation ever. Business people manipulate political and social movements, including terrorists and counter terrorists, through instruments like the CIA, so they can make more money. The police keep resistant poor and black neighborhoods in lockdown. The FBI manipulates lost, insecure, and even intellectually disabled individuals into attempting acts of terrorism, which they then jump in to prevent. The CIA conducts false flag operations all over the world to enhance public fear of terrorists, even as they arm and train them in Syria, Iraq and elsewhere to overthrow elected governments. 

Having been implemented covertly over decades, the War on Terror defines the contours of America’s legally criminal social structure, which, in the name of protecting the people from terrorism, steals from the poor and gives to the rich. 

Underlying the “structural violence” of state-sponsored terrorism is an ever expanding National Security Establishment comprised of nearly a million cadres, all of whom profit from the structural violence they maintain. At the lower tier, cops and soldiers get to be heroes. The oligarchs get to laugh. In the middle, at Homeland Security, they get jobs. 

Emanating from the super-secret CIA, which informs every other government bureaucracy, this criminal enterprise corrupts every social and political movement in America, forming consumers of myths and commodities into a moat of true believers that surrounds the Establishment elite that oppresses them. It’s a perfect system, stabilized by manufactured crises du jour, and ineluctably heading in a predictable direction. 

In the next national emergency – the next financial meltdown or environmental catastrophe – cadres will be mobilized, shout slogans, and appeal to our traditional values or diversity. Their managers will review reports about the suspicious activities of terrorist surrogates. The definition of a terrorist will be expanded to include people deemed dangerous to the Public Order, at which point the non-believers will be arrested on criminal charges for political offenses, like protesting climate change. 

It’s not hard to imagine a few of the most highly motivated cadres grabbing ropes and forming lynch mobs, and going after those who refused to stand for the National Anthem. 

Only five percent of the people need to be organized in this fashion to install a fascist dictator in the United States. That is the ultimate objective of the greatest covert operation ever, the one in which the oligarchs steal everything you own. 

The five percent who resist will be subject to “compromise and discredit” operations like the letter the FBI sent to Martin Luther King, Jr. encouraging him to commit suicide. Forged documents, like the ones the Bush regime used to justify the illegal invasion of Iraq, will become indistinguishable from real ones. 

Did the Russians hack the DNC, or was it a disgruntled DNC cadre? You’ll never know. [No Doug, we actually do know about the Russian hoax pulled by the loons DC]

False rumors will proliferate and ruin the reputation of anyone who refuses to comply. People will become more terrified than ever. They will grab their precious guns and start shooting. Midnight arrests and disappearances into administrative detention centers will become commonplace. 

Amid the confusion, the CIA will activate assassination units within the front organizations it has placed around the country, and plant plastic explosives in school buses, not as training exercises, but as provocations to call in the militarized police. 

Property values will plummet, blood will run in the streets, and 10,000 Trumps and Clintons, safely ensconced in their pre-secure Israeli-style Bantustans, will buy everything on the cheap. 

This is the Phoenix future, the ultimate goal of the greatest covert operation ever.

notes and source
https://ia803000.us.archive.org/18/items/DouglasValentineTheCIAAsOrganizedCrime2016/Douglas%20Valentine%20-%20The%20CIA%20as%20Organized%20Crime%20-%202016.pdf

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