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Ron Jacobs
The
Darkening Tunnel
Recent
Stories
August 21, 2003
Robert Fisk
The US
Needs to Blame Anyone But Locals for UN Bombing
Virginia Tilley
The Quisling Policies of the UN in Iraq: Toward a Permanent War?
Rep. Henry Waxman
Bush Owes the Public Some Serious Answers on Iraq
Ben Terrall
War Crimes and Punishment in Indonesia: Rapes, Murders and Slaps
on the Wrists
Elaine Cassel
Brother John Ashcroft's Traveling Patriot Salvation Show
Christopher Brauchli
Getting Gouged by Banks
Marjorie Cohn
Sergio Vieira de Mello: Victim of Terrorism or US Policy in Iraq?
Vicente Navarro
Media
Double Standards: The Case of Mr. Aznar, Friend of Bush
Website of the Day
The Intelligence Squad
August 20, 2003
Robert Fisk
Now No
One Is Safe in Iraq
Caoimhe Butterly
Life and Death on the Frontlines of Baghdad
Kurt Nimmo
UN Bombing: Act of Terrorism or Guerrilla War?
Michael Egan
Revisiting the Paranoid Style in the Dark
Ramzi Kysia
Peace
is not an Abstract Idea
Steven Higgs
NPR and the NAFTA Highway
John L. Hess
A Downside Day
Edward Said
The Imperial Bluster of Tom Delay
Jason Leopold
Gridlock at Path 15: the California Blackouts were the "Wake
Up Call"
Website of the Day
Ashcroft's Patriotic Hype
August 19, 2003
Jeffrey St. Clair
Blackouts Happen
Gary Leupp
"Our Patch": Australia v. the Evil Doers of the South
Pacific
Sean Donahue
Uribe's Cruel Model: Colombia Moves Toward Totalitarianism
Matt Martin
Bush's Credibility Problem on Missile Defense
Juliana Fredman
Recipe for the Destruction of a Hudna
John Ross
Fox Government's Attack on Mexican Basques
Sasan Fayazmanesh
What Kermit Roosevelt Didn't Say
Website of the Day
Tom Delay's Dual Loyalities
August 18, 2003
Uri Avnery
Hero in War and Peace
Stan Goff
The Volunteer Military and the Wicked Adventure
Cathy Breen
Baghdad on the Hudson
Michael Kimaid
Fight the Power (Companies)!
Jason Leopold
The California Rip-Off Revisited: Arnold, Milken and Ken Lay
Matt Siegfried
The Bush Administration in Context
Elaine Cassel
At Last, A Judge Who Acts Like a Judge
Alexander Cockburn
Judy Miller's War
Harvey Wasserman
The Legacy of Blackout Pete Wilson
Website of the Day
Fire Griles!
Congratulations
to CounterPuncher Gilad Atzmon! BBC Names EXILE Top Jazz CD
August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille
New Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which
Electric System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
for August 14, 2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder
August 14, 2003
Peter Phillips
Inside
Bohemian Grove: Where US Power Elites Party
Brian Cloughley
Charlie Wilson and Pakistan: the Strange Congressman Behind the
CIA's Most Expensive War
Linville and Ruder
Tyson
Strike Draws the Line
Jim Lobe
Bush Administration Divided Over Iran
Ramzy Baroud
Sharon Freezes the Road Map
Tom Turnipseed
Blowback in Iraq
Gary Leupp
Condi's
Speech: From Birgmingham to Baghdad, Imperialism's Freedom Ride
Website of the Day
Tony Benn's Greatest Hits
August 13, 2003
Joanne Mariner
A Wall of Separation Through the
Heart
Donald Worster
The Heavy Cost of Empire
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Elaine Cassel
Murderous Errors: Executing the Innocent
Ralph Nader
Make the Recall Count
Alexander Cockburn
Ted Honderich Hit with "Anti-Semitism" Slur
Website of the Day
Defending Yourself Against DirectTV Lawsuits: 9000 and Counting
August 12, 2003
Ron Jacobs
Revisionist History: the Bush Administration, Civil Rights and
Iraq
Josh Frank
Dean's Constitutional Hang-Up
Wayne Madsen
What's a Fifth Columnist? Well, Someone Like Hitchens
Ray McGovern
Relax,
It Was All a Pack of Lies
Wendy Brinker
Hubris in the White House
Website of the Day
Black
Mustache
Hot Stories
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
William Blum
Myth
and Denial in the War on Terrorism
Standard Schaefer
Experimental Casinos: DARPA and the War Economy
Uzma
Aslam Khan
The Unbearably Grim Aftermath of War:
What America Says Does Not Go
Paul de Rooij
Arrogant
Propaganda
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
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August
22, 2003
Operation Paperclip
Revisited
Moral
Schmoral
By RICHARD THIEME
One way a government mobilizes support for morally
dubious actions is to make those actions sound like the right
thing to do. Decisions made for other reasons entirely, for reasons
of strategy, say, or economic advantage, are cloaked in religious
rhetoric, and when our leaders claim the moral high ground, we
the people want to believe them.
Recent caricatures show how Moslem terrorists
like Isama bin Laden and Christian crusaders like George W. Bush
use nearly identical rhetoric to justify their actions. Both
abuse their religious traditions to manipulate believers in those
traditions.
Those who worry about such things are
often pained because the desire to believe and follow our leaders
is twisted, that desire being contradicted by obvious discrepancies
in what our leaders are doing rather than saying.
This gets a person with a strong conscience
into a real pickle. The simple fact is, any person willing to
act on the convictions of a strong conscience is as much an enemy
of the state as an avowed terrorist because they will not accept
the designer lies of the state as the motivation for its morally
dubious actions.
Perhaps this is illustrated best with
a historical example. Let's use Operation Paperclip.
The United States and its western European
allies agreed after World War Two to deny immigration rights
and work opportunities to Nazis with scientific and technological
expertise who were more than trivially connected to the Third
Reich. Those who joined the party before 1933 or advanced in
the SA (Brown Shirts) or the SS or were identified by credible
witnesses as participating in atrocities were included in that
category.
Contradictions arose, however, after
the war. Denying German scientific expertise to the Soviets and
using it ourselves became primary motivations for wanting those
Germans here, working for us. Over time the need for German proficiency
in aerospace design, lasers, and other advanced research superceded
moral concerns for what they had done during the war.
Operation Paperclip was the name of the
project that assimilated Nazi scientists into the American establishment
by obscuring their histories and short-circuiting efforts to
bring their true stories to light. The project was led by officers
in the United States Army. Although the program officially ended
in September 1947, those officers and others carried out a conspiracy
until the mid-fifties that bypassed both law and presidential
directive to keep Paperclip going. Neither Truman nor Eisenhower
were informed that their instructions were ignored, and if there
is a lesson to be learned from Operation Paperclip, it is that,
as Elie Wiesel said of the Holocaust, the world can get away
with it.
Please note: those who documented Operation
Paperclip are not "conspiracy theorists." They are
journalists and scholars who described a genuine conspiracy.
Fast forward fifty years.
When Total Information Awareness - the
effort to mine and correlate vast amounts of data about Americans
and non-Americans alike, people here and people there - became
public knowledge, it was assailed for further eroding civil liberties
already undermined by the Patriot Act, rights previously guaranteed
by the constitution.
Asked about TIA, Secretary of Defense
Donald Rumsfeld laughed at a press conference and said, well
then we'll change the name and do it anyway.
Rumsfeld was just stating the obvious.
Data mining has long been an important area of research for the
intelligence establishment. The ability to filter out irrelevant
data and align the many signals transmitted by our daily transactions
into profiles with predictive value has been pursued for a long
time. Rumsfeld was just saying, OK, if there's a problem with
the name, we'll change the name and do it secretly.
It's the combination, <don.t> you
see, of eradicating rights guaranteed by the constitution such
as habeas corpus and modern technologies that enable the national
security state to know and anticipate the tendencies of the souls
of its citizenry, all in the name of counter-terrorism, that
makes us nervous. This is not a "conspiracy theory."
It is a literal description of what our leadership is and has
been doing for a long time.
Back in the early days of Paperclip,
when those with consciences and/or memories of Nazi atrocities
tried to stop the steamroller, they were accused of being Communist
agents or sympathizers or useful idiots who did not know they
were manipulated by the Communist Party.
Real enemies during the Cold War became
the justification for labeling persons of conscience enemies
too, a strategy that was canny and intentional.
Today real terrorists are the justification
for targeting persons of conscience as if they are enemies not
only of America but of the American Empire too.
"Even before 9/11, U.S. armed services
professionals were engaged in operations in 150 countries a year,"
notes Robert Kaplan approvingly in the 2003 Pitcairn Trust Lecture
on World Affairs. "t is already a cliche to say that by
any historical standard the United States is more an empire,
especially a military one, than many care to acknowledge."
Kaplan goes on to advocate the efficient
use of covert action to overthrow regimes and destabilize enemies
of the empire. "he U.S. had 550,000 troops in Vietnam but
didn't accomplish much," he observes, contrasting that effort
with the successful appropriation of right wing groups in El
Salvador with only 55 special forces trainers on the ground.
That, he suggests, is the model for the
future.
I discussed this with two neighbors yesterday
on a sunny lawn with late summer flowers in full bloom. One said
she was concerned for what had happened to the America she knew.
The other said she was too busy with her job and taking care
of children to do much about it. Both felt helpless to do anything
anyway, and that's the intention.
Those feelings of helplessness are typical,
I would guess, but there was something else in the conversation.
"You'd better be careful," one warned. "You're
probably on the list."
Now, that's relatively new. The belief
that there IS a list, the belief that with technological advances
we can be tracked, databased and identified as enemies, the belief
that we are so tracked, that the information will be used against
us, that's new. Among middle-aged Midwest conservative people,
that's new.
Those beliefs, intermittently reinforced
by stories of police or FBI questioning innocent people for speaking
aloud their objections to Empire, is one means of control of
mainstream citizens who "want to believe the American myth,"
as one put it, while evidence accumulates that the high moral
ground is one more means for keeping us acquiescent and compliant.
It was warm on the sunny lawn among those
flowers, yet soon enough, shorn of our real history, shorn of
constitutional rights, we'll be shivering like sheep in the first
chill breeze of autumn.
One could do worse than revisit Paperclip
and other forgotten events, the real antecedents of our current
situation. One could do worse than refuse to surrender to denial
or design.
Richard Thieme
speaks, writes and consults on the human dimensions of life and
work, the impact of technology, and "life
on the edge." He is a contributing editor for Information
Security Magazine. Articles in Wired, Salon, Information Security,
CISO, Forbes, Secure Business Quarterly, Village Voice, others.
He can be reached at: rthieme@thiemeworks.com
Weekend
Edition Features for August 16 / 17, 2003
Flavia Alaya
Bastille
New Jersey
Jeffrey St. Clair
War Pimps
Saul Landau
The Legacy of Moncada: the Cuban Revolution at 50
Brian Cloughley
What Has Happened to the US Army in Iraq?
William S. Lind
Coffins for the Crews: How Not to Use Light Armored Vehicles
Col. Dan Smith
Time for Straight Talk
Wenonah Hauter
Which
Electric System Do We Want?
David Lindorff
Where's Arnold When We Need Him?
Harvey Wasserman
This Grid Should Not Exist
Don Moniak
"Unusual Events" at Nuclear Power Plants: a Timeline
for August 14, 2003
David Vest
Rolling Blackout Revue
Merlin Chowkwanyun
An Interview with Sherman Austin
Adam Engel
The Loneliest Number
Poets' Basement
Guthrie, Hamod & Albert
Book of the Weekend
Powerplay by Sharon Beder
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