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lies shouldn't be leading us into battle again MICHELE LANDSBERG Whatever our other reasons for opposing the war, we're also skeptics,
remembering the long history of official lies that have served as a
smokescreen for U.S. government adventurism in other places and times.
Some of us remember Cuba, and how mighty America and its CIA planned an
invasion of that little island after Fidel Castro came to power. Their
tragically botched attack in 1961, when more than 100 commandoes died
senselessly at the Bay of Pigs, is not forgotten.
I've been browsing some of the declassified documents that record the
actual top-secret conversations of the most powerful men in America, then
and afterward, in their obsessive and ludicrous attempts to invent a
plausible reason to launch a major military attack on Cuba.
In March, 1962, for example, the top officials of the Joint Chiefs of
Staff met in Washington to come up with ideas "which would provide
justification for U.S. military intervention in Cuba." Operation
Mongoose, it was called. (Presumably, Castro was the cobra).
To destroy Castro was a government obsession. "...All else is
secondary, no time, money, effort or manpower is to be spared" said a
White House memo.
They plotted to destroy Cuba's sugar crop or to contaminate food
supplies, in order to provoke the lamentably "apathetic" Cubans
to rebel, rise up and call in American troops to help them overthrow
Castro. They thought of creating "at least the illusion of a popular
[anti-Castro] movement," for want of a real one.
According to these archived documents, the Americans were prepared to
do anything: invade Guatemala with soldiers disguised as Cubans, blow up
one of their own warships in Guantanamo Bay and stage a fake funeral for
the `victims', and even rig up an elaborate phoney attack on a tourist
charter flight (complete with airplane debris floating in the ocean) to
persuade the United Nations and world public opinion that the U.S. was
"suffering justifiable grievances". They went so far as to
consider mounting a terrorism campaign against Cuban exiles in Miami, even
wounding some people and "widely publicizing" the incidents as
caused by Castro. Or — and please listen to the jaunty language —
"We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or
simulated)."
These covert operations, including "a build-up of seemingly
unrelated incidents", would, they vowed, create an image of the Cuban
government as "rash and irresponsible ... an alarming and
unpredictable threat to the peace of the Western Hemisphere".
Does any of this sound hauntingly familiar? Is there any echo with the
current depiction of Iraq as demonically dangerous?
For much of the last half of the 20th century, American presidents and
their chief advisers and military leaders were directly involved in
elaborate schemes of drug-running, manipulating public opinion through
planted editorials and news stories, and illicit campaigns of what they
themselves called "White propaganda," like the now-notorious
episode of the hoked-up Iraqi atrocities against incubator babies in
Kuwait, a crime invented by a powerful public relations firm and used to
sway Congress to support the Gulf War.
I needn't remind Star readers about the government crimes of the
Iran-Contra gun-running scandal, ruthlessly designed to overturn the
elected Sandinista government of Nicaragua by organizing and arming the
Contra opposition. Browse the National Security Archives and you can
eavesdrop directly on these ruthless conspirators as they plotted to use
the U.S. media to vilify their enemies and whitewash their chosen
henchmen.
But don't stop there. Go ahead and read the transcript of the meeting
at the White House in September, 1970.They were all there: Nixon, his
vice-president, the heads of the CIA and the military. Henry Kissinger
spelled out how they must "bring down" Salvador Allende, the
newly elected democratic socialist president of Chile. They all agreed to
subvert Allende by sabotaging the Chilean economy, while (and Nixon
insisted on this) behaving publicly "in a cool and correct
manner".
Allende, of course, was duly murdered three years later in a coup
orchestrated by the CIA, which ushered in the 17-year bloody dictatorship
by mass murderer Augusto Pinochet.
The history of U.S. foreign policy is paradoxical: so much bush-league
covert action, so many lies, so many failures, so little understanding of
consequences, so many botched interventions. And yet, such openness. What
other regime would make its top secret documents available through freedom
of information laws, to be read on the Internet by anyone with an
inquiring mind?
Perhaps U.S. leaders can afford to be so open because they believe
their citizens to be infinitely manipulable through the obligingly docile
media. The patriotic American public, after all, bought the lies about the
Gulf of Tonkin (a supposed attack on U.S. warships that actually never
happened), precipitating the disastrous Vietnam War. They believed the TV
version of the Gulf War, with "smart bombs" zipping through
windows to kill only bad guys.
And for all I know, they believe the charade that Saddam Hussein is
linked to Al Qaeda. The U.S. media have almost turned themselves into an
arm of government propaganda.
They're still repeating the mantra that "Saddam gassed his own
people," even though the senior CIA political analyst in Iraq during
the Iran-Iraq war has recently written — in the New York Times, no less
— that the Kurdish civilians who died in that attack were killed by a
poison gas that only Iran had at that time. They even believe that Saddam
wilfully marched into Kuwait as some sort of unprovoked Hitlerian
aggressor, despite the well-documented history of the border dispute
between Iraq and Kuwait that goes back at least to the time of World War
I.
Most Canadians, however, don't buy the idea that Saddam, however
vicious a dictator, poses an imminent threat to world peace or safety, any
more than Fidel Castro did.
History is just too heavy with fateful lies — lies that led to too
many millions of needless deaths — for skeptical Canadians to agree to
go to war at the behest of George Dubya Bush.
Hello,
I am writing in regards to Michele Landsberg's article "US
Lies Shouldn't Be Leading Us Into Battle As an American, I agree that a tragic number of my fellow countrymen
are uninformed and I agree with Michele that the current US administration is not
justified in an attack against Iraq at this time. Bush and his team
ARE behaving very similarly to Nixon and his coup-happy team. But Saddam
Hussein is no friend to this world--to his country, to his fellow Arabs,
not even to those in his own administration. To deny his past crimes
to prove her point is disrespectful and ultimately makes me dubious about
the precision of some of her other examples.
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