Douglas Valentine's Scathing Review of Jeremy Scahills 'Dirty Wars'

[Kara Dellacioppa]

Whatever Happened to the CIA? Dirty Wars and the Cinema of Self-Indulgence

By Douglas Valentine
Global Research, June 09, 2013
Counterpunch



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Let me begin with some background not covered in the film. Dirty War derives from "La Sale Guerre", the term the French applied to their counter-terror campaign in Algeria, circa 1954-1961. Algeria wanted independence, and France resisted.
Like subject people everywhere, the Algerians were badly outgunned and resorted to guerrilla tactics including "selective terrorism," a hallmark of the Viet Minh, who fought the French until 1954, when America claimed Vietnam as its rightful property. Viet Minh tactics were derived largely from Mao's precepts for fighting a People's War.
Selective terrorism meant the murder of low-ranking officials collaborators who worked closely with the people; policemen, mailmen, teachers, etc. The murders were gruesome a bullet in the belly or a grenade lobbed into a café designed to achieve maximum publicity and demonstrate to the people the power of the nationalists to strike crippling blows against their oppressors.
Whether the Great White Fathers are French or American or English, they agree that putting down a People's War means torturing and slaughtering the people despite the fact that most people are not engaged in terrorism or guerrilla action and have no blood on their hands.
As John Stockwell taught us years ago, Dirty War means destabilizing a targeted nation through covert methods, the type the CIA has practiced around the world for 66 years. Destabilizing means "hiring agents to tear apart the social and economic fabric of the country.
"What we're talking about is going in and deliberately creating conditions where the farmer can't get his produce to market; where children can't go to school; where women are terrified inside their homes as well as outside; where government administered programs grind to a complete halt; where the hospitals are treating wounded people instead of sick people; where international capital is scared away and the country goes bankrupt."
Economic warfare strangling nations like Cuba, Iraq and Iran in Medieval fashion is a type of Dirty Warfare beloved by the Great White Fathers who control the world's finances. Though no less deadly than atomic bombs, or firebombing Dresden, it is easier to sell to the bourgeoisie.
You'll hear no mention of this in Scahill's film, nor will you hear any references to Phil Agee, or the countless others who have explained Dirty War to each generation of Americans since World War Two.
You will not hear about psychological warfare, the essence of Dirty War.
America's first was terror guru was Ed Lansdale, the advertising executive who made Levi's blue jeans a national craze in the 1930's. He applied his sales skills to propaganda in the OSS and after WW II, concocted a new generation of psywar tactics as an agent of the Office of Policy Coordination assigned to the Philippines under military cover. Lansdale's bottomless black bag of dirty tricks included a "skull squadron" death squad that roamed the countryside, torturing and murdering Communist terrorists.
One of Lansdale's counter-terror "psywar" tactics was to string a captured Communist guerrilla upside down from a tree, stab him in the neck with a stiletto, and drain his blood. The terrorized Commies fled the area and the terrified villagers, who believed in vampires, begged the government for protection.
Lansdale referred to his sadism as "low humor," an excuse borrowed liberally by American officialdom during the Abu Ghraib prison scandal.
Lansdale formalized "black propaganda" practices to vilify the Communists: one of his Filipino commando units would dress as rebels and commit atrocities, and then another unit would arrive with cameras to record the staged scenes and chase the "terrorists" away.
Lansdale brought his black propaganda and passion for atrocity to Saigon in 1954, along with a goon squad of Filipinos mercenaries packaged as "Freedom Company."
Under Lansdale's guidance, Freedom Company sent Vietnamese commandoes into North Vietnam, under cover as relief workers, to activate stay-behind agent nets and conduct all manner of sabotage and subversion. Disinformation was a Lansdale specialty, and his agents spread lurid tales of Vietminh soldiers' disemboweling pregnant Catholic women, castrating priests, and sticking bamboo slivers in the ears of children so they could not hear the Word of God.
In the South, with the help of the American media, Lansdale re-branded the heroic Vietminh as the beastly Viet Cong.
Lansdale's greatest innovation, still used today, was to conduct all manner of espionage and terror under cover of "civic action." As a way of attacking Viet Minh agents in the South, Lansdale launched "Operation Brotherhood," a Filipino paramedical team patterned on the typical Special Forces A team. With CIA money, Operation Brotherhood built medical dispensaries that the CIA used as cover for terror operations, as depicted in the book and movie The Quiet American.
Levis never went out of fashion, nor did Lansdale's dirty tricks. Think Saddam Hussein killing babies in their incubators. Such disinformation invariably works on an American public looking for any excuse to rationalize its urge for racist genocide.
Think Argo and Zero Dark Thirty and every Rambo and Bruce Willis film.
Only Americans were fooled by the propaganda, and the Vietnamese quickly caught on. So the CIA in 1956 launched the Denunciation of Communists campaign, which compelled the Vietnamese people to inform on Commies or get tortured and murdered. The campaign was managed by CIA agents who could arrest, confiscate land from, and execute Communists and their sympathizers on the CIA's master list. In determining who was a Communist, the CIA used a three-part classification system: A for dangerous party members, B for less dangerous party members, and C for loyal citizens.
As happened later in the Phoenix program, the threat of an A or B classification was used to extort innocent civilians, while category A and B offenders were put to work building houses and offices for CIA officers and their lackeys. And, of course, the puppet Vietnamese President used his CIA created, funded and trained security forces to eliminate his political rivals.
As Lansdale confessed, "it became a repressive tool to liquidate any opponent."
"This development was political," Lansdale observes. "My first inkling came when several families appeared at my house one morning to tell me about the arrest at midnight of their men-folk, all of whom were political figures. The arrests had a strange aspect to them, having come when the city was asleep and being made by heavily armed men who were identified as `special police.""
Lansdale complained, but he was told that a "U.S. policy decision had been made. We Americans were to give what assistance we could to the building of a strong nationalistic party that would support Diem. Since Diem was now the elected president, he needed to have his own party. "
How We Got To Scahill's Dirty War
By 1962, as the US expanded its Dirty Wars in the Far East and South America, the military replaced its Office of Special Operations with an up-dated Special Assistant for Counter-insurgency and Special Activities (SACSA). SACSA assigned unconventional warfare forces to the CIA and regular army commanders, who initially resisted.
The development of psychological warfare and special operations is explained in Michael McClintock's Instruments of Statecraft. For the CIA politics behind it, see Burton Hersh's The Old Boys.
In 1965 Lansdale went back to Vietnam to run the Revolutionary Development Cadre Program as the CIA's "second station" with a staff of CIA officers, Green Beanies, and Daniel Ellsberg. Vietnam was a laboratory and the CIA was experimenting with Pacification, aka "the Other War."
In 1967, the CIA created the Phoenix program to coordinate everyone in its Dirty War. Phoenix combined existing counterinsurgency programs in a concerted effort to neutralize the civilians running the shadow government. Neutralize means to kill, capture, or make to defect. Central to Phoenix was that it targeted civilians. "By analogy," said Ogden Reid, a member of a congressional committee investigating Phoenix in 1971, "if the Union had had a Phoenix program during the Civil War, its targets would have been civilians like Jefferson Davis or the mayor of Macon, Georgia."
Under Phoenix, due process was nonexistent. South Vietnamese civilians whose names appeared on CIA blacklists were kidnapped, tortured, detained without trial, or murdered on the word of an informer. Phoenix managers imposed a quota of 1,800 neutralizations per month on the saps running the program in the field, opening it up to abuses by corrupt security officers, policemen, politicians, and racketeers. One CIA officer described Phoenix as, "A very good blackmail scheme for the central government. `If you don't do what I want, you're VC."
Because Phoenix assassinations (totaling 25,000+) were often conducted at night while its victims were home sleeping, Phoenix proponents describe the program as a "scalpel" designed to replace the "bludgeon" of My Lai-style search and destroy operations, air strikes, and artillery barrages that indiscriminately wiped out entire villages and did little to "win the hearts and minds" of the people. But that was just propaganda and Phoenix was, among other things, an instrument of counter-terror the psywar tactic in which enemy agents were brutally murdered along with their families and neighbors as a means of terrorizing the people into a state of submission. Such horrendous acts were, for propaganda purposes, often made to look as if they had been committed by the enemy.
This practice is at the heart of the film I will be reviewing.
As noted, conventional soldiers hated Phoenix. General Bruce Palmer, commander of the U.S. Ninth Infantry Division in 1968, objected to the "involuntary assignment of U.S. Army officers to the program. I don't believe that people in uniform," he said, "who are pledged to abide by the Geneva Conventions, should be put in the position of having to break those laws of warfare."
Palmer's was such a charming sentiment. By 2004, Obama advisor Lt. Col. David Kilcullen, in an article for Small Wars Journal, was calling for a "global Phoenix Program." Tom Hayden wrote an article for The Nation about Kilcullen in 2008 titled "Reviving Vietnam War Tactics".
Fact is, Phoenix never went out of fashion. As McClintock notes, "Counterinsurgency and indeed all aspects of special warfare doctrine had developed a reasonable level of political sophistication by the mid-1970s, acknowledging the necessity of combining military and civil initiatives."
By 1975 SACSA had expired, the nation had internalized its humiliating defeat in Vietnam, and the CIA, wounded by the Church Committee hearings, went underground. The age of counter-terror began. Central and South America were the new laboratories. The CIA forged secret alliances with proxy nations like Israel and Taiwan, whose agents taught Latin American landowners how to organize criminals into death squads which murdered and terrorized labor leaders, Human Rights activists, and all other enemies of the Great White Fathers.
To compensate for the reduction in size of its paramilitary Special Operations Division, the CIA formed its Office of Terrorism. Meanwhile, the military branches beefed up their terror capabilities, all of which glommed together in December 1980 in the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). Steve Emerson chronicles this development in detail in Secret Warriors (1988).
JSOC's mission, conducted on the Phoenix model with the CIA, is identifying and destroying terrorists and terror cells worldwide. Paramilitary personnel are often exchanged between JSOC and CIA.
By the early 1980s, CIA and military veterans of the Phoenix program were running counter-insurgency and counter-terror ops worldwide. http://www.american-buddha.com/phoenixprogepi.htm
General Paul Gorman, who commanded U.S. forces in Central America in the mid-1980′s, defined this advanced form of Dirty War as "a form of warfare repugnant to Americans, a conflict which involves innocents, in which non-combatant casualties may be an explicit object." (Toledo Blade 1 Jan 1987)
All of which brings me to my review.
Dirty Wars
Dirty Wars is a post-modern film by Jeremy Scahill, about himself, starring himself in many poses.
The film owes more to Sergio Leone and Kathryn Bigelow than Constantinos Gavras. Scahill certainly is no Leslie Cockburn: there is no Tony Poe telling how the CIA facilitates heroin shipments; no Richard Secord suing him for unraveling the financial intrigues of the CIA's secret operators. The CIA is rarely mentioned.
There is no reference to the Guerra Sucia in Argentina.
Scahill is no Franz Fanon documenting the devastating psychological effects of racism on society. There are no cameos by Jean Paul Sartre advocating violent retribution on Hollywood, no mingling with the Taliban in their caves as they conspire against their Yankee oppressors at the Sundance Film Festival.
We get the first taste of his self-indulgent idiocy when he says it is "hard to tell" when the Dirty War began. He does tell us, however, that he is on the "front lines" of the war on terror.
Scahill (hereafter JS) brags that he wasn't going to find the front lines in Kabul, although he could have, if he knew where to look. Instead he just looks around furtively on his way to the scene of a war crime. We see a close-up of his face.
The endless close-ups artfully convey the feeling that our hero is utterly alone, on some mythic journey of self-discovery, without a film crew or interpreters. There is no evidence that anyone went to Gardez to make sure everyone was waiting and not toiling in the fields or tending the flocks, or whatever they do. And we'll never find out what the victims do. The stage isn't big enough for JS and anyone else.
This is a major theme throughout the story JS is doing all this alone and the isolation preys on him. He bears this heavy burden alone, with many soulless looks.
Initially, there is no mention that journalist Jerome Starkey reported what happened in Gardez. JS is too busy establishing himself as the courageous super-sleuth. As we drive along the road, he reminds us how much danger he is in. Two journalists were kidnapped here, he says. This area is "beyond" NATO control. He must get in and out before nightfall or the Taliban will surely kill him like the Capitalist dog he is.
In my drinking days, we referred to this type of behavior as grandiosity. Telling everyone how you defied death, so the guys would talk about your exploits in the bars, and the girls would fall at your feet. For JS, this formula is working a visit to his Facebook page reveals scores of "Millennial girls" wringing their hands and fretting for his safety as he strides across America's secret battlefields in search of the truth. His carefully crafted Wiki bio furthers the legend.
Using the material gathered by Starkey (whom he eventually acknowledges), JS shows that in February 2010, American soldiers murdered five people in Gardez, including two pregnant women, and tried to cover it up by digging the bullets out of the targeted man's body. He interviews the surviving family members. They weep. Violin music plays. They seem more like props than human beings.
JS ingenuously asks various Afghan and American officials, why the cover-up? The officials suggest that the targeted man was working for the Taliban and if you play that double-game, you risk your family and friends. The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff tells JS they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. He says there will be no investigation.
Cut to Capitol Hill where, by his own account, JS has greatness thrust upon him. "It is imperative," he tells Chairman John Conyers, "that Congress investigates this shadow war to examine its legality."
What, one wonders, was Conyers thinking? Forty-two years earlier, after hearing testimony from Bart Osborn and Michael Uhl about the Phoenix program, Conyers and three other U.S. representatives stated their belief that "The people of these United States … have deliberately imposed on the Vietnamese people a system of justice which admittedly denies due process of law …. In so doing, we appear to have violated the 1949 Geneva Convention for the protection of civilian peoples."
His testimony, JS tells us, "throws him into the public arena," ever so reluctantly. He revisits his Blackwater testimony and shows pictures of himself with numerous celebrities on TV.
B-takes of Scahill walking among the common folk in Brooklyn, plotting his next move. Haunted by the horror of Gardez, he files FOIA requests and discovers that William McRaven is head of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). He's stunned. He's been a national security reporter for over a decade, and he's never heard of JSOC before. It's covert. The story has been hidden in the shadows, he says.
This was the turning point of the film for me. For a National Security correspondent, this is an admission akin to a botanist saying he'd never heard of flowers. It's an admission that fairly sums up the sorry state of reporting in America today. Has JS ever read a book?
JS discovers that Gardez is not an isolated incident, and that JSOC rampages across Afghanistan with "unprecedented authority." He talks to a former JSOC soldier about its activities in Iraq, where it had hit lists and conducted night raids. This revelation, and the fact that McRaven took responsibility for Gardez, leads JS to conclude that JSOC is responsible for Gardez. It certainly wasn't Congress, which according to JS, has no control over JSOC. JSOC money comes from rich donors.
JS learns that JSOC is not only in Afghanistan, but that it operates worldwide, and that its hit lists get bigger all the time. And we hear, for the first time, the catchy phrase, "the world is a battlefield."
At this point JS decides, with the help of The Nation brain trust, to investigate JSOC in Yemen where CIA drones are wiping out people by the score.
B-take of JS sipping tea thoughtfully. He's going to talk to the most powerful man in South Yemen. We view of scene of a drone strike: 46 killed, including five pregnant women. A woman in a black veil says her entire family, save one daughter, were wiped out. Violin music. But there's no cover-up here. In fact, Obama personally kept the journalist in prison who reported the strike.
What will Obama do to JS?
Once again, we fear for JS. Luckily he lives to talk to Rachel Maddow and Morning Joe. The greatness thrust upon him forces him onto TV shows everywhere. There he is with Amy Goodman!
More close-ups. We count the pores on his nose, the hairs in his eyebrows. We feel the fear. He gets a strange call. Someone tells him JSOC tortures people without telling the CIA or regular army, which are too busy torturing people to care.
As he studies the hit lists, he comes across radical America Muslim, Anwar al-Awlaki. After talking to Tony Schaffer, he realizes JSOC targets Muslims and that is why, along with the US invasion of Iraq, Awlaki is pissed off. Awlaki is an American but is inciting people to revolution in Yemen, so Yemen allows the CIA to kill him.
Note the CIA is mentioned maybe twice in the film. Apparently it is so covert it escaped his notice.
We see JS in an exotic location. An airplane lands. JS is back in the USA. He's been traumatized by what he's seen. He tells anyone who will listen that the US cannot kill its way to peace, as if peace is the objective. The war on terror, he concludes, is creating enemies, which of course is the objective.
Before the American people can rally to JS's clarion call, Obama sends some guys to kill Osama bin Laden. This is too much of a coincidence to ignore. Was it done to subvert his investigation? In any event, McRaven and JSOC are now heroes. He meets a knowledgeable person who tells him the Dirty War will go on forever. He tells us about signature strikes that kill people randomly (but not that the CIA conducts them) and that the war on terror is out of control.
Pictures of JS pointing to countries on a map where JSOC operates. He decides to visit Somalia, where JSOC is snatching bodies and taking them to ships in the Arabian Sea, and outsourcing its Dirty War to mercenaries. He visits mercenaries wearing camo fatigues. There are no other journalists here, it is too dangerous. Someone hands JS a flak jacket. Someone tells him they bury traitors alive. The tension soars. He's surrounded by armed men. There's a gunshot. He ducks behind sandbags.
We wonder who arranged for JS to meet these guys? Where did he get an interpreter? What's the quid pro quo?
JS goes to a hospital morgue and look at a mutilated body. After which he wants to go home. But he learns that Awlaki's son has been killed and reluctantly he returns to Yemen.
I liked this part of the film. It seemed genuine. We see home videos of Awlaki's son doing youthful happy things. JS tries to understand why the US would deliberately kill a 16 year old kid? Which is a good question. Perhaps America is ruled by a murderous Cult of Death.
We see pictures of young girls smiling, and we revert back to the contrived scenes and monologue that drag the documentary down into gratuitous self-promotion. JS says he never had any idea where the story would lead, as if all this happened magically, like a rabbit pulled out of a hat.
He asks what will happen to us.
The film ends and I wonder what he could have produced if he hadn't melodramatized and spent so much time and film on close-ups. I wonder what he could have done if he'd read a few history books.
Ultimately, the film is so devoid of historical context, and so contrived, as to render it a work of art, rather than political commentary. And as art, it is pure self-indulgence.
And in this sense, it is a perfect slice of modern American life.
Doug Valentine is the author of five books, including The Phoenix Program. See www.douglasvalentine.com or write to him at dougvalentine77@gmail.com

[David Guyatt]

I liked this part of the film. It seemed genuine. We see home videos of Awlaki's son doing youthful happy things. JS tries to understand why the US would deliberately kill a 16 year old kid? Which is a good question. Perhaps America is ruled by a murderous Cult of Death.

My bolding.

I have often wondered if the US is ruled by a Cult of Death. Is it such an alarming idea? After all, Germany 1933-45 was increasingly in the grip of a death's head cult, that indiscriminately murdered in the millions. Stalin's Russia was even worse in its death toll and that, in turn, was usurped by Mao's China. Since WWII the US has started more wars than Rome could've dreamt of and the death toll has been phenomenal.

Maybe it's Cult of War - almost the same thing, but not quite the same psychological impact as a Cult of Death perhaps. After all, we are now all used to war. One or more wars are raging in some part of the world every waking day.

If we look at the evidence of history, both ancient and contemporary, the conclusion has to be that there has been an active Cult of Death in operation most of that time.

As Jung wrote:

We need more understanding of the human nature, because the only real danger that exists is man himself. He is the great danger, and we are pitifully unaware of it. We know nothing of man, far too little. His psyche should be studied, because we are the origin of all coming evil

[Jan Klimkowski]

Kara - thank you for posting this powerful article by Douglas Valentine.

He is an outstanding journalist and the chronicler of the Phoenix Program. He is also a member of DPF.

The first two sections of Doug Valentine's review represent an essential and largely ignored history of "Dirty Wars". It is a disgrace that this history is still suppressed or omitted.

The last section is a critique of Jeremy Scahlil's documentary, which I have not seen.

Judging by the review, and writing as an experienced docuentary filmmaker, I suspect that several "narrative tricks" were played in the film.

For instance:

B-takes of Scahill walking among the common folk in Brooklyn, plotting his next move. Haunted by the horror of Gardez, he files FOIA requests and discovers that William McRaven is head of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC). He's stunned. He's been a national security reporter for over a decade, and he's never heard of JSOC before. It's covert. The story has been hidden in the shadows, he says.
This was the turning point of the film for me. For a National Security correspondent, this is an admission akin to a botanist saying he'd never heard of flowers. It's an admission that fairly sums up the sorry state of reporting in America today. Has JS ever read a book?

It is possible that this is intended as a "retelling" of Scahill's political journey. It is also possible that this scene is structured in this way for "narrative effect", to "tell a story".

If either of these possibilities are true, then - unless the documentary commentary or introduction frames the film appropriately - there is a risk, indeed almost a certainty, of reducing Scahill to the role of actor.

The third possibility, Valentine's conclusion that this scene is "akin to a botanist saying he'd never heard of flowers" is, if true, devastating for Scahill.

I haven't seen the film, so the above is based on the review.

Once again, we fear for JS. Luckily he lives to talk to Rachel Maddow and Morning Joe. The greatness thrust upon him forces him onto TV shows everywhere. There he is with Amy Goodman!
More close-ups. We count the pores on his nose, the hairs in his eyebrows. We feel the fear. He gets a strange call. Someone tells him JSOC tortures people without telling the CIA or regular army, which are too busy torturing people to care.

Again, if JS is the protagonist of the film, then there is an inevitable temptation to make him "heroic". There is an archetypal grammar here. Equally, other archetypes can be called into play, and many powerful documentaries have been made without a central "hero" figure.

I am happy that a documentary about the contemporary incarnation of the Phoenix Program has been made. From Doug Valentine's review, it appears that Scahill should have avoided the "Hollywood narrative" tricks, and stuck to the facts.

Alan J Pakula's All the President's Men turned Bob Woodward into a heroic investigative journalist and we now know that was a lie.

I hope Jeremy Scahill has more integrity than Woodward, because the crimes he is exposing need to be exposed.

[Peter Lemkin]

I haven't seen the film, but respect both Scahill and Valentine greatly. Sorry to see one bashing the other....I hope some of your analysis, if speculative - as you also haven't seen the fim Jan - turns out to be the 'problem'. Scahill has a book out by the same title.

[Kara Dellacioppa]

http://www.corbettreport.com/interview-6...irty-wars/ I think this interview gives a better understanding of Valentines critique of Dirty Wars.

[Dawn Meredith]

I haven't seen the film, but respect both Scahill and Valentine greatly. Sorry to see one bashing the other....I hope some of your analysis, if speculative - as you also haven't seen the fim Jan - turns out to be the 'problem'. Scahill has a book out by the same title.

I have nothing but the greatest respect for Doug Valentine. I agree with Peter
that it is very sad to see him bashing Scahill. I just watched this film and while I do not disagree with Doug's issues, the film was worthy of viewing by the widest possible audience.
I did not get the sense that Scahill was attempting to convey that this is something new. Then again I also read much of The Winter soldier investigation in 1973, so am more than aware of just what our soldiers and black ops
"specialists" do in the name of ..."war".
I hope everyone here sees this film.

Dawn

[Keith Millea]

Doug has also gone after Glenn Greenwald...

October 22, 2013


Glenn's Big Adventure

The NSA Provides Tech Support for Assassinations? Shocking!

by DOUGLAS VALENTINE

Glenn Greenwald has announced that he is going to revolutionize the news business. Ta Da!

Greenwald's self-described "momentous" media venture will be financed by billionaire eBay creator Pierre Omidar, whose staff of computer geeks is savvy enough to have rolled out Obamacare without any glitches.

Can we expect Greenwald to use his high tech media empire for good or evil? Will he expose the contradictions of capitalism, and pillory billionaires like Omidar who could use their wealth to bail out Detroit, but instead buy luxury yachts and 5,800-square-foot beachfront homes in Hawaii?

Or will he use his new found fortune to carve out a fiefdom in a media market overflowing with warlords like Arianna Huffington, Joan Walsh, Katrina vanden Heuvel and Amy Goodman; limousine liberals who make oodles of money marketing themselves as different from one another, the way Coke is different than Pepsi, while peddling the same sugar sweet, carbonated crap?

To prove he is a different sort of liberal capitalist, Greenwald will launch his media empire with a sensational "exposé" on the National Security Agency (NSA). The exposé will be based on documents NSA contractor Edward Snowden pilfered and slipped into Greenwald's hot little hands.

NSA spying is all the rage these days, and the perfect way to promote a capitalist venture. But how deep will Greenwald go? Will he, for example, tie his sugar daddy into the underlying political and economic need for global NSA surveillance? We know that NSA spying in Mexico and France helped Americans "get an upper hand in diplomatic talks and find good investment opportunities," as reported on RT.

Will Greenwald tell us which American corporations are profiting from NSA spying? Will he tell us how, specifically, the CIA uses NSA intercepts to manipulate political affairs in foreign nations to America's political and economic advantage?

It's certainly not news that America is exceptional because it breaks all the laws in its role as the world's omnipotent policeman, at home as well as abroad. As Frank Donner explained 30 years ago in his book The Age of Surveillance, the defense of capitalism against all its failures requires massive political, economic, and security measures to suppress dissent, and knowledge.

And the best way to suppress dissent and knowledge today is to drown them under a deluge of Dr. Pepper in their internet cradle.

To his credit, Greenwald has acknowledged this, and has condemned the corporate media for keeping the public ignorant of the devilish details of how and why the US goes about breaking the law, for the benefit of particular individuals. But how, pray tell, can he break the mold if he's part of the system?

Perhaps it's cynical to assume that as a venture capitalist, Greenwald and his media empire will not be revolutionary in the sense of focusing on, say, racism in America's newsrooms, or rampaging Zionist settlers and inhumane Israeli oppression of Palestinians.

Will he dispatch Jeremy Scahill to Gaza to expose how the CIA brings Hamas and Fatah in line with US and Israeli wishes?

Or will he merely escalate the hype that drives American media in the new millennium?

One wonders, precisely because Greenwald is kicking off his really big show with an exposé about how the NSA assists the CIA in its assassinations. Such an exposé may prove to be anti-climactic, however, in so far as linking the NSA to CIA assassinations is as startling as showing that the administrative staff at a hospital assists doctors in providing medical care to patients.

A little background is helpful in understanding why it may also be diversionary.

The NSA was formed in 1952 within the Department of Defense to coordinate military, State Dept., FBI and CIA signals intelligence. It also manages DOD communications and electronic intelligence activities.

The NSA doesn't do anything with the intelligence it collects. It parcels information out to policy makers in the White House and to operational customers like the DEA, CIA, FBI, and military. Some of the intelligence has strategic importance and some has tactical importance. Thus, it's helpful to differentiate tactics from strategy.
For example, as a strategy, the CIA sought to control the political climate in South Vietnam. In doing this, the CIA ran a variety of secret operations to counter the infiltration of South Vietnam's political parties by revolutionary forces. At the same time, the CIA sought "compatible elements" (South Vietnamese willing to promote US policy at the expense of South Vietnam's interests) to create a counterforce to steal the South Vietnamese political process away from nationalists.

The NSA assisted the CIA in this strategic plan by monitoring the communications of both revolutionary and nationalist political cadre, so the CIA would know when best to intercept them, and how best to try to buy them off. (The revolutionaries would always say yes, but were usually doubles.)

Controlling South Vietnam, like controlling America, was a dual-level scheme. Apart from opposition to its strategy of controlling all political factions, the CIA was faced with the threat of terrorism at the tactical level. The CIA sought to neutralize terrorists primarily through the use of paramilitary and special police forces organized at the Phoenix Directorate in Saigon, as well as through the joint CIA-military Special Operations Group (SOG).

The Phoenix Directorate and SOG were engaged in widespread assassinations of low-level political cadre, whose status rated them as terrorists whether or not they engaged in terrorism. The NSA helped in this particular capitalist venture, by pinpointing the location of targeted individuals. Some put the number of assassinations at 25,000, others at over 40,000 perhaps closer to 10O,000. In any event, the purpose of widespread assassinations, the kind Obama is conducting worldwide, is psychological and designed to suppress resistance within broad populations. Just as the assassination of Osama bin Laden did nothing to disrupt Al Qaeda, such assassination programs have little impact on organizations with de-centralized leadership and popular movements with a well-defined ideology.

To summarize so far: at the strategic level, the CIA sought to control its opponents, not to murder them. In pursuit of strategic goals, the CIA operated over and above the tactical Phoenix Directorate, through a special unit in Saigon which could take whatever it wanted people or information from the Phoenix program. When the Phoenix program identified a top ranking revolutionary, the CIA would not assassinate him or her, but would send that person to the National Interrogation Center and try to turn him or her into a penetration agent capable of influencing events or discovering enemy plans and strategies.

The CIA's special unit ran the same sort of operations against South Vietnamese officials who worked counter to US policy. Again, they rarely killed them, but sought to control them.

The CIA conducts the same types of strategic and tactical programs and operations today in nations around the world. If you follow event closely in Afghanistan and Iraq, you will see this unfolding before your very eyes the assassination of low level cadre and innocent civilians as part of a psywar campaign to terrorize the widespread resistance into submission; and the insidious control of strategic players in an attempt to further American political and economic policies.

In a more sophisticated manner, US intelligence and security services are doing this in America on a strategic level, often through the corporate media. Nothing has changed.

The material Snowden gave Greenwald undoubtedly reveals NSA-supported CIA operations at the strategic level around the world; in the UN, in friendly nations like Mexico and France, as well as in hostile nations like Russia and China. If Greenwald wants, he can probably outline how, for example, the CIA uses NSA-intercepted communications in Germany to assure that certain American corporations receive German government contracts. And name the players. He can probably show how, using NSA intercepts, the CIA manipulates events in the Philippines so that self-serving politicians who support US policy are elected. Again name names. And with luck, he can reveal the machinations of intelligence and security services in American politics and industry, including the media players.

Or he can sift through Snowden's material, edit out the good stuff, and focus on tactical matters like assassinations, the exposure of which will have no effect on strategic CIA operations at home or abroad. Indeed, the powers that be would be happy to have Greenwald cover its drone assassination program, so that more Zero Dark Thirty-style movies can be made, glorifying the heroic CIA.

By focusing on the NSA's role in supporting CIA assassinations, Greenwald risks keeping the public focused on the sensational but ultimately insignificant tactical use of intelligence, and thus ignorant of how US intelligence and security agencies manipulate the political process. In this way, like all the other soft drink sellers, he will serve only himself and his patron by not angering the powerful individuals who stand to be exposed as criminals, subverting democracy.

Or he can go what Snowden did and risk it all. The choice is his.

Douglas Valentine is the author of five books, including The Phoenix Program. See www.douglasvalentine.com or write to him at dougvalentine77@gmail.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/22/t...-shocking/

[Keith Millea]

Dougs on a roll.Here's his latest piece...

Weekend Edition October 25-27, 2013

You Say You Want a Revolution, Well, You Know...

Brand X and the Absurdity of Celebrity Culture

by DOUGLAS VALENTINE

Russell Brand is a celebrity, one of those pretty faces you see on ragged magazines at the check-out counter and think: "Who gives a flying f what he's screwing this week?"

At one point he was screwing Katy Perry, a teeny-bopper who makes recruitment music videos for the US Army. They were married in a traditional Hindu ceremony, near a tiger sanctuary in India which is just so cool! Except they divorced a year later, right after Brand, the cad, twittered an unflattering photo of Perry for all their fans to see.

Brand meditates, but prefers transcendental medication. According to Wikipedia, he "has incorporated his notorious drug use, alcoholism, and promiscuity into his comedic material." And he certainly has a talent for casting himself as a rebel (there's a poster of him floating around the internet depicting him as Che Guevara) and for shameless self-promotion: something of a serial flasher, he's been arrested numerous times, often, ironically, for throwing punches at paparazzo.

On Facebook he is adored by millions of millennial girls for his "gorgeous beard" and for being a vegetarian, which equals a reverence for all sentient beings. And yet, simply because he's a celebrity, he must constantly defend himself from charges of being "trivial," which really hurts when you're a sensitive guy like Brand.

And he is sensitive, and has convictions, as well as arrests. Brand has publicly condemned Israel's assault on Gaza, and the "cruel and massive loss of life of the citizens of Gaza." He has taken other principled stands as well.

But he drenched himself in glitz, and acted like a fool, to get to the point where people would look at him and listen to what he says. And that is the irony of Brand's karma-challenged life: he suffers for the fame and fortune he brought upon himself.

Don't you get it, Russ? You can't speak authoritatively against corporate and economic oppression if you're a wealthy glamour-boy, featured regularly in GQ and Esquire.

This is the trap all our modern heroes fall into. The first (paraphrased) words Dan Ellsberg spoke to me were: "You can't understand me because you're not a celebrity. Being a celebrity changes everything."

Danny was absolutely right. Being a celebrity does change everything. Ask Zimmerman, who stopped pretending to be a champion of the poor, once he became rich.

Celebrity changes everything, yes, but not like being an unwed mother changes everything. Being a celebrity makes you publicly absurd. It makes you another Brand X on a shelf overflowing with commodities packaged and sold by money-grubbing corporations.

It's like a prominent libertarian using the oxymoron "billionaire philanthropist" to describe Glenn Greenwald's sugar daddy Pierre Omidyar, and then calling on libertarians everywhere to implore their Congressional representatives (like Rand Paul?) to pave the way for ex-pat Greenwald's safe-return from self-imposed exile. Forget the 11 million undocumented aliens in the country (which libertarians are doing their best to deport), trying to stay here for a chance to work and exist in noble anonymity; you must expend your time and energy on one celeb who, single-handedly, is going to make "us" understand "what kind of country we're turning into."

Give me a break. Celebrity-making in the hands of venture capitalists and social-service wrecking libertarians renders Greenwald absurd like he made himself absurd for taking Omidyar's blood money; like celebrity-seeking made devout Maherist-Lenoist Jeremy Scahill absurd; like it makes every other denizen of late-night comedy shows, hosted by millionaire racists, in a word, absurd.

In this spirit, Russell Brand has reached new heights of absurdity by predicting a coming revolution.

The poster of him looking like Che has done more damage to his brain than all the dope he pumped into his veins; but his adoring fans believe his rubbish and, for 24 hours, happily imagine themselves as revolutionaries.

They do, after all, identify with him, and his brand of consumer absurdity. And in modern America, money and an adoring fan base are what matter.

From down here in the trenches, I wonder what Russell's brand of revolution looks like? A civil war, perhaps, in America, with well-armed Tea Partiers surrendering by the score? Or will it be a worldwide uprising of the lower classes against their corporate oppressors? (Didn't someone already suggest that?) Will Brand's revolution involve people killing and being killed, or simply pretending they have the courage of their convictions, assuming they have any convictions (or critical thoughts) at all?

In any case, the powers-that-be are thanking Russell Brand X for reducing the on-going struggle for freedom and justice, once again, to the absurd.

http://www.counterpunch.org/2013/10/25/b...y-culture/

[Magda Hassan]

Doug is definitely on a roll ::coolrock:: and he definitely has a point. But fortunately it's not the only point as Dawn and Peter point out.

[Peter Lemkin]

Doug is definitely on a roll ::coolrock:: and he definitely has a point. But fortunately it's not the only point as Dawn and Peter point out.

I have the highest respect for DV and nothing that follows is meant as criticism of him. That said, I believe all of us who are in the know about the hidden secrets and players of the Deep Political Powers/Events [certainly more powerful and influential than the 'ordinary' visible politics and politicians], have different levels of awareness [lets call it depth we can see or have explored into the Deep Political shit], as well as different approaches of how to best bring this to the alarmed attention of the Public, at large. While someone who's analyses are wrong or in the enemy camp should be vilified, IMHO, brutal attacks on those who only differ in approach or who have a less-deeply enlighten view of events and powers, past and present, should be critiqued, criticized, but not pilloried. There are many in society who just can not or will not listen to those of us who have a more radical [if more realistic] stance/outlook. Just my two cents. It will take all progressive forces and persons to turn this mess around and save the Planet and human societies from total destruction at the hands of the growing neo-fascism/neo-feudalism, Worldwide. IMHO