THE PRESIDENTIAL ELECTIONS LEAVE US NO CHOICE

I have long maintained that this country is no longer governed by it elected officials but by non-elected bureaucrats, in particular the intelligence establishment, above all the CIA, and certain elements in the military (with the support of course of big money). The ongoing campaign for president, which is pushing the far more serious issue of the trial of the Guantánamo Six off center stage, rather proves my point. For about a year I had supported Chris Dodd, as he seemed to be the only person in the public eye who was seriously concerned about the Military Commissions Act under which the Guantánamo Six are to be tried, for Democratic nominee. As it became clear that he was falling behind in the race, I lost interest. But just the other day I saw him in a segment of the News Hour standing next to Barack Obama, and sure enough, the following day I received an e-mail circular from the Dodd campaign urging me to vote for Obama. But interestingly enough, when I read the arguments which Senator Dodd put forward as to why voters should support Obama, the primary reason I had originally supported the Senator himself was missing. That is to say, there was nothing about restoring the Constitution or repealing the Military Commissions Act. We are in the worst constitutional crisis in U.S. history, yet neither of the Democratic front-runners will say anything about the most pressing issue of the moment: the manner in which our government is fighting the so-called "War on Terror", which involves violations of the civil liberties of Americans and the human rights of foreigners. When I look at what is happening in this country now, in Guantánamo and around the world in the secret CIA prisons, when I witness our government's quest for absolute dominance in space and the erection of a shield which will protect it from retaliation, thus facilitating a first strike, I see events more dangerous than those which led up to the Nazi holocaust and World War II. Yet one would never know this from listening to the candidates. For the U.S. presidential race now has about as much political importance as the World Series.

Why will the Democratic candidates say nothing about the most important issue of all? Some will answer, that subject is taboo. The American people are afraid of a terrorist attack, and to question the measures our government has been taking in the so-called "War on Terror" is to risk sounding "soft on terror". But who has planted that fear in the minds of Americans? And why, in the seven years which have elapsed since the events of 9/11, has our government not brought forward one individual who was involved in those events (with the exception of Zacarias Moussaoui, a bit player at best), for a fair and public trial? No matter how heinous the crimes such individuals may have committed, they deserve that-- indeed, they must have it if we are to know the truth. After all, we gave fair and open trials even to the Nazi War Criminals, who had killed millions. Some say that the terrorist suspects cannot tried because they have been "interrogated aggressively" (i.e., tortured) and that would make their testimony inadmissable in court. But so many of our federal judges are now mere "rubber stamp" placemen that such testimony would probably be accepted, and let's face it, if the defendant(s) could be proven to truly have played a role in 9/11, the American people would applaud. If the case was thrown out of court because the defendants had been tortured, there would be massive demonstrations against the court's decision, and the defendants would undoubtedly be placed back in the custody of the military or CIA. In either case, there would be no possibility of a truly dangerous terrorist being released and the Republicans would look like heroes for just trying to bring these people to account. So why have there been no such trials? Why is the trial which is finally about to be held, of the Guantánamo Six, being conducted in such secrecy and in violation of all hallowed rules of due process, to the extent that many career military men who could have served as counsel for the defendants have resigned in protest? There can be only two reasons: either the defendants are innocent or they know that our own government was complicit in the attacks of 9/11.

Evidence of that complicity is to be found in the manner in which detainees in the "War on Terror" have been "questioned". For the methods used to "interrogate" them, known collectively as PSYWAR, are not designed to elicit intelligence but rather to spread terror and produce false confessions. I have referred again and again in these blogs to Alfred W. McCoy's excellent book, A Question of Torture: CIA Methods of Interrogation from the Cold War to the War on Terror, which demonstrates this. The thing that stands out most about these methods, inspired by the Stalinist show trials and Chinese and North Korean "brainwashing", is how inappropriate they are to the CIA's stated mission. Utilizing a combination of physical brutality and psychological pressures, they aim to sever a person's contact with reality and destroy his sense of identity so that he will become whatever the so-called "interrogator" wants him to be. In this they resemble more than anything the methods used in Orwell's classic 1984. As O'Brien says to Winston as he is torturing him, "We will empty you and fill you with ourselves." The implication is that the CIA is not seeking "actionable intelligence" but attempting to produce broken zomby-like individuals who can be trotted out before a court and "confess" whatever crimes they are accused of, a process which is facilitated by the irregular nature of the military commissions. And where the truth really lies is something that the public will never be allowed to know. This adds nothing to the security of Americans, but provides very effective cover for the misdeeds of our government, misdeed which may well include the murder of thousands of its own citizens.

So what if the presidential candidates did emphasize the threat to our liberty and the travesty of justice that these show-trials represent? I naturally think of what happened to John F. Kennedy after he handed down National Security Memoranda 55, 56 and 57, which would have splintered the CIA. And I think as well of a less well-known figure from my own Bay Area. Representative Leo Ryan Jr. was an outspoken critic of the CIA in Congress. He co-authored a Hughes-Ryan Amendment, which aimed to limit the funding of covert actions and increase congressional oversight of them. In 1978, he traveled to Guyana to investigate reported abuses at the settlement of the People's Temple there. Although Ryan had been concerned about the growing influence of cults, it was probably his concern about the ongoing lawlessness of the CIA which prompted him to make this investigation, particularly after investigative reporter Jack Anderson published a syndicated column suggesting that the Jonestown colony was really being run by the CIA. Just as Ryan was investigating, and finding that a number of the residents of Jonestown actually wanted to leave, he was murdered along with four journalists. One People's Temple member, Larry Layton, was convicted of the murder. But soon after Ryan was murdered, nine hundred men, women and children belonging to the Jonestown colony were found dead. Could Layton have been responsible for all these deaths or was he a mere scapegoat? The question acquires further weight when one discovers that not many of the deaths-- widely believed to be suicides-- were clearly murders, with the fatal injections in places the deceased individual could not possibly have reached. What is of still more significance is the large quantity of mind-altering drugs of a certain type which were found at Jonestown.

According to John Judge, author of "The Black Hole of Guyana: The Untold Story of the Jonestown Massacre" (http://www.ratical.org/ratville/JFK/JohnJudge/Jonestown.html) "Guyanese troops discovered a large cache of drugs, enough to drug the entire population of Georgetown, Guyana for more than a year. According to survivors, these drugs were being used regularly to "control" a population of only 1,100 people." The drugs all belonged to a group with which this author has had personal experience, the major tranquilizers or neuroleptics. Neuroleptics can have a variety of effects, none of them therapeutic. Some induce a state of mental torture known as tardive akathisia, in which the victim cannot sit or lie still, and is afflicted with extreme anxiety. The effects of this type are similar to a "bad trip" on another drug unleashed on American society by the CIA, LSD. Others leave the person in a zombie-like state, unable to think coherently or protest his/her treatment. Having experienced both these reactions from prescribed neuroleptic drugs myself, I was not surprised to learn that the CIA, which had been experimenting with mind-controlling drugs from the nineteen-fifties through its programs MK-ULTRA, was using them on inmates of the psychiatric prison at Vacaville, California. And why not the poor and Black people who predominated at Jonestown? More than 20 months after Leo Ryan was killed, his five adult children filed a lawsuit based on extensive investigation charging that "the Jonestown Colony was infilitrated with agents of the Central Intelligence Agency of the United States," and that they were working as part of the CIA's MK-ULTRA program. It essentially accused agents of the CIA of being responsible for Ryan's death. The suit was dropped for reasons which have never been fully disclosed, but which have been linked to threats delivered by the CIA (see http://www.freedommag.org/english/vol2914/page08.htm. The Hughes-Ryan Amendment, which would have imposed controls on the CIA, was dropped soon after Ryan's death (see the Wikipedia article on Ryan).

So what would happen if we for once had elected officials who were willing to not only speak out against CIA tyranny, but also take action against it? The answer is clear: we have had such elected officials, and they have been murdered, one can guess by whom. No wonder the presidential elections leave us no choice. And the double meaning is intentional: perhaps it is no longer possible to remedy this problem by working peacefully through the system.