Global Policy Forum

By John Gerassi

The time has come to say it out loud. Most of my academic colleagues say it privately, but hedge in their classes. Many of my old buddies at Time and Newsweek, where I was an editor for a decade, agree, but tell me they can never say so in print. All my friends fear that if they spell it out the FBI will arrest them in the middle of the night and they will become "disappeared" like hundreds of innocent Moslems who are not even charged with a crime. They know that Attorney General Ashcroft is itching to use the proposed Patriots' Act II, which will certainly become law after US forces suffer casualties in Iraq, to deport native-born critics of the Administration to Antarctica or bury them in solitary confinement in the Arizona desert, as that law permits. But it is now time to say and act upon the fact that the United States, as a state, is Fascist.

We all know, and the media certainly can list the proofs, that those in power in Washington, Vice President Cheney, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and his deputy Wolfowitz, among others, plotted the current anti-Iraq policy years ago. In 1992 they actually wrote it up in a letter to Bush I. Even Ted Koppel read parts of that 96-page letter on Nightline the other day, proving that Bush II's War has nothing to do with 9/11 or al Qaeda or terrorism. In fact, President Reagan removed Iraq from the list of states sponsoring terror back in l982.

To those 1992 conspirators now making policy in the White House, adding up with Bush II as the world's new and dreaded Gang of Four, the goal was and is control of the whole region. Not just to own the oil and gas, but also to control their sale, in order to dictate which developing country the US will help and which it will sink into desperate poverty. After Iraq, they want to invade Iran. Then any other country, especially the oil-rich "...stans" surrounding the Caspian Sea if they balk at US demands and where the US now has bases.

No nation (certainly not Cuba) must be allowed to maintain an independent course, say the Gang of Four. The world's worst dictators (in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Kuwait, Turkey, Kazakhstan et al) are acceptable if they trade by Washington's rules. If not, a "regime change" is the next move. Bush II's War on Iraq is only the beginning. It's part of what in polite circles is called Globalization. In real terms it's just plain Americanization.

Most Americans support Bush II and his Gang of Four. So did the Germans support Hitler. He won over 60 percent of the vote in a fair election. He repeated ad nausea that it was the others' fault and the Germans believed him. It was the Czechs who stole the Sudetenland, he said. Repeat it often, Goebels advised him, and the world will believe it. And now, he would advise Bush II, say over and over that Saddam gassed his own people in the village of Halapja and the world will believe it, even if the CIA's senior political analyst on Iraq at the time, who had access to the classified investigation of the incident, reported that it did not happen (NYT 10/31/03). The media said it did, without proof, almost every day since Bush said it during his State of the Union address. And again in his March 15 radio talk. Goebels would have been proud.

Both the CIA and the FBI found no connection between Al Qaeda and Iraq. Bush II said there was one. He offered no proof. So what. He repeated it so often most Americans believe it. That's like when daddy Bush said that Saddam was going to attack Saudi Arabia after Kuwait. Totally absurd, and everyone in the media knew it. Saddam may be a scumbag but he isn't mad. But the media repeated it so often most Americans, who don't even know where Saudi Arabia is, believed it.

To go against the Gang of Four is to be ostracized from Washington. The end of a Journalism Career. Notice Bush II's last press conference. Only those reporters on his "goodie" list could ask him questions. Those who usually pose tough questions were silenced. CBS's veteran reporter-anchorman Dan Rather admitted in a BBC interview on his way back from Iraq that even he was intimidated by the Gang of Four: "It's that fear that keeps journalists from asking the toughest of the tough questions."

Who is really threatened by Saddam? Israel? Saddam knows very well that if he attacks it Iraq will be permanently exterminated. The American people? How absolutely ludicrous: his longest range missiles, which according to the UN inspectors violated the 93 miles maximum by all of 30 miles, couldn't even reach the immense and oppressive US base on the Island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean. So why do Americans support a bloodthirsty liar whose bombs kill children? Americans don't even know that the UN does not sanction the US/British bombing of Iraq's self-defense guns.

The sanctions that the US did force the UN to adopt have already killed more than half a million Iraqi children, as reported by the UN and Bill Moyers on Public Television. But we know from the My Lai massacre that American soldiers are trained to view children of enemies, even tiny babies, equally as enemies, and kill them (raping the young girls first, of course).

What has happened to the US when murderers and liars run our affairs and neither Congress nor ordinary Americans seem to care? Such Fascists as Elliot Abrams, guilty of lying to Congress and pardoned by Bush I (NYT 12,/07/02), member of the Israel lobby, now in charge of Palestine affairs at National Security; John Negroponte, who as US ambassador to Honduras during the Contra wars, helped Generals Alvarez, chief of Honduras' Armed Forces, and Luis Alonso Discua Elvir, head of Battalion 3-16, create the death squads responsible for the torture and murder or hundreds of men and women, including nuns opposed to the war, now US ambassador to the UN (LATimes 03/25/01; Sister Laetiti Bordes, s.h., 08/24/01); John Poindexter, former vice admiral convicted of five felonies of lying to Congress and obstruction of justice pardoned by Bush I, now in charge of the Pentagon's electronic surveillance system which plans to spy on all Americans' banking, credit card, and travel! transactions without a search warrant (NYT 11/10/02): Otto J. Reich, a Cuba-born anti-Castro fanatic whose office engaged in prohibited acts of propaganda (New Yorker, Oct. 14 & 21, 2002) and appears to want to execute anyone saying one word in favor of the Cuban revolution, now boss of all Latin American US diplomats; Gerald A Reynolds, a longtime foe of Affirmative Action, in charge of Bush II's Office of Civil Rights (NYT 06/27/01); Harvey L. Pitt, a corporate lawyer who has represented the industries opposed to regulations by the SEC, to head the SEC; and on and on, plus all the disgustingly anti-poor, pro-big business lawyers being nominated by Bush II to judgeships around the country.

But by far the most dangerous fascist in Bush II's government is the man in charge of "justice", Attorney General John Ashcroft. A racist, fanatic fundamentalist, opposed to the civil and bodily (abortion) liberties upheld by the Constitution or the Supreme Court. Ashcroft is in favor of secret arrests, secret detentions, secret trials without appeals, secret verdicts and secret executions, all "odious to a democratic society" as Judge Arthur N. D'Italia of New Jersey's Superior Court said, when he ruled that secret detentions were illegal. Ashcroft not only appealed but ordered state and local governments to stop making public the names of those arrested (NYT 05/05/02).

Like in Nazi Germany of yesterday, an innocent citizen who may or may not have mumbled some criticism of Ashcroft himself will suddenly disappear when out walking his dog, and his family will be allowed to go crazy trying to find out what happened.

Will the innocent citizen then be tortured? Don't laugh: the US already uses torture. Now that the evidence is firm, the debate rages. Should we or should we not? And who decides? But in fact, the CIA has been torturing anti-US suspects for years, in Asia, Africa and especially Latin America. When I accompanied former Attorney General Ramsey Clark to Teheran in l980, I saw a video's of CIA men, or Special Forces soldiers, sometimes in US uniform, showing SAVAK officers how to torture.

I remember very vividly one horrifying case: a naked anti-Shah Iranian hanging six inches off the floor by a chain around his wrists, which were bleeding, in the middle of what appeared to be a cement bunker. Two Iranians in civilian clothes were having difficulty forcing a cattle prod, which was wired to an electric generator, into the man's rectum, because his body kept swinging to and fro. An officer, obviously an American, in uniform but sporting no insignia, pushed the Iranians to the side, grabbed the prod with his right hand, held the prisoner with his left, and rammed the prod as far as he could, turning the Iranian toward the camera, and smiled as if to say "see! it's easy." Then, one of the officers of the SAVAK, which was created, financed and trained for the Shah by the CIA and Israel's secret service, the Mossad, turned on the juice, and while the three men jokingly talked to the cameraman in this silent video, the hapless prisoner kept shaking wildly behind.! When the three turned back to him, he was dead.

Not quite what the Washington Post reported on the front page of its December 26, 2002, issue, but what it did report about systematic torture at CIA and Special Forces centers was bad enough. Since then, the NYTimes has been publishing other torture incidents, including the death of two old farmers tortured for having been forced to fight for Taliban. Enough to make every American democrat ashamed. And agree with the chief of Egypt's Organization for Human Rights who said: "Torture demonstrates that the regime deserves destroying because it does not respect the dignity of the people." (The Nation, 03/31/03). Yes, it is the US which needs a regime change -- before we all become either Gestapo informers or actual goons, or end up rotting in jail.

So who benefits from all this repression at home, torture, destruction and killing of children overseas? Not you or me, not us ordinary Joe and Jane. But the rich, those who profit from controlling world trade, the CEO's of the multi-national corporations, like Goodyear, Texaco, Colgate-Palmolive, WorldCom, which earned more than $12 billion in l996-98 but instead of paying taxes got $535 million in credit and refunds, or General Electric, IBM, Intel, and so many others which paid almost no taxes (NYT 10/20/00), while their CEOs gave themselves such huge bonuses that, combined, they could have built a modest home stocked with a year's worth of healthy food for every poor person in the Third World. In 1997, Occidental Petroleum lost $390 million, but CEO Ray Ironi gave himself a $100 bonus. Sanford Wyle, CEO of Travellers upped him quite a bit, with $230 million. Bill Gates' new mansion cost $53.4 million, more than the budget of 72 countries of the world. In 2000, the rat! io of the average salary of a Japanese CEO to that of a Japanese blue-collar worker was 11 to 1; in the US it was 476 to 1 (Time, 04/24/00). Today the US figures are up another third. Obscene, isn't it? So which country really needs a regime change?

The Gang of Four are dedicated to these greedy bloodsuckers. They will continue to lie, torture and kill for their patrons. As Hitler would have said: Iraq today, the world tomorrow. It is time to stop them. Or to try, anyway. Like the German Catholic underground. They risked their lives, and most did indeed lose them, because they knew in their souls that to conquer the world is more than a sin; it is the establishment of evil on earth.

In Germany the goal was power. In the US the goal is mostly money. The result is the same, and the leaders of this country should be tried for war crimes and crimes against humanity, just as they were in Germany. That's why US leaders, who voted for the creation of a War Crimes Tribunal, want Americans to be immune from the court's prosecutors. Understandably, since some of worst crimes against humanity were perpetrated by former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, Reagan's team with its decision to assassinate teachers, doctors, nurses and agricultural workers in order to bring down the government of Nicaragua which had been fairly elected after the revolution, by all of Nixon's top staff, and especially by America's No.1 political gangster, Henry Kissinger who is responsible for the murder of 30,000 Chileans.

American law gives each of us the right to make a citizen's arrest when we see a criminal in action. The Gang of Four are such criminals. Let's stop them. We tried and did fairly well during the Vietnam War. The Gang of Four are tougher; unlike President Johnson they have no human conscience. So it will be harder. But you can do it.

I say "you" because if this is printed I will surely be arrested and deported to some Arizona desert cave by Ashcroft's criminal organization known as the FBI. Or beaten to death by some American "patriotic" yokel.

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