Over the last decade and a half, and
especially since the 9/11 attacks, the Pentagon has developed
methods to intervene in other countries without resorting to direct
military force. The military has adopted tactics usually reserved
for the Central Intelligence Agency as a means of avoiding
congressional oversight and curious journalists. As is generally
the case with government agencies these days, the Pentagon is
placing an emphasis on secrecy and the covering of trails.
The Joint Combined Exchange Training program,
authorized by Congress in 1991, allows U.S. special forces to train
with military units of other nations, with little regard for that
country’s human-rights record, as long as the stated purpose
of the exchange is the training of our soldiers, not theirs. This
is, of course, a meaningless caveat that could be applied to any
situation. The focus of JCET activities in many countries has been
“foreign internal defense,” which is a euphemism for
state terrorism against any element that threatens the
pro-American, pro-business status quo. Targets of FID activities
have included union organizers, landless peasants, and leaders of
separatist movements. U.S. special forces have trained Turkish
commandos who have killed thousands of Kurds in eastern Turkey.
In Colombia, a country whose military is so
brutal and corrupt that it was decertified for military aid during
the Clinton years, our military has trained soldiers in their war
against the guerilla FARC (Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia)
movement. The Indonesian army, which has carried out genocidal
campaigns in East Timor and Aceh province, was a favorite partner
in the JCET program until Congress suspended cooperation in 1999.
The Bush administration is reopening channels for cooperation with
the Indonesian military.
Another tactic that has become especially
popular since 9/11 is the privatization of American military
activities. Much of the dirty work performed by these private
mercenary armies is hidden, deemed “proprietary
information” and not subject to the Freedom of Information
Act. Citizens interested in U.S. misdeeds come to a dead end when they try to investigate these
firms. In a 1998 essay for the Army War College, Col. Bruce Grant
wrote, “Privatization is a way of going around Congress and not
telling the public. Foreign policy is made by default by private
military consultants motivated by bottom-line profits.” These
private armies are largely staffed by retired U.S. military personnel.
Three of the leading private armies include the Vinnell Corp., which
trains the Saudi army; Kellogg Brown & Root, a subsidiary of
Halliburton; and DynCorp. DynCorp gained international notoriety in
2003 when several of the firm’s employees were discovered to be
keeping sex slaves in Bosnia. The guilty parties were simply dismissed,
and Congress took no action.
The School of the Americas (whose name was
changed in 2000 to the less elegant Western Hemisphere Institute
for Security Cooperation) has been a key organization in the
Pentagon’s efforts to crush opposition groups in Latin
America. This school has trained an estimated 60,000 Latin American
military and police officers, many of whom have been involved in
torture, rape, and murder in their home countries. The
aforementioned Colombian army is believed to have some 10,000 SOA
graduates. In the 1980s, the SOA circulated a manual among Latin
American military officers that taught methods for
“neutralizing government officials, political leaders, and
members of the infrastructure.” “Neutralizing,”
of course, is another word for killing.
Recently there has been talk of duplicating
in Iraq the anti-insurgency programs that were used in El Salvador
in the 1980s. Thousands of people were killed in that program, and
the end result was the bolstering of a classic banana republic, in
which a hopelessly corrupt oligarchy, controlled by U.S. business
interests, governs a desperately poor nation. The people of Iraq
will likely find that their version of democracy is no different.
If this is indeed the fate of Iraq, the fine patriots at the
Pentagon and on Wall Street will surely congratulate themselves on
yet another job well done.
This article appears in Mar 24-30, 2005.
