Washington’s Counter-Insurgency Strategy

“Our morality has no precedent, and our humanity is absolute, because it rests on a new ideal. Our aim is to destroy all forms of oppression and violence. To us, everything is permitted, for we are the first to raise the sword not to oppress races and reduce them to slavery, but to liberate humanity from its shackles …. Blood? Let blood flow like water . .. for only through the death of the old world can we liberate ourselves forever.”

From a 1920 editorial in Krasni Mech (The Red Sword), a publication of the Soviet Checka secret police; quoted in The Black Book of Communism by Stephane Courtois, et al, pg. 102.

Under the legal regime proposed by attorney and law professor William C. Bradford, who until recently was an instructor at West Point, lawyers and legal scholars who criticize or impede the Regime’s endless “war on terror” could be designated “fifth columnists” and “enemy combatants” subject to indefinite detention or summary execution.Every judge and lawyer was required to be “a son of his country” who would “place the vital interests of the nation unconditionally above what is formally the law.”

Bradford spent several years teaching law to West Point cadets before being forced to resign in early August. Significantly, he wasn’t terminated for his advocacy of a genocidal foreign policy or a totalitarian campaign to suppress domestic dissent, but rather for inflating his military resume by falsely claiming to have received a Silver Star for combat duty in Desert Storm.

Not surprisingly, Bradford blames his forced resignation on critics of his essay who hadn’t read it, but had only seen a handful of inflammatory statements orphaned of their context. Reasonably well-informed readers who manage to plow through the entire paper should recognize that it is a commendably candid effort to provide a legal argument for domesticating practices that have been employed abroad by the United States Government for at least six decades.

Beginning in the late 1950s or early 1960s, U.S.-aligned militarist regimes in Latin America, with the help of the Pentagon and the CIA, “shared intelligence and seized, tortured, and executed political opponents in one another’s territory,” recounts historian and author J. Patrick McSherry in his book Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America. “Counterinsurgency militaries organized massive new state and parastatal apparatuses for intelligence, surveillance, and social control, including secret torture-disappearance-killing systems and new technologies of violence to terrorize who populations.”

This coordinated venture in international state terrorism was eventually known as “Operation Condor,” a name derived from the national symbol of Uruguay –whose national police agency was among the bloodiest participants.

Owing to the existence of “an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination,” insisted the CIA’s 1954 Doolittle Report, “hitherto acceptable norms of conduct do not apply.” By that time, Communist regimes had slaughtered tens of millions of people, and the architects of Washington’s Cold War strategy assumed that the best way to defeat the Communists was to echo their claim of plenary moral immunity (see the statement from the Krasni Mech editorial above) and emulate some of their most reprehensible behavior, including the state-ordered disposal of what the Soviets called “socially dangerous persons.”

“Increasingly, a person’s ideas – not illegal acts – were the criteria used in decisions to detain or disappear him,” McSherry points out. “Counterinsurgency specialists also re-engineered police forces and changed their mission from a law enforcement to a militarized model.”

In the name of counter-insurgency warfare, these “Spartanized” states – to use Bradford’s entirely appropriate term – slaughtered millions of people throughout Latin America, and conducted extra-territorial kidnappings and murders in Europe and the United States. Nor were they content to focus on armed guerrillas and people who provably offered them material support.

“First we will kill all the subversives; then we will kill their collaborators; then their sympathizers; then those who remain indifferent,” explained Argentine General Iberico St. Jean, speaking on behalf of a U.S.-supported junta that “disappeared” countless thousands of people in that fashion. General St. Jean’s formula was originally presented in Spanish, but he and professor Bradford speak the same language.