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Pursuing Truth and Villains:
A Chronicle of a Trip to the Halls of Power
John H. Smihula
April 5, 2001
To our sister republics south of the border, we offer a special pledge--to convert our good words into good deeds--in a new alliance for progress. Let all our neighbors know that we shall join with them to oppose aggression or subversion anywhere in the Americas. And let every other power know that this Hemisphere intends to remain the master of its own house.
–President John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961
Bad ideas flourish because they are in the interest of powerful groups.
–Paul Krugman
History was in the grasp of the Right.
–Lieutenant Robert Hearn, in Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead
I. Viva la Libertad
Silhouetted figures stand sentinel in moonlight atop the hill. They are motionless. Below them there are sounds of slow, deliberate movement on the brushy slope and among the trees that lead down to a broad hidden swale. Wet leaves crunch underfoot, twigs snap. A small light periodically pierces the darkness beyond the clearing at the base of the hill--each flash a signal. The forest is alive with unseen visitors.
In the clearing, which is enclosed on two sides by the steep hill, stands a roofed plywood platform, perhaps fifteen feet square. A generator hums in the background, and bright light pours forth from the bare bulbs hanging below the roof. Four men are busy processing coca plants into cocaine. One carries a rifle. Another is American. This is Colombia. The men are listening to American rock songs from the 1970s--songs about love and peace and the frustrations of male adolescence--on their small boombox. Between the platform and the hill there is a shed made of corrugated iron and filled with barrels; on the side facing the light is scrawled "Viva la Libertad" (Long Live Liberty).
Suddenly soldiers spring from the forest shouting in Spanish to the narco-traffickers. Twenty or thirty rush in from two directions, carrying high-powered rifles and special masks for night vision, their faces darkened and camouflaged. With a red light pulsing at the end of their rifles and a neon blue one attached to their shirts, they resemble futuristic warriors on a movie set. Cat-like, they storm the clearing low to the ground, preternaturally alert, shouting all the while, and chase down the fleeing men. On their shoulders are the flags of their countries: Colombia, El Salvador, Guatemala, Ecuador, and others. Only one shot is fired. One of the traffickers has been hit in the lower leg. It doesn't take long for the fierce young soldiers--two of whom appear to be women--to round up the men, who are forced prostrate to the ground with their arms behind them. One breaks free and tries to escape, but is instantly tackled and surrounded. The wounded man is attended to by a medic.
The drug interdiction is successful. In the War on Drugs, a battle has been won. The silhouetted men atop the hill gesture their satisfaction to one another.
I was glad when the raid finally happened. So was my cameraman, Chip, who was anxious to get some action footage after a long day of office inter-views and then return to our motel room for a beer or two and a phone conversation with his girlfriend back in San Jose. In fact, we were all happy when the raid came because on this cold night we had stood at the edge of the clearing--after a long drive and a half-mile walk through swampy terrain--for nearly two hours rubbing our hands and stomping our feet in an effort to keep warm. My assistant, Andrés, and I were weary, and my feet were wet and frozen, but we enjoyed our lively, jocose, sometimes philosophical conversation with Major Mariani and the other Army officers present. Everyone agreed, however, that our conversation would have been more enjoyable if someone had remembered to bring coffee or hot chocolate.
We had witnessed a field exercise for the Counterdrug Operations Course taught at the former School of the Americas at Fort Benning, Georgia. In a move not unlike the War Department renaming itself the Department of Defense, the SOA closed in December and reopened in January as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, or WHISC. This school has been the subject of an intense controversy for over a decade, or since a 1989 Congressional Task Force led by Joseph Moakley investigated the murder of six Jesuit priests and their two female co-workers (a mother and her fifteen-year-old daughter) at El Salvador's University of Central America and discovered that 19 of the 26 soldiers involved had trained at the SOA. The task force had also linked SOA graduates to many other human rights abuses in El Salvador. Now my colleagues and I were at Fort Benning to get the Army's perspective on the school, the growing movement to shut it down, and our nation's military role in Latin America.
The Army's point of view would be an essential element in my documentary, tentatively titled "Not In Our Name." It holds up to scrutiny U.S. foreign policy in Latin America--both past and present--which we see through the prism of the SOA/WHISC. On this crucial and urgent issue, there is quite a clash of perspectives, of ideologies. My aim is to present the conflict as clearly, compre-hensively, insightfully, and fairly as possible as I elucidate the nature of the school and the role it plays in our hemisphere's geopolitics, the rationale behind the endorsement of the school, and the motivations of those who protest at Fort Benning and risk arrest. Admittedly, I find it difficult to be fair to the American armed forces, for it spends, at last count, $265 million annually on advertising, enjoys the highest popularity rating of any major institution in the country (64 percent)[1], yet has the effrontery to complain that it has "lost the PR battle" to SOA Watch. Nevertheless, I plan to curb, as much as I can, my ideological predilections because I do not want my documentary reduced to propaganda (which is not necessarily a pejorative term, but it is a limited one). I intend to give each side of the controversy an equal opportunity to state its case and to let the audience decide which has the more convincing argument. The truth will, I believe, appear to all but the most obtuse viewers. If my documentary is successful, it will inform the curious, inspire the goodhearted, disconcert the complacent, anger the nationalistic and reactionary, and worry the powerful.
On one side of the controversy are the protesters. Ten thousand people--nuns and clergymen, doctors and teachers, labor leaders and social workers, high school and college students, World War II, Korean War and Vietnam War veterans--from all over the U.S. and from as far away as Canada and Peru stood vigil in the freezing rain at Fort Benning last November to call for the closing of the School of the Americas. 3,500 of the demonstrators crossed the line onto the (ordinarily open) base and 1,766 were arrested. Led by Father Roy Bourgeois, a decorated Vietnam veteran, human rights worker, and founder of SOA Watch a decade before, this has become the largest anti-war movement in America since Vietnam. The protesters claim that the SOA, which they call the "School of Assassins," has been responsible for some of the worst human rights abuses in Latin America, including the rape and murder of four American churchwomen and the assassination of Archbishop Oscar Romero in El Salvador in 1980, the massacre of over 900 unarmed civilians in the Salvadoran village of El Mozote in 1981, the murder of the six Jesuit priests and their two co-workers in El Salvador in 1989, the 1998 assassination of Guatemalan human rights champion, Bishop Juan Gerardi, and, currently, numerous murders and disappearances in Colombia and Mexico. The protesters add that the school, as the military arm of the IMF and the World Bank, provides the shock troops for globalization, thus bringing murder and mayhem to Latin America in an ongoing "war against the poor."
On the other side is the U.S. military establishment. The Pentagon says the SOA, as an elite international training academy for "counter-insurgency" and "teaching democracy", is a "centerpiece" of U.S. foreign policy. Founded in 1946 (the year before the CIA and National Security Council) in Panama, given a specific mission in 1949 with the implementation of the Truman Doctrine (which sought to eradicate around the world whatever forces threatened American democracy and capitalism), and relocated in 1984 to Fort Benning, the SOA/WHISC specializes in training Latin American military personnel in combat, counter-narcotics, sniper marksmanship, psychological and commando operations, and "democratic values and respect for human rights." Colonel Glenn Weidner, the last commandant of the SOA, asserted during the post-protest press conference last November that the school, as an organ of our foreign policy, is helping to bring development, democracy, and "stability" to Latin America. He dismissed the charges against the school by arguing that if there are in fact a few rogue graduates who have committed crimes, there are 60,000 graduates who have not. A few bad apples don't spoil the bushel. Moreover, if a soldier commits a crime years after graduating, can we justifiably attribute his transgression to the SOA training he received?
And in the middle is the U.S. House of Representatives, almost equally divided between the two sides. Last May, by a 214 to 204 margin, the House voted to close the SOA, but in the same vote approved the Pentagon proposal to open WHISC. "New name, same shame," its opponents say. Supporters, however, range in opinion from late Georgia Senator Paul Coverdell, who called the new institute a clone, to Army officials who emphasize that the institute will finally put the Cold War conflict behind it and focus on the needs of Latin America today, which means increased counter-narcotics and human rights instruction.
What follows is an account of an exciting and grueling six-day journey my two colleagues and I made to Fort Benning, Georgia and Washington, D.C. to see the new institute, gather information, speak with powerful and influential people, and uncover the truth about, or at least gain insight into, this controversial and divisive issue.
II. Going South
More than once, Chip Holley, my cameraman, remarked, "We are three totally different individuals, but we get along." He characterized us as the film-maker, the activist, and the biker. I was surprised he called himself a biker rather than a cameraman, videographer or cinematographer, but I realize, having a biker brother, how passionate a man can be about his Harley-Davidson. More than a motorcycle, it is a subculture, a way of life.
The first time I met Chip was at the Oakland Airport Sunday morning. He was waiting in the cold, dressed in black from head to toe like a commando, and surrounded by his gear. When I saw him, I thought it a miracle. Three weeks before the departure date, when I still did not have a cameraperson, I expressed my anxiety to Vivi, who is helping me produce the documentary. I reminded her that she had somehow procured a camera operator just days before the November protest, and urged her to cast her spell again. She told me not to worry. A few days later she hired Chip. When Chip and I spoke about this, he said, "She's very persuasive." (Which is the same remark Christopher Hitchens made after I interviewed him.)
But Chip was also eager for a project like mine. Like almost every cameraperson in the Bay Area, he has to shoot corporate videos to make a living. It is dreary, enervating work videotaping inane CEOs and their hirelings talking in acronym-laced, language-annihilating jargon (I know, I've videotaped some of them myself), but it helps pay the bills. So Chip was ready to shoot something that had meaning, and he was ready to travel.
Chip comes from a military family. One grandfather was a colonel in World War II and Korea, and the other worked for the CIA in the 1960s. His father was a colonel who belonged to JAG (Judge Advocate General), and a very distant relative on his mother's side was General George Patton. Chip, however, who is 35, never joined the military, and is politically moderate. Acknowledging that he is neither as educated nor as radical as Andrés and I, he said, "I'm just bringing the common man into the picture." Because he didn't know anything about the SOA when he began the trip, he promised he'd remain open-minded about it and wait until he was informed enough to hazard an opinion. By journey's end he was ready to share his opinion, and it revealed that the U.S. Army and Congress had shattered most of whatever faith he had in his country.
One of Chip's more peculiar qualities is his determination to quit smoking. His chosen method is not to buy any cigarettes and to hope that the embarrassment of asking for one outweighs the desire to have one. During our time together I never witnessed the success of his method, but I did see he and Major Mariani take many smoke breaks together and become good friends. Chip found the perfect accomplice in Mariani. Born and raised in Puerto Rico, and the new Public Affairs Officer at Fort Benning, he is a friendly and gregarious man with a wry sense of humor who had recently resumed smoking when his wife left him. He'd stand outside Ridgway Hall, smoking and brooding in equal measure, and, wanting company and conversation, he'd offer a cigarette to Chip, who always graciously accepted.
While Chip handled all the technical aspects of the trip--camera, lights, sound--work typically done by three people, Andrés Conteris helped me with logistical matters, strategized with me about the interview topics and questions, interviewed those at WHISC who spoke only Spanish, and provided quite a bit of information about Latin American affairs. Born to a Uruguayan mother and American father, Andrés is bicultural and equally comfortable speaking Spanish and English. He graduated Earlham College in Indiana with a degree in Peace and Global Studies, and earned a M.A. in Religious Studies from Howard University in Washington, D.C. He is, like me, "thirty something."
Andrés' cousin, a Uruguayan citizen and volunteer with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, was murdered by the Contras in 1985. His cousin's father was a political prisoner for eight years during the Uruguayan military dictatorship. These incidents plus a visit that Father Roy made to his college campus galvanized Andrés into a human rights advocate. Over the years he has been arrested numerous times, roughed up on a few occasions, and has been in jail, including a Honduran dungeon twice (when he told me this I envisioned a medieval torture chamber). He has also battled Hodgkin's disease. Recently he fasted for fifty days (a genuine water-only fast), losing sixty pounds, in a protest of the continual American bombing of Vieques, a little semi-inhabited Puerto Rican island that most Americans have never heard of. Employed by the United Methodist Church as a peace and social justice activist, he travels up and down the Americas meeting people, joining demonstrations, aiding movements and talking to journalists and politicians about crucial issues. In January he was honored in Honduras for his years of human rights work in that country.
One of Andrés' more amusing stories concerns a demonstration in front of the Capitol Building in Washington in the late 1980s against further aid to the Nicaraguan Contras. As the sign-carrying demonstrators marched, Andrés noticed the notoriously racist governor of Alabama, Lester Maddox, engaged in a one-man counter-protest. He carried high a sign calling for more aid to the Contras. Andrés promptly said to a policeman that his group had requested and received permission to demonstrate, but had Maddox? No, the officer replied, because one person can protest without permission; two or more people, however, need a permit. Hearing this legal nuance, Andrés left his group and began to shadow Maddox. Wherever Maddox went walked, there was Andrés, right behind him. Maddox grew increasingly irritated until he angrily wheeled around, lifted his wooden signpost, and threatened to swing it at Andrés' head. Andrés hoped he would because then his political career would be over, but the next best thing happened: the policeman told Maddox he would have to stop his demonstration because he did not have a permit. Enraged, Maddox tramped back to his office.
A few years later, in 1990, Andrés was one of the handful of people who first protested against the SOA, and in 1997 he returned, got arrested, and received a Ban and Bar Letter stipulating that if he entered the base within five years he'd face six months in prison and a $5,000 fine.
I met Andrés at November's protest. At first an interviewee, he volunteered his services as a production assistant--even crossing the line, risking arrest (which he did again on this trip)--and was an enormous help. For hours he stood in the rain, holding an umbrella over me as I tried to videotape the demonstration with an exposed camera. Over the last few months we have gotten together a few times and become good friends. Shortly before we were to meet in the South, Andrés spent a week in San Francisco, where we planned our trip, worked at a friend's ethnic art show, and joined a spirited FTAA (Free Trade Area of the Americas) protest downtown.
Early in the morning of Sunday, March 4, Chip and I flew from Oakland to Birmingham, Alabama, and Andrés flew from Baltimore to Birmingham. I have always found the South a little disquieting. When I'm there, I realize just how erroneous is the title "United States." The states are not united (in more ways than one), the Civil War is not over, and, I regret to say, the South is winning. The U.S. population is shifting southward; based on the 2000 census, Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, and Arizona will gain Congressional representatives, while New York, Pennsylvania, and Massachusetts will lose them; and the last Northerner to be elected president was John F. Kennedy. Can a Northern candidate again win a presidential election? Now we have a president who spoke at Bob Jones "University," a South Carolina institution which forbids interracial dating, and an Attorney General and Secretary of the Interior who have praised the Confederacy.
I knew I was in the South when I saw an "Amnesty Box" outside the airport's x-ray check-point. A person who comes to catch a flight but has forgotten to leave his gun at home (who can be this stupid?) can anonymously ask a security guard to unlock the box so he (I'll presume that women aren't this stupid) can discard his weapon (it's deposit but no return), because if he is caught trying to get to a gate with a gun in his possession, he will be fined $10,000. When a Southern woman innocently questioned me about the box, I said, "I've never seen one before. But this is the South. There's a different culture down here. Guns are everywhere." Feeling that her culture had been slighted, which it was, the woman turned away from me in a huff and marched off. But I was disturbed far less by the Amnesty Box than by the absence of Martin Luther King. No photograph, no plaque, no statue, no painting--nothing. Not even a postcard. Like a rebel against Big Brother in 1984, he had been excised from history. He therefore never existed.
We rented a car and drove the 150 miles through the drizzle and late day gloom to Columbus, Georgia, where we spent three nights in a Days Inn motel on Victory Drive a couple of miles from Fort Benning. One morning I noticed a group of elderly folks milling about outside one of the motel's doors. They looked, like so many older Americans, especially in the South, battered by life, prematurely aged, and perhaps ill. On the door was a sign reading Free Asbestos Testing and Health Exam, probably sponsored by a local church. I thought of the price lower and middle class people pay for believing in rugged individualism, detesting the government and rejecting environmental regulations. Their warm embrace of industry only shortens and immiserates their lives. They have failed to recognize that only the government, no matter how corrupt, can protect them from the predatory nature of corporations. The South is notorious not only for its lax enforcement of civil rights laws but for its aversion to anything deemed "environmental," and so there are only voluntary (and thus ignored) industrial emission controls in Texas and Superfund sites all across the South, and asbestos, which was removed from buildings twenty years ago in most parts of the country, remains a serious health problem.
Military bases are also common in the South, and they are some of our country's worst polluters, though this fact is generally concealed from the public. At Fort Benning, I caught only glimpses of denuded landscapes and dumping grounds as we drove from appointment to appointment. A documentary could easily be made about the environmental impact of military installations. Start shooting and ask questions later.
The really odd thing about our experience at Fort Benning was that everyone seemed to know who we were, even the employees of a pizza parlor. Chip heard one of patrons say, as he passed a table, "There goes the '48 Hours' crew." Everyone also knew that Mel Gibson and his team were on the base shooting a movie; apparently yet another Hollywood movie that romanticizes and glorifies military life, and one that will no doubt inspire many American youths to become cannon fodder in some conflict they know little about.
After holding nine interviews and getting classroom footage and exterior shots at Fort Benning, we drove, on Wednesday, the 800 miles to Baltimore (to pick up Andrés' car at the airport) and back to Washington. As we drove through the South, we were astonished by the scale of development (inter-states being widened, subdivisions and shopping malls being built, woods being turned into industrial parks) and the sheer number of gaudy billboards, and dismayed by all the Bush-Cheney 2000 signs and Confederate flags we spotted--in backyards, above stores, in open fields. Racism, ignorance and nostalgia--this woeful amalgam is what generates the lynch mob, and what compelled Mark Twain a century ago to rename our country, "The United States of Lyncherdom." (Today, of course, we generally don't lynch; we execute. Different means to the same end. Some call it progress.)
In Washington, we interviewed four Congressmen and an independent journalist, and videotaped some sights. We spent two evenings in a motel, another terrible Days Inn, in a rough noisy neighborhood. Below us was a crack den that operated all night, and a number of rooms were used for drug deals and sexual transactions. Late Friday afternoon, Chip and I were ready to leave town for sunny and warm California; we left Andrés in Washington, where he is based, and flew to San Jose.
I returned home to San Francisco with nine and a half hours of footage, much of it fascinating, disturbing, enlightening. In November, at the annual anti-SOA protest at Fort Benning, my camerawoman and I shot many hours of the action and interviews with demonstrators; now, with plenty of videotape of Army officials and conservative Congressmen explaining why the school is so important, I have the other side of the issue. As I gathered the material in support of the school, the Army and U.S. policies in Latin America, I grew troubled and not a little terrified. I had run headfirst into the military-industrial complex, the Establishment, the World System, the Imperium, the Juggernaut. Call it what you will, but I felt its tremendous power. The best way I can describe this power is by first turning to one of our country's leading novelists.
III. The Force of Evil
Robert Stone's 1981 political novel, A Flag for Sunrise, contains what I consider one of the most compelling passages in recent American fiction. The novel follows the fortunes of three Americans--Frank Holliwell, a 40-year-old liberal anthropologist who regrets having worked for the CIA in Vietnam [2]; Sister Justin Feeney, a radicalized 28-year-old nun who works to help the poor (like the four church-women who were murdered in 1980); and Pablo Tabor, a young drug-addicted soldier of fortune--in an unspecified war-ravaged, death squad-terrorized [3] Central American country clearly modeled on El Salvador.
Halfway through the story, Holliwell decides to go scuba diving for the first time in many years. Alone he explores a coral reef until it ends abruptly; beyond is the "abyss" of the vast mysterious ocean. He goes over the edge and down to a hundred and twenty feet, where most color is lost, and where he feels exhilarated. When he begins to climb, he sees flashes all around him--the bodies of fish in desperate flight. He, too, is frightened. "And then it was as if the ocean itself had begun to tremble....Turning full circle, he saw the same shudder pass over all the living things around him--a terror had struck the sea, an invisible shadow, a silence within a silence" (227). There is, of course, a shark in the depths, but this shark is metaphorical as well as literal. As Mr. Heath, a British entrepreneur and death squad supporter, says to Holliwell later in the story, "I'm the wrath of God in my tiny way. I don't go seeking out the misguided and the perverse, not at all. Those afflicted find me. I'm the shark on the bottom of the lagoon. You have to sink a long damn way before you get to me. When you do, I'm waiting" (402). What Holliwell has encountered, both in the sea and in society, is the force of evil in the world:
The stuff was aqueous, waterborne like cholera or schistosomiasis. He had been around; he had seen it many times before. Among swarms of quivering fish, in rice paddies, shining in gutters. It was as strong as anything in the world. Stronger perhaps, when the illusions were stripped away. It glistened in a billion pairs of eyes. Comforting to think of it as some aberration, a perversion of nature. But it was the real thing, he thought. The thing itself. (428-29) [4]
Stone is a Manichean: he sees the world as divided between light and darkness, good and evil, with each struggling for supremacy. Based on his experiences in Vietnam and El Salvador, and as a resident in the U.S., he believes evil is pervasive, implacable, and very nearly irresistible--and, for people like Mr. Heath and Mr. Soyer, wondrously profitable. Strip away such comforting illusions as "freedom" and "democracy" and "justice," and you come face to face with evil, with the naked, oppressive, rapacious power of the State.
Like Holliwell, I had encountered the force of evil many times before, in many places, in many forms, but a single example, not of a person but of a symbolic object, will serve to illustrate the fundamental nature of it. The time: 1986. The place: the American Embassy in Nouakchott, capital of Mauritania, one of the poorest countries in the world. I was there, as a Peace Corps volunteer, to meet with some venal official I no longer remember. I marveled at the little piece of America tucked away behind walls, fences, and hedges, and protected by African security guards: a large pool and patio, hot tub, tennis court, volleyball court, garden, water sprinklers, barbecue, fully-equipped bar, TV and outdoor stereo system. A tanned, attractive woman in a bikini and high heels shuffled around the pool, sipping a cold drink, and complained, "Steak, chicken, and fish...steak, chicken, and fish--that's all I eat here. I'm sick of it." I walked to the edge of this El Dorado and, looking beyond the six-foot concrete wall topped with strands of barbed wire and shards of broken glass, I saw, thirty feet away, in the lifeless sand and dust of the Sahara, a small wind-shredded tent and beside it a mother, a father, and a boy of maybe five or six years. They were Black Moors, or Haratin, the lowest caste in the country; in more remote regions, they were still slaves of the White Moors. This was the Holy Family, poor and forgotten. The mother was sewing a threadbare blanket, the father trying to collect enough charcoal to make tea, the boy petting the family's two scrawny goats. He was emaciated, with a distended stomach and open sores on his scalp. While this family struggled mightily day after day just to stay alive, the woman and her associates on the other side of the wall, who reveled in luxury and indolence, bemoaned their limited diet.
It is this wall which separates those who have too much from those who have nothing at all, and military and police forces are formed (increasingly so by corporations and other private interests) to make sure this wall continues to stand.
The separation of the Haves from the Have-nots, and the ambition to maintain this class divide, is fundamental to the American tradition--or perhaps it the fundamental American tradition. The U.S. has been, from its inception, an oligarchy or plutocracy. Former U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark says, in the splendid 1992 documentary, "The Panama Deception":
We are a plutocracy. We ought to face it. A country in which wealth controls....Even our democratic processes are hardly that because money dominates politics and we know it. Through politics it dominates government and it dominates the media.
Democracy in America, as the Chinese government reminded us a few weeks ago, is but "a game for the rich." For James Madison, "the father of the Constitution," the primary responsibility of government is "to protect the minority of the opulent against the majority." According to Alexander Hamilton, the true father of our country, the people are a "great beast" that must be tamed. And John Jay, President of the Continental Congress and the first Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, declared, "The people who own the country ought to govern it." [5]
Moving ahead in time, our oligarchic tradition is unambiguously articulated in a number of post-World War II American reports and pro-nouncements. In 1948, George Kennan, who at the time headed the State Department's planning staff, said:
We have about 50 percent of the world's wealth, but only 6.3 of its population....In this situation, we cannot fail to be the object of envy and resentment. Our real task in the coming period is to devise a pattern of relationships which will permit us to maintain this position of disparity without positive detriment to our national security....We need not deceive ourselves that we can afford today the luxury of altruism and world- benefaction. We should cease to talk about vague and...unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards and democratization. The day is not far off when we are going to have to deal in straight power concepts.
By 1954, the Communist threat had been hyperbolized into an "implacable enemy" to justify Kennan's unscrupulous policy objectives, and so the Hoover Commission Report states:
It is now clear that we are facing an implacable enemy whose avowed objective is world domination....There are no rules in such a game. Hitherto accepted norms of human conduct do not apply....If the United States is to survive, long-standing American concepts of fair play must be reconsidered....We must learn to subvert, sabotage, and destroy our enemies by more clever, sophisticated, more effective methods than those used against us. [6]
This is precisely what we did in Guatemala in 1954. The implacable enemy was Guatemala's first experiment with democracy. Commenting on the CIA-led coup, Latin American scholar Piero Gleijeses writes: "Just as the Indian was branded a savage beast to justify his exploitation, so those who sought social reform were branded communists to justify their persecution." [7]
In 1979, there was, however, an excellent opportunity for the U.S. to reconsider its position on Communism. President Carter saw Daniel Ortega's Sandinista Revolution as a positive step for Nicaragua, and he had finally imposed sanctions on the murderous Duarte dictatorship in El Salvador, but in 1980 Carter lost the election and the Council for Inter-American Security published the notorious Santa Fe Statement, which became the blueprint for the Latin American policies of the Reagan and Bush administrations, including the training, at the SOA, of "Contras" (our very own insurgents, Reagan's "freedom fighters") to fight freedom and undermine the Sandinista government. The Statement asserted that Cuba (and now Sandinista-led Nicaragua) threatened to conquer all of Latin America and that liberation theology was a disguise for Communist subversion. Not surprisingly, liberation theologian Archbishop Romero and the four American churchwomen were assassinated at this time, and El Salvador became, for the duration of the decade, a bloodbath. [8]
The U.S.-sponsored reign of terror in Latin America shifted, in the 1990s, from El Salvador and Guatemala to Colombia, and soon it will expand beyond the Earth and into space. Led by Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, [9] the U.S. is preparing to violate international law and militarize space. Making the controversial ground-based national missile defense shield seem almost quaint, the U.S. wants the capability to wage space-age counterinsurgency war. In its "Vision for 2020," which serves to update Kennan and the Hoover Commission, the U.S. Space Command emphasizes how the global economy will widen the gulf between "the Haves" and the "Have-nots." Our "national interests, both military and economic," will be preserved, however, by deploying space-based weaponry and surveillance with which we can "control space" and, from space, "dominate" the Earth below. It will be the Truman Doctrine modified by the "[Colin] Powell doctrine" (decimate the enemy quickly--from the air--before anyone can protest) and carried out by twenty-first-century weapons. [10]
Possessing such grim, distressing knowledge (excepting "Vision for 2020," which I learned of after the trip), I went to Fort Benning knowing I would hear a different tale, a different history--the "official" one. My expectations were met. Every Army officer chanted the same mantra: We have, in our model democracy, "civilian control of the military," and this is the fundamental principle we are teaching Latin American soldiers. It was stupefying to hear them present a blatant lie as the truth. It was disconcertingly Orwellian. If the military is civilian-controlled, then War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength., and Two Plus Two is Five.
Further, I encountered at the base a tremendous coldness and heartlessness, and a rejection of feeling and emotion. I interacted with calculating minds but not with hearts and souls, and learned that the intellect can always justify the most heinous crime so long as feeling is repressed. The officers could have been machines. I was told Father Roy and the other protesters rely on emotion, but the Army acts from reason and logic. But what is reason without feeling? I think of Wordsworth's admonition, "Let this be the hour of feeling," and of the old Chinese proverb, "The heart is the emperor, the mind is its servant." The greatest evil is the abrogation of all human feeling.
I will begin my account with the commanding general of Fort Benning. When I first saw Major General John Le Moyne at the press conference last November, where he bullied a fawning Associated Press reporter, was visibly irritated at having to deal with a mass protest and its aftermath, and said "Roy's thesis is based on emotion and falsehoods," I thought, "Here is a killer." He had a face like a clenched fist. I pictured him in Vietnam doing what Oliver North did: jumping out from behind trees and slitting Vietcong throats just for the thrill. Two weeks before I left for Georgia, I learned that Le Moyne is indeed a killer--a war criminal and mass murderer to be precise--though the Hoover Commission would, I presume, declare him a hero. In a long, finely detailed article, "Overwhelming Force," [11] Seymour M. Hersh, one of the few good investigative journalists left in America (he exposed the My Lai Massacre), reveals that General Barry McCaffrey and then-Colonel Le Moyne committed war crimes after the Gulf War's cease-fire. Le Moyne, as commander of the 1st Brigade of the 24th Infantry Division, gave the orders to destroy a hospital bus filled with 382 wounded Iraqi prisoners and gun down twenty unarmed Iraqi civilians waving a white flag. He may have also launched the rocket that destroyed a bus containing an undetermined number of civilians and children. He murdered the innocent...and the Army made him a general! What does this say about military values, about American values?
It took me weeks, and many phone calls and e-mails, to set up an interview with Le Moyne through his aide Rich McDowell, and now I was in his spacious office listening to him proudly declare that he's a member of Amnesty International, and say things like, "We believe in the inherent rights of man," we wish to "treat with dignity the individual person," and how the SOA has spread democracy and respect for human rights throughout Latin America. As he carried on about the Army's values of respect and honor and selfless service, and how the Army continually evolves as it learns from its mistakes, I said to myself, "You fucking liar. You dirty murdering sonofabitch. You should spend the rest of your life in jail. The prisoners were tattered, exhausted, starving, and were consuming food and water given to them by sympathetic American soldiers--and you butchered them, ripped them apart, machine-gunned them--at a thousand rounds a minute--from Bradley fighting vehicles, and then during the subsequent investigation you intimidated your subordinates into silence. You evil bastard."
I was ill-at-ease the moment I entered in his office. I was in the lion's den. The burly Le Moyne swaggered and smiled half-gleefully, half-malevolently, and gestured like a dictator to his underlings. My only solace was that he couldn't physically intimidate me; I clearly surprised and chagrined him by being the bigger man. So rather than play the thug, he put on his glasses, at least for a few minutes, and became the philosopher-soldier. He sat across his conference table from me and said that he was "taking a risk" by talking to me. I thought of how enraged he must still be at Hersh. He dictated the terms of the discussion, giving me only twenty minutes (though I managed to get thirty), and said he wouldn't answer any questions off the topic of the SOA and the protest. I asked him about Plan Colombia, but he refused to comment beyond saying that he had visited Colombia as a teenager and found it both stunningly beautiful and stunningly violent. He wanted to answer only the questions I had sent him--that is, the questions he had prepared for. I sensed this would happen, but I could do nothing about it, for he asked to see my questions before he consented to an interview.
I chuckled at his response to my question on how soldiers learn democracy at the school. He said the most effective way Latin American soldiers learn about American democracy is not through SOA/WHISC courses but by visiting Columbus, staying for a while with local families (he dismissed the language barrier as insignificant), and watching MTV and CNN! I thought of those parts of Columbus which adjoin the base, areas filled with bars, strip clubs, massage parlors, tattoo joints, pawn shops, and fast-food restaurants, and had to admit they probably were the best way for Latin Americans to discover that peculiar brand of democracy found in the U.S. [12]
I really wanted to ask Le Moyne my final question--one I didn't send him-- that would have had him respond to Hersh's charges. I wanted to see him squirm. For days I had considered this question and his possible reactions, but when I sat across the table from him, I decided not to. Was I a coward? Perhaps. But I knew he wouldn't answer it, and he'd kick me off the base immediately when I had several important interviews scheduled for the next day. I had to be cautious and agonizingly respectful toward him ("General...," "Sir...") if I was to get the footage I needed at the base.
During the interview, McDowell was writing notes and had his tape recorder on. (I wondered if someone in a secret subterranean windowless room at the Pentagon would be listening to my interview anytime soon.) Another aide stood close by. Still another aide entered the room twice to pass messages to Le Moyne. When the interview was over and the camera shut off, Le Moyne loosened up a bit and said he trusted I had the character and integrity to present the Army's views fairly and accurately. If I don't do this, he said, with a demonic smile, "I will hound you for the rest of your life." Yes, I'm sure he would.
Though Le Moyne's threat, and brazen hypocrisy, have troubled me since our meeting, I have been far more disturbed by my two-hour discussion with Colonel Glenn Weidner. Le Moyne can perhaps be dismissed as a "stupid infantryman" who has done astonishingly well for himself, as Major Blair contends, but Weidner is a force to be reckoned with. He is living proof of Hannah Arendt's theory of the "banality of evil"; he is like Joseph Conrad's Mr. Jones in Victory, the evil intelligence which is deadly and unavoidable; and he is like General Cummings in Norman Mailer's The Naked and the Dead, the intellectual and "realist" who understands that "the entire historical process has been working toward greater and greater consolidation of power" (321). Through the character of Cummings, Mailer explores the nature and menace of fascism--and, as I spoke with Weidner, I found myself doing the same. After hearing just a few words, I thought of Noam Chomsky's incisive remark that "The Nazis won the war"; and Orson Welles, in his post-World War II radio broadcasts, warning Americans of the threat of fascism at home; and the chilling words of General Cummings:
The concept of fascism, far sounder than communism if you consider it, for it's grounded firmly in men's actual natures, merely started in the wrong country, in a country which did not have enough intrinsic potential power to develop completely. In Germany with that basic frustration of limited physical means there were bound to be excesses. But the dream, the concept was sound enough....there's a process of osmosis. America is going to absorb that dream, it's in the business of doing it now. (321)
There is no qualitative difference between Weidner saying that the occupation by people of property not their own gives the State the right to use force, the State "has a right to defend itself," and "When one chooses violence as a means of redistributing wealth, one engenders violence," and Cummings saying, in words that could have been uttered by George Kennan:
The only morality of the future is a power morality, and a man who cannot find its adjustment to it is doomed. There's one thing about power. It can flow only from the top down. When there are little surges of resistance at the middle levels, it merely calls for more power to be directed downward, to burn it out. (323)
When Lieutenant Hearn reminds Cummings, "We're not in the future yet," the general instantly replies, "You can consider the Army...a preview of the future" (324). Consider the events subsequent to the year Mailer wrote his novel, and you discover that every "little surge of resistance"--the civil rights movement in the South, grass-roots democracy movements in Latin America, the actions of Ken Saro-Wiwa and his fellow environmentalists in Nigeria, the demonstrations at Fort Benning, and so forth--has been met by force, by the determined downward push of power.
Order must be maintained: that is the dream of the State, and that is Weidner's obsession. On his desk was The Anarchical Society, written by some corporate-sponsored hack (they abound today) who starts with the lie--fabricated by the American Right in the 1880s to undermine the burgeoning labor movement--that anarchism is disorder and violence. For Weidner the highest virtues are not faith, hope, and charity, but law and order, the highest aspiration not "Know thyself" but Know Thy Place.
Weidner sees the world from only one perspective, that of the military. He has had, as an adult, no life experience outside the Army, and thus no opportunity to look at it from a critical distance. Hence he can say such things as "The U.S. military is universally admired for its accountability" without a trace of hesitancy or irony. At the age of eighteen he went to West Point (as did General Cummings), and has spent most of his career commanding artillery battalions and representing the Army in such places as Panama, Chile, and Honduras. As I read his SOA biography, I found it interesting that he never served in Vietnam and that he has been "decorated by the Republics of Honduras, Ecuador and Brazil." Decorated by whom? By the people? By church and labor and human rights groups? Or by the rulers and robber barons? I think the answer is clear. Weidner has visited every Latin American nation except Cuba, but has never met the Latin American people. As a U.S. military officer, he has traveled in a protective bubble, living lavishly, meeting only heads of state, military leaders, and business tycoons--and so he sees nothing wrong with capitalism and globalization. But he knows nothing about the lives and needs of campesinos. They are, in his eyes, no more than a faceless roiling mob prone to insurgency.
Weidner, as a good soldier, was ready for me. He had been given the questions I sent to Le Moyne and Downie and, after a week of reading and research, his desk was covered with carefully marked books, essays, and articles. His computer was on, and he eagerly showed me two elaborate graphs, of El Salvador and Guatemala, which, to his mind, prove that human rights abuses by the armed forces significantly declined when the number of students attending the SOA increased--therefore U.S. engagement with Latin American militaries promotes respect for human rights. He didn't, however, provide me with the source of his statistics.
He overwhelmed me with information, arcane military history, and sciolistic philosophical digressions, even mentioning Croce and Kant. He waged war but I felt, like Hearn before Cummings, inadequately armed. After two solid weeks of frantically arranging and preparing for the trip, numerous sleepless nights, seventeen hours of work the day before, and not enough calories consumed, I was spent, my head ached and my stomach throbbed. Also, my knowledge of Latin America diplomacy is not extensive. As Weidner predictably rambled on and on about the Latin American transition to democracy and "cooperative or human security," I realized he was the consummate public relations officer, the consummate salesman for the Pentagon. Major Blair points out that because the Army has not fought a ground war since Vietnam, which was an unpopular war, it has specialized not in combat training but in public relations, the intention being that it should never have to fight an unpopular war again.
Further, the Army must find ways to justify the Pentagon's outrageous budget. If there's no "enemy" to be found, one will be conveniently manufactured. Once it was Indians; then it was Communists; in the late '60s it was anyone (particularly black radicals and intellectuals) who questioned authority; today it is "narco-traffickers"; tomorrow it will be someone else. Judging by our plan to militarize space, I suppose we are preparing for the Green Menace, little green men, heavily armed, who want our women, our resources, and our MTV. As we wait for the Green Menace, we may make do with the Yellow Menace--no, not the Vietnamese again but the Chinese. As I write this, the U.S. is ready to anoint China the next "Evil Empire."
There is always an enemy to be fought, Weidner believes, and for a long time the enemy was Communism--and it still is in some form and to some degree. Everything he said either sprang from or came back to that old Red Menace. 2001 had become 1951. A Panama newspaper calling the SOA "School of Assassins"? TASS, the Soviet news agency, coined this term and disseminated it to discredit the U.S. in Latin America. Counterinsurgency? It's meant to stop Communists and protect our "national security." Guatemala in 1954 and Chile in 1970? Communist states that we didn't topple but "we were glad to see it happen." The Cuban Revolution? Castro's aim was to conquer all of Latin America; we had to stop him. Jack Nelson-Pallmeyer, clergyman and author of School of Assassins? He spent years in Nicaragua so he was brainwashed by the Sandinistas. The demonstrators? Dupes of Soviet propaganda--their bodies snatched, in effect, by the devious Red invaders. Clearly the colonel had seen too many science-fiction films of the 1950s.
I was in the presence of a madman. In a just society, Weidner would be the one behind bars and Charles Liteky--the decorated Vietnam veteran and priest currently serving a one-year sentence at Lompoc State Penitentiary for peacefully protesting at Fort Benning--would be free.
After the camera was turned off, I read Weidner a passage from Christopher Hitchens' devastating two-part article in Harper's magazine, "The Case Against Henry Kissinger" (who, as our number one war criminal, makes Le Moyne look like a choir boy). The passage, a CIA internal memo which was recently declassified, shows precisely how the U.S. violently overthrew Salvador Allende's democratically-elected government in Chile. Weidner denied American culpability and quickly changed the subject.
As we were leaving his office, Weidner took his argument to an absurd and nauseating extreme. With a new intensity in his cold, dark, piscine eyes, he claimed that every day he gets at least fifteen phone calls from Latin Americans, mostly wives of students, thanking him profusely not for his work ("The calls have nothing to do with me") but for the school which has brought so much joy and satisfaction into their lives. He then reached for a glossy magazine he published--the final, retrospective edition of Adelante, celebrating the 54-year history of the SOA--turned to a color photograph of the wives of SOA's instructors dressed traditionally in front of the school, and said, with a surprising degree of emotion--yes, he was relying on emotion to get his point across--that he is sick of the protesters attacking these people, that such attacks are racially-motivated. "No," I answered, overlooking his vile remark about racism and noticing that Andrés was ashen with disgust, "the protesters protest against the soldiers, not their wives." "Same thing," Weidner declared.
Andrés, Chip and I could not leave Weidner's office, and the Infantry Hall, fast enough. We were glad to be free of him and out in the fresh air.
Unlike Weidner and Le Moyne, Colonel Richard Downie, the Director of WHISC, is likable: behind the uniform and rank there's a real person, with a sense of humor and, I think, an earnest desire to "understand" the perspective of the protesters--though he believes that only "intellectual disa-greement" separates SOA Watch and the Army. I wondered what he would say "off the record," over a few beers at a local tavern. After last November's press conference, Weidner said to Andrés, "off the record," that the military is "institutionalized violence." If Weidner could say this, who knows what Downie would say.
Downie was our first interview, at seven o'clock Monday morning. Short, fit, with a chiseled face and a buzz cut, he looked like an exemplary product of military discipline. Despite possessing a doctorate in international relations, he was slightly nervous; I figured he was pondering why he was being grilled about the school when he was barely six weeks into his tenure as its director.
His on the record remarks were predictably bland. He simply toed the company line. He didn't want to discuss the SOA because he wasn't affiliated with the school and because WHISC starts with a "blank page." The past is past, it's irrelevant--except for the My Lai Massacre, which is used, proclaims every Army official I've encountered, as a "teaching tool." In Downie's words, the Army's murder of hundreds of unarmed Vietnamese civilians was wrong because the action did not "benefit" us (well, maybe he's not so likable).
He acknowledged that Colombia has the most students (137) at WHISC, but when I asked him why the Latin American nations with the worst human rights records have consistently sent the most soldiers to the school (such as Bolivia under General Banzer and Nicaragua under Somoza), he was artfully evasive. His thorough training in public relations was coming in handy.
The interview left me perplexed about the "War on Drugs." We are, ostensibly, fighting narco-traffickers in Colombia, but Downie said only five to ten percent of WHISC students are enrolled in drug interdiction courses. There are 37 courses offered at the institute, but only one is counterdrug, while another is being developed. So what are we teaching Colombian students?
I requested, and received, a list of course titles, but was told the course descriptions had not yet been written--which I found strange. All I have is a list of banal, cryptic titles like "Joint Operations Course," "Democratic Sustainment Course," "Intelligence Officer Course," and "Cadet Leadership Development Course." I have little idea of what is actually taught in these classes, and I suspect the Army prefers it that way.
After Downie, Andrés interviewed Colonel Patricio Haro of Ecuador, the Deputy Director of the institute. He is a short, dapper man with an air of formality, dark, penetrating eyes, and a single speck of gray on the left side of his head. When I intro-duced myself, he looked at me suspiciously, staring at me unblinkingly for a moment, and asked Andrés who our intended audience is. When Haro heard it would be the American general public, he sat down.
Intelligent and nationalistic, Haro made it clear that the military defends the rights of indigenous peoples in Ecuador. Although he articulated a concern for the poor, he didn't want to discuss the recent repression of them in his country.
The other three Latin Americans we interviewed also proved to be nationalistic and staunch defenders of WHISC. Early Tuesday morning, Chip and I set up in a corner of the institute library, which was as small as an elementary school library but with many computers. Two-thirds of the books were in Spanish and most had not been checked out in twenty years, if at all. I was surprised to find two copies of Pallmeyer's book. It appeared untouched. Over the course of a couple of hours, as I perused the bookshelves (finding a few radical texts but no shortage of tomes on the evils of Communism, socialism, and anarchism), Major Mariani brought us two instructors and a student to interview. I had hoped to see a roster of students and faculty and then randomly choose a few names to interview, but was told it wasn't possible. Nor was it possible, because of their fear of the FARC and ELN guerrillas, to interview a Colombian soldier. Each person had to be cleared--and probably briefed--before being interviewed, which was done by Andrés in Spanish, while I sat off to the side with Mariani and lamented my inability to speak the language.
First was a Costa Rican Comisionado (or Lt. Col. here) named Carlos Alvarado, a high-ranking official in the police department. In his thirties, bespectacled, wearing a freshly pressed blue uniform, energetic and amiable, I pictured him more easily carrying a book than a gun. He is proud of his country for abolishing the military in 1947 (which is one reason Costa Rica has been, over the last fifty years, the Latin American country least cited for human rights abuses), though Andrés tells me the Costa Rican police are like an army--ubiquitous and often repressive.
Alvarado wore a colorful patch on his right shoulder that I had Chip get a close-up of. It was a scene Norman Rockwell could have painted. A smiling, lantern-jawed policeman, with the broad shoulders of a comic book superhero, is shaking the hands of two very happy children. All three are white and Anglicized. The rising sun is beaming behind the gracious officer, producing a halo effect. A society marked by law and order, where authority is respected, it is the Costa Rican police department's vision of paradise.
Next was a young, poker-faced Guatemalan soldier, and WHISC student, Major Oscar Lorenzana, who looked like he's only comfortable with a gun in his hands. Reserved and cautious, he didn't wish to discuss human rights violations in his country, where 200,000 people were murdered and disappeared by American-trained and funded death squads between 1954, when the CIA overthrew the democratically-elected Arbenz government, and 1990.
Last was Captain Moraima Varga, a lawyer and human rights instructor from Venezuela, presently one of the more democratic Latin American nations. When I saw her, I turned to Mariani and said, "Sign me up. I'm joining the Army. I want to be in her class." She was very pretty and charming, even though she wore baggy camouflage fatigues. Now I really regretted not being able to speak Spanish. When she sat in the chair and expressed concern about her hair, I pulled Andrés' cap off, exposing his bald head, and said to her, "You have nothing to worry about." Chip then pulled off his hat and I pointed to my own time-ravaged scalp. The three of us must have been a sad sight. Fortunately, Varga appeared sympathetic.
After these interviews, Major Mariani and I walked through the building looking for classes to videotape. Outside of one of the main offices, I saw a table with religious propaganda on it: copies of Our Daily Bread in both English and Spanish. I paused for a moment as I grabbed a copy and thought of either the incongruity, or the perfect logic, of having Christian devotional literature in a military combat school. "Onward Christian Soldiers" indeed. I remembered Weidner mentioning something about the Christian doctrine of a "just war"--and that I had forgotten to tell him that a war is never just but a revolution always is. Turning in Our Daily Bread to the page for that day, March 6th, I read this tripe: "God always rewards hidden spirituality. He hears every private prayer; He recognizes every secret gift; He notes and richly rewards each unseen act of devotion." If someone really believes this, he or she has to explain how this omnipresent, omniscient, omnipotent God who is so active in world affairs allowed 70,000 Salvadorans to perish in the 1980s.
We videotaped a few minutes of two classes in session: the Human Rights Instructor Course and the Commanding General and Staff officer Course, the institute's longest course at 49 weeks. I regret that we missed the opportunity to shoot footage in the class that was studying how to wage war from outer space. I'd love to know how democracy and human rights are taught in that course. Can it be that U.S. Space Command plays a role in the development of WHISC's curriculum?
I have been in many classrooms, as both student and instructor, but I have never seen a more lifeless and fatuous class than the Human Rights Instructor Course. There were only four students in the class, and two of them, Colombian women, were giving a presentation. There were also three ob-servers. I don't yet know what was said, for it was in Spanish, but I saw that little actually happened. The class spent as much time in break as in session. It seemed like a charade, with everyone simply going through the motions.
The officer course, on the other hand, had thirty students in it. Most were attentive but only a few bothered to write any notes. Major Blair contends that the school is an excuse for an all-expense-paid vacation offered to Latin American soldiers so they can come to the States, buy goods (cars, computers, clothes, etc.), deposit drug money, learn the latest killing and espionage techniques, and go home to do our dirty work--which is counter-insurgency or perpetual "low-intensity conflict" (LIC), carried out against domestic enemies like intellectuals and missionaries. Critics call it the "culture of terror."
A slight majority of Congresspersons, however, see the school in an entirely different light. In Washington, I met two of the school's most avid supporters, Republican Mac Collins and Democrat Sanford Bishop, Jr. of Georgia, both of whose districts include part of Fort Benning.
Collins is a good ol' boy who, despite never finishing grade school, made a small fortune in the trucking business. He's an American success story: not rags-to-enlightenment or rags-to-compassion but rags-to-riches, for American "success" is always pecuniary. Around sixty years of age, and a Congressman since 1993, he's a large, sluggish man who speaks in a soft drawl and probably grew up idolizing George Wallace and Bull Connor. His office looks barely used, as if it's only there to entertain visitors. Seeing few books or papers, I imagined him spending time either cleaning his gun or sleeping behind his desk. His aide and speechwriter, Doug Graham, who is one small step to the left of Attila the Hun and enjoys calling his ideological opponents "scumbags," told me on the phone once that if I started sounding "like a Leftist" during the interview, Collins would pull his gun on me. There was a trace of seriousness in his little joke.
During the long process of securing an interview with Collins, I found my several conver-sations with Graham intriguing. He distrusted me at first. His Republican paranoia showed when he learned I live in San Francisco. "I know what that means," he said. When he found out I teach English at a university, he probably thought I was a Com-munist insurgent trying to take away his gun and his wife. But I kept calling, kept badgering him to grant me an interview with Collins, and as we talked he constantly tested me by calling liberal politicians and journalists various foul names, denouncing Father Roy as a demagogue no better and probably no poorer than Jesse Jackson (nothing like a little racism to leaven the conversation), and espousing the red, white and blue Republican conservative cause. He wanted me to lose my temper so he could hang-up but I somehow kept my composure (he couldn't see me grimace or clench my fist). Clearly I did some-thing right because he ultimately scheduled the interview, offered his home if I needed a place to stay, gave me his home number, informed his wife that I would call from the road for information, and came to work early to let us in to Collins' office. Our enormous ideological differences notwithstanding, I actually came to like Doug in some strange way and wished I had time while in the capital to have a relaxing conversation with him and discover why he is so far to the right.
As Graham surprised me, Collins surprised Chip. I had worried how I was going to break the ice with the Congressman, but Chip did this for me. He and Collins immediately started talking about Harley-Davidsons, and with the enthusiasm of teenagers. If Collins was made uncomfortable by the presence of Andrés and I, he was put at ease by my biker cameraman.
Collins doesn't know very much but he has compensatory faith. Though he has no idea who will be on the WHISC Board of Visitors, and how they will be appointed, he has "confidence" in the school: "My confidence in the school is in the United States Army and in how the United States Army conducts itself."
His main point was that the protesters dwell only on the negatives. He wants them to also talk about the good things graduates have done (other than occasional disaster relief, I'm still waiting to hear of these good things). He asks, "Why does the Church only focus on the negative?" As for Father Roy, Collins would prefer him to address local problems: "Why don't [sic] Reverend Bourgeois become involved in the problems that are happening to our young in our schools?"
Interestingly, Collins said he wasn't aware of any Communist infiltration or influence in SOA Watch. This refutes what Weidner told me. Collins also said something bizarre: that Moakley undertook his investigation in 1989 only to satisfy his constituents. It was simply a politically expedient move.
I have to admit that I didn't dislike old Mac Collins. He isn't very bright, and he probably hasn't done one good thing during his eight years in Congress, but he is who he is--genuine, unsophisticated, affable, and candid. Bishop is just the opposite. He's enigmatic and largely inscrutable. I don't know who the real Sanford Bishop is. What can be said about a man who was a civil rights attorney working with black and white death row inmates but who is now in favor of capital punishment? What can be said about a black politician who claims to have never heard of Mumia Abu-Jamal, the former Black Panther on Death Row who was framed for the 1981 murder of a Philadelphia police officer?
Bishop is a black "blue dog" Democrat but he's anything but a colorful character. I spent over an hour with him and never saw him joke or smile, except derisively, when the subject was the protesters. He could have been made of cardboard. Blue dog Democrats are Southerners who are known to be socially liberal but fiscally conservative--if such a combination is logically possible. I'd say they're just confused. Bishop is a shrewd man, however. He is really a Republican, and as right-wing as they come (he was one of only ten Democrats to vote for Bush's supply-side, trickle-down Tax Cut, which will only facilitate the upward redistribution of wealth), but he ran as a Democrat to make sure blacks would vote overwhelmingly for him. His extreme conservatism, and rather light skin, probably earned him half the white vote, while his race and allegiance to the Democratic Party gave him the black vote. He will be difficult to beat in future elections.
As soon as I entered his office, I sensed mistrust and concern. An aide pulled Chip aside and queried him about his political views. (He told me later that he played dumb and the guy left him alone.) Two aides watched me warily and questioned my intentions. I was under interrogation. Earlier that day, I learned, an incensed nun had charged into Bishop's office and started "screaming" about the SOA, Bishop's support of it, and U.S. support of dictators and death squads in Latin America. Ah, if only I could have captured this on videotape! The aides were busy denouncing the woman as hysterical and foolish when the door opened behind me and out stepped Bishop, elegantly attired in a thousand-dollar suit. He diffidently surveyed the room and looked at each of his aides. Rather than introducing himself, he waited for me to introduce myself, which I did, and then he walked into another room to speak with someone.
An aide offered us a Coke, as Doug Graham had done, and said, with a chuckle, that he couldn't offer us a Pepsi. We both declined the offer. But this little joke revealed a pernicious and well-known reality: that Big Business controls our government. The Coca-Cola Company is headquartered in Atlanta; its economy is larger than that of many nations; and it buys politicians--nearly all of whom are for sale to the highest bidder--so they can pass business-friendly legislation. The company has paid Bishop and Collins very well over the years; the least they can do is provide the product to their visitors. If they don't, the company will sever their umbilical cord and the Congressmen will lose the next election to candidates who are funded by Coca-Cola--for the candidate with the most money usually wins (Bush, for example, outspent Gore by 42 percent last year).
Bishop's two closest aides, Shelby McCash, an older white man, and Roxanne Burnham, a younger black woman, followed me into his office and continued their questioning. They were protecting their Congressman and employer as if he were made of fine, delicate china and I was the bull in the china shop. Fearing that I would break, or at least harass, their boss, they stayed for the interview, during which I could hear Roxanne busily scribbling notes.
Bishop, no less than Weidner, was prepared for the interview. He had rehearsed well. Before him on his desk were a couple pages of carefully typed notes; I'm positive these were written by his staff and given to him to study. I had not sent him my questions but I did send a description of my documentary, so he knew what to expect. As we talked, he often glanced down at his notes, as if he were reading a speech. And indeed he sounded like he was simply reading excerpts from a speech. His two main points were that the U.S., partly through the SOA, has brought democracy to Latin America, save for Cuba, which has never sent any soldiers to the school, and that the movement to close the school is "based more on emotion than it is on fact." As he kept dutifully returning to these points, it became clear to me that he was saying what he was supposed to say. The words weren't his.
Before he joined Congress in 1993, he was a member of the SOA Support Group in Columbus. The school was founded to "prevent coups and dictatorships" and protect our national security, and so this group was appalled that so many Americans wanted to scuttle it. Bishop expressed nothing but disdain for the protesters. Have SOA graduates murdered people? No, Bishop claims, for the "allegations" are based on "anecdotal" and "undocumented" sources. Human rights and church groups have been incited by "slanted information." This produced a "strong emotional reaction" to the deaths in Latin America, which grew into a "cause celebre" that forced the school to close. Fortunately, however, the name change "puts the controversy behind us and allows us to move forward." Now the protesters are looking for "another cause" to keep going, since having a cause is their "raison d'être." (One of his aides seems to be adept at hackneyed French.)
Bishop disturbed Chip as much as me. Chip left the office muttering bad things about our government and about the apologists for the SOA.
IV. Knights-Errant
My encounters with dead souls like Bishop and Weidner drained and depressed me, and made the world seem dark, wicked and unredeemable. As I write these words, I recall a few poignant verses about our world from Bob Dylan's "Song to Woody": "It's sick and it's hungry, it's tired and it's torn; looks like it's dying and it's hardly been born." But there are, and have always been, individuals who try to alleviate this sickness and hunger, who try to stop the violence and give the weary and oppressed liberty and hope and justice. I have had the good fortune to meet over the years many of these enlightened and compassionate souls, and each encounter has left me rejuvenated, and, I think, a better person. Andrés is one; Father Roy Bourgeois is another.
Despite being hated by so many powerful people, some of whom have tapped his phone, Roy is a remarkably cheerful man, though when the conversation turns to the SOA and U.S. policy in Latin America he becomes very serious. When I inter-viewed him in his tiny, Spartan-like, one-bedroom apartment just outside the main gate of Fort Benning, he was exhausted from his travels. He zigzags all over the country--he visited the S.F. Bay Area three weeks before and gave a marvelous speech--speaking before school and church audiences about the SOA, globalization, his experiences in Latin America, and how people can get involved in important issues and make their voices heard.
Born in rural Louisiana, Roy earned a B.S. in geology, then was a naval officer for four years, the last spent in shore duty in Vietnam, where he received the Purple Heart (I find it noteworthy that the jingoistic Weidner did not serve his country in the Vietnam War but Roy did). While there, Roy, like so many others, discovered that everything the military had told him about our noble and necessary war against godless Communism was a lie. After his military service, he entered the seminary of the Maryknoll Missionary Order and was ordained a Catholic priest in 1972. He went to Bolivia, where General Hugo Banzer, a graduate of the SOA, was murdering and disappearing thousands of the usual "insurgents": peasants, intellectuals, teachers, journalists, missionaries, labor organizers, health care workers, and anyone else who sought reform. Roy witnessed this. After working with the Bolivian poor for five years, he was arrested and forced to leave the country. In 1980, when the four American churchwomen were raped and killed--two of whom were his friends--he became involved in El Salvador. Shortly after the six Jesuit priests and their two co-workers were found dead in late 1989, Roy founded the School of Americas Watch. What began with a vigil and fast by a dozen people--including Charlie Liteky and Andrés--has become a movement which draws many thousands of demonstrators to Fort Benning each November.
Since 1990 Roy has spent over four years in U.S. federal prisons for nonviolent protests at Fort Benning against the SOA. Noting that fifty demon-strators have collectively spent over thirty years behind bars (most sent there by "Maximum Bob" Elliot, a judge who once incarcerated Martin Luther King), he says each arrest only energizes the move-ment and that no matter how many are locked up, "the truth cannot be silenced." (In a March 28 phone conversation, Roy told me that 26 of those arrested last fall, including 73- and 88-year-old nuns, will face trial in Columbus on May 22. Most likely, they will all receive prison sentences of not less than six months. But only five of the more than 600 SOA graduates who are documented human rights violators have spent any time in prison, and they were not officers but enlisted men who participated in the rape and murder of the four U.S. churchwomen.)
I confronted Roy with the criticisms I heard from Le Moyne, Doug Graham, and others, including the one about he being a demagogue who's carrying on a crusade to gain affluence and celebrity. He was saddened and said the issue is not himself or the other protesters but the people of Latin America--they are the beginning and the end of the issue. Once they speak out, and ask for land reform or adequate housing or higher pay, "they are in big trouble." They are killed or disappeared. They are the issue and no one else. If he wanted to become a celebrity, he added wryly, there are better ways than fasting and going to prison.
Some of Roy's responses were emotionally charged, and consciously so. Disgusted that Army officials denigrate emotion, he asserts that anyone with compassion and a sense of justice would get emotional and angry at the suffering the people of Latin American have had to endure for so many years.
He scoffs at the belief that Latin American governments are, with the one exception of Cuba, democratic and civilian-controlled, for "the real power is in the hands of the military." Talk to the people--which is something Army officers never do--and you learn how far from democracy these nations are. An oligarchic system is entrenched, and the SOA provides the "muscle" that supports it. "We have become the new Conquistadors," seeking profits, seeking ways to enrich ourselves, and this means we are on the side of oligarchy. Since our first forays into Latin America, Roy says, "We have been on the wrong side," on the side of "the men with the guns." Now we have "Plan Colombia"--called the "Plan of Death" by indigenous leaders--which is not a drug war but a counterinsurgency war to drive the indigenous peoples out of oil-rich lands so our corporations can plunder them without hindrance. We are making Colombia safe for Chevron.
For the purposes of my documentary, the most significant remark Roy made during this, our third interview over four months, was that the U.S. should follow the example of post-apartheid South Africa and establish its own Truth and Reconciliation (or Truth and Justice) Commission--an excellent idea which will figure prominently in my film's conclusion. But will such a commission be formed? Can it be? I fear that being an "American" means never having to say you're sorry. America has great difficulty in admitting that it was wrong; our talent lies in how we are always able to justify our actions by using a logic all our own. Consider : World War I was "the war to end all wars" and to "make the world safe for democracy." Or: The dropping of the bomb on Japan, twice; why? to save lives. Or: "We destroyed the village to save it." Or: We called our brutal and illegal 1989 invasion of Panama--where we left 20,000 (mostly poor) Panamanians homeless; killed 4,000 (nearly all civilians, including children and the elderly), dumping most of the bodies (with hands tied behind them and bullet holes in the back of their heads) in fifteen mass graves and incinerating many others (techniques learned from the Nazis); and made 7,000 political arrests, thereby eliminating the Left--"Operation Just Cause." Will we ever acknowledge these and so many other mistakes? Will we ever repent our sins? Every politician says "God Bless America," but I don't see how God can love a nation that refuses to admit it has sinned.
Roy wants the files of SOA graduates declassified and made public. He wants the CIA and State Department and other agencies to turn them over. Never has a government agency given SOA Watch any files, any information, but this must change. It is time for our government to cooperate. "What have they got to hide?," Roy asks. "A lot." The releasing of these files is the first step toward reconciliation, for "There can never be forgiveness or healing without accountability. And there can never be justice without the truth."
Roy was my last interview on Monday, and retired Major Joseph Blair was my last interview on Tuesday. While Roy is a consistent, congruent peace activist, Blair is a mass of contradictions. According to anthropologist Leslie Gill, who is at American University in Washington D.C. and is researching the SOA for a book she is writing on what the graduates do when they return to their countries, Blair is an "uncredible" source, a glory-seeking loudmouth on an ego trip. Her rancor surprised me. Indeed, Blair does have some unsavory opinions--for instance, he admires the sanguinary Colin Powell and doesn't mind the prospect of nuclear war--but he is a smart and knowledgeable crusader against the SOA, and the Army is clearly afraid of what he might say. Both Le Moyne and Weidner asked if I would be interviewing Blair, and when I said I would be, each said, as they struggled to hold back their contempt, "It should be interesting."
I believe Blair when he says his life has been threatened, but I also surmise that a deal has been struck between he and the Army: he gets to stay alive and to censure the SOA so long as he doesn't go further in his censure and involve the entire military-industrial complex--for he knows a lot. The Army, in other words, will gladly give him an inch so he doesn't take a foot. This concession includes the periodic commentary in the local newspaper, the Columbus Ledger-Enquirer. His most recent one,"School has only changed names," from January 24, contains the following passage, one that Professor Gill may someday cite as evidence of the man's egomania:
The current U.S. military initiative in South America, Plan Colombia, that will spend $1.6 billion to fight the losing drug war in Colombia appears now to be logically linked to WHISC's mission and future. Weekly reports of kidnapping, brutal murders and paramilitary oppression in Colombian villages routinely describe apparent army- uniformed personnel involvement. Where's the evidence in Colombia of SOA's past successes from its human rights, democracy and military professionalization training?
We had to interview Blair in our cramped motel room because his wife, an upper-class Guatemalan, is deeply conservative and won't hear anyone question the ethics and actions of any soldier. For years she has been upset at her husband for criticizing the Army. Blair stopped by in the early evening for the interview (our last in Georgia) on the way to the hospital--his wife had been admitted earlier that day with a heart problem--and stayed for nearly four hours. (One can only wonder about the state of his marriage.) He talked almost nonstop. Unfortunately, he said many interesting things after the camera was shut off and put away and Chip had crawled wearily into bed. Blair, for example, remarked that the infamous "SOA Torture Manual" was not an aberration but the standard Army manual which he used in his classes--and the first class he taught happened to include Glenn Weidner.
Blair taught at the SOA in the middle to late 1980s as a political military officer who specialized in Latin America. He became a critic--and not the only critic among the faculty--of the school shortly after he arrived. He also spent some time at an army base in Missouri, where he taught soldiers how to make bombs out of diesel fuel and garden fertilizer. Timothy McVeigh was one of his students.
Blair was never boring. Chip stayed in bed but decided to put off sleep so he could listen. Andrés, who was asleep when Blair arrived, was now fully awake. When I described the nighttime drug raid, Blair said if you teach soldiers how to bust a drug ring you teach them how to set up one, if you teach them how to defuse mines you teach them how to plant mines. The U.S. military, he added, is now training American and Latin American soldiers in night warfare, which includes jumping out of planes at 50,000 feet--or above radar detection--with oxygen tanks. While war can be waged from high altitudes, countries can be brought to their knees from subter-ranean detonations. Apparently Germany and the U.S. have a nuclear bomb whose explosion can poison a water table the size of Denmark. This is a means of warfare that has been kept a secret from the public.
I began the interview by showing Blair the graphs that Weidner is so proud of. Indignantly, he called them an "attempt to misrepresent historical facts." The numbers were manipulated by the authorities to prove their point. It is a deductive fallacy: the particulars were made to conform to a hypothesis. The real numbers exist in classified files, and Blair, like Roy, wants these files opened. He believes it is time we prosecute those SOA graduates who have gone on to commit crimes against humanity.
With Roy's and Major Blair's interviews finished, we proceeded to Washington, where we met Joe Moakley and Jim McGovern, two liberal northern Democrats who have been leading the Congressional movement to defund and disband the SOA.
A Congressman from the 9th District of Massachusetts since 1972, Joe Moakley, one of the last of the liberals, will not run for re-election next year because he has inoperable leukemia. He is stoical about his affliction: "I've lived 73 years; I've got nothing to complain about." The couple of times during the interview when he had some difficulty formulating his thoughts, one of his aides, Steve La Rose, who appeared fresh out of college, helped him, and in the way that a young man helps his beloved but ailing grandfather. As I talked with Steve and another aide, Deborah Spriggs, I felt I wasn't in an office but in a home with Moakley and his family. The work they were doing seemed less like a job than a cherished duty.
After the interview, Steve came in with Moakley's mid-morning snack: half a cantaloupe. He put the plate on the desk and helped Moakley place a bib over his suit. On it was a large four-leaf clover. We all continued to talk as he ate his fruit--looking more like a little boy now than an elderly man-- and shuffled and marked papers; in an hour he would be making the keynote address to the House in an effort to stop Bush's Tax Cut.
The most surprising thing Moakley said during the interview was that he had never heard of the School of the Americas until 1989, when he began his investigation into the murders of the six priests and their two co-workers in El Salvador and found that "Almost every atrocity that came across our desk...there was somebody from the School of Americas involved." Indeed, the school was com-pletely unpublicized, and operating as part of our secret government, until Moakley's investigation and the inception of SOA Watch forced it to come out of the shadows and respond to its critics' charges.
Even though he continues to call the school the SOA, and says it basically teaches "how to kill your neighbor," Moakley has temporarily stopped his crusade to defund and close it--while being supportive of Father Roy's ongoing movement. Wishing to learn with certainty how WHISC differs, if at all, from the old SOA, he will soon try to pass legislation that will ensure the institute is closely monitored. If it isn't a dramatic improvement over its predecessor, he will resume his crusade.
He would like the institute to demilitarize and teach soldiers how to rebuild a country rather than destroy it. He agrees with Father Roy that democracy can't be taught at the end of a gun barrel. Mentioning the subjects of electoral, judicial, labor, and land reform, and how to disband sweatshops, he says instead of military captains, let's produce captains of business.
Moakley expressed great compassion for the people of El Salvador and said the U.S. has a moral obligation to rebuild the country it so devastated. He fears that Colombia is becoming the next El Salvador, and wonders why we haven't learned from our mistakes. Because he believes, in stark contrast to George Kennan, the Hoover Commission, and U.S. Space Command, that "We can't be an island of prosperity in a sea of depression," he wants his nation to raise up rather than tear down poorer, less developed societies.
After Moakley, I went to see Jim McGovern, who became an aide for the older Massachusetts Congressman in 1982 and gained his own seat in 1996, filling the void left by Joseph Kennedy, who crusaded against the SOA until he retired from the House. When I entered McGovern's office, I sensed it was a place where important work is done. Several aides were talking on the phone, doing research on the computer, writing down information. Everyone was busy working and it was a team effort. On McGovern's desk were piles of papers and a jumble of notes and memos--of things to do. Politicians are like professors: some do as little work as possible, just enough to slide by, while they enjoy the perks associated with the position--this describes Mac Collins and Sanford Bishop; while others take their job very seriously and work hard to do some good in the world--Joe Moakley and Jim McGovern are two examples.
McGovern wasn't in his office for our scheduled interview. He was busy somewhere trying to convince Congress to pass a bill that would outlaw land mines. I was told he is the only member of Congress who has made this issue a priority.
While waiting for him, I surveyed his office. Since you are what you read, I walked over to his bookcase and saw books by Oscar Romero and Ron Dellums (black socialist, and former Congressman, from Oakland) and many others on labor, human rights, and liberation theology. He also had a photograph of Romero and a small plaque which read, "Joe Moakley & Jim McGovern: they seemed to some like Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, setting out on their quest for the truth." In 1989 McGovern was Moakley's assistant and together they found the truth: they identified the murderers of the six priests and their two co-workers and were subsequently able to convince Congress to terminate military aid to El Salvador.
Jim McGovern has in his office three or four pictures of George McGovern, but there is no relation except ideologically. On one wall he has an ap-palling cartoon that shows a man, a constituent, saying, "Gee, I didn't know Congressman McGovern's district extended that far south." He is addressing a smug, pot-bellied, fat cigar-smoking Fidel Castro. I'm glad McGovern can laugh at it.
As we continued to wait, we had the opportunity to watch the proceedings on the House floor as representatives squared off over President Bush's Tax Cut. Republicans and Democrats alternated, the former supporting the bill, the latter generally denouncing it (it would pass, bringing us back to 1981 and Reaganomics). I was horrified by James Traficant, a Democrat from Ohio so conser-vative he makes Sanford Bishop seem like a Black Panther. Sporting a bad toupeé and an angry sneer, he fulminated like Joseph McCarthy against the more moderate and liberal members of his party, calling them socialists and asking, in a booming though plaintive voice, and with great solemnity, "What's wrong with profit?" Fortunately, a few speakers after Traficant elevated the Tax Cut to the level of Holy Scripture, McGovern spoke sense, calling it precisely the wrong thing to do. Ten minutes later, he entered his office, apologized for keeping us waiting, and reached for the microphone.
He was exhausted. He had bags under his eyes. It was noon on Thursday and he looked like he was in dire need of the weekend. He answered questions for twenty minutes, then rushed out of the room and back to work. Bright, articulate, passionate and committed, he gave a superb interview. "It's unconscionable," he said, "that we're still training people who go back to their homes and become part of military establishments that have awful human rights records. U.S. taxpayer money shouldn't be spent that way." He was disappointed in President Clinton for being persuaded last year by the Joint Chiefs of Staff to keep the school open, and he figures the struggle to close it will become even more difficult with Bush in office.
Like Moakley, he spoke compassionately of the Salvadoran people and all they have endured, and believes the U.S. has a responsibility to rebuild El Salvador after having nearly destroyed it. He has been working with the families of the four slain churchwomen, trying to get all the information concerning their murders declassified but for twenty years the State Department and Pentagon have stonewalled.
Talking with Moakley and McGovern lifted my spirit, energized me. It is a myth that every politician is corrupt and mercenary. Most are indeed scoundrels, but there are a few--Representative Jesse Jackson, Jr. of Illinois and Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota come immediately to mind--who are honorable and humane, and I was glad to have met two members of this progressive minority.
My last, and most gratifying, interview in Washington was with Christopher Hitchens, who lives on the top floor of a fairly elegant apartment building. It has marble floors and a receptionist who had to call Hitchens before he let Chip and I through (Andrés was out on a much-needed date). Two seconds after I rang the doorbell, the door opened mysteriously, with no one standing by it, and halfway down the hall stood Hitchens in sandals, blue jeans, and blue dress shirt, looking a bit disheveled and holding a glass of liquor, which turned out to be rare scotch diluted with ginger ale. "What can I get you gentlemen to drink?" he asked rather gallantly as I looked behind the door and found his little daughter Antonia. Judging by Chip's reaction, this was the best offer he had heard all day, so I couldn't object to him having a drink--but only one--before and during the interview. "Whatever you're drinking," he replied.
Hitchens made us feel comfortable as soon as we entered his apartment. But even if no one was there, I would have felt at home: the music of Brahms filled the air and books were shelved and stacked and piled everywhere I looked. Chip and I were treated more like old friends than new acquaintances. We met his wife Carol and Antonia showed us some of her art. Our conversation flowed easily until finally we all agreed that we should get the interview out of the way before talking any further.
The interview was amusing because Hitchens kept drinking and smoking as if he couldn't talk without a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other. Even though he is only in his forties, he reminded me of a 1930s' radical, of someone like Dalton Trumbo or Studs Terkel, of old, tough-souled, hard-boiled Leftist activists and intellectuals who have spent their lives combating the inhumanity of capitalism while giving little thought to more personal concerns like health and appearance. It may be that when they find "fashion" next to "fascism" in the dictionary, they do not see it as coincidental.
And the interview was difficult because of interruptions: Antonia was curious; Carol had to tell her husband something; sirens screamed in the streets below; Antonia was preparing to take a bath; after her bath, she came out to say goodnight to her father and to us; sirens screamed again--and so forth, with each interruption seeming like a commercial break. But we managed to complete the interview and get some good sound bites from one of America's leading journalists and iconoclasts. Here is his definition of the SOA:
You could describe the School of the Americas as the symbolic scimitar of the policy of counter-revolution or of repression in the whole hemisphere rising out of the Kennedy Alliance for Progress, the Reagan-Kirkpatrick school of justification of dictatorship as long as its anti-Communist, of an alliance between the United States and a series of oligarchs in the region which predates the Cold War...was going on long before Communism was thought of.
The SOA, he continued, "reminds people in a very blunt way that Americans too can be collectively responsible for murder, for torture, for dictatorship."
Hitchens marveled that the U.S., rather than concealing it, "flaunts" the SOA and yet the Amer-ican people can't close it down: "The astonishing thing is that everybody knows where it is and it's still there." About the school's name change, he said: "It may be the compliment that vice pays to virtue for the SOA to say it's having a new beginning because that's an implicit admission that it isn't all that proud of its past."
He deplored how the U.S. has "degraded the idea of revolution or rebellion." What gave America its independence--revolution--is what we are denying other nations. We have forgotten our revolutionary heritage as we have become the world's leading "arsenal of dictatorship and oligarchy and colonialism."
We are also increasingly repressing our own people, currently under the aegis of the "Drug War." Hitchens is surprised that this war is still seen by many as legitimate when it was started thirty years by President Nixon in a "desperate attempt" to find a domestic issue to win him some popularity. It failed miserably then, and it's failing now. What we have is rampant police and judicial corruption, and people being locked up for committing no offenses against others. Drugs should be legalized.
Often during the interview, Hitchens' thoughts turned to Chile, for how we mercilessly destroyed its democracy in the early 1970s figures prominently in his two recent articles in Harper's magazine and in his soon-to-be-published book on "The Case Against Henry Kissinger." Declassified information enabled him to write his book and to establish a case for trying Kissinger as a war criminal, and he wants more information to be declassified and made public. He agrees with Father Roy that we need a Truth and Reconciliation Commission of some sort in this country.
After the interview, Chip and I sat with Christopher and Carol and talked for a couple of hours. Whatever subject came up--even my adoption story--we discussed. When Chip was offered ciga-rettes, he graciously accepted, as was his custom on the trip. Sitting there smoking and drinking expen-sive scotch, unwinding from a long day of taping, he was the picture of contentment. Before we left, Hitchens gave me a copy of his scathing indictment of the Clintons, No One Left To Lie To, published by Verso in 1999. In it he wrote, "For John, who pursues truth and villains, well met in DC."
V. Vietnam(ization)
On Friday morning, Chip and I met Andrés by the heavily-guarded, fortress-like White House. How odd that in the world's "democracies" the leaders have to be protected from their own people. Chip shot some footage of Bush's purloined palace and, across the street, of the anti-nuclear war vigil held continuously since 1981, or since the start of the Reagan Administration. A solitary old woman sat between two plywood boards covered with horrific photographs of the dead and dying in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. She was bundled up against the cold wind. Andrés knew her.
On the sidewalk in front of the White House, a group of demonstrators called for the U.S. to stop the sanctions against Iraq, sanctions which are devastating the country and killing thousands of children each year. The Gulf War never ended. Andrés and I briefly joined the demonstration and then left with Chip for the other side of the White House, the Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, and Vietnam Veterans Memorial.
Maya Lin's memorial to the American soldiers who died in the Vietnam War is cut into the earth like a grave a couple hundred yards from the Lincoln Memorial. 58,000 names are inscribed on the long, shiny black stone. As you gaze at the names, and see your face reflected, you may begin to wonder about fate and why you are standing there but those whose names you see are not. You may also wonder how little it takes to produce a war casualty--just a draft or induction and a simple stroke of misfortune, say a random explosion or a stray bullet, or perhaps following the senseless order of a glory-seeking commander. Indeed, while it takes quite an effort to live, it is easy to die.
Chip began to weep when he saw the wall. He thought of his best friend's father who had died in the war, a father his friend never knew. A moment later, he fought through his tears to photograph the bronze statue of three sturdy and stern-looking servicemen--one black--who stand indomitably between the wall and the Lincoln Memorial. The men are portrayed as American heroes, valiant and patriotic warriors, versions of the hypermasculine John J. Rambo, when the average soldier was nineteen years old, from a dirt poor family, and scared. "They died for nothing," Chip said.