Guerrillas of the Year

GuerillaNews.com -December 31

Photo: RayMcGovern

In GNN's first two years of existence we picked journalists (Greg Palast and Robert Fisk) for our coveted Guerrilla of the Year award (winners receive a Noam Chomsky bobblehead doll). This year there were more worthy nominations from the Fourth Estate, most notably Democracy Now's Amy Goodman, who consistently featured some of the best reporting on the War on Terror on the planet. Sadly, many other brave journalists didn't live to tell their stories:

Canadian photojournalist Zahra Kazemi died of a cerebral haemorrhage after her skull was smashed in an Iranian prison; ITV's Terry Lloyd was apparently shot by American troops in Iraq; Cameramen Ukrainian Taras Protsyuk and Spainard José Couso were killed when a U.S. tank fired on the Hotel Palestine in Baghdad; Jordanian cameraman for Al Jazeera Tarek Ayoub died after his Baghdad office was bombed by American troops; British freelance videographer James Miller was shot by Israeli forces in Gaza.

Call them our runners up in memoriam.

But this year's winners are not journalists at all. They are members of the growing legion of former U.S. military, State Department and intelligence officials who have stepped forward to expose the realities behind the neocon agenda.

Karen Kwiakowski, whose upcoming book is set to blow the lid on Rumsfeld's Office of Special Plans, is one. Career diplomat John Brady Kiesling is another. In a March letter to his boss Colin Powell, he wrote: "[T]his Administration has chosen to make terrorism a domestic political tool, enlisting a scattered and largely defeated Al Qaeda as its bureaucratic ally. We spread disproportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq."

There are many more.

We settled on five: former CIA operative Robert Baer, author of "Sleeping with the Devil"; former ambassador to Iraq Joseph Wilson, whose alleged CIA undercover operative wife was outed by the White House; former CIA analyst Ray McGovern, who heads up the Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity; retired Special Forces officer Stan Goff, who helped found "Bring Them Home Now"; and retired Col. David Hackworth, whose web site, hackworth.com, is the best place to go for uncensored reports directly from soldiers in the field.

The following are excepts from some of our guerrillas best words of wisdom from 2003:

ROBERT BAER

Robert Baer, author of "Sleeping with the Devil," on the Saudis in an interview with Buzzflash:

BUZZFLASH: So that's the basis of your claim that through our dependence on Saudi oil, we're, in essence, financing terrorism - because you do say in your book that, over the past decade, Saudi Arabia has transferred half a billion dollars to Al-Qaeda, and at least a hundred million dollars to the Taliban.

BAER: Exactly. And it's obviously not intentional on the part of consumers; there's no conspiracy in this on this side of the ocean. People in Washington didn't sit around and say, let's finance terrorism. But it doesn't really matter. It's this process of what I call slow accrual.

BUZZFLASH: Another factor in terms of the relationship that you've described as sleeping with the devil, and that you detail in your book, is that the Saudis have very shrewdly given jobs and consulting contracts to politicians and American government officials as they leave their government jobs.

BAER: I could have sat down and done a list of all my former colleagues from the CIA who ended up on the Saudi Arabian payroll. Some of them are known, like Ray Close. Others have gone public, but there are others that haven't. A bunch of my colleagues went to work for a public consulting firm where the initial capital was paid for by the Saudi embassy to lobby the Hill for the Gulf countries. A former member of the National Security Council under Reagan set this up. And it's not like it's a secret. Even Bandar [Bandar bin Sultan, Saudi prince and U.S. ambassador] has said, according to the Washington Post, that if I take care of people coming out of office, the new ones coming in are going to be a lot friendlier to Saudi Arabia once it gets known.

BUZZFLASH: And it's worked.

BAER: It works great. I'd be really popular in Washington if I could throw around a couple hundred million dollars every year to law firms and others. Another thing the royal family does is cultivate the press through public relations firms.

By the way, I just heard today The New York Times refused to review my book. BUZZFLASH: Is that right? And you have no idea why?

BAER: Maybe they didn't like my English. Maybe they didn't like that I mentioned one of their reporters in it. I don't know.

JOSEPH WILSON

Joseph Wilson on the fallout of UN bombing (from an interview with Talking Points Memo's Josh Marshall):

Well, I think we're fucked. I think the--we should have learned from the bombing of the United Nations building that there was all sorts of anti--not just American but anti-international presence--pressure building within Iraq. And I think we should have reacted rather quickly to that by attempting to truly embrace the United Nations in the sense of internationalization. A crime against the United Nations should have been perceived as a crime against us all, and we should have been much more aggressive in ensuring that we did everything we could to help the United Nations through that period. And that would have meant really trying to draw them into something that, as I said the other day, would help us change "latitudes and attitudes" in Iraq (to quote Jimmy Buffett). And by that I mean what you need to do is, you need to aggressively persuade Iraqis that what we--the rest of the world, not the United States, the rest of the world--are doing is attempting to assist it through this difficult period and assist it in reconstructing itself in a new, modern, post-Saddam Iraq.

We didn't do that in a positive way. We made all the right noises about de Mello's death and the deaths of the United Nations people, and then we made some noises about how this is an opportunity for the international community to realize its interests are at stake as well. I think we should have been much more aggressive in embracing this crime against all of us, because at the end of the day the United Nations bureaucracy is nothing more or nothing less than the will of its membership--and we are the predominant member of the United Nations. We should not have shied away from that. I think that the bombing of the ayatollah in Najaf was the real clarion call to us and the rest of the world as to how dire a situation we find ourselves in. I say that because it was very clearly an attempt to draw the Shi'a off the sidelines. Now, the Shi'a populate the south between Baghdad and Kuwait--in other words, the route that we are going to have to take one of these days when we leave Iraq.

The Shi'a have been content with what I consider to be a tactical ceasefire, tactical truce with the United States. They've been content with that so long as they're able to consolidate their control, political control over the villages in the south and the towns in the south, and so long as the Americans were killing Sunni on their behalf. That means that if you were Sunni, that they eventually would have to kill--if in fact there's a war between the Shi'a and the Sunni. Now the bombing of Najaf made very clear that the Sunni were not going to go along willingly, either by being killed by Americans or by not resisting what they think is going to be a Shi'a push for power.

STAN GOFF

Sgt. Stan Goff, U.S. Army ret., on Rumsfeld's "crackpot doctrine" from an interview with GNN:

I think there is probably a great deal of dismay inside the Pentagon to this day. But given the relationship between the White House and Pentagon this isn't something that's going to be aired out in public. Everyone knows that conventional military forces aren't equipped to conduct an occupation like this. Especially one with such a dramatic cultural divide between the occupying troops and the people they are trying to occupy.

With the Special Forces operations in Haiti at least there were French speakers on the teams so there was a lot lower probability of misunderstanding - which is not to say there wasn't colossal ignorance of Haitian culture and a fair amount of imperial hauteur and racism, which is operating in this operation as well. In this case, the imperial hauteur and racism is being displayed by the National Command Authority, who I think really expected the Iraqis were going to conduct themselves in accordance with their stereotypical preconceptions of what these people were going to do. And I think they were surprised.

The Pentagon has a lot of issues, not the least of which is Donald Rumsfeld is imposing a crackpot doctrine on them which is being paid for in blood. There is a lot of resentment. A lot of these military decisions have been taken away from the Pentagon. There are a clique of neo-cons that operate pretty much in secret. Rumsfeld has been known to be extremely dismissive of his generals and extremely arrogant and not very inclined to admit when he's made mistakes.

So I am sure there are plenty in the Pentagon right now who would love to see the fall of Donald Rumsfeld. I can't prove that but I think it's probably true.

This imperial arrogance, this hubris, that affects the National Command Authority combined with the anti-Arab racism, has a parallel in the way they view the military.

They have a profound disrespect for the working class people who are the soldiers in this fight. They expect they can use and abuse them as much as they want and feed them the same line of horseshit that they feed the American public. But the fact is the soldiers are pretty critical thinkers and they tend to pay attention to politics, especially when their lives depend on it.

COL. DAVID HACKWORTH, ret.

Col. David Hackworth on the problems facing the occupiers from his web site, hackworth.com:

Almost daily we're told that another American soldier has sacrificed life or limb in Iraq. For way too many of us - unless we have a white flag with a blue star in our window - these casualty reports have become as big a yawn as a TV forecast of the weather in Baghdad.

Even I - and I deal with that beleaguered land seven days a week - was staggered when a Pentagon source gave me a copy of a Nov. 30 dispatch showing that since George W. Bush unleashed the dogs of war, our armed forces have taken 14,000 casualties in Iraq - about the number of warriors in a line tank division.

We have the equivalent of five combat divisions plus support for a total of about 135,000 troops deployed in the Iraqi theater of operations, which means we've lost the equivalent of a fighting division since March. At least 10 percent of the total number of Joes and Jills available to the theater commander to fight or support the occupation effort have been evacuated back to the USA!

Lt. Col. Scott D. Ross of the U.S. military's Transportation Command told me that as of Dec. 23, his outfit had evacuated 3,255 battle-injured casualties and 18,717 non-battle injuries.

Of the battle casualties, 473 died and 3,255 were wounded by hostile fire.

Following are the major categories of the non-battle evacuations:

Orthopedic surgery - 3,907
General surgery - 1,995
Internal medicine - 1,291
Psychiatric - 1,167
Neurology - 1,002
Gynecological - 491

Sources say that most of the gynecological evacuations are pregnancy-related, although the exact figure can't be confirmed - Pentagon pregnancy counts are kept closer to the vest than the number of nuke warheads in the U.S. arsenal.

Ross cautioned that his total of 21,972 evacuees could be higher than other reports because "in some cases, the same service member may be counted more than once."

The Pentagon has never won prizes for the accuracy of its reporting, but I think it's safe to say that so far somewhere between 14,000 and 22,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines have been medically evacuated from Iraq to the USA.

So at the end of this turbulent year, we must ask ourselves: Was the price our warriors paid in blood worth the outcome? Are we any safer than before our pre-emptive invasion?

[...]

RAY McGOVERN

Finally, Ray McGovern who spent 27 years as a CIA analyst, on God and the American empire from a recent essay published on Commondreams.org:

Hijacking "Him" for Empire, December 29, 2003

Put It On Your Shield…or on your Christmas card, as did Vice President Dick and Lynne Cheney:

"And if a sparrow cannot fall to the ground without His notice, is it probable that an empire can rise without His aid?"

This, of course, is not the first hijacking of "Him" for the needs of empire. In 312 before the great battle at the Milvian Bridge at Rome, Hijacker the Great, also known as Constantine, saw a cross in the sky with the words "In Hoc Signo Vinces" ("In This Sign You Will Conquer"). Constantine had a cross inscribed on his soldiers' armor. The new "Christians" won the battle and lost Jesus' message of nonviolence.

Several centuries later, "Deus Vult" ("God wills it") was the inscription chosen by St. Peter's successors as they dispatched crusaders to war in the Holy Land. And "Gott Mit Uns" decorated Nazi belt buckles.

So "He" was hijacked long ago, with countless imperial and other brutalities carried out in "His" name.

But wait. Was not "His" message a direct challenge to empire-in his day the Roman Empire and religious and civil collaborators in the Roman occupation? Isn't that why the religious and civil authorities put their heads together and ended up torturing and executing him? Had Jesus allowed himself to be co-opted by the empire and its Quislings, had he chosen to divorce his nonviolent but challenging vision from the politics of the day, he could have died peacefully in his bed-as did the leaders of the institutional church in Nazi Germany. And we can too. All that is required is a mind-trick to convince ourselves that Jesus did not really mean to say what he said, that he did not really mean to do what he did in exposing the evil of empire. Help is at hand. It is easy to find a pastor preaching a domesticated Jesus-an ahistorical Jesus far more interested in "piety" than justice. I find myself wondering how the Cheneys' pastor reacted to their Christmas card.

Often it takes a compassionate but truth-telling outsider to throw light on our country, its leaders, its policies. Bishop Peter Storey of South Africa, who walked the walk in his courageous, outspoken resistance to the apartheid regime, provides this prophetic word: "I have often suggested to American Christians that the only way to understand their mission is to ask what it might have meant to witness faithfully to Jesus in the heart of the Roman Empire. Certainly, when I preach in the United States I feel, as I imagine the Apostle Paul did when he first passed through the gates of Rome-admiration for its people, awe at its manifest virtues, and resentment of its careless power.

"America's preachers have a task more difficult, perhaps, than those faced by us under South Africa's apartheid, or by Christians under Communism. We had obvious evils to engage; you have to unwrap your culture from years of red, white, and blue myth. You have to expose and confront the great disconnect between the kindness, compassion, and caring of most American people and the ruthless way American power is experienced, directly and indirectly, by the poor of the earth. You have to help good people see how they have let their institutions do their sinning for them.

"This is not easy among people who really believe that their country does nothing but good. But it is necessary, not only for their future, but for us all. All around the world there are those who believe in the basic goodness of the American people, who agonize with you in your pain, but also long to see your human goodness translated into a different, more compassionate way of relating with the rest of this bleeding planet."

Let us begin the New Year with what Scripture calls "circumcised hearts," before we ask that God bless America.

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printed from Guerrillas of the Year on 2004-03-08 10:50:29