============================================================================ From: "royeh" <•••@••.•••> To: •••@••.••• Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 20:07:02 -0700 Subject: statement on corporate violence and evil Richard, The following was posted on an online forum where I hang out. #################################################### From the New Hampshire Peace Action Listserv... The following statement on corporate violence and evil was made by Jack Bussel of Veterans For Peace (Maine) at the New Chautauqua in Unity, Maine, on Saturday, September 22, 2001. Lest we forget, Maine Veterans for Peace seeks to encourage people to pay heed to the most vivid evidence of the destruction of human values wrought by our corporate system, i.e. the imperalist U.S. tactics toward other countries, which is often referred to as "foreign policy." These policies have been consistently interventionist, militaristic, brutal, racist and sadistic. My friends, we cannot focus on the dismemberment of the corporation without acknowledging the fact that our souls will not be saved by achieving thriving local economies if we allow rogue, out-of-control military machines and the corporate military complex to continue directly, or through surrogates, to savage the populations of the Caribbean, the Middle East, the Baltic, the Far East, Africa, and South America. Through out so-called enlightened policies of war and assignation, we have provided aid and comfort, at one time or another, to every murderous and corrupt dictator that has come along. The existence of the corporation as an entity, and as it is currently structured, must be ended, especially those known collectively as the military-industrial complex, thus bringing radical change to a corporate system that is so destructive of our world, our peoples, ourselves, and our souls. The changing of our corporate system will only come when, and if, the corporation as it is currently structured, is ended. A start toward this beginning would be to support legislation that seeks to terminate the special legal relationship the corporation has within our system. Secondly, regarding the corporate military complex, the demilitarization of Maine should be sought. Bath Iron Works, convert or close; Saco Defense, convert or close; end Department of Defense research at the University of Maine and elsewhere. In other words, end Department of Defense involvement with the economy of Maine. How sad it is that the only way our workers can earn a living is to construct instruments of mass murder. How sad it is that the only way our young people can find a way out of poverty is to enroll in the military. One of the Buddha's Eight-Fold Paths is "right occupation." That does not mean working in an occupation that builds a product whose only function is to kill one family so than another may live. Labor must be held responsible for the products they build. We in the peace and social justice community must reject the exploitation of the creed of "trade unionism" that would keep Bath Iron Works and Saco Defense open. We know that there can be progressive unionism which sees workers' interests as connected to larger issues of public good. They are among the activists around the world, from Seattle to Quebec to Genoa, who have challenged the World Trade Organization's domination of the global economy and environment. Progressive unionists have seen corporations and their government servants as the principal enemy. Edward Arlington Robinson, one of Maine's premier poets, in his poem "Reuben Bright", puts it much more elegantly than I: Because he was a butcher and thereby Did earn an honest living (and did right) I would not have you think that Reuben Bright Was anymore a brute than you or I For when they told him that his wife must die He stared at them and shook with grief and fright And cried like a great baby half the night And made the women cry to see him cry, And after she was dead, and he had paid The singers and the sexton and the rest He packed a lot of things that she had made Most mournfully away in an old chest of hers And put some chopped-up cedar boughs in with them And tore down the slaughter-house. We should not sit here and discuss the tearing down of the corporate slaughter-house without acknowledging that corporate evil has always been denied by this very same system and who insist that evil "...is never intrinsic to the American landscape or the American character. Evil is a deadly and unlicensed import, an outlandish disease smuggled through customs in a shipment of German philosophy or Asian rice. Innocent by definition, America invariably finds its image of inviolate purity betrayed (at Pearl Harbor, Little Big Horn, Havana Bay, 1998 & 1960, and now New York City). And because our image of purity has been defiled we always can justify the use of brutal and un-Christian means to defend the American Corporate Empire against treachery by others..." This quote, slightly adapted for my presentation, is from Lewis Lapham's Harper's article, "The American Rome," August 2001 issue. The evil imported into our country these past weeks is a most extreme, but very clear example, of our corporate empire's "boomerang" effect: that in a curved universe all things come back to their origin. It is time to say enough to a corporate system that humiliates and abuses "lessor" peoples, and it is time to say enough to so-called "liberal" leaders who from time to time play the union card, the patriotic card, the job card, and, most suspicious of all, the "trust us to do the right thing" card. Those same "liberal" leaders never seem to encounter a "foreign" adventure they do not like. Once again it is the innocent who suffer while the guilty go unpunished. Note that more children die in Iraq during a two month period as a direct result if our continued support of sanctions and the continued bombing and which has been going on for ten years, than have died in the current attacks on our country. To close I would like to bring to your attention the point that the Declaration of Independence not only reminds us of our inalienable rights but also our duty to throw off any government that perpetrates a long train of abuses and usurpations. A beginning to this beginning would be cooperation among peace and social justice groups in the electoral process. Especially in bringing to the people candidates other than the standard, corporate sponsored ones invariably seen in our electoral process. We Vets for Peace have taken Caesar's coin and have given Caesar his due. Now is the time for redemption not retribution. ################################################### peace, royeh ============================================================================ Delivered-To: moderator for •••@••.••• Date: Mon, 24 Sep 2001 16:23:01 -0700 From: frank scott <•••@••.•••> Subject: we be in trouble (some of us) fwd: if you find yourself in here.... Are you a terrorist? Check out this document with the FBI's definitions of domestic "terrorist groups". http://www.fbi.gov/congress/congress01/freeh051001.htm "The FBI views domestic terrorism as the unlawful use, or threatened use, of violence by a group or individual that is based and operating entirely within the United States or its territories without foreign direction and which is committed against persons or property with the intent of intimidating or coercing a government or its population in furtherance of political or social objectives." "The second category of domestic terrorists, left-wing groups, generally profess a revolutionary socialist doctrine and view themselves as protectors of the people against the "dehumanizing effects" of capitalism and imperialism. They aim to bring about change in the United States through revolution rather than through the established political process." "Anarchists and extremist socialist groups -- many of which, such as the Workers'World Party, Reclaim the Streets, and Carnival Against Capitalism -- have an international presence and, at times, also represent a potential threat in the United States. For example, anarchists, operating individually and in groups, caused much of the damage during the 1999 World Trade Organization ministerial meeting in Seattle." "Special interest terrorism differs from traditional right-wing and left-wing terrorism in that extremist special interest groups seek to resolve specific issues, rather than effect more widespread political change. Special interest extremists continue to conduct acts of politically motivated violence to force segments of society, including, the general public, to change attitudes about issues considered important to their causes. These groups occupy the extreme fringes of animal rights, pro-life, environmental, anti-nuclear, and other political and social movements." ============================================================================ Date: Fri, 28 Sep 2001 20:00:13 -0700 From: CyberBrook <•••@••.•••> Subject: US terror plans To: •••@••.••• New book on NSA sheds light on secret U.S. terror plan called Cuba invasion pretext By Scott Shane and Tom Bowman, Sun Staff Originally published April 24, 2001 WASHINGTON - U.S. military leaders proposed in 1962 a secret plan to commit terrorist acts against Americans and blame Cuba to create a pretext for invasion and the ouster of Communist leader Fidel Castro, according to a new book about the National Security Agency. "We could develop a Communist Cuban terror campaign in the Miami area, in other Florida cities and even in Washington," said one document reportedly prepared by the Joint Chiefs of Staff. "We could blow up a U.S. ship in Guantanamo Bay and blame Cuba," the document says. "Casualty lists in U.S. newspapers would cause a helpful wave of indignation." The plan is laid out in documents signed by the five Joint Chiefs but never carried out, according to writer James Bamford in "Body of Secrets." The new history of the Fort Meade-based eavesdropping agency is being released today by Doubleday. NSA regularly picks up the conversations of suspected terrorist financier Osama bin Laden, says Bamford, and has monitored Chinese and French companies trying to sell missiles to Iran. He provides new details about an Israeli attack on a Navy eavesdropping ship in 1967, suggesting that the sinking was deliberate. And he reveals the loss of an "entire warehouse" full of secret cryptographic gear to the North Vietnamese in 1975, at the end of the Vietnam War. Bamford, a former investigative reporter for ABC News who wrote "The Puzzle Palace" about the NSA in 1982, said his new book is based mostly on documents obtained through the Freedom of Information Act or found in government archives. "NSA never handed me any documents," he said. "It was a question of digging." He said he was most surprised by the anti-Cuba terror plan, code-named Operation Northwoods. It "may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the U.S. government," he writes. The Northwoods plan also proposed that if the 1962 launch of John Glenn into orbit were to fail, resulting in the astronaut's death, the U.S. government would publicize fabricated evidence that Cuba had used electronic interference to sabotage the flight, the book says. A previously secret document obtained by Bamford offers further suggestions for mayhem to be blamed on Cuba. "We could sink a boatload of Cubans en route to Florida (real or simulated). ... We could foster attempts on lives of Cubans in the United States, even to the extent of wounding in instances to be widely publicized," the document says. Another idea was to shoot down a CIA plane designed to replicate a passenger flight and announce that Cuban forces shot it down. Citing a White House document, Bamford writes that the idea of creating a pretext for the invasion of Cuba might have started with President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the last weeks of his administration, when the plan for an invasion by Cuban exiles trained in the United States was hatched. Carried out in April 1961, soon after Kennedy became president, the Bay of Pigs invasion proved a fiasco. Castro's forces quickly killed or rounded up the invaders. Army Gen. Lyman L. Lemnitzer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, presented the Operation Northwoods plan to Kennedy early in 1962, but the president rejected it that March because he wanted no overt U.S. military action against Cuba. Lemnitzer then sought unsuccessfully to destroy all evidence of the plan, according to Bamford. Lemnitzer and those who served with him in 1962 as chiefs of the nation's military branches are dead. But two former top Kennedy administration officials said yesterday that they were unaware of Operation Northwoods and questioned whether such a plan was ever drafted. "I've never heard of Operation Northwoods. Never heard of it and don't believe it," said Theodore Sorenson, Kennedy's White House special counsel. "Obviously, it would be totally illegal as well as totally unwise." Robert S. McNamara, Kennedy's defense secretary, said: "I never heard of it. I can't believe the chiefs were talking about or engaged in what I would call CIA-type operations." Bamford writes that besides the Joint Chiefs, then-Assistant Secretary of Defense Paul H. Nitze also favored "provoking a phony war with Cuba." "There may be a piece of paper" on Northwoods, said McNamara. "I just cannot conceive of Nitze approving anything like that or doing it without talking to me." The book contains many other revelations in its detailed account of NSA, the biggest U.S. intelligence agency and Maryland's largest employer, with more than 25,000 personnel at Fort Meade, site of its global eavesdropping efforts. Among them: In recent years, NSA has regularly listened to bin Laden's unencrypted telephone calls. Agency officials have sometimes played tapes of bin Laden talking to his mother to impress members of Congress and select visitors to the agency. In the late 1990s, NSA tracked efforts by Chinese and French companies to sell missile technology to Iran, particularly the C-802 anti-ship missile. The eavesdropping led to U.S. protests to the Chinese and French governments. When U.S. troops evacuated Vietnam in 1975, "an entire warehouse overflowing with NSA's most important cryptographic machines and other supersensitive code and cipher materials" was left behind. It was the largest compromise of such equipment in U.S. history, Bamford writes, but the agency still has not acknowledged it. When Israeli fighter jets attacked the NSA eavesdropping ship USS Liberty in the Mediterranean in 1967, killing 34 Americans and wounding 171, an NSA aircraft was listening in and heard Israeli pilots referring to the American flag on the ship. U.S. officials, including President Lyndon Baines Johnson, decided to forget the matter, Bamford writes, because they did not want to embarrass Israel. To this day, Israeli officials say their forces mistakenly attacked the U.S. ship. Bamford says the reason for the strike was Israel's desperate effort to cover up its attacks on the Egyptian town of El Arish in the Sinai. The Liberty was sitting offshore and the Israelis feared that the ship would detect the operation, which included the shooting of prisoners. Yesterday, an NSA spokesperson questioned a point made in the book about the USS Liberty. "We do not comment on operational matters, alleged or otherwise; however, Mr. Bamford's claim that the NSA leadership was `virtually unanimous in their belief that the attack was deliberate' is simply not true," the spokesperson said. When he wrote "The Puzzle Palace" in 1982, Bamford was attacked by some NSA officials, who said his revelations gave the Soviet Union and other U.S. adversaries too much information on the secret agency. One former director referred to him as "an unconvicted felon." With the end of the Cold War, the agency has been less guarded. NSA's current director, Air Force Lt. Gen. Michael V. Hayden, has granted a number of interviews. Hayden "cracked the door open a tiny bit," said Bamford, partly to burnish NSA's public image and correct misconceptions. Sun staff writer Laura Sullivan contributed to this article. Copyright 2001, The Baltimore Sun ============================================================================
