The Blackout of the March 21 Antiwar Mobilizations

[JackRiddler]

March 16, 2009

http://counterpunch.org/walsh03162009.html

Redbaiting on the Left

By JOHN WALSH

The War on Iraq drags on with no clear end in sight. The war on Afghanistan is being escalated. The war on Pakistan has also been stepped up, a war undeclared by Congress, therefore unconstitutional and the basis for an impeachment. All this has happened since Obama took office.

And yet with one exception, no national antiwar demonstration has been called. Worse, to a large degree the one demonstration called, for this coming weekend, March 21, has been blacked out on the “respectable Left.” This ugly fact was brought home to me quite strikingly yesterday at a meeting of single-payer activists, most also antiwar activists. No one with whom I spoke knew about the coming demonstration! Part of the reason is that some have tried to characterize this action as a fringe event, because it has been called by A.N.S.W.E.R., about which more below and with which this writer is not affiliated.

This mobilization has a list of endorsers which are cannot readily be dismissed. For starters: Cindy Sheehan, Code Pink, Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), Ron Kovic, Edward Asner, Mimi Kennedy, Ramsey Clark, School of the Americas Watch, San Francisco Labor Council (AFL-CIO) and many other labor locals as well as Green Party locals.

Despite this, the official peace movement, sock puppets of the Democrat Party, like MoveOn and UFPJ, is refusing to join or even to publicize this effort in any substantial way.

And this was predicted some time back by no less a monster than neocon McCarthyite David Horowitz who wrote in the Wall Street Journal not so many weeks ago as he gazed fondly on Obama’s inauguration:

“Consider: When President Obama commits this nation to war against the Islamic terrorists, as he already has in Afghanistan, he will take millions of previously alienated and disaffected Americans with him, and they will support our troops in a way that most of his party has refused to support them until now. When another liberal, Bill Clinton went to war from the air, there was no anti-war movement in the streets or in his party's ranks to oppose him. That is an encouraging fact for us…

And so it has come to pass.

Now some in UFPJ have characterized A.N.S.W.E.R. as loony lefties because a leading member is a group calling itself “Marxist-Leninist.” Zowie, kids! That is really scary! I remind such people that Nelson Mandela and Martin Luther King were not deterred from allying with “Marxist-Leninists,” nor were any of those who joined in the fight against Nazism and Colonialism. What is the big deal? If A.N.S.W.E.R. is the only group willing to organize a loud and clear street opposition to the Obama version of war and empire, I for one will not be deterred from joining in by a pathetic bit of redbaiting. And if only those who call themselves “Marxists-Leninists” are willing to call such an action, then perhaps there is something in the wisdom of Marx, and Lenin, that remains of value.

So the question really is, Which side are you on? That of the Obamanation and the Democrat Party version of war and empire? Or on the side of public, mass opposition to the war? I hope that as many as possible choose the latter course – in D.C., L.A or S.F.

John Walsh can be reached at John.Endwar@gmail.com

[ninakat]

Thanks for that Jack. It's all so disheartening, really. And this is just more evidence of how lobotomized (lobamatomized) Americans have become. It's why I have felt all along that Obama is potentially more dangerous than even George W. Bush. What do you suppose will happen when another false-flag event occurs on Obama's watch? I already know, which is why I'm so damn angry and so damn scared. And helpless. Any coalition that might have come together before seems now completely dispersed.

[Seamus OBlimey]

“Consider: When President Obama commits this nation to war against the Islamic terrorists, as he already has in Afghanistan, he will take millions of previously alienated and disaffected Americans with him, and they will support our troops in a way that most of his party has refused to support them until now. When another liberal, Bill Clinton went to war from the air, there was no anti-war movement in the streets or in his party's ranks to oppose him. That is an encouraging fact for us…

We had no interwebs then. Now we does.

[American Dream]

John Walsh wrote:

with one exception, no national antiwar demonstration has been called. Worse, to a large degree the one demonstration called, for this coming weekend, March 21, has been blacked out on the “respectable Left.” This ugly fact was brought home to me quite strikingly yesterday at a meeting of single-payer activists, most also antiwar activists. No one with whom I spoke knew about the coming demonstration! Part of the reason is that some have tried to characterize this action as a fringe event, because it has been called by A.N.S.W.E.R., about which more below and with which this writer is not affiliated.

This mobilization has a list of endorsers which are cannot readily be dismissed. For starters: Cindy Sheehan, Code Pink, Iraq Veterans Against the War (IVAW), Ron Kovic, Edward Asner, Mimi Kennedy, Ramsey Clark, School of the Americas Watch, San Francisco Labor Council (AFL-CIO) and many other labor locals as well as Green Party locals.

Despite this, the official peace movement, sock puppets of the Democrat Party, like MoveOn and UFPJ, is refusing to join or even to publicize this effort in any substantial way.

I'm not entirely sure what to say about John Walsh's take on things. I think calling MoveOn a sock puppet of the Democratic Party is fair- they never want to challenge the policy of the Dems as far as I can see, rather they try to mobilize support for Democratic Party agenda.

UFPJ (United for Peace and Justice) is another story. I don't think it's fair or accurate to say they differ with A.N.S.W.E.R. because they are red-baiting pawns of the Democratic Party. My understanding is that they have a lot of socialists in their organization, maybe though with different affiliations than the people running A.N.S.W.E.R. There have been a lot of really heated turf-battles between the two factions, and I personally think there are some very good reasons to definitively reject some of A.N.S.W.E.R.'s actions in recent years.

Anyway, for whatever it is worth, here is an old article that presents a very critical perspective on Ramsey Clark and the Workers' World faction:

http://extra.shadowpress.org/sin001/clark.htm



THE MYSTERIOUS RAMSEY CLARK:

STALINIST DUPE OR RULING-CLASS SPOOK?

By Manny Goldstein



Take a close look and there is something downright suspicious about former Attorney General Ramsey Clark, now the darling of certain sectors of the radical left. His journey has taken him from the heights of federal power to outer orbits of the political fringe. In the process, he has seemingly transformed from a shill for the most corrupt elements of the US elites to a shill for any foreign despot who claims to oppose the US elites. Who is Ramsey Clark really working for?

Dynasty of Mediocrity

Ramsey Clark was born to power. In 1945, the Clark family made its leap from Dallas to DC when Ramsey's dad Tom Clark, a lobbyist for Texas oil interests, was appointed Attorney General by President Harry Truman. In his Texas days, the politically ambitious elder Clark was cultivated as a useful connection by New Orleans mafia kingpin Carlos Marcello, and many feared Clark's new job would afford organized crime access to higher levels of power.

AG Clark was repeatedly mired in corruption scandals. In 1945, he was accused of taking a bribe to fix a war profiteering case. In 1947, after he had four convicted Chicago mob bosses sprung from prison before their terms were complete, Congress appointed a committee to investigate--and was effectively roadblocked by Tom's refusal to hand over parole records.

Truman admitted to a biographer that "Tom Clark was my biggest mistake." But he insisted: "It isn't so much that he's a bad man. It's just that he's such a dumb son of a bitch."

AG Tom Clark played along with the post-war anti-communist hysteria, approving federal wiretaps on Alger Hiss, the State Department official accused being a Soviet mole. In 1949, he moved over to the Supreme Court. Carlos Marcello biographer John Davis asserts that the kingpin continued to funnel money to Clark when he sat on the high court.

Tom stepped down from the high court when young Ramsey was appointed attorney general by President Lyndon B. Johnson in 1967. Ramsey was likely appointed precisely because he was Tom's son. And not because LBJ was impressed with Tom, but just the opposite: Johnson knew that Ramsey's appointment would maneuver Tom into stepping down. This cleared the way for the appointment of Thurgood Marshall, a comparative moral and intellectual titan who was strategic to the White House's effort to buy peace with the civil rights movement.

AG Ramsey got into a famous showdown with FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover when he attempted to block the Director's wiretaps of Martin Luther King Jr.--apparently the first stirrings of Ramsey's conscience. Hoover, considering Clark a spineless "jellyfish," went over his head and ordered the wiretaps without the AG's approval. However, Clark later told Curt Gentry, author of a critical biography of Hoover, that the FBI director had "very strong human qualities" and "was not at all evil by any means. He really believed deeply in integrity, as he defined it, as he saw it."

Despite his unwillingness to approve the snooping on King (who, after all, had been a guest at the Kennedy White House), Clark was complicit with Hoover's COINTELPRO. Following the 1967 riots in Newark and Detroit, he directed the FBI to investigate whether the unrest was the result of some "scheme or conspiracy." He instructed Hoover to develop "sources or informants in black nationalist organizations, SNCC and other less publicized groups." The result was Hoover's extensive "ghetto informant program."

In 1968, Clark prosecuted Dr. Benjamin Spock for advocating draft resistance. "As late as 1968, while campaigning for Lyndon Johnson in Wisconsin, Clark was shouting at anti-war protesters to take their grievances to Hanoi rather than Washington," wrote John B. Judis in a 1991 expose on Clark in The New Republic.

Clark also dutifully backed the official findings that Lee Harvey Oswald and Sirhan Sirhan each acted alone in the assassination of the Kennedy brothers.

But when LBJ lost in '68, Clark was iced from his farewell luncheon. The humiliated White House isolated him as King's Resurrection City protesters occupied the DC mall and Republican candidate Richard Nixon baited the AG for undermining "law and order." He had become a convenient whipping boy for both parties.

Leftward, Ho

An embittered casualty of the '60s, Clark assumed a leftist posture after leaving the Justice Department. He became the lawyer for anti-war protestor Philip Berrigan, headed a private probe into the FBI killings of Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, and travelled to Vietnam to condemn the bombing.

In a 1974 bid for Senate in New York, he played the centrist in the Democratic primary, with Bella Abzug on the left and Daniel Moynihan on the right. Moynihan won. Clark, now 46, appeared to burn his bridges with the establishment at this point.

In June 1980, with America mesmerized by the Iran hostage crisis, he joined a forum on "Crimes of America" in Tehran--the first of many such junkets. The '80s saw him globetrotting to schmooze with any dictator who happened to be on the White House shit-list. After the US bombing of Libya in 1986, he met with Col. Moammar Qadaffi in Tripoli. He went to Grenada to advise Bernard and Phyllis Coard, leaders of the clique accused of murdering Maurice Bishop, who were facing treason charges.

Things started to smell really fishy in 1989, when Clark represented ultra-right cult-master Lyndon LaRouche and six cohorts on conspiracy and mail fraud charges. The LaRouchies had been bilking their naive followers of their savings by getting them to cough up their credit card numbers. Clark (who had been silent when the real COINTELPRO was conducted under his watch at the Justice Department) now charged that the LaRouche case was an "outgrowth" of COINTELPRO. He said the case was manufactured by LaRouche's "powerful enemies within the establishment" who targeted the cult because of its crusade "to combat the traffic in so-called 'recreational drugs'...and the practice of usury."

Clark was echoing the standard line of the LaRouche organization, which paradoxically pleads government persecution while boasting of its connections to the intelligence establishment (uniquely merging paranoia with delusions of grandeur). In fact, the cult has exchanged information with the FBI, and farmed out its "intelligence" services to Panama's Gen. Manuel Noriega. LaRouche's 1970s campaigns for a "War on Drugs" and space-based missile defense eerily predicted Reagan-era programs.

Clark couldn't keep his client from a conviction and brief prison term. But Clark's relationship with LaRouche went beyond legal representation to actual advocacy. Researcher Chip Berlet, a watchdog on radical right groups, told Judis that Clark's brief was a "political polemic."

In June 1990, a LaRouche front organization, the Schiller Institute, flew Clark to a cult-organized conference in Copenhagen. His speech there claimed the US government had moved against LaRouche because he was "a danger to the system," and decried that he was a victim of "vilification." The speech was printed in full by the LaRouchie New Federalist propaganda rag.

Clark also represented PLO leaders in a suit brought by the family of Leon Klinghoffer, the elderly vacationer who was shot and thrown overboard from the hijacked Achille Lauro cruise-ship by renegade Palestinian terrorists in 1986.

Another Clark client was Karl Linnas, an ex-Nazi concentration camp guard in Estonia (where he had overseen the murder of some 12,000 resistence fighters and Jews), who was being deported from the US to the USSR to face war crimes charges. Clark again lost the case, but again went to bat for his client in the public arena, questioning the need to prosecute Nazis "forty years after some god-awful crime they're alleged to have committed."

The Devil's Pact

In August 1990, two months after his return from the LaRouche conference in Copenhagen, with US troops mobilizing to Saudi Arabia, Clark accepted an invitation to lead the National Coalition to Stop US Intervention in the Middle East. This invitation had been extended by members of an orthodox Stalinist sect, the Workers World Party (WWP). Clark had finally found a new home. The Clark-WWP alliance has lasted to this day.

A brief look at the doctrinaire sect's history: WWP is the brainchild of Sam Marcy, intellectual guru at the party's helm until his death in 1998. In 1956, Marcy led the faction in the Socialist Workers Party that supported the Soviet invasion of Hungary, attacking the popular uprising and general strike there as "counter-revolutionary." In 1959, the Marcy clique broke from the Trotskyist SWP to found the more Stalinist WWP. The new group wasted little time in cheering on the brutal Chinese repression of the indigenous culture in Tibet that year (which sent the Dalai Lama and 80,000 refugees fleeing into exile).

Vying with SWP and other parties for top dog position on the radical left, WWP always maintained a front group to suck in neophytes. During the Vietnam era this was Youth Against War & Fascism (YAWF). In the Reagan-Bush era it was People's Anti-War Mobilization (PAM)--which would be the operative group in the National Coalition in 1990.

With glasnost, WWP supported the Kremlin hard-liners who resisted Gorbachev's reforms and disarmament moves. Insisting that China remained a "workers state," WWP supported Deng Xiaoping in the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, again attacking the protesting students and workers as "counter-revolutionaries." In 1991, WWP supported the KGB coup against Gorbachev.

Yet WWP also wooed the Democratic party, supporting Jesse Jackson's presidential bid in 1984. In New York, WWP made alliances with the left wing of the Democrats to establish a foothold in key trade unions.

WWP cadre Gavriella Gemma became a secretary in Clark's New York law office in 1977. In his New Republic piece, Judis suggests that Clark fell under her spell and was won over to the WWP. When David McReynolds of the War Resisters League met with Clark in 1990 to warn him that WWP was "using him," Clark refused to listen, constantly referring to what "Gavriella said."

With Clark as the figurehead and PAM/WWP at the helm, the National Coalition provoked a split in the movement against Operation Desert Storm through its refusal to condemn Saddam Hussein or Iraq's invasion of Kuwait. The other established anti-war groups (War Resisters League, CISPES, SANE/Freeze, National Organization for Women, etc.) formed the rival National Campaign for Peace in the Middle East, which condemned both Bush and Saddam. Soft-peddling their pro-Saddam line, WWP's National Coalition won endorsements from celebrities like Spike Lee and Casey Kasem, sucking in numbers even after the split. The two groups held separate marches on Washington in January 1991, allowing the media to portray a divided movement.

WWP went to extreme lengths to maintain control of the National Coalition. At an April 1991 protest in New York City, WWP thugs attacked a Lower East Side squatter contingent and ejected them from the rally for refusing to take down their unapproved homemade banners. WWPers then called in the police and had the squatters arrested (SHADOW April/May 1991).

In November 1990, Clark flew to Baghdad to meet with Saddam, who allowed him to return with a few hostages. In February, with the bombs falling, Clark was in Basra, Iraq's southern port, witnessing the destruction. But his consistent failure to complain about Saddam's regime made it clear he was there at its invitation.

With Clark's name-recognition and homespun, avuncular image, WWP had the opportunity to form a new front group to win over naive liberals. This was the International Action Center (IAC), which remains the top vehicle for Clark's ego and WWP's play for hegemony over the fragmented remnants of the left.

IAC/WWP's politics went from bad to worse as Yugoslavia descended into chaos. It soon became obvious that Clark's legal work now closely followed the WWP line. In 1992, Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs, was served with federal subpoenas when he touched down in New York for UN meetings. The National Organization for Women and the Center for Constitutional Rights, acting on behalf of Bosnian refugee women, were charging him with ordering mass rape and war crimes. Clark, of course, immediately came forward to represent Karadzic. Clark also made junkets to Serb-occupied Bosnia to schmooze with Karadzic (as did various Russian neo-fascists like Vladimir Zhirinovsky).

International Action Center leaflets engaged in blatant historical revisionism over Serb war crimes, portraying them as lies perpetrated by an imperialist conspiracy.

"What about all those reports of 'Serbian atrocities'?" asked an IAC leaflet in 1993, and then answered its own question: "Before the bombs can be dropped the lies must be told." It then went on to cite fabricated atrocities which the Kuwaiti regime's paid PR hacks had attributed to the Iraqi occupation forces, without offering a shred of evidence that the reports of Serb rape camps and "ethnic cleansing" were similarly fabricated. Note the subtly evil propaganda. Opposing NATO bombing is one thing. Calling the reports of mass rape and ethnic cleansing "lies" is quite another. This "anti-war" propaganda is on the same repugnant level as right-wing Holocaust Revisionism.

IAC/WWP embraces what is now called in Europe the "Red-Brown Alliance"--the notion of a left-fascist alliance against the West. This alliance is most advanced in Russia where neo-Stalinists and neo-Czarists have joined to oppose Yeltsin (seen as a stooge of the West). In an echo of the 1939 Hitler-Stalin Pact, former communists and anarchists in Russia now work with figures like Zhirinovsky, who have themselves sought alliances with German neo-Nazis. Like Clark and WWP, these Russian extremists have avidly rooted for the Serb armies throughout the wars in former Yugoslavia.

The "Red-Brown Alliance" was seen on the streets of New York during the 1999 NATO air campaign against Yugoslavia, when Clark led rallies which brought WWP communists together with right-wing nationalists and Orthodox priests from the Serb immigrant community. Serbian flags were proudly waved at these New York rallies, while meetings at IAC's 14th Street offices degenerated into mass chants of "Serbia! Serbia! Serbia!" This at a time when Serbian police and paramilitaries were forcing 800,000 Albanian refugees to flee their homes in Kosovo at gunpoint. Again, WRL and other anti-war groups broke away to form their own coalition that rejected both NATO's bombing and Serbian aggression against the Kosovo Albanians. But this time it was only IAC/WWP which held a national rally in DC.

In October 1999, Clark met with Yugoslavia's President Slobodan Milosevic in Belgrade, and said everything the dictator wanted to hear. Milosevic, by then facing war crimes charges before the UN tribunal, called his guest "brave, objective, and moral."

The case against Radovan Karadzic languished since the UN launched war crimes charges against him, forcing him into hiding in Serbia. Clark, meanwhile, represented a Rwandan Hutu militiaman fighting his extradition from the US back to Rwanda to face genocide charges. The WWP line simultaneously (and predictably) tilted to the genocidal Hutu militias as the UN wrote up war crime charges against their leaders for ordering the slaughter of half a million Tutsi civilians in 1994.

What is Ramsey Clark: dupe, kook or spook? Has a well-intentioned but none-too-bright Clark been duped by the WWP cadre? Or has his reasoning become unhinged for reasons of personal psychology? Or, is he a deep-cover spook, whose real Devil's pact is with sinister elements of the US intelligence community, his mission to divide and discredit any resistance to Washington's war moves?

You decide.

RECOMMENDED READING:

Alexander, Robert J.
International Trotskyism, 1929-1985: A Documented Analysis of the Movement
Duke University 1991

Davis, John H.
Mafia Kingfish: Carlos Marcello and the Assassination of John F. Kennedy
Signet 1989

Gentry, Curt
J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and the Secrets
Penguin 1992

Judis, John
"The Strange Case of Ramsey Clark"
The New Republic, April 22, 1991

Lee, Martin
The Beast Reawakens:
Resurgent Fascism & Right-Wing Extremism in the US & Europe
Routledge 1999

[Hugh Manatee Wins]

I've concluded Ramsey Clark is sincere and gives not a whit about the purity kerfuffle because he knows how SO much more dangerous the USG is from experience.

But questions about him come up online every time a Big Protest season comes around.

So read his words about spooks probably murdering JFK, Fred Hampton, and MLK carefully in an anti-spook magazine called Covert Action Quarterly started by whistleblowing icons like Philip Agee--

http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/CIA/C ... tions.html

The Corruption of Covert Actions
by Ramsey Clark

CovertAction Quarterly magazine, Fall 1998

Nothing is more destructive of democracy or peace and freedom through the rule of law than secret criminal acts by government. The fact, or appearance, of covert action by government agents or their surrogates rots the core of love and respect that is the foundation of any free democratic society. Every true citizen of any nation wants to be able to love her country and still love justice. Corrupt covert actions make this impossible.
***
Despite common knowledge that the U.S. government is engaged continually in dangerous covert actions, some that can alter the futures of whole societies, most people cling desperately to the faith that their government is different and better than others, that it would engage in criminal, or ignoble, acts only under the greatest provocation, or direst necessity, and then only for a greater good. They do not want information that suggests otherwise and question the patriotism of anyone who raises unwanted questions.
***
In Vietnam 30 years ago, with all of Charlie Company, including dozens of robust young American soldiers who shot and killed helpless Vietnamese women and children and many other U.S. military personnel witnesses to, or aware of, the slaughter at My Lai, few would imagine the murderous event could be kept secret. Yet few would deny the U.S. intended to do so. The tragedy barely came to light through the courage and perseverance of several men. Ron Ridenhour broke the story after personal inquiry with letters to the Congress. The hero of My Lai, Hugh Thompson, who ended the massacre by placing himself between the U.S. troops and surviving Vietnamese and ordering his helicopter machine gunner to aim at the American soldiers and shoot if they tried to continue, was removed from Vietnam, separated from the service, and threatened with prosecution supported by Congressmen Mendel Rivers and Edward Hebert. Lt. William Calley alone was convicted, confined to base for a while, and still enjoys government support. Only by the sacrifice and heroism of an unusual handful did the story become known, and even then there has never been an acknowledgment of wrongdoing by the U.S. The medal begrudgingly given Thompson in 1998 was for non-combat service. And My Lai is viewed as an aberration, an ambiguous aberration.

When Salvadoran soldiers of the elite Atlacatl Battalion, which trained in the U.S., massacred Salvadoran villagers at El Mozote, shooting even infants Iying on wooden floors at point blank range, the U.S. government was able to cover up any public disclosure, even though top reporters from the New York Times and the Washington Post and a TV team from CBS knew the story. It was a dozen years later before the massacre at El Mozote was confirmed, and years too late to affect U.S. plans for El Salvador, or the careers of those responsible for yet another U.S.-condoned, and inspired, massacre.

Just to list a few of the alleged assassinations conducted or planned by U.S. agents exposes the crisis in confidence covert actions have created for our country. Allende, Lumumba, Diem, Bhutto, with many questioning whether President Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., should be included, and U.S. planning for the assassination of Fidel Castro part of our public record, while air and missile attacks directed at Qaddafi of Libya and Saddam Hussein of Iraq missed their targets.
***
CIA Director Richard Helms pleaded guilty to perjury for false testimony he gave before the U.S. Senate on the CIA' s role in the overthrow of President Allende. He was fined, but his two-year prison sentence was suspended. But the American public is unaware of it, and Chile has never been the same. U.S. support for the overthrow of Allende was the essential element in that tragedy. For years, Patrice Lumumba's son would ask me whenever we met, first in Beirut, or later in Geneva, if the U.S. killed his father. I finally gave him a copy of former CIA officer John Stockwell's In Search of Enemies, which tells the story. Justice William O. Douglas wrote in later years that the U.S. killed Diem, painfully adding, "And Jack was responsible." Bhutto was removed from power in Pakistan by force on the l5th of July, after the usual party on the 4th at the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, with U.S. approval, if not more, by General Zia al-Haq. Bhutto was falsely accused and brutalized for months during proceedings that corrupted the judiciary of Pakistan before being murdered, then hanged. That Bhutto had run for president of the student body at U.C. Berkeley and helped arrange the opportunity for Nixon to visit China did not help him when he defied the U.S.
So we should not be surprised that patriotic Americans wonder whether, or even charge that, the U.S. government assassinated President John F. Kennedy and our greatest moral leader, Martin Luther King, Jr.
We have been told time and again of the "Deadly Deceits" of our government, occasionally by career CIA officers like Ralph McGehee, by FBI agents, crime lab scientists, and city detectives like Frank Serpico. Major studies on the lawless violence of COINTELPRO, the Life and Death of National Security Study Memorandum 200, the police murders of Black Panthers Fred Hampton and Mark Clark, are a part of the lore of our lawless government.

And still the People want to Believe.
Our covert government's past is modest prologue to its new powers of concealment, deception, and deadly secret violent actions. Too often the government is supported by a controlled, or willingly duped, mass media, by collaborating or infiltrated international governmental organizations, and by key officials in vast transnational corporations.

The new evil empires, terrorism, Islam, barely surviving socialist and would-be socialist states, economic competitors, uncooperative leaders of defenseless nations, and most of all the masses of impoverished people, overwhelmingly people of color, are the inspiration for new campaigns by the U.S. government ... to shoot first and ask questions later, to exploit, to demonize and destroy.

The CIA is rapidly expanding its manpower for covert operations against these newfound enemies. The National Security apparatus, with major new overseas involvement by the FBI, is creating an enormous new anti-terrorism industry exceeding in growth rate all other government activities.
***
The U.S. is not nearly so concerned that its acts be kept secret from their intended victims as it is that the American people not know of them. The Cambodians knew they were being bombed. So did the Libyans. The long suffering Iraqis know every secret the U.S. government conceals from the American people and every lie it tells them. Except for surprise attacks, it is primarily from the American people that the U.S. government must keep the true nature and real purpose of so many of its domestic and foreign acts secret while it manufactures fear and falsehood to manipulate the American public. The reasons for and effects of government covert acts and cultivated fear, with the hatred it creates, must remain secret for the U.S. to be able to send missiles against unknown people, deprive whole nations of food and medicine, and arrest, detain, and deport legal residents from the U.S. on secret allegations, without creating domestic outrage.

As never before, it is imperative that the American people care about and know what their government is doing in their name. That we be demanding of government, skeptical, critical, even a little paranoid, because not to suspect the unthinkable has been made a dangerous naiveté by a government that does unthinkable things and believes it knows best. We must challenge controlling power in America that seeks to pacify the people by bread and circuses and relies on violence, deception, and secrecy to advance its grand plans for the concentration of wealth and power in the hands of the few.

For 20 years, Ellen Ray, Bill Schaap, Lou Wolf, and Philip Agee, with the help of very few others, have struggled against all odds to alert our people to the perils of covert action. They started their lonely, courageous, dangerous struggle in what many want to think was the aftermath of the worst of times, but now we can clearly see the worst is yet to be. The American people owe an enormous debt of gratitude to these valiant few.
The role of CovertAction Quarterly is more important than ever. Those who love America should support and defend its efforts, against the most powerful and secretive forces, to find the truth that can prevent our self-destruction and may yet set us free.
***
Ramsey Clark was United States Attorney General during the Johnson administration. He is an international lawyer and human rights advocate, based in New York City, and a prolific author.

[American Dream]

I think redemption is a beautiful thing, and I hold out hope for it happening for even the most degraded souls.

For CIA defector Phil Agee, I believe it was real.

For Ramsey Clark, I'm not so sure. I'm not saying I know he's dirty- I don't. At the very minimum though, I do question his judgement.

The Workers' World Party, despite their ability to get things done effectively, seems to be overly centralized and have a very bad "line" on certain issues. This also doesn't prove they're dirty, but it does very much make me question what they're doing...