Chapter Two

Teach-In: Over Coffee

1. On post-World War II U.S. and Soviet military presence, see for example, Center for Defense Information, "Soviet Geopolitical Momentum: Myth or Menace? Trends of Soviet Influence Around the World From 1945 to 1980," Defense Monitor, January 1980, p. 5 (tracing Soviet influence on a country-by-country basis since World War II, and concluding that Soviet power peaked in the late 1950s and by 1979 "the Soviets were influencing only 6 percent of the world's population and 5 percent of the world's G.N.P., exclusive of the Soviet Union"); Senate Subcommittee on Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad, Security Agreements and Commitments Abroad, Report to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, December 21, 1970, 91st Congress, 2nd Session, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1970, C.I.S.# 70-S382-17, p. 3 (pointing out that the post-World War II U.S. global military presence reached over 3,000 foreign military bases "virtually surrounding both the Soviet Union and Communist China"); Ruth Leger Sivard, World Military and Social Expenditures 1981, Leesburg, VA: World Priorities, 1981, p. 8 (study counting at least 125 military conflicts since the end of World War II, 95 percent of them occurring in the Third World and in most cases involving foreign forces, with "western powers accounting for 79 percent of the interventions, communist for 6 percent").

2. For Gaddis's justification of his use of the "containment" concept, see John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy, New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. The exact words (p. vii n."*"; emphasis in original):

The term "containment" poses certain problems, implying as it does a consistently defensive orientation in American policy. One can argue at length about whether Washington's approach to the world since 1945 has been primarily defensive -- I tend to think it has -- but the argument is irrelevant for the purposes of this book. What is important here is that American leaders consistently perceived themselves as responding to rather than initiating challenges to the existing international order. For this reason, it seems to me valid to treat the idea of containment as the central theme of postwar national security policy.

3. For Gaddis's reference to "economic considerations," see John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of Postwar American National Security Policy, New York: Oxford University Press, 1982. The exact words (pp. 356-357; emphasis in original):

What is surprising is the primacy that has been accorded economic considerations in shaping strategies of containment, to the exclusion of other considerations. One would not expect to find, in initiatives directed so self-consciously at the world at large, such decisive but parochial concerns. . . . To a remarkable degree, containment has been the product, not so much of what the Russians have done, or of what has happened elsewhere in the world, but of internal forces operating within the United States.

4. For National Security Council [N.S.C.] 68, of April 14, 1950, see Foreign Relations of the United States, 1950, Vol. I, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1977, pp. 234-292. The exact words (section VI.B.2, pp. 261, 258):

[T]here are grounds for predicting that the United States and other free nations will within a period of a few years at most experience a decline in economic activity of serious proportions unless more positive governmental programs are developed than are now available. . . . Industrial production declined by 10 percent between the first quarter of 1948 and the last quarter of 1949, and by approximately one-fourth between 1944 and 1949. In March 1950 there were approximately 4,750,000 unemployed, as compared to 1,070,000 in 1943 and 670,000 in 1944. The gross national product declined slowly in 1949 from the peak reached in 1948 ($262 billion in 1948 to an annual rate of $256 billion in the last six months of 1949), and in terms of constant prices declined by about 20 percent between 1944 and 1948.

The document then proposes a build-up of "economic and military strength" through rearmament (pp. 258, 286):

With a high level of economic activity, the United States could soon attain a gross national product of $300 billion per year, as was pointed out in the President's Economic Report (January 1950). Progress in this direction would permit, and might itself be aided by, a build-up of the economic and military strength of the United States and the free world; furthermore, if a dynamic expansion of the economy were achieved, the necessary build-up could be accomplished without a decrease in the national standard of living because the required resources could be obtained by siphoning off a part of the annual increment in the gross national product. . . .

One of the most significant lessons of our World War II experience was that the American economy, when it operates at a level approaching full efficiency, can provide enormous resources for purposes other than civilian consumption while simultaneously providing a high standard of living. After allowing for price changes, personal consumption expenditures rose by about one-fifth between 1939 and 1944, even though the economy had in the meantime increased the amount of resources going into Government use by $60-$65 billion (in 1939 prices).

For commentary, see for example, Fred Block, "Economic Instability and Military Strength: The Paradoxes of the 1950 Rearmament Decision," Politics and Society, Vol. 10, No. 1, 1980, pp. 35-58; Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration, and the Cold War, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992, ch. 8. See also chapter 3 of U.P. and its footnotes 7 to 10.

5. On the decision to increase military spending in the wake of the Marshall Plan's failure, see for example, Richard M. Freeland, The Truman Doctrine and the Origins of McCarthyism: Foreign Policy, Domestic Politics, and Internal Security, 1946-1948, New York: New York University Press, 1985, pp. 329-334. An excerpt (pp. 330, 334):

Despite the rapid success of the aid program in inducing the recovery of western Europe's productive capacity, unsatisfactory progress was made with respect to the problem of increasing the dollar earnings of western European economies. In 1949 European exports to both the United States and Latin America actually declined. In this context Britain suffered another economic crisis and in September 1949 was forced to devalue the pound by 30 per cent; in subsequent months all other Marshall Plan countries followed suit. By the end of the year both [the Council of Economic Advisors] and other federal agencies came to the conclusion that the [Committee for European Economic Cooperation] had asserted in 1948: the E.R.P. [European Recovery Program, the "Marshall Plan,"] offered no prospect for the countries of Europe to balance their payments through exports to the U.S. . . .

The decision to shift the emphasis of American policy toward Europe from economic aid to military aid occurred within the context of the recognized failure of the politico-commercial strategy that was an essential component of the E.R.P. This failure left the kind of rearmament program proposed by N.S.C.-68 as the sole means for building the Atlantic political community to which U.S. policy was consistently committed after 1946.

William Borden, The Pacific Alliance: United States Foreign Economic Policy and Japanese Trade Recovery, 1947-1955, Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984, especially pp. 12, 27, 50-60, 245-246 n.75 (reaching the same general conclusion; also pointing out that "few dollars changed hands internationally under the aid programs, the dollars went to American producers and the goods were sold to the European public" in local currencies).

See also, Melvyn Leffler, "The United States and the Strategic Dimensions of the Marshall Plan," Diplomatic History, Summer 1988, pp. 277-306 at pp. 277-278 (overcoming the dollar gap "which had originally prompted the Marshall Plan" required a restoration of the triangular trade patterns whereby Europe earned dollars through U.S. purchase of raw materials from its colonies; hence European, and Japanese, access to Third World markets and raw materials was an essential component of the general strategic planning, and a necessary condition for fulfillment of the general purposes of the Marshall Plan, which were to "benefit the American economy," to "redress the European balance of power" in favor of U.S. allies -- state and class -- and to "enhance American national security," where "national security . . . meant the control of raw materials, industrial infrastructure, skilled manpower, and military bases"). And see chapter 3 of U.P. and its footnotes 3, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11.

6. For Gaddis's characterization of the 1918 invasion of the Soviet Union, see John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries Into the History of the Cold War, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 10f, 21. His exact words (pp. 10-11):

This debate over the motives for intervention misses an important point, though, which is that Wilson and his allies saw their actions in a defensive rather than an offensive context. Intervention in Russia took place in response to a profound and potentially far-reaching intervention by the new Soviet government in the internal affairs, not just of the West, but of virtually every other country in the world: I refer here, of course to the Revolution's challenge -- which could hardly have been more categorical -- to the very survival of the capitalist order. . . . From this perspective, the interesting question regarding Western intervention in Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution is why it was such a half-hearted, poorly planned, and ultimately ineffectual enterprise, given the seriousness of the threat it sought to counter.

7. For Secretary of State Lansing's warning, see "Lansing Papers, 1914-1920," Vol. II, Foreign Relations of the United States, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1940, p. 348. His exact words (referring to a 1918 communication from the Bolsheviks to "the peoples and governments of the Allied countries"):

The document is an appeal to the proletariat of all countries, to the ignorant and mentally deficient, who by their numbers are urged to become masters. Here seems to me to lie a very real danger in view of the present social unrest throughout the world.

For a similar warning by Lansing made elsewhere, see John Lewis Gaddis, Russia, the Soviet Union, and the United States: An Interpretive History, New York: Knopf, 1978, p. 105:

[Bolshevism's appeal is] to the unintelligent and brutish elements of mankind to take from the intellectual and successful their rights and possessions and to reduce them to a state of slavery. . . . Bolshevism is the most hideous and monstrous thing that the human mind has ever conceived.

See also, Lloyd Gardner, Safe for Democracy: The Anglo-American Response to Revolution, New York: Oxford University Press, 1984, p. 242 (on President Wilson's fears about Bolshevism's potential effect upon American blacks).

For a study of Wilson's intervention in Russia, see David S. Fogelsang, America's Secret War Against Bolshevism: U.S. Intervention in the Russian Civil War, 1917-1920, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995.

For sources on the Red Scare of 1919 in the U.S., see footnote 6 of chapter 8 of U.P. Chomsky remarks: "The Red Scare was strongly backed by the press and elites generally until they came to see that their own interests would be harmed as the right-wing frenzy got out of hand -- in particular, the anti-immigrant hysteria, which threatened the reserve of cheap labor" (Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, Boston: South End, 1989, p. 189).

8. On popular reform under the Sandinistas, see for example, Latin American Studies Association, The Electoral Process in Nicaragua: The Report of the Latin American Studies Association Delegation to Observe the Nicaraguan General Election of November 4, 1984, Latin American Studies Association Official Publication, November 19, 1984, pp. 4-7 (summarizing the Sandinista government's priorities and why it gained popular support during the first half of the 1980s; noting that the Sandinista agenda "defined national priorities according to 'the logic of the majority,' which meant that Nicaragua's poor majority would have access to, and be the primary beneficiaries of, public programs"); Joseph Collins et al., What Difference Could a Revolution Make?: Food and Farming in the New Nicaragua, San Francisco: Institute for Food and Development Policy, 1985; Dianna Melrose, Nicaragua: The Threat of a Good Example?, Oxford (U.K.): Oxfam [British charitable relief and development organization], 1985 (preface 1989). An excerpt (pp. 1, 13-14):

[Oxfam's] long-term development work is most likely to succeed where governments are genuinely committed to the needs of the poor majority. Rarely is this the case. Nicaragua stands out because of the positive climate for development based on people's active participation, which Oxfam has encountered over the past five years [i.e. since 1979 under the Sandinista government]. . . . [S]ince 1979 the scope for development has been enormous, with remarkable progress achieved in health, literacy and a more equitable distribution of resources. . . .

The new Government of National Reconstruction stressed its desire to develop a mixed economy and political pluralism in a country that had no tradition of democracy or free elections. Great importance was also attached to achieving a high degree of national self-sufficiency and an independent, non-aligned foreign policy. This radically new focus of social policy in Nicaragua towards the needs of the poor presented enormous scope for Oxfam's work. In addition to locally-based projects, Oxfam was now able to support nationwide initiatives to tackle problems rooted in poverty. The concept of actively involving people in development through community organisations is neither new nor radical, but widely recognised to be a precondition for successful development. However, as the World Bank points out: "Governments . . . vary greatly in the commitment of their political leadership to improving the condition of the people and encouraging their active participation in the development process." From Oxfam's experience of working in seventy-six developing countries, Nicaragua was to prove exceptional in the strength of that Government commitment.

This report documents a wide range of Sandinista reforms (pp. 14-26). They included a decline in the national illiteracy rate from 53 percent to 13 percent; popular education collectives established in 17,000 communities; 127 percent more schools, 61 percent more teachers, and 55 percent more children at primary school; a national program of mass inoculations against diseases which resulted in, among other successes, a 98 percent fall in new malaria cases; agrarian reform, including compensation for expropriated land, since up to a third of arable land (mainly on large estates) was idle or under-used; 49,661 families in a total population of three million receiving titles to land between late 1981 and late 1984; and an 8 percent increase in overall agricultural production between 1979 and 1983. The Inter-American Development Bank summarized: "Nicaragua has made noteworthy progress in the social sector, which is laying a solid foundation for long-term socio-economic development." As the New England Journal of Medicine put it: "In just three years, more has been done in most areas of social welfare than in fifty years of dictatorship under the Somoza family." See also footnote 52 of chapter 1 of U.P.

For the World Bank's 1980 prediction that it would take at least a decade for Nicaragua to reach the economic level that it had in 1977 -- because of the damaging economic consequences of the popular insurrection against the U.S.-client dictator Somoza's regime -- see Michael E. Conroy, "Economic Aggression as an Instrument of Low-Intensity Warfare," in Thomas Walker, ed., Reagan versus the Sandinistas: The Undeclared War on Nicaragua, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1987, pp. 57-79, especially p. 67 (citing "Nicaragua: The Challenge of Reconstruction," Washington: International Bank for Reconstruction and Development [the "World Bank"], October 9, 1981, p. 11). See also, Michael E. Conroy, "Economic Legacy and Policies: Performance and Critique," in Thomas Walker, ed., Nicaragua: The First Five Years, New York: Praeger, 1985, pp. 232-233.

9. On the "threat of a good example" as a preoccupation of U.S. foreign policy, see chapter 5 of U.P. and especially its footnote 32, and also its footnotes 7, 8 and 108. See also chapter 1 of U.P. and its footnote 20; and footnote 8 of this chapter.

10. A search on the Nexis computer database of newspapers and journals dating from the early 1980s for every instance in which the root-term "invade!" (i.e. including "invades," "invaded," etc.) was published within ten words of "South Vietnam" retrieved a total of two direct statements in American newspapers and journals that the U.S. invaded South Vietnam. One was by Chomsky in an interview -- see Eric Black, "Noam Chomsky: He's got a world on his mind," Star Tribune (Minneapolis), April 10, 1997, p. 17A. The other appeared in a letter to the editor from a reader in Lakeland, Florida -- see Fred Mercer, "U.S. caused 'Nam war," Letter, The Ledger (Lakeland, FL), December 1, 1995, p. A14. In addition, the Washington Post quoted the phrase one time in an article on North Vietnamese propaganda and reeducation camps; and the British news-wire Reuters and the British Broadcasting Corporation transmitted stories which utilized the terms in this manner. See Robert G. Kaiser, "Surviving Communist 'Reeducation Camp,'" Washington Post, May 15, 1994, p. A33; and, for example, John Chalmers, "Vietnam's party conclaves map turbulent history," Reuters, June 27, 1996.

11. For Gaddis's characterization of Dienbienphu, see John Lewis Gaddis, The Long Peace: Inquiries Into the History of the Cold War, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987, pp. 129f.

12. For Bundy's statement about Dienbienphu, see McGeorge Bundy, Danger and Survival: Choices About the Bomb in the First Fifty Years, New York: Random House, 1988, pp. 260-270 at pp. 260-261.

13. On the indigenous opposition which confronted the French and then the U.S. in Vietnam, see footnote 71 of chapter 1 of U.P.

14. On Nicaragua's 1984 election, see for example, Latin American Studies Association, The Electoral Process in Nicaragua: The Report of the Latin American Studies Association Delegation to Observe the Nicaraguan General Election of November 4, 1984, Latin American Studies Association Official Publication, November 19, 1984; Canadian Church and Human Rights Delegation, Nicaragua 1984: Democracy, Elections and War, Toronto: Inter-Church Committee on Human Rights in Latin America, 1984; Abraham Brumberg, "'Sham' and 'Farce' in Nicaragua?," Dissent, Spring 1985, pp. 226-237.

On El Salvador's 1982 election, see for example, Edward S. Herman and Frank Brodhead, Demonstration Elections: U.S.-Staged Elections in the Dominican Republic, Vietnam, and El Salvador, Boston: South End, 1984, ch. 4.

15. On repression in El Salvador and Guatemala versus that in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas, see for example, Americas Watch, Human Rights in Nicaragua 1986, New York: Americas Watch Committee, February 1987, chs. 1, 2 and 6. An excerpt (pp. 140-141, 158-159):

One illustration of the Reagan Administration's employment of human rights rhetoric in its war against the Sandinistas is a joint State Department-Defense Department document that was distributed to those who attended the White House ceremony on December 10, 1986 marking International Human Rights Day. Printed on glossy paper with a silver cover and with four color illustrations (a format that stands out in contrast to U.S. government documents on human rights in other parts of the world) it is titled "The Challenge to Democracy in Central America." At page 28, it cites the following statement approvingly: "In the American continent, there is no regime more barbaric and bloody, no regime that violates human rights in a manner more constant and permanent, than the Sandinista regime." Whatever the sins of the Sandinistas -- and they are real -- this is nonsense. . . .

Between 40,000 and 50,000 Salvadoran civilians were murdered by government forces and death squads allied to them during the 1980s. A similar number died during [the U.S. client] Somoza's last year or so in Nicaragua, mostly in indiscriminate attacks on the civilian population by the National Guard. The number of civilian noncombatants killed by the armed forces in Guatemala during the 1980s cannot be known, but it is probably the highest in the hemisphere. . . . As to Nicaragua, taking into account all of the civilian noncombatant deaths attributable to government forces in the more than seven years since the Sandinistas consolidated power, it is difficult to count a total of more than 300 . . . of which the largest number of victims were Miskito Indians on the Atlantic Coast in 1981 and 1982. . . . [Furthermore], Americas Watch knows of two cases of [Nicaraguan] political prisoners in the sense in which that term is used in the United States . . . [one of these] had been arrested for evading the military draft. . . . He was subsequently released without charges and is not presently serving in the military. . . . Also at this time, Amnesty International has no currently adopted "prisoner of conscience" in Nicaragua under the Sandinistas.

See also footnotes 8, 16 and 17 of this chapter; footnote 13 of chapter 1 of U.P.; footnote 48 of chapter 5 of U.P.; and footnote 54 of chapter 8 of U.P.

The true nature of the U.S.-client regimes in El Salvador and Guatemala should be fully appreciated. See for example, Reverend Daniel Santiago [Catholic priest working in El Salvador], "The Aesthetics of Terror, The Hermeneutics of Death," America [Jesuit journal], Vol. 162, No. 11, March 24, 1990, pp. 292-295. An excerpt:

I have heard Tonita tell her story at least a dozen times. She has recounted the horror for each delegation of North Americans who visited the refugee camp on the outskirts of San Salvador. With so many tellings, Tonita's testimony has acquired a repetitive quality. When translated and transcribed, it is somewhat unbelievable. What is convincing, however, is not the story itself, but Tonita's visceral reaction to each telling. Her tears are not the stage tears of an actress; the lines of pain that cross her wrinkled face have not been enhanced with makeup. Tonita's story is quite believable and that is the problem.

Tonita is a peasant from Santa Lucia, a rural village near the volcano of San Vicente in El Salvador. One day, two years ago, at 11:00 A.M., Tonita left her one-room home to carry lunch to her husband, Chepe, and their two teen-age sons who were cutting firewood on the volcano. She left her three smallest children -- an 18-month-old daughter, a 3-year-old son and a 5-year-old daughter -- in the care of her sister and mother. . . . Entering the house [on her return], Tonita was greeted by the grisly spectacle of a feast macabre. Seated around a small table in the middle of her house were her mother, sister and three children. The decapitated heads of all five had been placed in front of each torso, their hands arranged on top, as if each body was stroking its own head. This had proven to be difficult in the case of the youngest daughter. The difficulty had been overcome by nailing the hands onto the head. The hammer had been left on the table. The floor and table were awash with blood. In the very center of the table was a large plastic bowl filled with blood; the air hung heavy with its sweet, cloying smell. Tonita's neighbors had fled when the Salvadoran National Guard began their killing. The Guardia had not tried to stop the people from fleeing and, indeed, they encouraged it. One neighbor, Doña Laura, returned for Tonita and found her standing in the doorway, moaning and staring at her decapitated mother, sister and children. . . .

This is only one tableau of many. Other scènes macabres have been created by the armed forces in their 10-year exhibition of horror and death. People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador -- they are decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones while parents are forced to watch. . . . There is a purpose to all of this. One embraces a certain style in order to achieve a certain effect. Stories of atrocities committed by Government security troops spread by word of mouth. It is the attention to detail that captures people's imagination and leaves them shaking. But these stories are not fairy tales. The stories are punctuated with the hard evidence of corpses, mutilated flesh, splattered brains and eyewitnesses. Sadomasochistic killing creates terror in El Salvador. Terror creates passivity in the face of oppression. A passive population is easy to control. Why the need to control the peasants? Somebody has to pick the coffee and cotton and cut the sugar cane.

Craig W. Nelson and Kenneth I. Taylor, Witness to Genocide: The Present Situation of Indians in Guatemala, London: Survival International, 1983 (collection of depositions taken in Mexico of refugees from Guatemala). An excerpt (p. 19):

[A mother of two children, who fled her village as it was burned down with many killed by the Guatemalan army, reports]: "In July, 1982, soldiers flew into the area by helicopter. First they went to [the name is redacted to avoid possible retributions], a nearby town, and killed five people, burned the town, and threw people, including women and children, into the flames. . . . Children's throats were cut, and women were hit with machetes. . . ."

[A man reports that he] watched as the soldiers killed fifteen people, including women, with machetes. They set fire to the houses, and sometimes opened the doors of huts and threw hand grenades inside. In all, fifty people in his village were killed. Soldiers also killed forty-nine people in the nearby town of [name redacted], which they burned as well. Two of those killed were his uncles. From a kilometer away, he saw women from the village who were hung by their feet without clothes and left.

Elizabeth Hanley, "Tales of Terror from El Salvador," In These Times, April 17, 1985, p. 16 (recounting stories of Salvadoran women in a refugee camp in Honduras). An excerpt:

When the National Guard came to [the] village in U.S.-supplied helicopters, they chopped all the children to bits and threw them to the village pigs. "The soldiers laughed all the while," Luisa told me. "What were they trying to kill?" she asked, still able to cry two years later. . . .

Like [her], all of the women still had tears to cry as they told stories of sons, brothers and husbands gathered into a circle and set on fire after their legs had been broken; or of trees heavy with women hanging from their wrists, all with breasts cut off and facial skin peeled back, all slowly bleeding to death. A frenzy went with each telling, as though women had yet to find a place inside themselves to contain it. Now, to my right one of the women was rocking another. Everyone was trembling.

Representative Gerry Studds, Central America, 1981, Report to the Committee on Foreign Affairs, U.S. House of Representatives, 97th Congress, 1st Session, Washington: U.S. Government Printing Office, March 1981. An excerpt (pp. 26-29):

January 17-18, 1981 -- Conversations with refugees from El Salvador (conducted in areas along the Honduras-El Salvador border):

The conversations . . . were tape recorded and are summarized in detail below. They describe what appears to be a systematic campaign conducted by the security forces of El Salvador to deny any rural base for guerrilla operations in the north. By terrorizing and depopulating villages in the region, they have sought to isolate the guerrillas and create problems of logistics and food supply. This strategy was recently summarized by one military commander, who told the Boston Globe: "The subversives like to say that they are the fish and the people are the ocean. What we have done in the north is to dry up the ocean so we can catch the fish easily." The Salvadoran method of "drying up the ocean" involves, according to those who have fled from its violence, a combination of murder, torture, rape, the burning of crops in order to create starvation conditions, and a program of general terrorism and harassment. . . .

The following is an outline of the statements made by refugees to the [delegation led by Representative Barbara Mikulski], as summarized on the scene by the translator accompanying the group:

Interview -- Woman No. 1: "This woman fled in November 1980, and while she was then forced to flee, she was one of the last people from her village to flee. She was 9 months pregnant. She had her little baby, which she is holding in her arms right now, in the mountains on her way out to Honduras. The Army was setting up guns, heavy cannon artillery on the hills around their village, bombing the villages and forcing the people away. . . . If people were caught in the village, they would kill them. Women and children alike. She said that with pregnant women, they would cut open the stomachs and take the babies out. She said she was very afraid because she had seen the result of what a guard had done to a friend of hers. She had been pregnant and they took the child out after they cut open her stomach. And where she lived they did not leave one house standing. They burned all of them. . . ."

Interview -- Woman No. 2: Maria: "She say that she would like to tell us the following: That many of her family were killed, so many were killed that she doesn't even remember their names. . . . About 7 months ago they killed one of her family and the child was an infant and is now in a hospital in a nearby town close to death. The army threw the baby in the river when they found them, and they took them into the woods and later they were found. She personally saw children around the age of 8 being raped, and then they would take their bayonets and make mincemeat of them. With their guns they would shoot at their faces. . . ."

Question: "These were army troops or guards?"

Answer: "Troops. Army."

Question: "Did the left ever do these things?"

Answer: "No. No, they haven't done any of those kinds of things . . . but the army would cut people up and put soap and coffee in their stomachs as a mocking. They would slit the stomach of a pregnant woman and take the child out, as if they were taking eggs out of an iguana. That is what I saw. That is what I have to say. . . ."

Interview -- Man No. 2: "[United States helicopters] are up in the air and they shoot at us. And we are completely defenseless. We have our ax and machetes to clean the earth with and to cultivate the land, and that is all we have against the helicopters."

Ms. Mikulski: "Has the left done anything against him?"

Answer: "No, they don't kill children. We don't complain about them at all. . . ."

Interview -- Woman No. 5: "[O]nce she saw [the army] kill six women. First they killed two women and then they burned their bodies with firewood. She said, one thing she saw was a dog carrying a new born infant in its mouth. The child was dead because it had been taken from the mother's womb after the guard slit open her stomach."

Ms. Mikulski: "How were the other two women killed?"

Answer: "First, they hung them and then they machinegunned them and then they threw them down to the ground. When we arrived the dogs were eating them and the birds were eating them. They didn't have any clothes on. They had decapitated one of the women. They found the head somewhere else. Another woman's arm was sliced off. We saw the killings from a hillside and then when we came back down we saw what had happened. While we were with the bodies we heard another series of gunshots and we fled again. . . . [I]t's the military that is doing this. Only the military. The popular organization isn't doing any of this."

See also, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, "Bach and War in El Salvador," Spectator (London), May 10, 1986, pp. 16-17 (quoting a Salvadoran death squad member: "We learnt from you [i.e. Americans], we learnt from you the methods, like blowtorches in the armpits, shots in the balls"); Allan Nairn, "Behind the Death Squads," Progressive, May 1984, pp. 1f (documenting U.S. training of, support for, and behind-the-scenes involvement in Salvadoran Death Squad activities).

16. On freedom of the press in Sandinista Nicaragua, see for example, Thomas Walker, ed., Reagan versus the Sandinistas: the Undeclared War on Nicaragua, Boulder, CO: Westview, 1987, pp. 6-10. An excerpt (pp. 7-10):

As is true in all states in time of war or threat of war, certain human rights were gradually infringed upon in the name of national security [in Sandinista Nicaragua]. . . . [O]n a half-dozen occasions, La Prensa was closed for two-day periods [in late 1981]. This action was taken under the terms of a press law decreed by the original Junta (of which, ironically, La Prensa owner Violeta Chamorro had been part). . . . However, even with these shutdowns, La Prensa continued to operate freely and in bitter opposition to the government more than 95 percent of the time. . . .

In spring 1982 following contra attacks on important Nicaraguan infrastructure and the disclosure in the U.S. media of President Reagan's earlier authorization of funding for C.I.A.-sponsored paramilitary operations against its country, the government declared a state of prewar emergency under which certain civil and political rights were temporarily suspended. . . . La Prensa, though now heavily censored, continued to function until June 1986, when it was finally closed in the wake of the House approval of the $100 million [for the contras]. (In El Salvador the only real opposition papers had long since been driven completely out of business through the murder or exile of their owners.)

John Spicer Nichols, "The Media," in Thomas Walker, ed., Nicaragua: The First Five Years, New York: Praeger, 1985, pp. 183-199 (on the degree of censorship in Nicaragua during the contra war, with comparisons to censorship in the U.S. during wartime). See also chapter 4 of U.P. and its footnote 9. On civil liberties violations in times of war in the United States, see chapter 8 of U.P. and its footnotes 4 to 7.

17. On the fate of El Salvador's independent press, see for example, Jorge Pinto [editor of the former Salvadoran newspaper El Independiente, writing after he fled to Mexico], "In Salvador, Nooseprint," Op-Ed, New York Times, May 6, 1981, p. A31. An excerpt:

In January 1980, El Independiente's offices were bombed. In April, an office boy standing in the front entrance was killed in a machinegun attack. On June 27, armed men arrived at the printing shop and gave the 40 workers there one minute to leave before they placed dynamite under the press and destroyed it. Two days later, my car was sprayed with machine-gun fire, pocking it with 37 bullet holes. Two other such attacks were made on my life.

Raymond Bonner, Weakness and Deceit: U.S. Policy and El Salvador, New York: Times Books, 1984. An excerpt (pp. 206, 212):

The country's small opposition newspapers, El Independiente and La Crónica, were repeatedly bombed. La Crónica's editor in chief, Jaime Suárez, and a photojournalist, César Najarro, were seized mid-day while sitting in a downtown coffee shop. Their bodies, hacked to pieces by machetes, were found a few days later. . . . Two weeks after Reagan's triumph, troops stormed into the archdiocese's building, where they ransacked the offices of the church newspaper, Orientacíon, and destroyed the facilities of the radio station, YSAX.

Aside from Pinto's Op-Ed, there was not one word in the New York Times's news columns and not one editorial comment on the destruction of El Independiente. Before it was finally destroyed, there had been four bombings of La Crónica in six months; the last of these received forty words in a "News Brief" in the New York Times. See World News Briefs, "Salvador Groups Attack Paper and U.S. Plant," New York Times, April 19, 1980, p. 7. Chomsky comments (Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, Boston: South End, 1989, p. 42):

Contrasting sharply with the silence over the two Salvadoran newspapers is the case of the opposition journal La Prensa in Nicaragua. Media critic Francisco Goldman counted 263 references to its tribulations in the New York Times in four years [see Francisco Goldman, "Sad Tales of La Libertad de Prensa," Harper's, August 1988, p. 56]. The distinguishing criterion is not obscure: the Salvadoran newspapers were independent voices stilled by the murderous violence of U.S. clients; La Prensa is an agency of the U.S. campaign to overthrow the government of Nicaragua, therefore a "worthy victim," whose harassment calls forth anguish and outrage. . . . These matters did not arise in the enthusiastic reporting of El Salvador's "free elections" in 1982 and 1984.

The situation was much the same in U.S.-client Guatemala. For example, on June 10, 1988, fifteen heavily armed men broke into the offices of the newspaper La Epoca, stole valuable equipment, and firebombed the offices, destroying them. They also kidnapped the night watchman, releasing him later under threat of death if he were to speak about the attack. Eyewitness testimony and other sources left little doubt that it was an operation of the security forces. The editor, Byron Barrera Ortiz, held a press conference on June 14th to announce that the journal would shut down "because there are not conditions in the country to guarantee the exercise of free and independent journalism." The destruction of La Epoca "signaled not only the end of an independent media voice in Guatemala, but it served as a warning as well that future press independence would not be tolerated by the government or security forces," as Americas Watch put it. See "Guatemala: Independent press silenced by bombing," Central America Report (Guatemala City, Guatemala: Inforpress Centroamericana), Vol. XV, No. 23, June 17, 1988, p. 182; "Guatemala: Low-intensity political violence," Central America Report (Guatemala City, Guatemala: Inforpress Centroamericana), Vol. XV, No. 22, June 10, 1988, pp. 175-176.

These facts were not even reported contemporaneously in the New York Times or Washington Post. One month later, the seventeenth paragraph of a story on Guatemala by Stephen Kinzer mentioned the bombing of La Epoca, which "some diplomats attributed to the security forces," and it was referred to again in August in the Times book review in a report on a conference of Central American writers. See Stephen Kinzer, "Top Guatemala Officers Solidly Behind President," New York Times, July 6, 1988, p. A2; David Unger, "Central American Writers Meet Amid the Death Squads," New York Times, August 7, 1988, section 7, p. 25.

18. On the U.S. opposing the Central America peace process, see for example, Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America, New York: Norton, 1993 (revised and expanded edition). See also, Noam Chomsky, Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies, Boston: South End, 1989, ch. 4 and Appendix 4.5.

On the U.S. opposing the Middle East peace process, see chapter 4 of U.P. and its footnotes 41, 47, 48, 49 and 56; chapter 5 of U.P. and its footnotes 104 and 111; and the text of chapter 8 of U.P.

19. For King Hassan as a "moderate," see for example, Eleanor Blau, "A King of the Unexpected," New York Times, July 23, 1986, p. A6 (King Hassan "has been described as charming and extremely self-confident . . . he is usually regarded as pro-Western, moderate and eager to preserve his throne against Islamic militants").

For useful lists of common media buzzwords and deceptive terminology, see Martin A. Lee and Norman Solomon, Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media, New York: Lyle Stuart, 1990, pp. 10-13, 39-41 ("A Lexicon of Media Buzzwords"); Edward S. Herman, Beyond Hypocrisy: Decoding the News in an Age of Propaganda, Montreal: Black Rose, 1992, pp. 113-187 ("A Doublespeak Dictionary for the 1990s").

20. For Saudi Arabia as "moderate," see for example, Jonathan C. Randal, "Iran's Rivalry With Saudis Seen as Factor in Book Row," Washington Post, February 21, 1989, p. A17 ("Saudi Arabia and other moderate, pro-western regimes in the Arab world").

21. On Iraq being described as "moving towards moderation," see for example, Henry Kamm, "Iraq Is Improving Links to Both U.S. and Soviet," New York Times, March 29, 1984, p. A12 ("a dramatic but little discussed Iraqi swing from Arab radicalism toward moderation and a warming relationship with the United States"); E.A. Wayne, "Iraq Returns to Mideast Political Lineup," Christian Science Monitor, July 17, 1989, p. 7 ("Iraq's leadership remains 'tough-minded' says one official, but it is less ideological and is aligning itself with moderates").

22. For the article on Indonesia, see John Murray Brown, "Bringing Irian Jaya into 20th century," Christian Science Monitor, February 6, 1987, p. 9 ("With the downfall in 1965 of then President Sukarno, many in the West were keen to cultivate Jakarta's new moderate leader, Suharto").

23. On U.S. support for the 1965 coup in Indonesia, see footnote 18 of chapter 1 of U.P.

For casualty estimates for the post-coup massacres in Indonesia, see for example, Amnesty International, Indonesia: An Amnesty International Report, London: Amnesty International Publications, 1977. An excerpt (pp. 12-13, 22, 41):

In the aftermath of the attempted coup [in 1965], the Army carried out a massive and violent purge of people identified as or suspected of being members of the Communist Party, or affiliated to left-wing organizations. . . . In a Dutch television interview in October 1976, the head of the Indonesian state security agency, Admiral Sudomo, gave a definitive estimate: he said that more than half a million people were killed following the attempted coup. There can be no doubt about the authority of that estimate, except that the true figure is possibly much higher. . . . [Sudomo added] that after the coup, 750,000 people were arrested. (Televisie Radio Omroep Stichting, 9 October 1976). The official figures of 600,000 [given by Indonesian Foreign Minister Adam Malik] or 750,000 arrested, do not include the number who were killed.

Ernst Utrecht, "The Indonesian Army as an Instrument of Repression," Journal of Contemporary Asia, Vol. 2, No. 1, 1972, pp. 56 n.1, 62 (relating "reliable" estimates of 500,000 killed after the 1965 coup, and 700,000 killed by the Indonesian military by the 1970s).

On the U.S. government's view of the slaughter in Indonesia, see for example, Audrey R. Kahin and George McT. Kahin, Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia, New York: New Press, 1995. An excerpt (pp. 226, 229-230):

[T]he 1965-66 massacres constituted one of the bloodiest purges in modern history: in the words of the C.I.A. study, "In terms of the numbers killed the anti-P.K.I. [Indonesian Communist Party] massacres in Indonesia rank as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century, along with the Soviet purges of the 1930's, the Nazi mass murders during the Second World War, and the Maoist blood bath of the early 1950's. . . ."

The U.S. embassy's attitude [towards these killings] was clearly expressed when, almost a month after the mass killings had begun, Francis Galbraith, the deputy chief of mission (later to succeed Marshall Green as ambassador), reporting to Washington on his conversation with a high-ranking Indonesian army officer, said that he had "made clear" to him "that the embassy and the U.S.G[overnment] were generally sympathetic with and admiring of what the army was doing." Careful study of all declassified U.S. government documents that bear on the physical liquidation of the P.K.I. disclose no instance of any American official objecting to or in any way criticizing the 1965-66 killings. . . . American input went beyond mere approbation and encouragement. As Bunnell has established from U.S. government documents and corroborative interviews with General Sukendro (in 1965 the ranking army intelligence chief), the United States quickly fulfilled the army's request, relayed by Sukendro on November 6, 1965, for weapons "to arm Moslem and nationalist youth in Central Java for use against the P.K.I." in the context of overall army policy "to eliminate the P.K.I."

For a rare investigative report on U.S. involvement in the Indonesia coup, see Kathy Kadane, "Ex-agents say C.I.A. compiled death lists for Indonesians," San Francisco Examiner, May 20, 1990, p. A1. An excerpt:

The U.S. government played a significant role in one of the worst massacres of the century by supplying the names of thousands of Communist Party leaders to the Indonesian army, which hunted down the leftists and killed them, former U.S. diplomats say. For the first time, U.S. officials acknowledge that in 1965 they systematically compiled comprehensive lists of communist operatives, from top echelons down to village cadres. As many as 5,000 names were furnished to the Indonesian army, and the Americans later checked off the names of those who had been killed or captured, according to U.S. officials. . . .

Silent for a quarter century, former senior U.S. diplomats and C.I.A. officers described in lengthy interviews how they aided Indonesian President Suharto, then army leader, in his attack on the P.K.I. [Indonesian Communist Party]. "It really was a big help to the army," said Robert J. Martens, a former member of the U.S. Embassy's political section who is now a consultant to the State Department. "They probably killed a lot of people, and I probably have a lot of blood on my hands, but that's not all bad. There's a time when you have to strike hard at a decisive moment. . . ." Approval for release of the names came from top U.S. Embassy officials, including former Ambassador Marshall Green, deputy chief of mission Jack Lydman and political section chief Edward Masters, the three acknowledged in interviews.

For a reply by Martens, see Robert Martens, "Indonesia's Fight Against Communism, 1965," Letter, Washington Post, June 2, 1990, p. A18 ("If I said anything like [that], it could only have been a wry remark"; although "[i]t is true I passed names of the P.K.I. leaders and senior cadre system to the non-Communist forces," Suharto's men probably could have obtained the information in any event).

See also, Kathy Kadane, "U.S. had role in '65 Indonesia massacre, ex-officials say," Orange County Register (CA), May 20, 1990, p. A8 (reporting that the U.S. also provided "logistical support" including "state-of-the-art radio field equipment" on which Indonesia's orders to attack villages and individuals were monitored).

On Suharto's genocidal occupation of East Timor with U.S. support, see the text of chapter 8 of U.P. and its footnotes 41 and 57.