Chimoré, Cochabamba - Bolivia, 12 de octubre del 2007
Desde el corazón de América del Sur a los 12 días del mes de octubre de 2007, los delegados y delegadas de los pueblos y naciones indígenas originarias del mundo, reunidos en el Encuentro Mundial: “Por la Victoria Histórica de los Pueblos Indígenas del Mundo”, para celebrar la aprobación de la Declaración de las Naciones Unidas sobre los Derechos de los Pueblos Indígenas, expresamos nuestra palabra:
Que a 515 años de opresión y dominación, aquí estamos, no han podido eliminarnos. Hemos enfrentado y resistido a las políticas de etnocidio, genocidio, colonización, destrucción y saqueo. La imposición de sistemas económicos como el capitalismo, caracterizado por el intervencionismo, las guerras y los desastres socio-ambientales, sistema que continúa amenazando nuestros modos de vida como pueblos.
Que como consecuencia de la política neoliberal de dominación de la naturaleza, de la búsqueda de ganancia fácil de la concentración del capital en pocas manos y la irracional explotación de los recursos naturales, nuestra Madre Tierra está herida de muerte, mientras los pueblos indígenas seguimos siendo desalojados de nuestros territorios. El planeta se está recalentando. Estamos viviendo un cambio climático sin precedentes, donde los desastres socioambientales son cada vez más fuertes y más frecuentes, donde todos sin excepción somos afectados y afectadas.
Que nos asecha una gran crisis energética, donde la Era del Petróleo está por concluir, sin que hayamos encontrado una energía alternativa limpia que la pueda sustituir en las cantidades necesarias para mantener a esa civilización occidental que nos ha hecho totalmente dependiente de los hidrocarburos.
Que esta situación pueda ser una amenaza que nos dejará expuestos al peligro que las políticas neoliberales e imperialistas desaten guerras por las últimas gotas del llamado oro negro y el oro azul, pero también pueda darnos la oportunidad de hacer de este nuevo milenio un milenio de la vida, un milenio del equilibrio y la complementariedad, sin tener que abusar de energías que destruyen a la Madre Tierra.
Que tanto los recursos naturales como las tierras y territorios que habitamos son nuestros por historia, por nacimiento, por derecho y por siempre, por lo que la libre determinación sobre éstos es fundamental para poder mantener nuestra vida, ciencias, sabidurías, espiritualidad, organización, medicinas y soberanía alimentaría.
Que empieza una nueva era impulsada por los pueblos indígenas origina¬rios, dando luz a los tiempos de cambio, a los tiempos de Pachakuti, en tiempos de la culminación del Quinto Sol.
Que saludamos la aprobación de la Declaración de las Naciones Unidas sobre los Derechos de los Pueblos Indígenas, que es esencial para su supervivencia y bienestar de los mas de 370 millones de indígenas, en alrededor de 70 países del mundo. Luego de más de veinte años de lucha, da respuesta a nuestra demanda histórica de libre determinación de los pueblos y el reconocimiento de los mismos y los derechos colectivos.
La Declaración aprobada contiene un conjunto de principios y normas que reconocen y establecen en el régimen normativo internacional, los derechos fundamentales de los Pueblos Indígenas, los cuales que deben ser la base de la nueva relación entre los Pueblos Indígenas, los Estados, las sociedades y cooperación en todo el mundo. Por lo tanto, además de otros instrumentos jurídicos relativos a los derechos humanos ya existentes, la Declaración, es la nueva base normativa y práctica para garantizar y proteger los derechos indígenas en diversos ámbitos y niveles.
Exhortamos a los países miembros de las Naciones Unidas y alentamos a los pueblos indígenas que den cumplimiento y práctica a este importante instrumento de significación histórica. Censuramos a los gobiernos que votaron en contra de la Declaración sobre los Derechos de los Pueblos Indígenas, y condenamos la doble moral.
Que nos comprometemos a respaldar el histórico esfuerzo liderado por el hermano Evo Morales, Presidente de los Pueblos Indígenas de Abya Yala, en la construcción de un nuevo Estado plurinacional. Ante cualquier amenaza interna o externa, estaremos vigilantes de lo que suceda en Bolivia y pedimos a los pueblos del planeta brinden su apoyo y solidaridad a este proceso, que debe servir de ejemplo para que los Pueblos, Naciones y Estados del mundo continuemos por esta misma senda.
Por tanto, los Pueblos y Naciones Indígenas del mundo exigimos a los Estados cumplir los siguientes mandatos:
1. Construir un mundo basado en la Cultura de la Vida, en la identidad, filosofía, cosmovisión y espiritualidad milenaria de los pueblos indígenas originarios, aplicando los conocimientos y saberes ancestrales, consolidando procesos de intercambio y hermandad entre las naciones y respetando la autodeterminación.
2. Asumir decisiones nacionales e internacionales para salvar a la Madre Naturaleza de los desastres que está provocando el capitalismo en su decadencia, que se manifiesta en el calentamiento global y la crisis ecológica; reafirmando que la cultura indígena originaria es la única alternativa para salvar nuestro planeta tierra.
3. Sustituir los actuales modelos de desarrollo basados en el capitalismo, en la mercancía, en la explotación irracional de la humanidad y los recursos naturales, en el derroche de energía y en el consumismo, por modelos que coloquen a la vida, a la complementariedad, a la reciprocidad, al respeto de la diversidad cultural y el uso sustentable de los recursos naturales como las principales prioridades.
4. Aplicar políticas nacionales sobre Soberanía Alimentaria como base principal de la Soberanía Nacional, en la cual la comunidad garantiza tanto el respeto a su propia cultura como espacios y modos propios de producción, distribución y consumo en equilibrio con la naturaleza de alimentos sanos y limpios de contaminación para toda la población, eliminando el hambre, porque la alimentación es un derecho para la vida.
5. Repudiar los planes y proyectos de la generación de energía como el biocombustible, que destruyen y niegan el alimento a los pueblos. Asimismo condenamos la utilización de semillas transgénicas porque acaba con nuestras semillas milenarias y nos obliga a depender de la agroindustria.
6. Valorar y revalorizar el papel de la mujer indígena originaria como vanguardia de las luchas emancipatorias de nuestros pueblos bajo principios de dualidad, igualdad y equidad de la relación hombre mujer.
7. Asumir la Cultura de la Paz y la Vida como guía para resolver los problemas y conflictos del mundo, renunciando a la carrera armamentista, e iniciar el desarme para garantizar la preservación de la vida del planeta.
8. Asumir transformaciones legales justas necesarias para construir sistemas y medios de comunicación e información que estén basados en nuestra cosmovisión, espiritualidad y filosofía comunal, en la sabiduría de nuestros antepasados. Garantizar el reconocimiento al derecho a la comunicación e información de los pueblos indígenas.
9. Garantizar el respeto y derecho a la vida, a la salud y la educación intercultural bilingüe, construyendo políticas en beneficio de los pueblos y naciones indígenas originarias.
10. Declarar como derechos humanos el agua, por ser un elemento vital y un bien social de la humanidad, que no debe ser objeto de lucro. Asimismo, impulsar el uso de energías alternativas que no amenacen la vida del planeta, garantizando de esta manera el acceso a todos los servicios básicos.
11. Resolver de manera corresponsable las causas de la migración entre países, asumiendo políticas de libre circulación de personas para garantizar un mundo sin fronteras donde no exista discriminación, marginación y exclusión.
12. Descolonizar las Naciones Unidas, y trasladar su sede a un territorio que dignifique y exprese las justas aspiraciones de los Pueblos, Naciones y Estados del mundo.
13. No criminalizar las luchas de los pueblos indígenas, ni satanizar o acusarnos de terroristas, cuando los pueblos reclamamos nuestros derechos y planteamientos de cómo salvar la vida y la humanidad.
14. Liberar de manera inmediata a líderes y lideresas indígenas encarcelados en las diferentes partes del mundo; principalmente a Leonard Peltier en Estados Unidos.
La lucha no se detiene, se acabó el resistir por resistir, llegó nuestro tiempo. Proclamamos el 12 de octubre “día de inicio de nuestras luchas para salvar a la Madre Naturaleza”.
Desde nuestras familias, hogares, comunidades, pueblos, estando o no estando en el gobierno de nuestros países, nosotros mismos decidimos y encaminamos nuestros destinos, nosotros mismos asumimos la voluntad y responsabilidad del Vivir Bien que nos han legado nuestros ancestros, para irradiar desde lo más sencillo y simple a lo más grande y complejo, para construir de manera horizontal y entre todas, todos y el todo, la cultura de la paciencia, la cultura del diálogo y fundamentalmente la Cultura de la Vida.
Por los muertos, héroes y mártires que abonaron nuestras vidas, por sus utopías y anhelos, fortalezcamos nuestra identidad, nuestros procesos organizativos y nuestras luchas hasta lograr construir la unidad de los pueblos del mundo y volver al equilibrio, salvando a la vida, a la humanidad y el planeta tierra.
Ratificamos nuestro apoyo al hermano Evo Morales para Premio Nobel de la Paz, por su permanente e incondicional entrega de servicio al bien por la humanidad, los pueblos, el planeta y la paz mundial.
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Más información sobre el Encuentro, incluyendo las conclusiones de las mesas de trabajo, en:
http://www.movimientos.org/12octubre/
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Minga Informativa de Movimientos Sociales
http://movimientos.org/
Friday, October 12, 2007
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
“Amerika Über Alles” — Our Nazi Nation by Captain Eric H. May
The United States has become the Nazi Germany of the 21st Century (and the second half of the 20th Century as well)
Peter Guenther’s Prologue
The most persuasive anti-Nazi I ever knew was my mentor, Dr. Peter W. Guenther, who believed that Nazism was monstrous at every level. As a professor of humanities, he thought it was both inhumane and inhuman. As a professor of art history he thought its aesthetics were artless histrionics. He readily granted that his intellectual opinions were molded by his personal experiences. As a German veteran of World War II, he regretted the loss of his youth, the waste of his friends’ lives and the devastation that they had inflicted on others. He held Hitler accountable for all of this — after all, it was Hitler who had drafted them into the war. He had served from 1939 to 1945, from Poland to Norway to France to Russia. He once quipped that before every one of their invasions their leaders said they were fighting for national defense, but after the shooting started every soldier on every side believed that he was fighting for his own self-defense.
By the time of the Iraq war he was retired from academe, and I was writing military analysis for media. As US forces began storming up the Euphrates Valley in the spring of 2003, hell-bent on Baghdad, we began to discuss the limited American mobilized manpower and materiel, and the overall limitations of blitz tactics. Guided by his insights, I published a then-radical op-ed in the Houston Chronicle that predicted a quicksand war in Iraq, and maybe a world war as a result of it.
As the easy war promised us by the Bush administration wore on into the summer of 2003, Dr. Guenther and I began to note that there were more similarities between Post-9/11 America and Third Reich Germany than just over-reliance on Blitzkrieg tactics. We finally determined that the two nations were following parallel political courses. Most disturbing for my mentor, who had become a patriotic American citizen after World War II, was the painful conclusion that our American president, with his global war for a New American Century, was just another German fuhrer, with a world war for a Thousand Year Reich. “This is a bad copy of a bad original,” he said.
“Drang Nach Ost” — The Eastern Offensive
George W. Bush came into office with a secret war plan and no excuse to implement it — just as Hitler had come into office in 1933 with the same predicament. Both of them wanted the prize of Middle Eastern oil. In Hitler’s case that meant going through “Judeo-Bolshevik” Russia on the way, while in Bush’s case that meant going through “Islamo-Fascist” Iraq. In Hitler’s case the guiding document was Mein Kampf, while in Bush’s case there were two. A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm was presented to the Israeli government in 1996 by American neocons Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and David Wurmser, among others. Restructuring America’s Defenses was presented to the American government in 2000. Its arguments mirrored the Israeli document, and had been drawn up by the neocons as well. In 2001 Feith, Perle and Wurmser became key Bush administration members.
Neither Hitler’s nor Bush’s plans for world dominance could have been pursued without some good luck, though. Both leaders entered office with over half their nations opposing them, and an avid opposition that wanted to pull them down. Hitler’s good luck came with the Reichstag fire, blamed on Jewish Communists, which mobilized his fatherland to rally behind him. Bush’s good luck happened on 9/11, blamed on Muslim Fundamentalists, which mobilized his homeland to rally behind him.
In both cases, their followers smiled at their good luck, and began their new order of things. Hitler quickly instituted an Enabling Act for the protection of the German people, slated for expiration in five years, which was quietly continued. Bush quickly instituted a Patriot Act for the protection of the American people, slated for expiration in five years, which was quietly continued. Hitler created the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) to further protect the German people, while Bush created the Homeland Security Agency (Homeseca) to do the same for the American people.
“Führer Prinzip” — The Unitary Executive
Both leaders were believers in the authoritarian concept. A few weeks before assuming office, Bush said outright that he thought dictatorship would be a fine form of government, if he could be the dictator. They both believed that power should come from above and obedience should come from below, and they offered protection in exchange for loyalty. Thus no one was surprised when Hermann Goering made a fortune helping to run Germany, just as no one was surprised when Irving “Scooter” Libby received a pardon for his pro-Bush political crimes in America.
Both leaders supplemented their new security police and security acts with concentration camps such as Dachau and Gitmo, initially designed for only a small percentage of national enemies. Both dispensed with international rules and regulations in their treatment of enemies in those installations, and applied a wide variety of innovative persuasive techniques to extract information and obtain confessions. The lessons learned in these proto-type camps proved to be invaluable in later establishments such as Auschwitz and Abu Ghraib.
Both leaders relied on agreeable legislatures. In Germany the Reichstag cheered enthusiastically as it endorsed the increase in police powers, the reduction in civil rights and the national march to world war. In America Congress did the same things, but in more subdued fashion, even with a show of dissent. In Germany, Hitler declared a dictatorship under Article 48, provided by the old Weimar Constitution for the event of a national emergency. In America Bush recently created National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD 51), thereby legalizing a dictatorship in the event of a national emergency.
“Gott Mit Uns” — God’s on Our Side
Neither Hitler nor Bush could have effected their radical plans without a party full of functionaries and a compliant national media, of course. Hitler relied on his “Nazi” party, a word derived from the name of his National Socialist organization. He had a brilliant individual named Joseph Goebbels to control the Reich Propaganda Ministry and rally the public behind Nazi policies. Bush relied on his “Nozi” party, a word derived from “Zionism,” with the first four letters Z-i-o-n remixed into N-o-z-i. He had a brilliant cartel of Zionists to control the American Mainstream Media and rally the public behind Nozi policies.
The greatest accomplishment of both the Nazi and Nozi parties was convincing themselves and their citizens that they were not conspirators of any sort, but rather the victims of an international conspiracy. The Nazi party never tired of saying that Judeo-Communism was the hidden enemy, against which all the powers of a determined fatherland had to be directed, and that they were the targets of anti-German propaganda. The Nozi party never tires of saying that Islamo-Fascism is the hidden enemy, against which all the powers of a determined homeland have to be directed, and that they are the targets of anti-Semitic propaganda.
The rest of the world didn’t buy the pro-war propaganda from Germany’s Nazis three generations ago, and they don’t buy it from America’s Nozis three generations later. The way the rest of the world sees it, what we have been taught to call the axis of evil is not so dangerous to the world as the axis of America and Israel. They see American naval forces massing in the name of national defense against Iran, and they remember Iraq. They see Israeli air forces attacking Syria, and they remember Lebanon. The rest of the world knows who we have become, even if we don’t.
Peter Guenther’s Epilogue: He died in 2005, and was followed by his wife Andrea six months later. They had been married for 58 years, and had been American citizens for more than 50. For more about my friendship with them, refer to the first and fourth volumes of my 2003 Iraq war correspondence here.
Captain May is a former Army military intelligence and public affairs officer, as well as a former NBC editorial writer. His political and military analyses have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Houston Chronicle and Military Intelligence Magazine. Read other articles by Captain Eric, or visit Captain Eric's website.
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano
A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. -- Edward R. Murrow
Peter Guenther’s Prologue
The most persuasive anti-Nazi I ever knew was my mentor, Dr. Peter W. Guenther, who believed that Nazism was monstrous at every level. As a professor of humanities, he thought it was both inhumane and inhuman. As a professor of art history he thought its aesthetics were artless histrionics. He readily granted that his intellectual opinions were molded by his personal experiences. As a German veteran of World War II, he regretted the loss of his youth, the waste of his friends’ lives and the devastation that they had inflicted on others. He held Hitler accountable for all of this — after all, it was Hitler who had drafted them into the war. He had served from 1939 to 1945, from Poland to Norway to France to Russia. He once quipped that before every one of their invasions their leaders said they were fighting for national defense, but after the shooting started every soldier on every side believed that he was fighting for his own self-defense.
By the time of the Iraq war he was retired from academe, and I was writing military analysis for media. As US forces began storming up the Euphrates Valley in the spring of 2003, hell-bent on Baghdad, we began to discuss the limited American mobilized manpower and materiel, and the overall limitations of blitz tactics. Guided by his insights, I published a then-radical op-ed in the Houston Chronicle that predicted a quicksand war in Iraq, and maybe a world war as a result of it.
As the easy war promised us by the Bush administration wore on into the summer of 2003, Dr. Guenther and I began to note that there were more similarities between Post-9/11 America and Third Reich Germany than just over-reliance on Blitzkrieg tactics. We finally determined that the two nations were following parallel political courses. Most disturbing for my mentor, who had become a patriotic American citizen after World War II, was the painful conclusion that our American president, with his global war for a New American Century, was just another German fuhrer, with a world war for a Thousand Year Reich. “This is a bad copy of a bad original,” he said.
“Drang Nach Ost” — The Eastern Offensive
George W. Bush came into office with a secret war plan and no excuse to implement it — just as Hitler had come into office in 1933 with the same predicament. Both of them wanted the prize of Middle Eastern oil. In Hitler’s case that meant going through “Judeo-Bolshevik” Russia on the way, while in Bush’s case that meant going through “Islamo-Fascist” Iraq. In Hitler’s case the guiding document was Mein Kampf, while in Bush’s case there were two. A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm was presented to the Israeli government in 1996 by American neocons Douglas Feith, Richard Perle and David Wurmser, among others. Restructuring America’s Defenses was presented to the American government in 2000. Its arguments mirrored the Israeli document, and had been drawn up by the neocons as well. In 2001 Feith, Perle and Wurmser became key Bush administration members.
Neither Hitler’s nor Bush’s plans for world dominance could have been pursued without some good luck, though. Both leaders entered office with over half their nations opposing them, and an avid opposition that wanted to pull them down. Hitler’s good luck came with the Reichstag fire, blamed on Jewish Communists, which mobilized his fatherland to rally behind him. Bush’s good luck happened on 9/11, blamed on Muslim Fundamentalists, which mobilized his homeland to rally behind him.
In both cases, their followers smiled at their good luck, and began their new order of things. Hitler quickly instituted an Enabling Act for the protection of the German people, slated for expiration in five years, which was quietly continued. Bush quickly instituted a Patriot Act for the protection of the American people, slated for expiration in five years, which was quietly continued. Hitler created the Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo) to further protect the German people, while Bush created the Homeland Security Agency (Homeseca) to do the same for the American people.
“Führer Prinzip” — The Unitary Executive
Both leaders were believers in the authoritarian concept. A few weeks before assuming office, Bush said outright that he thought dictatorship would be a fine form of government, if he could be the dictator. They both believed that power should come from above and obedience should come from below, and they offered protection in exchange for loyalty. Thus no one was surprised when Hermann Goering made a fortune helping to run Germany, just as no one was surprised when Irving “Scooter” Libby received a pardon for his pro-Bush political crimes in America.
Both leaders supplemented their new security police and security acts with concentration camps such as Dachau and Gitmo, initially designed for only a small percentage of national enemies. Both dispensed with international rules and regulations in their treatment of enemies in those installations, and applied a wide variety of innovative persuasive techniques to extract information and obtain confessions. The lessons learned in these proto-type camps proved to be invaluable in later establishments such as Auschwitz and Abu Ghraib.
Both leaders relied on agreeable legislatures. In Germany the Reichstag cheered enthusiastically as it endorsed the increase in police powers, the reduction in civil rights and the national march to world war. In America Congress did the same things, but in more subdued fashion, even with a show of dissent. In Germany, Hitler declared a dictatorship under Article 48, provided by the old Weimar Constitution for the event of a national emergency. In America Bush recently created National Security Presidential Directive 51 (NSPD 51), thereby legalizing a dictatorship in the event of a national emergency.
“Gott Mit Uns” — God’s on Our Side
Neither Hitler nor Bush could have effected their radical plans without a party full of functionaries and a compliant national media, of course. Hitler relied on his “Nazi” party, a word derived from the name of his National Socialist organization. He had a brilliant individual named Joseph Goebbels to control the Reich Propaganda Ministry and rally the public behind Nazi policies. Bush relied on his “Nozi” party, a word derived from “Zionism,” with the first four letters Z-i-o-n remixed into N-o-z-i. He had a brilliant cartel of Zionists to control the American Mainstream Media and rally the public behind Nozi policies.
The greatest accomplishment of both the Nazi and Nozi parties was convincing themselves and their citizens that they were not conspirators of any sort, but rather the victims of an international conspiracy. The Nazi party never tired of saying that Judeo-Communism was the hidden enemy, against which all the powers of a determined fatherland had to be directed, and that they were the targets of anti-German propaganda. The Nozi party never tires of saying that Islamo-Fascism is the hidden enemy, against which all the powers of a determined homeland have to be directed, and that they are the targets of anti-Semitic propaganda.
The rest of the world didn’t buy the pro-war propaganda from Germany’s Nazis three generations ago, and they don’t buy it from America’s Nozis three generations later. The way the rest of the world sees it, what we have been taught to call the axis of evil is not so dangerous to the world as the axis of America and Israel. They see American naval forces massing in the name of national defense against Iran, and they remember Iraq. They see Israeli air forces attacking Syria, and they remember Lebanon. The rest of the world knows who we have become, even if we don’t.
Peter Guenther’s Epilogue: He died in 2005, and was followed by his wife Andrea six months later. They had been married for 58 years, and had been American citizens for more than 50. For more about my friendship with them, refer to the first and fourth volumes of my 2003 Iraq war correspondence here.
Captain May is a former Army military intelligence and public affairs officer, as well as a former NBC editorial writer. His political and military analyses have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Houston Chronicle and Military Intelligence Magazine. Read other articles by Captain Eric, or visit Captain Eric's website.
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano
A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. -- Edward R. Murrow
"In order to live better sometimes you have to exploit, steal, discriminate, and plunder, but to live the good life is to live communally"
Central speech by the President of the Republic of Bolivia, Evo Morales Ayma, at the 62nd Session of the United Nations (UN), addressing the environment. United Nations, 26 September, 2007
I would like to take this opportunity to express my extreme satisfaction over the election of the new General Secretary of the United Nations who will be leading this international organization for the good of humanity, and above all for the good of the abandoned and dispossessed.
That is why I wish to briefly comment about my country. For the first time in Bolivia’s history the most abandoned sectors, the most despised, scorned, and vilified in Bolivian history, the indigenous people, have assumed leadership of the country in order to transform our beloved Bolivia.
Political changes, economic changes and a commitment to recreate our country. We seek unity, respect for our diversity, and respect for our identity so that together we can solve our economic and social problems.
In this short time I have found that it will be difficult and we will have to struggle for equality and justice for all those living in the country.
But at the same time when the popular movement, the indigenous movement, intellectuals, even businessmen and professionals commit themselves with a great deal of effort to the earth and to their people, one is encouraged to continue working and transforming, democratically and peacefully to guarantee a cultural revolution in my country.
But recovering our natural resources has been the most important step. It pains me to say that in my country during the neo-liberal governments, natural resources and state companies were privatized. Under the pretext of capitalization they de-capitalized the country. They claimed that privatization was the solution for unemployment and corruption, but instead we have seen unemployment and corruption increase.
Just a few years ago Bolivia was considered the world’s champion of corruption, and now I am very pleased that international organizations have noted that corruption in Bolivia has dropped significantly. We would like to eradicate it.
I want you all to know that in 2005, before I became president of the Republic and the hydrocarbons, petroleum, and natural gas were in the hands of trans-nationals, Bolivia only received $300 million from hydrocarbons.
After modifying the hydrocarbon law, after recovering and nationalizing this extremely important natural resource, Bolivia received more than $2,000 million this year.
Therefore I would like to say from experience, to all presidents or nations where the natural resources have been privatized, it is important to recover these natural resources with the support of the people, for the benefit of the people and the nation.
I understand perfectly that the companies have the right to recover their investments and they have the right to profit. But not so much like before which amounted to the outright plunder of our natural resources.
What is most important about this short period is that we have begun to de-colonize Bolivia internally and externally. I say internally because in the past masters ruled our country. If we review our history we find that viceroy masters, religious groups, and the oligarchy have ruled. The people have never had any power.
Now we are establishing the people’s power, so that sovereignty belongs to the people instead of to a group of families and so that the people have the right to decide their own destiny. That is the best democracy we can implement.
It is not just a matter of simply opting for certain policies. When I say that we have begun to de-colonize externally I am not only talking about being subjugated to landlords o bosses in my country. I want you all to know right now that no ambassadors will change our ministers or name ministers in my country.
Regrettably in the past, the U.S. ambassadors changed and named our ministers. That is over. That is why we have begun to de-colonize our country.
In the past the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund imposed policies. That has also ended. I remember perfectly and I want you all to know a little bit of my country’s history.
In 2003, the World Bank and International Monetary Fund told the president of that time that either a spike in gas prices or a high tax had to be imposed in order to avoid a fiscal deficit. The government chose the tax. They taxed workers wages and in two days there were more than 15 Bolivians dead from internal clashes.
I want to inform you all that Bolivia enjoyed a fiscal surplus this year without taxes and without gasoline price spikes thanks to the recovery of our hydrocarbons, which are so important to my country. I want you all to know that we have already begun the external de-colonization.
Because we are interested in how to better gather the proposals and initiatives of our people, of organized people. These social forces, be they civic or labor, especially those with serious economic problems, they have the wisdom to propose initiatives and solutions from their communities, from their trade unions. That is my experience.
So I think it is important to develop the power of the people, thus giving social forces the power to make the decisions. I, as president, only rule in compliance with the people. In this way we will be able to solve our problems.
Yesterday, over the past few days and hours I have heard some very encouraging speeches, but also others that really disappointed me. For example global warming and climate change were addressed. I feel that many of our countries are victims of these phenomenon.
I still cannot understand why there are so many lives lost in floods, invasions, or wars. So many lives lost to hunger. I feel that there are economic models that cannot solve the problems of humanity. After having heard many of the statements made here and the experiences expressed by other presidents, I am even more convinced that the concentration of capital in a few hands is not the solution for humanity. Models that accumulate wealth in a few hands are not the solution for humankind, for life, and even less for the poor that inhabit this planet earth.
Global warming and melting icecaps were addressed but without mention of their cause. I am convinced that the cause is what is wrongly termed globalization, or selective globalization, a globalization that does not respect plurality or differences.
When talking about globalization we must first globalize the human being. Well, I don’t know how you all managed to make it to New York, United States, but my delegation had difficulties getting visas. Our parliamentarians, our congresspersons could not obtain visas to come to the U.S.
When I arrived here, my ministers, indigenous brothers, were held up in the airport and subjected to hours and hours of processing. Some from other countries arrived here only to be threatened by the head of the house, President Bush. If it is like that, if it is going to continue to be like that, I think we presidents, we nations, should think about changing the headquarters of the United Nations. I personally do not agree with being subjected to such investigations when coming here.
I feel that it is also time to de-colonize the United Nations. We should all be respected whether we are small or large, with problems or without.
The speeches I heard about polar melting did not reflect on the cause of this melting, this global warming. It is capitalism and the exaggerated and unlimited industrialization of some countries that generates these problems on the continent and around the globe.
But when we align ourselves with social movements in order to protest, to condemn these unsustainable policies, these economic models that do not solve our economic problems, then comes the interventions, military bases, and wars, the demonizing and accusations of terrorism, as if the people have no right to appeal for their needs, to claim their rights and to demand new approaches to rescuing life and humankind.
Therefore I believe it is important that we as presidents, as nations, as delegates sincerely speak the truth about these economic problems that are being faced not only by Bolivia, America, or South America. But when democratic changes take place in South America, liberating democracies not democracies subjugated to the empire, we hear more accusations and distortions, charges of cruelty and of dictators like those I heard President Bush directing towards the president and commander Cuba yesterday.
A salute to all revolutionaries. Especially to President Fidel for whom I have much respect, because Fidel has also sent troops to many countries. But these troops save lives, unlike those deployed by the U.S. president to take lives.
Therefore here, as presidents we should think of life, of humanity, about how to save the planet earth. The issue of global climate change is an ongoing debate.
Esteemed members, I am convinced that is not possible for basic services to continue being in the hands of private business. Fortunately, thanks to the foreign ministers of the Americas, water has been recognized as a human right. If water is a human right then it's now important that it become a public service and not a private business.
Is vital now, right here, to recognize energy as a human right also. Hopefully we can all agree that energy is a human right; and if it is a human right it should never be controlled by private business. Instead it must be a public service in order to meet the needs of the people.
I cannot understand their pretext of hegemony or the accumulation of capital in a few hands, which will only continue harming humanity, affecting the poor, marginalizing the needy.
I believe that that we are talking in order to change these economic policies that have caused and go on causing so much damage. These economic policies have caused genocide; and the genocide continues. I cannot understand why there are still countries involved in an arms race, I don’t agree with war. We are exploring how a large social, political movement, via a new constitution, can reject war.
I'm convinced that war is the industry of death, thus the arms race is just another industry that complements the industry and death. In this new millennium, how can countries and presidents still go on dealing with the interventions, arrogance, and authoritarianism of some countries towards other countries, without even considering humanity.
Esteemed presidents, I believe, that together we can work toward rescuing planet earth, which is the most important issue at the moment if we want to save life and humanity.
But yesterday I heard some speeches about Biofuel. I tried to understand what biofuel, or agrofuel is. I don't understand how we can give up our food to automobiles; I can't understand how the land can be given over to heaps of metal.
I think that food should be for human beings, the land for life. Because we lack gasoline, because we lack diesel we're going to divert land and food to automobiles?
For this reason I said two days ago that if we are really interested in life we would abandon luxury. It's imperative to abandon luxury. We cannot continue accumulating garbage, we cannot continue thinking only about a few families instead of thinking about humanity. I think that we have profound differences if we talk about these issues of life, especially the lives of our national majorities.
I wish to take this opportunity to acknowledge and thank you all for your support, with the exception of four governments, their presidents and their delegates, in approving the Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples of the world. I'm very satisfied. The people of America have waited more than 500 years for their rights to be recognized. We are the culture of patience.
And I want to make clear that just because we have a declaration now doesn’t mean that the indigenous movement is going to become vengeful towards other sectors. The indigenous people do not have a vengeful character. The indigenous people are a culture of dialogue and we are fundamentally a culture of life.
I ask the United Nations to convene a world indigenous forum soon so that we can share our experiences. In Bolivia we are gathering and drawing from our experiences with a program called the good life. In order to live better sometimes you have to exploit, to live better sometimes you have to steal, to live better sometimes you have to discriminate, to live better sometimes you have to plunder, but to live the good life is to live communally, to live collectively.
And not only among human beings, but also to live the good life in harmony with mother earth. The earth for the indigenous movement is sacred; mother earth is our life. The Pachamama, as we say in our language, cannot be converted into merchandise. If we're talking about and protesting against global warming, well, first we must understand what mother earth is. If the earth gives us life we are obligated to change our policies and to also recognize the indigenous movement.
We have lived collectively, communally; those with experience are here debating. We argue for collectivity, communitarianism and against capitalism. Let us draw from those experiences in order to defend life and rescue humankind.
I also want to quickly take this moment to say that this new millennium must be the millennium of life, the millennium of equality, of justice that respects our identity and is committed to human dignity.
Therefore we're talking about changing the economic models that harm humanity. But if we want to change things from here, we must first change ourselves. We mustn’t be egoistic, individualistic, greedy, ambitious, or sectarian. We mustn’t place the interests of a few families above those of the great family of planet earth.
So, we're talking here about first changing ourselves as presidents, as representatives of our respective nations in order to change economic models and seek equality and justice.
And I tell you that in these past 20 months as president working with the people, listening to their needs, I have found that there are still some groups that don’t want to lose their privileges, ill-gotten privileges. Above all they are accustom to the State doing business for the benefit of just a few families instead of for the [Bolivian] family.
I learned in these 20 months as president how beautiful it is to work for the homeland and not for money, how wonderful it is to work for these abandoned people, and how much better it has been to work together with some people who are economically well off but who also love their homeland and are committed to solidarity.
I would like to mention, you all know that we have a historical problem with the sister Republic of Chile: the issue of the ocean. I want to say that so far we have felt a real sense of amity, people to people amity, government to government amity, president to president amity, under the diplomacy of the people.
And we want to pledge to resolve the historic issue but within the framework of complementarity. Because neighboring countries, Latin American countries, countries of the world need to complement one another if we want to solve the problems of our people and the problems of our nations.
The concept of complimentarity is so important and we continue working towards this for humankind. In closing I'd like to say (...sometimes the red light makes one nervous, but never mind...) I would like to say that these kinds of participatory event where we all learn and continue learning, are the best universities available. But we must speak with clarity, with sincerity and not falsify the truth by only speaking of the effects and not the causes or of humanity’s problems.
In this case I wish to tell you all that I believe it is vital to change those economic models and eradicate capitalism.
Thank you very much.
Translated from ABI by Dawn Gable
Posted by Bolivia Rising on Thursday, October 04, 2007
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano
New revelations in Israeli attack on American spy ship USS Liberty
The Strike on USS Liberty
New revelations in attack on American spy ship
By John Crewdson
Bryce Lockwood, Marine staff sergeant, Russian-language expert, recipient of the Silver Star for heroism, ordained Baptist minister, is shouting into the phone.
"I'm angry! I'm seething with anger! Forty years, and I'm seething with anger!"
Lockwood was aboard the USS Liberty, a super-secret spy ship on station in the eastern Mediterranean, when four Israeli fighter jets flew out of the afternoon sun to strafe and bomb the virtually defenseless vessel on June 8, 1967, the fourth day of what would become known as the Six-Day War.
For Lockwood and many other survivors, the anger is mixed with incredulity: that Israel would attack an important ally, then attribute the attack to a case of mistaken identity by Israeli pilots who had confused the U.S. Navy's most distinctive ship with an Egyptian horse-cavalry transport that was half its size and had a dissimilar profile. And they're also incredulous that, for years, their own government would reject their calls for a thorough investigation.
"They tried to lie their way out of it!" Lockwood shouts. "I don't believe that for a minute! You just don't shoot at a ship at sea without identifying it, making sure of your target!"
Four decades later, many of the more than two dozen Liberty survivors located and interviewed by the Tribune cannot talk about the attack without shouting or weeping.
Their anger has been stoked by the declassification of government documents and the recollections of former military personnel, including some quoted in this article for the first time, which strengthen doubts about the U.S. National Security Agency's position that it never intercepted the communications of the attacking Israeli pilots -- communications, according to those who remember seeing them, that showed the Israelis knew they were attacking an American naval vessel.
The documents also suggest that the U.S. government, anxious to spare Israel's reputation and preserve its alliance with the U.S., closed the case with what even some of its participants now say was a hasty and seriously flawed investigation.
In declassifying the most recent and largest batch of materials last June 8, the 40th anniversary of the attack, the NSA, this country's chief U.S. electronic-intelligence-gatherer and code-breaker, acknowledged that the attack had "become the center of considerable controversy and debate." It was not the agency's intention, it said, "to prove or disprove any one set of conclusions, many of which can be drawn from a thorough review of this material," available athttp://www.nsa.gov/liberty .
An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mark Regev, called the attack on the Liberty "a tragic and terrible accident, a case of mistaken identity, for which Israel has officially apologized." Israel also paid reparations of $6.7 million to the injured survivors and the families of those killed in the attack, and another $6 million for the loss of the Liberty itself.
But for those who lost their sons and husbands, neither the Israelis' apology nor the passing of time has lessened their grief.
One is Pat Blue, who still remembers having her lunch in Washington's Farragut Square park on "a beautiful June afternoon" when she was a 22-year-old secretary for a law firm.
Blue heard somebody's portable radio saying a U.S. Navy ship had been torpedoed in the eastern Mediterranean. A few weeks before, Blue's husband of two years, an Arab-language expert with the NSA, had been hurriedly dispatched overseas.
As she listened to the news report, "it just all came together." Soon afterward, the NSA confirmed that Allen Blue was among the missing.
"I never felt young again," she said.
Aircraft on the horizon
Beginning before dawn on June 8, Israeli aircraft regularly appeared on the horizon and circled the Liberty.
The Israeli Air Force had gained control of the skies on the first day of the war by destroying the Egyptian air force on the ground. America was Israel's ally, and the Israelis knew the Americans were there. The ship's mission was to monitor the communications of Israel's Arab enemies and their Soviet advisers, but not Israeli communications. The Liberty felt safe.
Then the jets started shooting at the officers and enlisted men stretched out on the deck for a lunch-hour sun bath. Theodore Arfsten, a quartermaster, remembered watching a Jewish officer cry when he saw the blue Star of David on the planes' fuselages. At first, crew members below decks had no idea whose planes were shooting at their ship.
Thirty-four died that day, including Blue, the only civilian casualty. An additional 171 were wounded in the air and sea assault by Israel, which was about to celebrate an overwhelming victory over the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and several other Arab states.
For most of those who survived the attack, the Six-Day War has become the defining moment of their lives.
Some mustered out of the Navy as soon as their enlistments were up. Others stayed in long enough to retire. Several went on to successful business careers. One became a Secret Service agent, another a Baltimore policeman.
Several are being treated with therapy and drugs for what has since been recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder. One has undergone more than 30 major operations. Another suffers seizures caused by a piece of shrapnel still lodged in his brain.
After Bryce Lockwood left the Marines, he worked construction, then tried selling insurance. "I'd get a job and get fired," he said. "I had a hell of a time getting my feet on the ground."
With his linguistic background, Lockwood could have had a career with the NSA, the CIA, or the FBI. But he was too angry at the U.S. government to work for it. "Don't talk to me about government!" he shouts.
U.S. Navy jets were called back
An Israeli military court of inquiry later acknowledged that their naval headquarters knew at least three hours before the attack that the odd-looking ship 13 miles off the Sinai Peninsula, sprouting more than 40 antennas capable of receiving every kind of radio transmission, was "an electromagnetic audio-surveillance ship of the U.S. Navy," a floating electronic vacuum cleaner.
The Israeli inquiry later concluded that that information had simply gotten lost, never passed along to the ground controllers who directed the air attack nor to the crews of the three Israeli torpedo boats who picked up where the air force left off, strafing the Liberty's decks with their machine guns and launching a torpedo that blew a 39-foot hole in its starboard side.
To a man, the survivors interviewed by the Tribune rejected Israel's explanation.
Nor, the survivors said, did they understand why the American 6th Fleet, which included the aircraft carriers America and Saratoga, patrolling 400 miles west of the Liberty, launched and then recalled at least two squadrons of Navy fighter-bombers that might have arrived in time to prevent the torpedo attack -- and save 26 American lives.
J.Q. "Tony" Hart, then a chief petty officer assigned to a U.S. Navy relay station in Morocco that handled communications between Washington and the 6th Fleet, remembered listening as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, in Washington, ordered Rear Adm. Lawrence Geis, commander of the America's carrier battle group, to bring the jets home.
When Geis protested that the Liberty was under attack and needed help, Hart said, McNamara retorted that "President [Lyndon] Johnson is not going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors."
McNamara, who is now 91, told the Tribune he has "absolutely no recollection of what I did that day," except that "I have a memory that I didn't know at the time what was going on."
The Johnson administration did not publicly dispute Israel's claim that the attack had been nothing more than a disastrous mistake. But internal White House documents obtained from the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library show that the Israelis' explanation of how the mistake had occurred was not believed.
Except for McNamara, most senior administration officials from Secretary of State Dean Rusk on down privately agreed with Johnson's intelligence adviser, Clark Clifford, who was quoted in minutes of a National Security Council staff meeting as saying it was "inconceivable" that the attack had been a case of mistaken identity.
The attack "couldn't be anything else but deliberate," the NSA's director, Lt. Gen. Marshall Carter, later told Congress.
"I don't think you'll find many people at NSA who believe it was accidental," Benson Buffham, a former deputy NSA director, said in an interview.
"I just always assumed that the Israeli pilots knew what they were doing," said Harold Saunders, then a member of the National Security Council staff and later assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs.
"So for me, the question really is who issued the order to do that and why? That's the really interesting thing."
The answer, if there is one, will probably never be known. Gen. Moshe Dayan, then the country's minister of defense; Levi Eshkol, the Israeli prime minister; and Golda Meir, his successor, are all dead.
Many of those who believe the Liberty was purposely attacked have suggested that the Israelis feared the ship might intercept communications revealing its plans to widen the war, which the U.S. opposed. But no one has ever produced any solid evidence to support that theory, and the Israelis dismiss it. The NSA's deputy director, Louis Tordella, speculated in a recently declassified memo that the attack "might have been ordered by some senior commander on the Sinai Peninsula who wrongly suspected that the LIBERTY was monitoring his activities."
Was the U.S. flag visible?
Though the attack on the Liberty has faded from public memory, Michael Oren, a historian and senior fellow at The Shalem Center in Jerusalem, conceded that "the case of the assault on the Liberty has never been closed."
If anything, Oren said, "the accusations leveled against Israel have grown sharper with time." Oren said in an interview that he believed a formal investigation by the U.S., even 40 years later, would be useful if only because it would finally establish Israel's innocence.
Questions about what happened to the Liberty have been kept alive by survivors' groups and their Web sites, a half-dozen books, magazine articles and television documentaries, scholarly papers published in academic journals, and Internet chat groups where amateur sleuths debate arcane points of photo interpretation and torpedo running depth.
Meantime, the Liberty's survivors and their supporters, including a distinguished constellation of retired admirals and generals, have persisted in asking Congress for a full-scale formal investigation.
"We deserve to have the truth," Pat Blue said.
For all its apparent complexity, the attack on the Liberty can be reduced to a single question: Was the ship flying the American flag at the time of the attack, and was that flag visible from the air?
The survivors interviewed by the Tribune uniformly agree that the Liberty was flying the Stars and Stripes before, during and after the attack, except for a brief period in which one flag that had been shot down was replaced with another, larger flag -- the ship's "holiday colors" -- that measured 13 feet long.
Concludes one of the declassified NSA documents: "Every official interview of numerous Liberty crewmen gave consistent evidence that indeed the Liberty was flying an American flag -- and, further, the weather conditions were ideal to ensure its easy observance and identification."
The Israeli court of inquiry that examined the attack, and absolved the Israeli military of criminal culpability, came to precisely the opposite conclusion.
"Throughout the contact," it declared, "no American or any other flag appeared on the ship."
The attack, the court said, had been prompted by a report, which later proved erroneous, that a ship was shelling Israeli-held positions in the Sinai Peninsula. The Liberty had no guns capable of shelling the shore, but the court concluded that the U.S. ship had been mistakenly identified as the source of the shelling.
Yiftah Spector, the first Israeli pilot to attack the ship, told the Jerusalem Post in 2003 that when he first spotted the Liberty, "I circled it twice and it did not fire on me. My assumption was that it was likely to open fire at me and nevertheless I slowed down and I looked and there was positively no flag."
But the Liberty crewmen interviewed by the Tribune said the Israeli jets simply appeared and began shooting. They also said the Liberty did not open fire on the planes because it was armed only with four .50-caliber machine guns intended to repel boarders.
"I can't identify it, but in any case it's a military ship," Spector radioed his ground controller, according to a transcript of the Israeli air-to-ground communications published by the Jerusalem Post in 2004.
That transcript, made by a Post reporter who was allowed to listen to what the Israeli Air Force said were tapes of the attacking pilots' communications, contained only two references to "American" or "Americans," one at the beginning and the other at the end of the attack.
The first reference occurred at 1:54 p.m. local time, two minutes before the Israeli jets began their first strafing run.
In the Post transcript, a weapons system officer on the ground suddenly blurted out, "What is this? Americans?"
"Where are Americans?" replied one of the air controllers.
The question went unanswered, and it was not asked again.
Twenty minutes later, after the Liberty had been hit repeatedly by machine guns, 30 mm cannon and napalm from the Israelis' French-built Mirage and Mystere fighter-bombers, the controller directing the attack asked his chief in Tel Aviv to which country the target vessel belonged.
"Apparently American," the chief controller replied.
Fourteen minutes later the Liberty was struck amidships by a torpedo from an Israeli boat, killing 26 of the 100 or so NSA technicians and specialists in Russian and Arabic who were working in restricted compartments below the ship's waterline.
Analyst: Israelis wanted it sunk
The transcript published by the Jerusalem Post bore scant resemblance to the one that in 1967 rolled off the teletype machine behind the sealed vault door at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, where Steve Forslund worked as an intelligence analyst for the 544th Air Reconnaissance Technical Wing, then the highest-level strategic planning office in the Air Force.
"The ground control station stated that the target was American and for the aircraft to confirm it," Forslund recalled. "The aircraft did confirm the identity of the target as American, by the American flag.
"The ground control station ordered the aircraft to attack and sink the target and ensure they left no survivors."
Forslund said he clearly recalled "the obvious frustration of the controller over the inability of the pilots to sink the target quickly and completely."
"He kept insisting the mission had to sink the target, and was frustrated with the pilots' responses that it didn't sink."
Nor, Forslund said, was he the only member of his unit to have read the transcripts. "Everybody saw these," said Forslund, now retired after 26 years in the military.
Forslund's recollections are supported by those of two other Air Force intelligence specialists, working in widely separate locations, who say they also saw the transcripts of the attacking Israeli pilots' communications.
One is James Gotcher, now an attorney in California, who was then serving with the Air Force Security Service's 6924th Security Squadron, an adjunct of the NSA, at Son Tra, Vietnam.
"It was clear that the Israeli aircraft were being vectored directly at USS Liberty," Gotcher recalled in an e-mail. "Later, around the time Liberty got off a distress call, the controllers seemed to panic and urged the aircraft to 'complete the job' and get out of there."
Six thousand miles from Omaha, on the Mediterranean island of Crete, Air Force Capt. Richard Block was commanding an intelligence wing of more than 100 analysts and cryptologists monitoring Middle Eastern communications.
The transcripts Block remembered seeing "were teletypes, way beyond Top Secret. Some of the pilots did not want to attack," Block said. "The pilots said, 'This is an American ship. Do you still want us to attack?'
"And ground control came back and said, 'Yes, follow orders.'"
Gotcher and Forslund agreed with Block that the Jerusalem Post transcript was not at all like what they remember reading.
"There is simply no way that [the Post transcript is] the same as what I saw," Gotcher said. "More to the point, for anyone familiar with air-to-ground [communications] procedures, that simply isn't the way pilots and controllers communicate."
Block, now a child protection caseworker in Florida, observed that "the fact that the Israeli pilots clearly identified the ship as American and asked for further instructions from ground control appears to be a missing part of that Jerusalem Post article."
Arieh O'Sullivan, the Post reporter who made the newspaper's transcript, said the Israeli Air Force tapes he listened to contained blank spaces. He said he assumed those blank spaces occurred while Israeli pilots were conducting their strafing runs and had nothing to communicate.
'But sir, it's an American ship!'
Forslund, Gotcher and Block are not alone in claiming to have read transcripts of the attack that they said left no doubt the Israelis knew they were attempting to sink a U.S. Navy ship.
Many ears were tuned to the battles being fought in and around the Sinai during the Six-Day War, including those belonging to other Arab nations with a keen interest in the outcome.
"I had a Libyan naval captain who was listening in that day," said a retired CIA officer, who spoke on condition that he not be named discussing a clandestine informant.
"He thought history would change its course," the CIA officer recalled. "Israel attacking the U.S. He was certain, listening in to the Israeli and American comms [communications], that it was deliberate."
The late Dwight Porter, the American ambassador to Lebanon during the Six-Day War, told friends and family members that he had been shown English-language transcripts of Israeli pilots talking to their controllers.
A close friend, William Chandler, the former head of the Trans-Arabian Pipe Line Co., said Porter recalled one of the pilots protesting, "But sir, it's an American ship -- I can see the flag!' To which the ground control responded, 'Never mind; hit it!'"
Porter, who asked that his recollections not be made public while he was alive because they involved classified information, also discussed the transcripts during a lunch in 2000 at the Cosmos Club in Washington with another retired American diplomat, Andrew Kilgore, the former U.S. ambassador to Qatar.
Kilgore recalled Porter saying that he "saw the telex, read it, and passed it right back" to the embassy official who had shown it to him. He quoted Porter as recalling that the transcript showed "Israel was attacking, and they know it's an American ship."
Haviland Smith, a young CIA officer stationed in Beirut during the Six-Day War, said that although he never saw the transcript, he had "heard on a number of occasions exactly the story that you just told me about what that transcript contained."
He had later been told, Smith recalled, "that ultimately all of the transcripts were deep-sixed. I was told that they were deep-sixed because the administration did not wish to embarrass the Israelis."
Perhaps the most persuasive suggestion that such transcripts existed comes from the Israelis themselves, in a pair of diplomatic cables sent by the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Avraham Harman, to Foreign Minister Abba Eban in Tel Aviv.
Five days after the Liberty attack, Harman cabled Eban that a source the Israelis code-named "Hamlet" was reporting that the Americans had "clear proof that from a certain stage the pilot discovered the identity of the ship and continued the attack anyway."
Harman repeated the warning three days later, advising Eban, who is now dead, that the White House was "very angry," and that "the reason for this is that the Americans probably have findings showing that our pilots indeed knew that the ship was American."
According to a memoir by then-CIA director Richard Helms, President Johnson's personal anger was manifest when he discovered the story of the Liberty attack on an inside page of the next day's New York Times. Johnson barked that "it should have been on the front page!"
Israeli historian Tom Segev, who mentioned the cables in his recent book "1967," said other cables showed that Harman's source for the second cable was Arthur Goldberg, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
The cables, which have been declassified by the Israelis, were obtained from the Israeli State Archive and translated from Hebrew by the Tribune.
Oliver Kirby, the NSA's deputy director for operations at the time of the Liberty attack, confirmed the existence of NSA transcripts.
Asked whether he had personally read such transcripts, Kirby replied, "I sure did. I certainly did."
"They said, 'We've got him in the zero,'" Kirby recalled, "whatever that meant -- I guess the sights or something. And then one of them said, 'Can you see the flag?' They said 'Yes, it's U.S, it's U.S.' They said it several times, so there wasn't any doubt in anybody's mind that they knew it."
Kirby, now 86 and retired in Texas, said the transcripts were "something that's bothered me all my life. I'm willing to swear on a stack of Bibles that we knew they knew."
One set of transcripts apparently survived in the archives of the U.S. Army's intelligence school, then located at Ft. Holabird in Maryland.
W. Patrick Lang, a retired Army colonel who spent eight years as chief of Middle East intelligence for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the transcripts were used as "course material" in an advanced class for intelligence officers on the clandestine interception of voice transmissions.
"The flight leader spoke to his base to report that he had the ship in view, that it was the same ship that he had been briefed on and that it was clearly marked with the U.S. flag," Lang recalled in an e-mail.
"The flight commander was reluctant," Lang said in a subsequent interview. "That was very clear. He didn't want to do this. He asked them a couple of times, 'Do you really want me to do this?' I've remembered it ever since. It was very striking. I've been harboring this memory for all these years."
Key NSA tapes said missing
Asked whether the NSA had in fact intercepted the communications of the Israeli pilots who were attacking the Liberty, Kirby, the retired senior NSA official, replied, "We sure did."
On its Web site, the NSA has posted three recordings of Israeli communications made on June 8, 1967. But none of the recordings is of the attack itself.
Indeed, the declassified documents state that no recordings of the "actual attack" exist, raising questions about the source of the transcripts recalled by Forslund, Gotcher, Block, Porter, Lang and Kirby.
The three recordings reflect what the NSA describes as "the aftermath" of the attack -- Israeli communications with two Israeli helicopters dispatched to rescue any survivors who may have jumped into the water.
Two of the recordings were made by Michael Prostinak, a Hebrew linguist aboard a U.S. Navy EC-121, a lumbering propeller-driven aircraft specially equipped to gather electronic intelligence.
But Prostinak said he was certain that more than three recordings were made that day.
"I can tell you there were more tapes than just the three on the Internet," he said. "No doubt in my mind, more than three tapes."
At least one of the missing tapes, Prostinak said, captured Israeli communications "in which people were not just tranquil or taking care of business as normal. We knew that something was being attacked," Prostinak said. "Everyone we were listening to was excited. You know, it was an actual attack. And during the attack was when mention of the American flag was made."
Prostinak acknowledged that his Hebrew was not good enough to understand every word being said, but that after the mention of the American flag "the attack did continue. We copied [recorded] it until we got completely out of range. We got a great deal of it."
Charles Tiffany, the plane's navigator, remembers hearing Prostinak on the plane's intercom system, shouting, "I got something crazy on UHF," the radio frequency band used by the Israeli Air Force.
"I'll never forget it to this day," said Tiffany, now a retired Florida lawyer. He also remembers hearing the plane's pilot ordering the NSA linguists to "start taping everything."
Prostinak said he and the others aboard the plane had been unaware of the Liberty's presence 15,000 feet below, but had concluded that the Israelis' target must be an American ship. "We knew that something was being attacked," Prostinak said.
After listening to the three recordings released by the NSA, Prostinak said it was clear from the sequence in which they were numbered that at least two tapes that had once existed were not there.
One tape, designated A1104/A-02, begins at 2:29 p.m. local time, just after the Liberty was hit by the torpedo. Prostinak said there was a preceding tape, A1104/A-01.
That tape likely would have recorded much of the attack, which began with the air assault at 1:56 p.m. Prostinak said a second tape, which preceded one beginning at 3:07 p.m., made by another linguist aboard the same plane, also appeared to be missing.
As soon as the EC-121 landed at its base in Athens, Prostinak said, all the tapes were rushed to an NSA facility at the Athens airport where Hebrew translators were standing by.
"We told them what we had, and they immediately took the tapes and went to work," recalled Prostinak, who after leaving the Navy became chief of police and then town administrator for the village of Lake Waccamaw, N.C.
Another linguist aboard the EC-121, who spoke on condition that he not be named, said he believed there had been as many as "five or six" tapes recording the attack on the Liberty or its aftermath.
Andrea Martino, the NSA's senior media adviser, did not respond to a question about the apparent conflict between the agency's assertion that there were no recordings of the Israeli attack and the recollections of those interviewed for this article.
U.S. inquiry widely criticized
Rather than investigating how and why a U.S. Navy vessel had been attacked by an ally, the Navy seemed interested in asking as few questions as possible and answering them in record time.
Even while the Liberty was still limping toward a dry dock in Malta, the Navy convened a formal Court of Inquiry. Adm. John McCain Jr., the commander of U.S. naval forces in Europe and father of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chose Adm. Isaac Kidd Jr. to preside.
The court's charge was narrow: to determine whether any shortcomings on the part of the Liberty's crew had contributed to the injuries and deaths that resulted from the attack. McCain gave Kidd's investigators a week to complete the job.
"That was a shock," recalled retired Navy Capt. Ward Boston, the inquiry's counsel, who said he and Kidd had estimated that a thorough inquiry would take six months.
"Everyone was kind of stunned that it was handled so quickly and without much hullabaloo," said G. Patrick March, then a member of McCain's staff in London.
Largely because of time constraints, Boston said, the investigators were unable to question many of the survivors, or to visit Israel and interview any Israelis involved in the attack.
Rear Adm. Merlin Staring, the Navy's former judge advocate general, was asked to assess the American inquiry's report before it was sent to Washington. But Staring said it was taken from him when he began to question some aspects of the report. He describes it now as "a hasty, superficial, incomplete and totally inadequate inquiry."
Staring, who is among those calling for a full congressional investigation on behalf of the Liberty's survivors, observed in an interview that the inquiry report contained several "findings of fact" unsupported by testimony or evidence.
One such finding ignored the testimony of several inquiry witnesses that the American flag was flying during the attack, and held that the "available evidence combines to indicate the attack on LIBERTY on 8 June was in fact a case of mistaken identity."
There are also apparent omissions in the inquiry's report. It does not include, for example, the testimony of a young lieutenant, Lloyd Painter, who was serving as officer of the deck when the attack began. Painter said he testified that an Israeli torpedo boat "methodically machine-gunned one of our life rafts" that had been put over the side by crewmen preparing to abandon ship.
Painter, who spent 32 years as a Secret Service agent after leaving the Navy, charged that his testimony about the life rafts was purposely omitted.
Ward Boston recalled that, after McCain's one-week deadline expired, Kidd took the record compiled by the inquiry "and flew back to Washington, and I went back to Naples," the headquarters of the 6th Fleet.
"Two weeks later, he comes back to Naples and calls me from his office," Boston recalled in an interview. "In that deep voice, he said, 'Ward, they aren't interested in the facts. It's a political issue and we have to put a lid on it. We've been ordered to shut up.'
"It's time for the truth to come out," declared Boston, who is now 84. "There have been so many cover-ups."
"Someday the truth of this will come out," said Dennis Eikleberry, a NSA technician aboard the Liberty. "Someday it will, but we'll all be gone."
James Ennes, now 74, who was officer of the deck just before the attack began, and later spent two months in a body cast, is one of the more vocal survivors. Like the others, Ennes is tired of waiting.
"We want both sides to stop lying," he said.
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"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
New revelations in attack on American spy ship
Veterans, documents suggest U.S., Israel didn't tell full story of deadly '67 incident
By John Crewdson
Bryce Lockwood, Marine staff sergeant, Russian-language expert, recipient of the Silver Star for heroism, ordained Baptist minister, is shouting into the phone.
"I'm angry! I'm seething with anger! Forty years, and I'm seething with anger!"
Lockwood was aboard the USS Liberty, a super-secret spy ship on station in the eastern Mediterranean, when four Israeli fighter jets flew out of the afternoon sun to strafe and bomb the virtually defenseless vessel on June 8, 1967, the fourth day of what would become known as the Six-Day War.
For Lockwood and many other survivors, the anger is mixed with incredulity: that Israel would attack an important ally, then attribute the attack to a case of mistaken identity by Israeli pilots who had confused the U.S. Navy's most distinctive ship with an Egyptian horse-cavalry transport that was half its size and had a dissimilar profile. And they're also incredulous that, for years, their own government would reject their calls for a thorough investigation.
"They tried to lie their way out of it!" Lockwood shouts. "I don't believe that for a minute! You just don't shoot at a ship at sea without identifying it, making sure of your target!"
Four decades later, many of the more than two dozen Liberty survivors located and interviewed by the Tribune cannot talk about the attack without shouting or weeping.
Their anger has been stoked by the declassification of government documents and the recollections of former military personnel, including some quoted in this article for the first time, which strengthen doubts about the U.S. National Security Agency's position that it never intercepted the communications of the attacking Israeli pilots -- communications, according to those who remember seeing them, that showed the Israelis knew they were attacking an American naval vessel.
The documents also suggest that the U.S. government, anxious to spare Israel's reputation and preserve its alliance with the U.S., closed the case with what even some of its participants now say was a hasty and seriously flawed investigation.
In declassifying the most recent and largest batch of materials last June 8, the 40th anniversary of the attack, the NSA, this country's chief U.S. electronic-intelligence-gatherer and code-breaker, acknowledged that the attack had "become the center of considerable controversy and debate." It was not the agency's intention, it said, "to prove or disprove any one set of conclusions, many of which can be drawn from a thorough review of this material," available athttp://www.nsa.gov/liberty .
An Israeli Foreign Ministry spokesman, Mark Regev, called the attack on the Liberty "a tragic and terrible accident, a case of mistaken identity, for which Israel has officially apologized." Israel also paid reparations of $6.7 million to the injured survivors and the families of those killed in the attack, and another $6 million for the loss of the Liberty itself.
But for those who lost their sons and husbands, neither the Israelis' apology nor the passing of time has lessened their grief.
One is Pat Blue, who still remembers having her lunch in Washington's Farragut Square park on "a beautiful June afternoon" when she was a 22-year-old secretary for a law firm.
Blue heard somebody's portable radio saying a U.S. Navy ship had been torpedoed in the eastern Mediterranean. A few weeks before, Blue's husband of two years, an Arab-language expert with the NSA, had been hurriedly dispatched overseas.
As she listened to the news report, "it just all came together." Soon afterward, the NSA confirmed that Allen Blue was among the missing.
"I never felt young again," she said.
Aircraft on the horizon
Beginning before dawn on June 8, Israeli aircraft regularly appeared on the horizon and circled the Liberty.
The Israeli Air Force had gained control of the skies on the first day of the war by destroying the Egyptian air force on the ground. America was Israel's ally, and the Israelis knew the Americans were there. The ship's mission was to monitor the communications of Israel's Arab enemies and their Soviet advisers, but not Israeli communications. The Liberty felt safe.
Then the jets started shooting at the officers and enlisted men stretched out on the deck for a lunch-hour sun bath. Theodore Arfsten, a quartermaster, remembered watching a Jewish officer cry when he saw the blue Star of David on the planes' fuselages. At first, crew members below decks had no idea whose planes were shooting at their ship.
Thirty-four died that day, including Blue, the only civilian casualty. An additional 171 were wounded in the air and sea assault by Israel, which was about to celebrate an overwhelming victory over the combined armies of Egypt, Syria, Jordan, and several other Arab states.
For most of those who survived the attack, the Six-Day War has become the defining moment of their lives.
Some mustered out of the Navy as soon as their enlistments were up. Others stayed in long enough to retire. Several went on to successful business careers. One became a Secret Service agent, another a Baltimore policeman.
Several are being treated with therapy and drugs for what has since been recognized as post-traumatic stress disorder. One has undergone more than 30 major operations. Another suffers seizures caused by a piece of shrapnel still lodged in his brain.
After Bryce Lockwood left the Marines, he worked construction, then tried selling insurance. "I'd get a job and get fired," he said. "I had a hell of a time getting my feet on the ground."
With his linguistic background, Lockwood could have had a career with the NSA, the CIA, or the FBI. But he was too angry at the U.S. government to work for it. "Don't talk to me about government!" he shouts.
U.S. Navy jets were called back
An Israeli military court of inquiry later acknowledged that their naval headquarters knew at least three hours before the attack that the odd-looking ship 13 miles off the Sinai Peninsula, sprouting more than 40 antennas capable of receiving every kind of radio transmission, was "an electromagnetic audio-surveillance ship of the U.S. Navy," a floating electronic vacuum cleaner.
The Israeli inquiry later concluded that that information had simply gotten lost, never passed along to the ground controllers who directed the air attack nor to the crews of the three Israeli torpedo boats who picked up where the air force left off, strafing the Liberty's decks with their machine guns and launching a torpedo that blew a 39-foot hole in its starboard side.
To a man, the survivors interviewed by the Tribune rejected Israel's explanation.
Nor, the survivors said, did they understand why the American 6th Fleet, which included the aircraft carriers America and Saratoga, patrolling 400 miles west of the Liberty, launched and then recalled at least two squadrons of Navy fighter-bombers that might have arrived in time to prevent the torpedo attack -- and save 26 American lives.
J.Q. "Tony" Hart, then a chief petty officer assigned to a U.S. Navy relay station in Morocco that handled communications between Washington and the 6th Fleet, remembered listening as Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, in Washington, ordered Rear Adm. Lawrence Geis, commander of the America's carrier battle group, to bring the jets home.
When Geis protested that the Liberty was under attack and needed help, Hart said, McNamara retorted that "President [Lyndon] Johnson is not going to go to war or embarrass an American ally over a few sailors."
McNamara, who is now 91, told the Tribune he has "absolutely no recollection of what I did that day," except that "I have a memory that I didn't know at the time what was going on."
The Johnson administration did not publicly dispute Israel's claim that the attack had been nothing more than a disastrous mistake. But internal White House documents obtained from the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library show that the Israelis' explanation of how the mistake had occurred was not believed.
Except for McNamara, most senior administration officials from Secretary of State Dean Rusk on down privately agreed with Johnson's intelligence adviser, Clark Clifford, who was quoted in minutes of a National Security Council staff meeting as saying it was "inconceivable" that the attack had been a case of mistaken identity.
The attack "couldn't be anything else but deliberate," the NSA's director, Lt. Gen. Marshall Carter, later told Congress.
"I don't think you'll find many people at NSA who believe it was accidental," Benson Buffham, a former deputy NSA director, said in an interview.
"I just always assumed that the Israeli pilots knew what they were doing," said Harold Saunders, then a member of the National Security Council staff and later assistant secretary of state for Near Eastern and South Asian affairs.
"So for me, the question really is who issued the order to do that and why? That's the really interesting thing."
The answer, if there is one, will probably never be known. Gen. Moshe Dayan, then the country's minister of defense; Levi Eshkol, the Israeli prime minister; and Golda Meir, his successor, are all dead.
Many of those who believe the Liberty was purposely attacked have suggested that the Israelis feared the ship might intercept communications revealing its plans to widen the war, which the U.S. opposed. But no one has ever produced any solid evidence to support that theory, and the Israelis dismiss it. The NSA's deputy director, Louis Tordella, speculated in a recently declassified memo that the attack "might have been ordered by some senior commander on the Sinai Peninsula who wrongly suspected that the LIBERTY was monitoring his activities."
Was the U.S. flag visible?
Though the attack on the Liberty has faded from public memory, Michael Oren, a historian and senior fellow at The Shalem Center in Jerusalem, conceded that "the case of the assault on the Liberty has never been closed."
If anything, Oren said, "the accusations leveled against Israel have grown sharper with time." Oren said in an interview that he believed a formal investigation by the U.S., even 40 years later, would be useful if only because it would finally establish Israel's innocence.
Questions about what happened to the Liberty have been kept alive by survivors' groups and their Web sites, a half-dozen books, magazine articles and television documentaries, scholarly papers published in academic journals, and Internet chat groups where amateur sleuths debate arcane points of photo interpretation and torpedo running depth.
Meantime, the Liberty's survivors and their supporters, including a distinguished constellation of retired admirals and generals, have persisted in asking Congress for a full-scale formal investigation.
"We deserve to have the truth," Pat Blue said.
For all its apparent complexity, the attack on the Liberty can be reduced to a single question: Was the ship flying the American flag at the time of the attack, and was that flag visible from the air?
The survivors interviewed by the Tribune uniformly agree that the Liberty was flying the Stars and Stripes before, during and after the attack, except for a brief period in which one flag that had been shot down was replaced with another, larger flag -- the ship's "holiday colors" -- that measured 13 feet long.
Concludes one of the declassified NSA documents: "Every official interview of numerous Liberty crewmen gave consistent evidence that indeed the Liberty was flying an American flag -- and, further, the weather conditions were ideal to ensure its easy observance and identification."
The Israeli court of inquiry that examined the attack, and absolved the Israeli military of criminal culpability, came to precisely the opposite conclusion.
"Throughout the contact," it declared, "no American or any other flag appeared on the ship."
The attack, the court said, had been prompted by a report, which later proved erroneous, that a ship was shelling Israeli-held positions in the Sinai Peninsula. The Liberty had no guns capable of shelling the shore, but the court concluded that the U.S. ship had been mistakenly identified as the source of the shelling.
Yiftah Spector, the first Israeli pilot to attack the ship, told the Jerusalem Post in 2003 that when he first spotted the Liberty, "I circled it twice and it did not fire on me. My assumption was that it was likely to open fire at me and nevertheless I slowed down and I looked and there was positively no flag."
But the Liberty crewmen interviewed by the Tribune said the Israeli jets simply appeared and began shooting. They also said the Liberty did not open fire on the planes because it was armed only with four .50-caliber machine guns intended to repel boarders.
"I can't identify it, but in any case it's a military ship," Spector radioed his ground controller, according to a transcript of the Israeli air-to-ground communications published by the Jerusalem Post in 2004.
That transcript, made by a Post reporter who was allowed to listen to what the Israeli Air Force said were tapes of the attacking pilots' communications, contained only two references to "American" or "Americans," one at the beginning and the other at the end of the attack.
The first reference occurred at 1:54 p.m. local time, two minutes before the Israeli jets began their first strafing run.
In the Post transcript, a weapons system officer on the ground suddenly blurted out, "What is this? Americans?"
"Where are Americans?" replied one of the air controllers.
The question went unanswered, and it was not asked again.
Twenty minutes later, after the Liberty had been hit repeatedly by machine guns, 30 mm cannon and napalm from the Israelis' French-built Mirage and Mystere fighter-bombers, the controller directing the attack asked his chief in Tel Aviv to which country the target vessel belonged.
"Apparently American," the chief controller replied.
Fourteen minutes later the Liberty was struck amidships by a torpedo from an Israeli boat, killing 26 of the 100 or so NSA technicians and specialists in Russian and Arabic who were working in restricted compartments below the ship's waterline.
Analyst: Israelis wanted it sunk
The transcript published by the Jerusalem Post bore scant resemblance to the one that in 1967 rolled off the teletype machine behind the sealed vault door at Offutt Air Force Base in Omaha, where Steve Forslund worked as an intelligence analyst for the 544th Air Reconnaissance Technical Wing, then the highest-level strategic planning office in the Air Force.
"The ground control station stated that the target was American and for the aircraft to confirm it," Forslund recalled. "The aircraft did confirm the identity of the target as American, by the American flag.
"The ground control station ordered the aircraft to attack and sink the target and ensure they left no survivors."
Forslund said he clearly recalled "the obvious frustration of the controller over the inability of the pilots to sink the target quickly and completely."
"He kept insisting the mission had to sink the target, and was frustrated with the pilots' responses that it didn't sink."
Nor, Forslund said, was he the only member of his unit to have read the transcripts. "Everybody saw these," said Forslund, now retired after 26 years in the military.
Forslund's recollections are supported by those of two other Air Force intelligence specialists, working in widely separate locations, who say they also saw the transcripts of the attacking Israeli pilots' communications.
One is James Gotcher, now an attorney in California, who was then serving with the Air Force Security Service's 6924th Security Squadron, an adjunct of the NSA, at Son Tra, Vietnam.
"It was clear that the Israeli aircraft were being vectored directly at USS Liberty," Gotcher recalled in an e-mail. "Later, around the time Liberty got off a distress call, the controllers seemed to panic and urged the aircraft to 'complete the job' and get out of there."
Six thousand miles from Omaha, on the Mediterranean island of Crete, Air Force Capt. Richard Block was commanding an intelligence wing of more than 100 analysts and cryptologists monitoring Middle Eastern communications.
The transcripts Block remembered seeing "were teletypes, way beyond Top Secret. Some of the pilots did not want to attack," Block said. "The pilots said, 'This is an American ship. Do you still want us to attack?'
"And ground control came back and said, 'Yes, follow orders.'"
Gotcher and Forslund agreed with Block that the Jerusalem Post transcript was not at all like what they remember reading.
"There is simply no way that [the Post transcript is] the same as what I saw," Gotcher said. "More to the point, for anyone familiar with air-to-ground [communications] procedures, that simply isn't the way pilots and controllers communicate."
Block, now a child protection caseworker in Florida, observed that "the fact that the Israeli pilots clearly identified the ship as American and asked for further instructions from ground control appears to be a missing part of that Jerusalem Post article."
Arieh O'Sullivan, the Post reporter who made the newspaper's transcript, said the Israeli Air Force tapes he listened to contained blank spaces. He said he assumed those blank spaces occurred while Israeli pilots were conducting their strafing runs and had nothing to communicate.
'But sir, it's an American ship!'
Forslund, Gotcher and Block are not alone in claiming to have read transcripts of the attack that they said left no doubt the Israelis knew they were attempting to sink a U.S. Navy ship.
Many ears were tuned to the battles being fought in and around the Sinai during the Six-Day War, including those belonging to other Arab nations with a keen interest in the outcome.
"I had a Libyan naval captain who was listening in that day," said a retired CIA officer, who spoke on condition that he not be named discussing a clandestine informant.
"He thought history would change its course," the CIA officer recalled. "Israel attacking the U.S. He was certain, listening in to the Israeli and American comms [communications], that it was deliberate."
The late Dwight Porter, the American ambassador to Lebanon during the Six-Day War, told friends and family members that he had been shown English-language transcripts of Israeli pilots talking to their controllers.
A close friend, William Chandler, the former head of the Trans-Arabian Pipe Line Co., said Porter recalled one of the pilots protesting, "But sir, it's an American ship -- I can see the flag!' To which the ground control responded, 'Never mind; hit it!'"
Porter, who asked that his recollections not be made public while he was alive because they involved classified information, also discussed the transcripts during a lunch in 2000 at the Cosmos Club in Washington with another retired American diplomat, Andrew Kilgore, the former U.S. ambassador to Qatar.
Kilgore recalled Porter saying that he "saw the telex, read it, and passed it right back" to the embassy official who had shown it to him. He quoted Porter as recalling that the transcript showed "Israel was attacking, and they know it's an American ship."
Haviland Smith, a young CIA officer stationed in Beirut during the Six-Day War, said that although he never saw the transcript, he had "heard on a number of occasions exactly the story that you just told me about what that transcript contained."
He had later been told, Smith recalled, "that ultimately all of the transcripts were deep-sixed. I was told that they were deep-sixed because the administration did not wish to embarrass the Israelis."
Perhaps the most persuasive suggestion that such transcripts existed comes from the Israelis themselves, in a pair of diplomatic cables sent by the Israeli ambassador in Washington, Avraham Harman, to Foreign Minister Abba Eban in Tel Aviv.
Five days after the Liberty attack, Harman cabled Eban that a source the Israelis code-named "Hamlet" was reporting that the Americans had "clear proof that from a certain stage the pilot discovered the identity of the ship and continued the attack anyway."
Harman repeated the warning three days later, advising Eban, who is now dead, that the White House was "very angry," and that "the reason for this is that the Americans probably have findings showing that our pilots indeed knew that the ship was American."
According to a memoir by then-CIA director Richard Helms, President Johnson's personal anger was manifest when he discovered the story of the Liberty attack on an inside page of the next day's New York Times. Johnson barked that "it should have been on the front page!"
Israeli historian Tom Segev, who mentioned the cables in his recent book "1967," said other cables showed that Harman's source for the second cable was Arthur Goldberg, then U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
The cables, which have been declassified by the Israelis, were obtained from the Israeli State Archive and translated from Hebrew by the Tribune.
Oliver Kirby, the NSA's deputy director for operations at the time of the Liberty attack, confirmed the existence of NSA transcripts.
Asked whether he had personally read such transcripts, Kirby replied, "I sure did. I certainly did."
"They said, 'We've got him in the zero,'" Kirby recalled, "whatever that meant -- I guess the sights or something. And then one of them said, 'Can you see the flag?' They said 'Yes, it's U.S, it's U.S.' They said it several times, so there wasn't any doubt in anybody's mind that they knew it."
Kirby, now 86 and retired in Texas, said the transcripts were "something that's bothered me all my life. I'm willing to swear on a stack of Bibles that we knew they knew."
One set of transcripts apparently survived in the archives of the U.S. Army's intelligence school, then located at Ft. Holabird in Maryland.
W. Patrick Lang, a retired Army colonel who spent eight years as chief of Middle East intelligence for the Defense Intelligence Agency, said the transcripts were used as "course material" in an advanced class for intelligence officers on the clandestine interception of voice transmissions.
"The flight leader spoke to his base to report that he had the ship in view, that it was the same ship that he had been briefed on and that it was clearly marked with the U.S. flag," Lang recalled in an e-mail.
"The flight commander was reluctant," Lang said in a subsequent interview. "That was very clear. He didn't want to do this. He asked them a couple of times, 'Do you really want me to do this?' I've remembered it ever since. It was very striking. I've been harboring this memory for all these years."
Key NSA tapes said missing
Asked whether the NSA had in fact intercepted the communications of the Israeli pilots who were attacking the Liberty, Kirby, the retired senior NSA official, replied, "We sure did."
On its Web site, the NSA has posted three recordings of Israeli communications made on June 8, 1967. But none of the recordings is of the attack itself.
Indeed, the declassified documents state that no recordings of the "actual attack" exist, raising questions about the source of the transcripts recalled by Forslund, Gotcher, Block, Porter, Lang and Kirby.
The three recordings reflect what the NSA describes as "the aftermath" of the attack -- Israeli communications with two Israeli helicopters dispatched to rescue any survivors who may have jumped into the water.
Two of the recordings were made by Michael Prostinak, a Hebrew linguist aboard a U.S. Navy EC-121, a lumbering propeller-driven aircraft specially equipped to gather electronic intelligence.
But Prostinak said he was certain that more than three recordings were made that day.
"I can tell you there were more tapes than just the three on the Internet," he said. "No doubt in my mind, more than three tapes."
At least one of the missing tapes, Prostinak said, captured Israeli communications "in which people were not just tranquil or taking care of business as normal. We knew that something was being attacked," Prostinak said. "Everyone we were listening to was excited. You know, it was an actual attack. And during the attack was when mention of the American flag was made."
Prostinak acknowledged that his Hebrew was not good enough to understand every word being said, but that after the mention of the American flag "the attack did continue. We copied [recorded] it until we got completely out of range. We got a great deal of it."
Charles Tiffany, the plane's navigator, remembers hearing Prostinak on the plane's intercom system, shouting, "I got something crazy on UHF," the radio frequency band used by the Israeli Air Force.
"I'll never forget it to this day," said Tiffany, now a retired Florida lawyer. He also remembers hearing the plane's pilot ordering the NSA linguists to "start taping everything."
Prostinak said he and the others aboard the plane had been unaware of the Liberty's presence 15,000 feet below, but had concluded that the Israelis' target must be an American ship. "We knew that something was being attacked," Prostinak said.
After listening to the three recordings released by the NSA, Prostinak said it was clear from the sequence in which they were numbered that at least two tapes that had once existed were not there.
One tape, designated A1104/A-02, begins at 2:29 p.m. local time, just after the Liberty was hit by the torpedo. Prostinak said there was a preceding tape, A1104/A-01.
That tape likely would have recorded much of the attack, which began with the air assault at 1:56 p.m. Prostinak said a second tape, which preceded one beginning at 3:07 p.m., made by another linguist aboard the same plane, also appeared to be missing.
As soon as the EC-121 landed at its base in Athens, Prostinak said, all the tapes were rushed to an NSA facility at the Athens airport where Hebrew translators were standing by.
"We told them what we had, and they immediately took the tapes and went to work," recalled Prostinak, who after leaving the Navy became chief of police and then town administrator for the village of Lake Waccamaw, N.C.
Another linguist aboard the EC-121, who spoke on condition that he not be named, said he believed there had been as many as "five or six" tapes recording the attack on the Liberty or its aftermath.
Andrea Martino, the NSA's senior media adviser, did not respond to a question about the apparent conflict between the agency's assertion that there were no recordings of the Israeli attack and the recollections of those interviewed for this article.
U.S. inquiry widely criticized
Rather than investigating how and why a U.S. Navy vessel had been attacked by an ally, the Navy seemed interested in asking as few questions as possible and answering them in record time.
Even while the Liberty was still limping toward a dry dock in Malta, the Navy convened a formal Court of Inquiry. Adm. John McCain Jr., the commander of U.S. naval forces in Europe and father of Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), chose Adm. Isaac Kidd Jr. to preside.
The court's charge was narrow: to determine whether any shortcomings on the part of the Liberty's crew had contributed to the injuries and deaths that resulted from the attack. McCain gave Kidd's investigators a week to complete the job.
"That was a shock," recalled retired Navy Capt. Ward Boston, the inquiry's counsel, who said he and Kidd had estimated that a thorough inquiry would take six months.
"Everyone was kind of stunned that it was handled so quickly and without much hullabaloo," said G. Patrick March, then a member of McCain's staff in London.
Largely because of time constraints, Boston said, the investigators were unable to question many of the survivors, or to visit Israel and interview any Israelis involved in the attack.
Rear Adm. Merlin Staring, the Navy's former judge advocate general, was asked to assess the American inquiry's report before it was sent to Washington. But Staring said it was taken from him when he began to question some aspects of the report. He describes it now as "a hasty, superficial, incomplete and totally inadequate inquiry."
Staring, who is among those calling for a full congressional investigation on behalf of the Liberty's survivors, observed in an interview that the inquiry report contained several "findings of fact" unsupported by testimony or evidence.
One such finding ignored the testimony of several inquiry witnesses that the American flag was flying during the attack, and held that the "available evidence combines to indicate the attack on LIBERTY on 8 June was in fact a case of mistaken identity."
There are also apparent omissions in the inquiry's report. It does not include, for example, the testimony of a young lieutenant, Lloyd Painter, who was serving as officer of the deck when the attack began. Painter said he testified that an Israeli torpedo boat "methodically machine-gunned one of our life rafts" that had been put over the side by crewmen preparing to abandon ship.
Painter, who spent 32 years as a Secret Service agent after leaving the Navy, charged that his testimony about the life rafts was purposely omitted.
Ward Boston recalled that, after McCain's one-week deadline expired, Kidd took the record compiled by the inquiry "and flew back to Washington, and I went back to Naples," the headquarters of the 6th Fleet.
"Two weeks later, he comes back to Naples and calls me from his office," Boston recalled in an interview. "In that deep voice, he said, 'Ward, they aren't interested in the facts. It's a political issue and we have to put a lid on it. We've been ordered to shut up.'
"It's time for the truth to come out," declared Boston, who is now 84. "There have been so many cover-ups."
"Someday the truth of this will come out," said Dennis Eikleberry, a NSA technician aboard the Liberty. "Someday it will, but we'll all be gone."
James Ennes, now 74, who was officer of the deck just before the attack began, and later spent two months in a body cast, is one of the more vocal survivors. Like the others, Ennes is tired of waiting.
"We want both sides to stop lying," he said.
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"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
Thanks to his dad, George W. Bush was saved from the horrors of Vietnam
• It is documented that the current U.S. president was partying in Alabama while 58,000 of his contemporaries were dying in that country • This truth that he was forced to deny cost CBS commentator Dan Rather years of humiliation
BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD—Granma International staff writer—
WHILE the number of victims among U.S. soldiers condemned by George W. Bush to die in Iraq continues to rise, the truth of the circumstances in which the president himself avoided being sent to the war on Vietnam, like thousands of young men of his generation, are still censored.
Circulating information on that issue in the run-up to the 2004 presidential elections cost CBS journalist and commentator Dan Rather years of humiliation. Rather has just filed a million-dollar claim against his former employer for having punished him in order to calm down the furious White House occupant.
At that time, Rather was forced by his bosses to apologize in the middle of the top U.S. news program for having “used apparently false documents” on the military service record of President George W. Bush during the war in Vietnam… although he knew perfectly well that they were authentic.
In an article just published on this controversy, Greg Palast, the British-based investigative journalist revealed how Bush’s notorious cowardice has been an open confirmed secret since 1999.
Palest recalls that on September 8, 2004, Rather presented his report in which he explained how in 1968, then Congressman George Bush – father of the current president – had arranged things so that his son was not called up for the war in Vietnam, as he should have been, but did his military service in an aviation unit of the National Guard. Something totally unusual when that military corps demanded of its pilots three years’ previous experience in a regular National Air Force unit.
George junior was thus spared from the war in order to defend Houston from a Vietcong attack, the journalist ironically commented.
Bush Sr. maneuvered that solution just 12 days before his son was to be formally recruited.
The BBC had disclosed that information one year previously, Palast noted, and never had to retract it.
23 MILLION TO SAVE HIS BOY
The BBC report, Palast says, was based on a confidential Justice Department document that states how Ben Barnes, lieutenant governor of Texas, who made the arrangements to have Bush junior removed from the U.S. Army registers, received his reward 35 years later.
In 1997, as governor of Texas, George W. Bush, acting irregularly, granted a state lottery contract worth more than one million dollars to a company linked to Barnes, who received a commission of $23 million.
Barnes confessed how, in 1968, he received a call from businessman Sid Adger, a buddy of the Bush family, asking him to do him the favor of moving Bush junior’s name up the waiting list for the National Guard. The current president has always falsely claimed that there was a shortage of candidates to join that military corps whose members are not usually deployed outside national territory.
Barnes then called General James Rose, the local National Guard commander, who sorted out “W”’s registration in a unit of the Ellington airbase where he hooked up with other daddies’ sons.
Bush rapidly rose to the rank of second lieutenant while his less privileged counterparts had to wait years to gain such recognition.
Bush always distinguished himself for his unjustified absences and delays in completing the tasks ascribed to him. Over time, he learned to pilot an F-102, an obsolete aircraft that was not even being used in the South East Asia conflict.
From Ellington, he asked for a transfer to Montgomery, Alabama, where he never showed up. But he was seen taking part in maneuvers surrounding the Senate electoral campaign of Winton “Red” Blount, a buddy in his clan. And enjoying himself at parties where his excessive inclination to alcohol could already be seen. Marijuana and cocaine consumption was in fashion then in get-togethers of moneyed youth and his former buddies have affirmed that the future president was happy to indulge in that pleasure.
A number of documents that would make it possible to confirm the activities or lack of activities of George W. Bush in the war years have mysteriously disappeared from the National Guard files.
In 1972 (the year of Watergate), “W”, then aged 26, decided to extract himself from the masquerade; as it happened, at a time when the National Guard began to impose doping tests. He was then assigned to civilian tasks in Denver where he never showed up.
Meanwhile, 58,000 compatriots of his age lost their lives in Vietnam, in another useless war of a decadent empire.
Despite his documented cowardice, Bush has never hesitated to show himself off in the same Air Force uniform worn by those who never returned from the conflict.
Just like now he is resolutely maintaining more than 150,000 young soldiers in Iraq. More than 3,800 have already died in this war of occupation and thousands have been mutilated… as have one million-plus Iraqis, victims of the lessons in ‘democracy’ of this Texan cowboy who was so afraid of war.
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano
A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. -- Edward R. Murrow
BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD—Granma International staff writer—
WHILE the number of victims among U.S. soldiers condemned by George W. Bush to die in Iraq continues to rise, the truth of the circumstances in which the president himself avoided being sent to the war on Vietnam, like thousands of young men of his generation, are still censored.
Circulating information on that issue in the run-up to the 2004 presidential elections cost CBS journalist and commentator Dan Rather years of humiliation. Rather has just filed a million-dollar claim against his former employer for having punished him in order to calm down the furious White House occupant.
At that time, Rather was forced by his bosses to apologize in the middle of the top U.S. news program for having “used apparently false documents” on the military service record of President George W. Bush during the war in Vietnam… although he knew perfectly well that they were authentic.
In an article just published on this controversy, Greg Palast, the British-based investigative journalist revealed how Bush’s notorious cowardice has been an open confirmed secret since 1999.
Palest recalls that on September 8, 2004, Rather presented his report in which he explained how in 1968, then Congressman George Bush – father of the current president – had arranged things so that his son was not called up for the war in Vietnam, as he should have been, but did his military service in an aviation unit of the National Guard. Something totally unusual when that military corps demanded of its pilots three years’ previous experience in a regular National Air Force unit.
George junior was thus spared from the war in order to defend Houston from a Vietcong attack, the journalist ironically commented.
Bush Sr. maneuvered that solution just 12 days before his son was to be formally recruited.
The BBC had disclosed that information one year previously, Palast noted, and never had to retract it.
23 MILLION TO SAVE HIS BOY
The BBC report, Palast says, was based on a confidential Justice Department document that states how Ben Barnes, lieutenant governor of Texas, who made the arrangements to have Bush junior removed from the U.S. Army registers, received his reward 35 years later.
In 1997, as governor of Texas, George W. Bush, acting irregularly, granted a state lottery contract worth more than one million dollars to a company linked to Barnes, who received a commission of $23 million.
Barnes confessed how, in 1968, he received a call from businessman Sid Adger, a buddy of the Bush family, asking him to do him the favor of moving Bush junior’s name up the waiting list for the National Guard. The current president has always falsely claimed that there was a shortage of candidates to join that military corps whose members are not usually deployed outside national territory.
Barnes then called General James Rose, the local National Guard commander, who sorted out “W”’s registration in a unit of the Ellington airbase where he hooked up with other daddies’ sons.
Bush rapidly rose to the rank of second lieutenant while his less privileged counterparts had to wait years to gain such recognition.
Bush always distinguished himself for his unjustified absences and delays in completing the tasks ascribed to him. Over time, he learned to pilot an F-102, an obsolete aircraft that was not even being used in the South East Asia conflict.
From Ellington, he asked for a transfer to Montgomery, Alabama, where he never showed up. But he was seen taking part in maneuvers surrounding the Senate electoral campaign of Winton “Red” Blount, a buddy in his clan. And enjoying himself at parties where his excessive inclination to alcohol could already be seen. Marijuana and cocaine consumption was in fashion then in get-togethers of moneyed youth and his former buddies have affirmed that the future president was happy to indulge in that pleasure.
A number of documents that would make it possible to confirm the activities or lack of activities of George W. Bush in the war years have mysteriously disappeared from the National Guard files.
In 1972 (the year of Watergate), “W”, then aged 26, decided to extract himself from the masquerade; as it happened, at a time when the National Guard began to impose doping tests. He was then assigned to civilian tasks in Denver where he never showed up.
Meanwhile, 58,000 compatriots of his age lost their lives in Vietnam, in another useless war of a decadent empire.
Despite his documented cowardice, Bush has never hesitated to show himself off in the same Air Force uniform worn by those who never returned from the conflict.
Just like now he is resolutely maintaining more than 150,000 young soldiers in Iraq. More than 3,800 have already died in this war of occupation and thousands have been mutilated… as have one million-plus Iraqis, victims of the lessons in ‘democracy’ of this Texan cowboy who was so afraid of war.
"IN TIMES OF UNIVERSAL DECEIT, TELLING THE TRUTH WILL BE A REVOLUTIONARY ACT." - George Orwell
“If the world is upside down the way it is now, wouldn’t we have to turn it over to get it to stand up straight?” - Eduardo Galeano
A nation of sheep will beget a government of wolves. -- Edward R. Murrow
The Struggle to Industrialize Venezuela by Chris Carlson
"Two systems are before the world... One looks to pauperism, ignorance, depopulation, and barbarism; the other to increasing wealth, comfort, intelligence, combination of action, and civilization. One looks towards universal war; the other towards universal peace."
-Henry C. Carey, a leading 19th Century American economist who made the case against free trade
Latin America has been told for decades that free trade is the path to modernization. Washington's politicians and intellectuals praise its virtues and promise underdeveloped countries that it is a crucial element for successful development. But Latin American leaders are getting tired of empty promises.
When George W. Bush traveled through the region earlier this year, once again promoting the free trade agenda, his calls fell on increasingly skeptical ears. "We will believe Bush's promises when there is transfer of technology, when tariff barriers are lifted," said the President of Paraguay Nicanor Duarte.[1]
But U.S. political leaders and intellectuals haven't always been proponents of free trade. In fact, for most of U.S. history they were vehemently opposed to it. During the 19th and much of the 20th century, when the United States was struggling to develop and build national industry, U.S. leaders viewed free trade much like Hugo Chavez and other Latin American leaders do today.
For most of the 19th century it was the British Empire that dominated world commerce. With superior production, more advanced manufacturing, and control over world trade, it was British politicians and intellectuals such as Adam Smith that then advocated "free trade" and preached to the nations of the world about the "miracles" of the unchecked market. American politicians, however, were insistent on developing and transforming their nation from a poor colony into a world power, and would not be deceived. They rejected the British creed outright.
Alexander Hamilton, for example, a contemporary of Adam Smith, believed that free trade skewed the benefits of trade to the colonial or imperial powers. According to Hamilton, it was a policy of protectionism that would help develop the fledgling nation's emerging economy. The United States, he thought, could not become fully independent until it was self-sufficient in all necessary economic products.[2] He wasn't mistaken as the United States would use exactly these kinds of protectionist policies to build their industrial might in the years to follow
A century later, the stance of US leaders had not changed. "Free trade cheapens the product by cheapening the producer," said US President William McKinley in 1892.
"Under free trade the trader is the master and the producer the slave. Protection is but the law of nature, the law of self-preservation of self-development of securing the highest and best destiny of the race of man."[3]
Major economists in the United States, such as Henry C. Carey, also sharply rejected the system promoted by the British, labeling it "barbarism." The German American economist Friedrich List explained in 1841 why the free trade system was unfair to less advanced nations:
"Free competition between two nations which are highly civilized can only be mutually beneficial in [the] case [that] both of them are in a nearly equal position of industrial development, and any nation which owing to misfortunes is behind others in industry, commerce, and navigation... must first of all strengthen her own individual powers, in order to fit herself to enter into free competition with more advanced nations."[4]
The result of free trade, he believed, would be "a universal subjection of the less advanced nations to the predominant manufacturing, commercial and naval power."
But most leaders and intellectuals in first world countries seem to have forgotten that the United States and other first-world nations developed industry by rejecting calls for free trade and actively protecting their nascent industries. The poorer nations of the world today would be wise to remember that the United States, once a colony of the British Empire, soon surpassed the British in industrial and economic might with policies that directly contrasted the free trade policies advocated by the intellectuals and politicians of the empire.
President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela seems to understand this lesson of world history and has become the most outspoken opponent of the free trade doctrine now promoted by the United States. As US leaders did less than a century ago, Hugo Chavez understands that free trade is unfair for the weaker, less advanced nations, and that the true path to national development and advancement is the strengthening of his own nation's industry and production through direct state support, guidance and intervention. Before free trade could ever be fair trade, Venezuela and the rest of Latin America would have to become stronger. And toward that end, Hugo Chavez is making significant efforts.
The Failures of Venezuela's Past
Since the beginning of democracy in Venezuela in 1958, it has been generally understood that the main development goals of the country include industrialization and economic sovereignty. Industrialization as a means to national sovereignty was generally seen as a part of a larger process of nation-building that was initiated with the overthrow of the Perez Jimenez dictatorship in 1958.[5]
In 1962, the new government passed the Automobile Policy Law to begin building a Venezuelan national car industry, as well as a policy to create a national tractor industry. Both of these measures had the intention of reducing Venezuela's technological dependence and creating the capacity for heavy industry. It was generally understood that if Venezuela were to ever be an independent, developed country, it would need to industrialize. National car and tractor industries, characterized by complex technology and advanced organization of production, were seen as two strategic industries that could create the beginnings of a modern industrial society in Venezuela.[6]
But Venezuela's efforts to industrialize failed. Despite the fact that it was official government policy well into the 1980's, not one tractor would ever be produced; no national auto industry would be created. Venezuela remained almost completely dependent on imported technology from the developed world, paid for with oil exports. The traditional colonial structure of the economy had changed very little; Venezuela still exported raw materials, mostly oil, in exchange for imported manufactured goods from the developed world.
To understand Venezuela's past failures to develop industry is to understand the failures of liberal democracy. As is the case in most liberal democracies, the democracy of the Fourth Republic (1958-1998) was built on a political pact between rival parties. Two political parties, composed of various conflicting sectors of society, with the exclusion of leftist parties, agreed to share power amongst themselves and to alternate the presidency between them.
As a government built on a coalition of conflicting sectors and class interests, it was nearly impossible to build a coherent political program that could satisfy the demands of conflicting interests. Industrialization was recognized as an important development goal, but would require significant changes in the structure of the economy. Nascent industry would need to be promoted for the nation to become independent from imported goods, creating a clear conflict with the traditional import sector. The political system, built on an agreement to avoid conflict and defend the interests of conflicting sectors, including the most powerful groups, would find it very difficult, or nearly impossible, to make the needed changes.[7]
So, for example, when President Carlos Andres Perez made an extra effort to implement the auto industry policy in the 1970's, the government guidelines for the policy said it should cause the least possible "social and economic upset" to the existing auto companies. The existing "structure of the market" would be a determining factor in the policy.[8]
In other words, even though it was necessary to make profound structural changes to the economy, the Fourth Republic planned to do it without making any waves, without creating conflict. But given that it was against the interests of the international car companies, and the domestic car importers to build a national auto industry independent of imports, it would be impossible to do without rocking the boat.
The same happened to the tractor industry. International tractor companies were not genuinely interested in cooperating in the transfer of technology, tractor importers were opposed to the policy, and the government, internally divided, did not have the political will to carry the project forward. In the end, the initiative left the empty carcass of a brand new tractor factory in the middle of the Venezuelan jungle, never to produce a single unit.
It was obvious that the liberal democracy of the Fourth Republic would not be capable of making the necessary changes, or confronting the conflicting class interests of a divided society. As is the norm in liberal democracies, powerful groups in Venezuela and abroad used their influence to prevent undesired changes, undercutting the interests of the majority poor, and the status quo was preserved.
After the failure of industrialization efforts, industry in Venezuela went backwards. Resurgent groups in the government took the country towards liberalization, and international financial organizations such as the IMF and World Bank pushed the country towards Washington's "consensus" on free trade. The economy went through a process of deindustrialization and privatization as major sectors of the economy were sold off to international capital, including telecommunications, the steel industry, the national airline, and plans were made do the same with the national oil and petrochemical industries.[9]
By the end of the Fourth Republic, the goals of national development had been completely abandoned. Venezuela's economy would remain a colonial economy, the desires of the impoverished masses betrayed. The lesson was clear: the kinds of revolutionary changes needed to transform the country could only be made by a revolutionary government.
The Bolivarian Revolution: Building Industry in Venezuela
The rise of Hugo Chavez and the Bolivarian Revolution was the end of democracy by pacts and coalitions in Venezuela. There would be no power-sharing agreements, and no powerful economic groups would have undue influence over the government. If it was the limitations of liberal democracy that had prevented previous governments from carrying out initiatives to build industry in Venezuela, it was the lack of those very same limitations that would allow the Bolivarian Revolution to engage in a flurry of industrial initiatives within the first few years of the revolution. Revolution meant just that; class conflict would be confronted, not avoided.
In search of the technology needed to build new national industries, the Chavez government has not made the same errors of past governments. Instead of attempting to arrange for technology transfer from the dominant US and multinational corporations which are linked to powerful local groups and are uninterested in cooperating with Venezuela's industrialization, the Chavez government has built close relations to countries that are interested in cooperating, such as China, Russia, Iran, Argentina, Belarus, Brazil and others. And instead of worrying about the impact their policies would have on powerful economic groups in the country, the Chavez government has tended to focus more on the impact they could have on national development and the lives of the majority poor.
"We are going to be a power on this continent and in the world. In petroleum, in gas, in petrochemicals, in industry, there is no doubt about it," said Chavez recently as he announced the launch of a new petrochemicals industry in the country. The industry would include the construction of more than 50 factories across the country, with investment and technology from Brazil, Russia, and Iran, to produce plastic and chemical goods from Venezuela's abundant natural resources. Chavez said the industry would not only supply the domestic market but would also be for export to other countries in the region.[10]
From Argentina, the country plans to bring technology for more than 56 industrial projects to produce consumer goods, foods, auto parts, furniture, home appliances, and more. And not only are cooperative projects among the countries in the region rapidly increasing, but they have the intention of building national industries through what one Argentinean minister recently called a "new method of cooperation."[11]
"That is the idea, authentic cooperation in industrial technology transfer, more than commercial agreements," he said. "Cooperation among the southern countries is the true path to national development."
In an effort to construct industry in a socialist model, Venezuela recently announced the construction of more than 200 "socialist" factories over the next two years. With cooperation and technology from Belarus, Vietnam, Italy, and Brazil, the factories will produce electronics, motorcycles, housing and building materials, health care products, and more. The factories will be managed and operated by the communities where they are located and spread out around the country to bring development to poorer regions.[12]
With Russia and Belarus, Venezuela plans to construct joint companies to manufacture bicycles, heavy machinery, construction tools, and plastics. Belarus has agreed to supply Venezuela with seismic technology needed by the oil industry, a new aerial defense system, and needed aid in the distribution of natural gas to Venezuelan cities. They have also agreed to work with Venezuela in the areas of science and technology, agriculture, petrochemicals, energy, and military cooperation.[13]
Russia has provided Venezuela with military equipment to update its army, including a factory to manufacture Russian rifles, given that the US has refused further arms sales to Venezuela. But Moscow has also considered the creation of a bilateral development fund to finance joint projects in the oil sector, petrochemicals, food industry, transportation and construction.
From Iran, Venezuela is acquiring the needed technology to produce cars and tractors. Through an agreement for the transfer of technology, Iran and Venezuela have set up joint factories to produce 25,000 cars annually and 20 tractors daily, and with an increasing percentage of parts produced nationally. By 2011, Venezuela expects to have a line of cars that is one hundred percent nationally produced.[14] Tractor production is moving in the same direction and now, in a symbolic irony, Venezuela rolls the new models out of the same old factory that Venezuela's liberal democracy left abandoned for two decades.
Venezuela and Iran, which Chavez affirms are united in their opposition to U.S. imperialism, are also cooperating in the exploration and refining of oil, in petrochemicals, and technology for the production of corn flour in Venezuela. Joint petrochemical initiatives are also being set up in both Iran and Venezuela to the benefit of both countries, and Iran has agreed to invest billions of dollars in these projects.
From China, Venezuela is bringing the necessary capital, technology and expertise to make advances in transportation, the oil sector, the manufacture of electronics and more. China has invested several billions of dollars in Venezuela's oil industry, creating a joint company with Venezuela to explore new oil fields. The agreement will give Venezuela needed investment in technology and infrastructure for the heavy-crude oil in Venezuela's Orinoco river basin.[15]
"It's the infrastructure that our nation needs to take a step forward in areas of industrialization and joint-companies, as well as in other non-petroleum initiatives," said oil minister Rafael Ramirez.
The joint venture will include the construction of oil tankers for the transport of oil between Venezuela and China, an exchange that has greatly increased in recent years. China has also agreed to invest several billions of dollars in the construction of a national train system in Venezuela, not only for the transport of oil, but also passenger trains.
In addition, Venezuela is now producing computers with Chinese technology. The joint project will produce computers for the Venezuelan and Latin American market, with an agreement to progressively transfer the technology for the production of computer components inside Venezuela. The project is not only meant for import-substitution inside the country, but to also export units internationally. A $6 billion dollar bi-national development fund will serve the purpose of financing future projects like these between the two countries including the manufacture of cellular phones, automobiles, and more.[16]
With Brazil, Venezuela has plans to build joint oil and natural gas refineries, as well as the huge Gas Pipeline of the South project that will carry Venezuelan gas through the Brazilian Amazon all the way to Argentina.
The Chavez government has also created new subsidiary companies to the state oil company PDVSA. These different branch companies will work to promote development in different sectors of the economy such as agriculture, industry, shipbuilding, and even consumer goods like shoes, clothes, tools, and electronics.
PDVSA Naval, the shipbuilding subsidiary, has signed an agreement with Brazil to build a joint shipyard in Venezuela for the 42 new oil tankers that the country intends to build by 2012. The Russians intend to help Venezuela build special natural gas tankers as well.[17]
"Within ten years we will be witness to an unprecedented jump in the heavy and light industry of the country, allowing us to penetrate new markets in the maritime industry in line with the strategy of PDVSA and the national government," assured Chavez last year.
And the list of industrial projects goes on and on. Two weeks ago, the president inaugurated a new steel industry as well as a factory to produce piping for the national oil industry, a product Venezuela has traditionally imported. Huge deposits of iron, bauxite, and natural gas will supply the new industries, thanks in part to new government policies that limit the export of raw materials and guarantee these basic inputs to Venezuelan producers.
The country is building an industrial framework by establishing lower-level industry to work with its huge natural resources. These lower-level industries will then supply more advanced industry in the future such as the automotive and shipbuilding sectors, creating a vertically-integrated industrial system. Venezuela, as Chavez says, "must walk on its own feet." Its "feet," he assures, are the massive minerals and natural resources abundant in Venezuela on top of which the nation's industry is being built.
And the policies have had results. Not only has the Venezuelan economy shown impressive growth rates in recent years, but the manufacturing sector has been one of the fastest growing sectors since 2003, growing faster than the overall economy.[18] Imports of final-consumption goods have gone down as well, accompanied by an increase in goods devoted to gross capital formation, such as the machines and equipment needed for industrialization.[19]
Venezuela is building industry like never before in the history of the country and they are doing it by going against almost everything the free trade model calls for. The Chavez government has actively controlled foreign investment from a variety of nations, funneling it into productive projects and nascent industries with Venezuelan majority-ownership. The state has greatly intervened, nationalizing major sectors of the economy, carrying out agrarian reform, using currency controls to control capital flight and regulate imports, nurturing import-substitution industries and directing their production towards more advanced national industry. The government has also made significant efforts toward building alternative sources of funding and bilateral development funds to escape the mandates of the World Bank and other international lending institutions, and increase the country's economic sovereignty.
The Venezuelan state is playing a very active role in directing, planning, and guiding the development of the country, totally rejecting any illusions that the market will magically bring modernization. The Chavez government is pursuing sovereign industrial development and technology transfer on its own terms, with the help of a variety of allied countries, and there are few powerful groups in Venezuela, or abroad, in a position to stop them. To put it mildly, Venezuela has clearly shown that following the demands of Washington is not well-advised. To put it more bluntly, the Bolivarian Revolution seems to be demonstrating that the real path for the industrialization and development of the third world is social and economic revolution.
Notes:
[1] Chris Carlson, "Presidents of Argentina, Paraguay, and Ecuador Publicly Defend Venezuela's Chavez," March 16, 2007, Venezuelanalysis.com http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/2282
[2] Alexander Hamilton, Report on Manufactures, US Congress December 5th, 1791
[3] William McKinley speech, Oct. 4, 1892 in Boston, MA William McKinley Papers (Library of Congress)
[4] Friedrich List, The National System of Political Economy, 1841, translated by Sampson S. Lloyd M.P., 1885 edition, Fourth Book, "The Politics," Chapter 33
[5] Fernando Coronil; Julie Skurski, Reproducing Dependency: Auto Industry Policy and Petrodollar Circulation in Venezuela. International Organization, Vol. 36, No. 1. (Winter, 1982), pg. 74
[6] Coronil, pg. 74
[7] Fernando Coronil's The Magical State: Nature, Money, and Modernity in Venezuela (1997, University of Chicago Press) provides an in-depth discussion of the details of Venezuela's liberal democracy, with a detailed explanation of its failed industrial programs.
[8] Coronil, pg. 75
[9] See Steve Ellner's The Politics of Privatization, NACLA Report on the Americas, 30 April 1998. http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/42/170.html
[10] Chris Carlson, "Venezuela Officially Launches ‘Petrochemical Revolution'" September 24th 2007, http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/2641
[11] Chris Carlson, "Venezuela and Argentina Deepen Industrial Integration," July 31st 2007, http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/2525
[12] Chris Carlson, Venezuela To Construct Over 200 "Socialist" Factories, September 6th 2007, http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/2588
[13] Chris Carlson, Venezuela Strengthens Ties to Russia and Belarus with Chavez Visit, June 30th 2007, http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/2478
[14] Chris Carlson, "Venezuelan-Iranian Car Company Releases First Models," July 10th 2007, http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/2491
[15] Chris Carlson, "Venezuela and China Strengthen Strategic and Economic Alliance," March 31st 2007, http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/2311
[16] Chris Carlson, "Venezuela Launches Sale of ‘Bolivarian' Computers," June 12th 2007, http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/2441
[17] Steven Mather, "Venezuela and Brazil to Build Shipyard in Venezuela," August 3rd 2006, http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/news/1867
[18] The Venezuelan Economy in the Chavez Years, by Mark Weisbrot and Luis Sandoval, Center for Economic and Policy Research, July 2007, http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/venezuela_2007_07.pdf
[19] Luciano Wexell Severo, "In Venezuela, Oil Sows Emancipation," Venezuelanalysis.com, March 20, 2006 http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/1666
Source URL: http://www.venezuelanalysis.com/analysis/2689
Printed: October 6th 2007
License: Published under a Creative Commons license (by-nc-nd). See creativecommons.org for more information.
Pentagon hires South African Apartheid-era racist butchers as mercenaries in Iraq
S. Africa's silent war in Iraq
Apartheid-era hired guns drawn by money
PRETORIA, South Africa
Andre Durant, a burly policeman from this leafy African capital, was kidnapped 10 months ago by unidentified gunmen in Iraq. Apart from one brief phone call, in which Durant managed to shout a strangled "I love you" to his wife, he hasn't been heard from since.
Yet there are no yellow ribbons trimming Durant's quiet suburban Pretoria house, as hopeful ribbons might adorn the home of a U.S. soldier missing in Iraq. There has been no drumbeat of sympathetic news coverage about his case, as one would expect when a local man gets sucked into a global story in the world's most notorious war zone. Indeed, Durant's family, like the families of three other South Africans who were snatched with Durant in a Baghdad ambush in December, has maintained an anguished and puzzling silence for the better part of a year.
And in that hush lies a clue to this African nation's murky and angst-ridden participation in America's military adventure in the Middle East: Durant is one of thousands of South African police officers and soldiers, most of them white veterans of the old apartheid regime, who have left their jobs to work as private security contractors in Iraq -- a semiclandestine exodus of hired guns that has alternately embarrassed and alarmed the pacifist government here.
"Maybe in the States soldiers' wives can talk about these things to ease their loss," said Lourika Durant, who has kept a low profile for months not only to safeguard negotiations for her kidnapped husband's release, but because of the stigma attached to operatives who freelance in a war deeply unpopular in South Africa. "Here we must suffer alone, without making waves."
The Sept. 16 killings of up to 11 Iraqi civilians by guards from the security firm Blackwater USA have rekindled intense debate in the U.S. over the propriety of outsourcing security responsibilities in Iraq to scores of private companies. But the acrimony in America can't begin to match the political hand-wringing that surrounds the issue in South Africa.
Sensitive to its apartheid-era reputation for exporting soldiers of fortune to wars across Africa, the young, black-led government in Pretoria recently drafted the harshest anti-mercenary bill in the world, a measure that would criminalize virtually all of its citizens working in Iraq.
And as the war grinds through its fifth year, there is growing concern that Iraq's drain on skilled police and military personnel may be crippling the nation's elite security services. Local media reports warn that tactical police units in major cities are being thinned by the stampede of officers to Baghdad. And a former South African military officer who runs his own security firm conceded that most of the nation's best special forces trainers now are on the U.S. contracting payroll in Iraq.
South Africa's national police force, meanwhile, has begun offering its most experienced staff monthly bonuses of about $900, in part to stanch the flight of talent.
"We don't deny that there has been an exodus," said Selby Bokaba, a police spokesman. "We simply can't compete with the obscene salaries that our officers are being offered in Iraq."
Wages for private contractors who work as bodyguards, convoy escorts and oil field security workers in Iraq average about $10,000 a month -- more than 10 times the pay of a South African army or police captain.
Up to 10,000 in Iraq
Nobody knows how many South Africans have signed up for such hazardous duty. The foreign affairs ministry puts the number as high as 10,000, though industry experts and U.S. contracting firms say the figure is far smaller, more like 2,000 to 3,000 men. Still, even the lower estimate would make South Africans the third-largest contingent of armed foreigners deployed in Iraq after Washington's closest military ally, Britain.
A Blackwater spokeswoman, Anne Tyrrell, said no South Africans were currently employed by her security firm in Iraq. She said the company's main contract, guarding State Department officials, requires a U.S. security clearance. Industry sources said most of South Africa's guns for hire rent their services to British companies, or U.S. companies with strong South African ties.
Their presence in Iraq certainly isn't new. Beefy South Africans armed with submachine guns were guarding Washington's first proconsul, Jay Garner, within days of Saddam Hussein's fall. Up to 30 of its citizens have died in Iraq, the South African government says.
"The Americans like us because we're well-trained and used to working in rustic conditions," said Alex de Witt, who spent 18 months in Iraq protecting construction sites run by KBR, the U.S. engineering giant. "But there's a political cost to going. The government here doesn't like it."
The root of that distrust dates to the mid-1990s, when thousands of white officers abandoned South Africa's security agencies during the transition from apartheid to majority black rule. Many unemployed soldiers and police joined private security companies that became embroiled in African wars from Angola to Sierra Leone.
In 2004, more than 60 South Africans -- in this case mostly black veterans of a covert unit that once fought in the apartheid government's border wars -- were arrested on allegations that they plotted to invade oil-rich Equatorial Guinea. That incident prompted one exasperated South African minister to label her country "a cesspool of mercenaries," and Parliament tightened existing anti-mercenary rules to make it all but impossible for South Africans to work in conflict zones overseas. The new bill has been awaiting President Thabo Mbeki's signature for months.
"It may never be signed into law because it will be challenged in court," said Sabelo Gumedze, a military analyst at the Institute for Security Studies, a Pretoria think tank. "Its definition of mercenary is so broad that even private humanitarian groups working in war zones would be affected."
Still, the mere threat of a tough new law has driven South Africa's shadowy community of Iraq contractors even further underground than it already was. Indeed, While Fiji, Nepal, Colombia and other nations supply large contingents of guards to the U.S. war effort somewhat openly, gaining access to South Africa's army of private soldiers can seem like infiltrating a secret fraternity.
"I've got a letter of commendation from Gen. Petraeus," said Hendrik, a 33-year-old ex-policeman, referring to praise he received from the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, for his work training Iraqi police. "I'm probably the only South African with one, but that's not something you talk about in South Africa."
Like most contractors who agreed to be interviewed for this article, he asked that his full name not be used for fear of future legal repercussions under the anti-mercenary act.
Desperation cracks silence
That silence is cracking, however, with the case of the so-called "Baghdad Four," the South African men, including policeman Durant, who were abducted while escorting a food convoy through a phony Iraqi police checkpoint north of Baghdad. Desperation has driven the four families to speak out about their sense of isolation.
"I didn't even know what Shiites and Sunnis were," said Durant's wife, Lourika, 36, naming the two dominant Muslim sects battling for power in Iraq. "I think South Africans should think very hard before going there. I don't care what they earn. It really isn't worth it."
She said her 6-year-old son, Xandre, had recently packed a bag and announced he was going to Iraq to look for his father. The night before, she added, he declared that he wanted to die.
"We need a support network in South Africa because we're on our own," said Daniel Brink, 38, who worked as a bodyguard for the U.S. security company DynCorp. "Our guys have no way to deal with the bossies" -- the Afrikaans term for post-traumatic stress disorder, he said. "When I first saw my wife, I told her to leave me. I didn't even want her to see me."
A bluff, wheelchair-bound man who owns an SUV with vanity plates that proclaim "Baghdad," Brink lost a leg and fingers in 2005 to a mine that exploded under his armored vehicle in Baqouba, a hotbed of the Iraqi insurgency. Since returning to South Africa, he has been trying to encourage his wounded colleagues to apply for U.S. worker's compensation under the U.S. Defense Base Act, which applies to all workers, American or foreign, who are subcontracted in war zones by Washington.
As he met one recent afternoon with another ex-contractor in suburban Pretoria, there unfolded a scene that could happen only in South Africa.
The house's resident, Deon Gouws, is a former police sergeant who had received an amnesty under South Africa's famed Truth and Reconciliation Commission for human-rights abuses, including assassinations, he committed under the old apartheid regime.
Now he was one of the few public voices warning his countrymen about the dangers of Iraq. Gouws' right arm, left eye and toes were blown away by a suicide bomber who had driven an explosives-packed ambulance into his Baghdad hotel. Brink was advising him on how to file for U.S. worker's compensation.
"I'll buy a farm if I can collect on my claim," said Gouws, 45, an unlucky man who has survived a mugger's bullet and a train collision since returning to South Africa. "But I don't recommend this method of getting a farm to anyone else."
There may be little need.
According to security industry experts, the golden era of freelance work in Iraq may wane as Iraqi companies take over in the wake of the Blackwater shootings and as the U.S. draws down its troops.
Still, as several South African contractors said, there is always Afghanistan.
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Apartheid-era hired guns drawn by money
PRETORIA, South Africa
Andre Durant, a burly policeman from this leafy African capital, was kidnapped 10 months ago by unidentified gunmen in Iraq. Apart from one brief phone call, in which Durant managed to shout a strangled "I love you" to his wife, he hasn't been heard from since.
Yet there are no yellow ribbons trimming Durant's quiet suburban Pretoria house, as hopeful ribbons might adorn the home of a U.S. soldier missing in Iraq. There has been no drumbeat of sympathetic news coverage about his case, as one would expect when a local man gets sucked into a global story in the world's most notorious war zone. Indeed, Durant's family, like the families of three other South Africans who were snatched with Durant in a Baghdad ambush in December, has maintained an anguished and puzzling silence for the better part of a year.
And in that hush lies a clue to this African nation's murky and angst-ridden participation in America's military adventure in the Middle East: Durant is one of thousands of South African police officers and soldiers, most of them white veterans of the old apartheid regime, who have left their jobs to work as private security contractors in Iraq -- a semiclandestine exodus of hired guns that has alternately embarrassed and alarmed the pacifist government here.
"Maybe in the States soldiers' wives can talk about these things to ease their loss," said Lourika Durant, who has kept a low profile for months not only to safeguard negotiations for her kidnapped husband's release, but because of the stigma attached to operatives who freelance in a war deeply unpopular in South Africa. "Here we must suffer alone, without making waves."
The Sept. 16 killings of up to 11 Iraqi civilians by guards from the security firm Blackwater USA have rekindled intense debate in the U.S. over the propriety of outsourcing security responsibilities in Iraq to scores of private companies. But the acrimony in America can't begin to match the political hand-wringing that surrounds the issue in South Africa.
Sensitive to its apartheid-era reputation for exporting soldiers of fortune to wars across Africa, the young, black-led government in Pretoria recently drafted the harshest anti-mercenary bill in the world, a measure that would criminalize virtually all of its citizens working in Iraq.
And as the war grinds through its fifth year, there is growing concern that Iraq's drain on skilled police and military personnel may be crippling the nation's elite security services. Local media reports warn that tactical police units in major cities are being thinned by the stampede of officers to Baghdad. And a former South African military officer who runs his own security firm conceded that most of the nation's best special forces trainers now are on the U.S. contracting payroll in Iraq.
South Africa's national police force, meanwhile, has begun offering its most experienced staff monthly bonuses of about $900, in part to stanch the flight of talent.
"We don't deny that there has been an exodus," said Selby Bokaba, a police spokesman. "We simply can't compete with the obscene salaries that our officers are being offered in Iraq."
Wages for private contractors who work as bodyguards, convoy escorts and oil field security workers in Iraq average about $10,000 a month -- more than 10 times the pay of a South African army or police captain.
Up to 10,000 in Iraq
Nobody knows how many South Africans have signed up for such hazardous duty. The foreign affairs ministry puts the number as high as 10,000, though industry experts and U.S. contracting firms say the figure is far smaller, more like 2,000 to 3,000 men. Still, even the lower estimate would make South Africans the third-largest contingent of armed foreigners deployed in Iraq after Washington's closest military ally, Britain.
A Blackwater spokeswoman, Anne Tyrrell, said no South Africans were currently employed by her security firm in Iraq. She said the company's main contract, guarding State Department officials, requires a U.S. security clearance. Industry sources said most of South Africa's guns for hire rent their services to British companies, or U.S. companies with strong South African ties.
Their presence in Iraq certainly isn't new. Beefy South Africans armed with submachine guns were guarding Washington's first proconsul, Jay Garner, within days of Saddam Hussein's fall. Up to 30 of its citizens have died in Iraq, the South African government says.
"The Americans like us because we're well-trained and used to working in rustic conditions," said Alex de Witt, who spent 18 months in Iraq protecting construction sites run by KBR, the U.S. engineering giant. "But there's a political cost to going. The government here doesn't like it."
The root of that distrust dates to the mid-1990s, when thousands of white officers abandoned South Africa's security agencies during the transition from apartheid to majority black rule. Many unemployed soldiers and police joined private security companies that became embroiled in African wars from Angola to Sierra Leone.
In 2004, more than 60 South Africans -- in this case mostly black veterans of a covert unit that once fought in the apartheid government's border wars -- were arrested on allegations that they plotted to invade oil-rich Equatorial Guinea. That incident prompted one exasperated South African minister to label her country "a cesspool of mercenaries," and Parliament tightened existing anti-mercenary rules to make it all but impossible for South Africans to work in conflict zones overseas. The new bill has been awaiting President Thabo Mbeki's signature for months.
"It may never be signed into law because it will be challenged in court," said Sabelo Gumedze, a military analyst at the Institute for Security Studies, a Pretoria think tank. "Its definition of mercenary is so broad that even private humanitarian groups working in war zones would be affected."
Still, the mere threat of a tough new law has driven South Africa's shadowy community of Iraq contractors even further underground than it already was. Indeed, While Fiji, Nepal, Colombia and other nations supply large contingents of guards to the U.S. war effort somewhat openly, gaining access to South Africa's army of private soldiers can seem like infiltrating a secret fraternity.
"I've got a letter of commendation from Gen. Petraeus," said Hendrik, a 33-year-old ex-policeman, referring to praise he received from the senior U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, for his work training Iraqi police. "I'm probably the only South African with one, but that's not something you talk about in South Africa."
Like most contractors who agreed to be interviewed for this article, he asked that his full name not be used for fear of future legal repercussions under the anti-mercenary act.
Desperation cracks silence
That silence is cracking, however, with the case of the so-called "Baghdad Four," the South African men, including policeman Durant, who were abducted while escorting a food convoy through a phony Iraqi police checkpoint north of Baghdad. Desperation has driven the four families to speak out about their sense of isolation.
"I didn't even know what Shiites and Sunnis were," said Durant's wife, Lourika, 36, naming the two dominant Muslim sects battling for power in Iraq. "I think South Africans should think very hard before going there. I don't care what they earn. It really isn't worth it."
She said her 6-year-old son, Xandre, had recently packed a bag and announced he was going to Iraq to look for his father. The night before, she added, he declared that he wanted to die.
"We need a support network in South Africa because we're on our own," said Daniel Brink, 38, who worked as a bodyguard for the U.S. security company DynCorp. "Our guys have no way to deal with the bossies" -- the Afrikaans term for post-traumatic stress disorder, he said. "When I first saw my wife, I told her to leave me. I didn't even want her to see me."
A bluff, wheelchair-bound man who owns an SUV with vanity plates that proclaim "Baghdad," Brink lost a leg and fingers in 2005 to a mine that exploded under his armored vehicle in Baqouba, a hotbed of the Iraqi insurgency. Since returning to South Africa, he has been trying to encourage his wounded colleagues to apply for U.S. worker's compensation under the U.S. Defense Base Act, which applies to all workers, American or foreign, who are subcontracted in war zones by Washington.
As he met one recent afternoon with another ex-contractor in suburban Pretoria, there unfolded a scene that could happen only in South Africa.
The house's resident, Deon Gouws, is a former police sergeant who had received an amnesty under South Africa's famed Truth and Reconciliation Commission for human-rights abuses, including assassinations, he committed under the old apartheid regime.
Now he was one of the few public voices warning his countrymen about the dangers of Iraq. Gouws' right arm, left eye and toes were blown away by a suicide bomber who had driven an explosives-packed ambulance into his Baghdad hotel. Brink was advising him on how to file for U.S. worker's compensation.
"I'll buy a farm if I can collect on my claim," said Gouws, 45, an unlucky man who has survived a mugger's bullet and a train collision since returning to South Africa. "But I don't recommend this method of getting a farm to anyone else."
There may be little need.
According to security industry experts, the golden era of freelance work in Iraq may wane as Iraqi companies take over in the wake of the Blackwater shootings and as the U.S. draws down its troops.
Still, as several South African contractors said, there is always Afghanistan.
----------
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