The Kennedy years saw deep US implication in the murder of the Diem brothers in Vietnam and the first of many well-attested efforts by the Agency to assassinate Fidel Castro. It was Lyndon Johnson who famously said shortly after he took office in 1963, “We had been operating a damned Murder Inc. in the Caribbean.” Reagan’s first year in office saw the inconvenient Omar Torrijos of Panama downed in an air crash. In 1986 came the Reagan White House’s effort to bomb Muammar Q’addafi to death in his encampment in 1986, though this enterprise was conducted by the US Air Force. Led by that man of darkness, William Casey, in 1985 the CIA tried to kill the Lebanese Shiite leader Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah by setting off a car bomb outside his mosque. He survived, though 80 others were blown to pieces.

In his Killing Hope: U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II Bill Blum has a long and interesting list starting in 1949 with Kim Koo, Korean opposition leader, going on to efforts to kill Sukarno, President of Indonesia,Kim Il Sung, Premier of North Korea, Mohammed Mossadegh, Claro M. Recto (the Philippines opposition leader), Jawaharlal Nehru, Gamal Abdul Nasser, Norodom Sihanouk, José Figueres,Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier, Gen. Rafael Trujillo, Charles de Gaulle, Salvador Allende, Michael Manley, Ayatollah Khomeini, the nine comandantes of the Sandinista National Directorate, Mohamed Farah Aideed, prominent clan leader of Somalia, Slobodan Milosevic…

And we should not forget that the CIA is by no means the only US government player in the assassination game. The US military have their own teams. A friend of mine once had a gardener – “a very scary looking guy” — who remarked that he’d been part of a secret unit in the U.S. Marine Corps, murdering targets in the Caribbean.

In sum, assassination has always been an arm of US foreign policy, just as in periods of turbulence, as in the Sixties, it has always been an arm of domestic repression as well. This is true either side of the executive order, issued by president Gerald Ford in 1976, banning assassinations. “No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination,” states Executive Order 11905.

One way to read the brou-ha-ha of the past few days is as an effort at pre-emptive damage control by the CIA. Remember, in the months following the 2001 attacks, Americans were looking for blood. They wanted teams to hunt down Osama and his crew and kill them. They cheered the reports – now resurfacing – of U.S., British and French special forces presiding over and directing the slaughter in November, 2001, of about 1000 prisoners of war by the Northern Alliance at Mazar-e-Sharif, with the Taliban prisoners shut in containers left out in the sun with an okay by US personnel, till their occupants roasted and suffocated. Over the next few months and years, more terrible stories will probably surface. Attorney General Eric Holder told Newsweek recently he was “shocked and saddened” after reading the still secret 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on the torture of detainees at CIA “black sites.” “Shocked and saddened”, after what we know and what we have seen already? It must be pretty bad. As William Polk remarks on this site today of the evidence of sodomy, rape and torture captured in the photograph collection that Obama first wanted to release and then changed his mind: “Those who profess to know say that what these pictures show is truly horrible. Some have compared them to the vivid record the Nazis kept of their sadism.”

The CIA death squads and kindred units from the military killed and tortured to death many, many people and most certainly there was extensive “collateral damage” – meaning innocent people being murdered. As regards numbers, we have this public boast in 2003 by president George Bush: “All told, more than 3,000 suspected terrorists have been arrested in many countries. And many others have met a different fate. Let’s put it this way: They are no longer a problem to the United States and our friends and allies.”
The CIA’s former counter-terrorism chief of operations, Vincent Cannistraro, recently remarked that “There were things the agency was involved with after 9/11 which were basically over the edge because of 9/11. There were some very unsavory things going on. Now they are a problem for the CIA,” he said. “There is a lot of pressure on the CIA now and it’s going to handicap future activities.” Just because vice president Dick Cheney may have been supervising Murder Inc it doesn’t mean that CIA officers who became his operational accomplices won’t be legally vulnerable. At the moment President Obama is trying to keep the lid on still secret crimes committed by US government agencies in the Global War on Terror in the Bush years. The CIA is clearly positioning itself for further disclosures. So is Dick Cheney.

Ending the “Third Degree”

“Eighty years ago, with the publication of the Wickersham Report on Lawlessness in Law Enforcement, America learned that torture didn’t work…and promptly forgot.
“Debates on the morality and practical efficacy of torture periodically erupt in American politics. Now, the issue has re-emerged with the efforts of ex-Bush administration officials and allies to defend their legacy and their legal impunity against the current administration’s stated desire to move beyond coercive interrogations…”
This is Peter Lee in our latest CounterPunch newsletter, in an enthralling piece of historical excavation about how a commission appointed by Herbert Hoover managed to include a savage expose of torture as practiced by US police departments. Lee shows how exactly the torture techniques of our current era and their rationales mirror those of the practitioners and sponsors of torture in the last century.

Also in this crackerjack issue is Marcus Rediker’s diary of his lectures in Auburn Prison on pirates and how the inmates responded to them.

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