In “The State Within”, an award-winning BBC production of a couple of years ago, a British plane explodes over Washington, D.C., killing more than two hundred people and touching off a nationwide ‘anti-terrorist’ campaign when it is learned that the bomb was detonated by an ‘extremist’ Muslim passenger.
As the Congress moves to pass “Patriot Act II”, the U.S. Secretary of Defense argues that sanctions have to be invoked against a former Soviet Republic in which the bombing may have been planned. Meanwhile, the leader of opposition to that country’s ruler, long in hiding, is brought to the United States for a clandestine meeting with the Defense Secretary, to be brokered by the British Ambassador.
We know that something is wrong here, something deeply wrong, but we don’t know what it is. Neither does the Ambassador, the central character in this drama. But when the underground leader is shot to death, he begins to suspect that some of the people he knows, people of enormous power, have set in motion a series of events designed to provoke an American invasion of the former Soviet state.
It’s a riveting film, complex and disturbing. It explores the relationships between high government officials and the corporation which stands to make billions from ‘reconstruction’, between American intelligence and Pentagon assassins, between a private army very much like Blackwater and the Defense Department.
“The State Within” is a bedtime story for grown-ups. It is about what Berkeley professor Peter Dale Scott has called “deep politics”, the layers of power which lie beneath the fantasies we, the people, are fed.
More than a year ago, video surfaced which plainly showed three identifiable members of the CIA’s Special Operations division –– its ‘black ops’ –– in the ballroom of the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on the night of June 4, 1968. On that night, Robert F. Kennedy, the likely Democratic nominee for President, was assassinated by a ‘lone gunman’ named Sirhan Bishara Sirhan. But Sirhan did not kill Kennedy.
The SpecialOps personnel included the man who would later serve as liaison for the CIA with the congressional investigative committee in the mid-seventies which was to investigate this killing and the murders of RFK’s brother, President John Kennedy, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The other two were men who had instructed South American police forces on counter-insurgency and funneled millions of dollars to death squads.
There is no innocent reason which might account for the presence of these three men at the Ambassador. And there is overwhelming forensic evidence that more than one gun was fired in the hotel pantry and that no bullets from Sirhan’s .22 caliber Iver-Johnson could have struck Kennedy.
As has been the case with a landslide of stunning evidence over the last forty-five years, the L.A. video and its manifest implications were ignored. U.S. media, from FIXED News to MSNBC and CNN, even including most “liberal” webLog, would not even report it, although the video and the proof of the agents’ identities caused an uproar in England and throughout Europe.
Please cop to it: you don’t want to know. You don’t even want to read about it, do you? You really, really wish I was crazy, but you know I’m not. I sympathize. I don’t want to know this stuff, either. Good God, who would? When people asked me about the death of Senator Paul Wellstone in obviously suspicious circumstances, I didn’t want to hear about it or learn more. It might easily have been just a plane crash; they happen. But whether by happenstance or something more, I saw suggestive items in the first reports, later denied, with the trace of fingerprints I’d seen before.
People who asked me about Wellstone didn’t much care for my answer. I said that in a sense, it didn’t matter whether a plane went down by design or by human screw-up. The point was that it might’ve been either one, and that domestic political assassination, whether carried out bloodlessly by scandal and public disgrace or by blowing up an airplane, is a fact of American life and has been since 1963 (although it’s been there all along in one guise or another).
We in America have our own trained killers, clandestine operators working with a budget whose size is literally unknown to the Congress, and they have not limited their reach to foreign leaders such as Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Mossadegh in Iran, and Dag Hammerskjold, Secretary General of the United Nations. They have brought these operations home.
We don’t want to know this. But that doesn’t stop it from being true, nor our national life from being corrupted by it.
Two days ago, Seymour Hersh of the New Yorker, whose reporting of the My Lai Massacre exposed the horror of what we were doing in Viet Nam, broke the story that the American military operates an “executive assassination ring”, and that this unit has been active within U.S. borders.
Later, Hersh said that his comments at a University of Minnesota forum were “honest responses to a question” from the moderator and “not something I wanted to dwell on in public.” He also said that he is working on a book on the subject and that it might be a year or more before he had developed sufficient evidence to prove “empirical for even the most skeptical.”
Here’s part of what Hersh said:
“After 9/11, I haven’t written about this yet, but the Central Intelligence Agency was very deeply involved in domestic activities against people they thought to be enemies of the state. Without legal authority...
“Right now, today, there was a story in the New York Times that if you read it carefully mentioned something known as the Joint Special Operations Command... It’s a special wing of our special operations community that is set up independently. They do not report to anybody, except in the Bush-Cheney days they reported directly to Cheney’s office. They did not report to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff or to Mr. Gates, the secretary of defense...
“Congress has no oversight of it. It’s an executive assassination ring, and it’s been going on and on and on... ...there (have been) so many collateral deaths.”
“...they’ve been going into countries, not talking to the Ambassador or the CIA station chief, and finding people on a list and executing them...”
Hersh’s remarks have received little mention, not by anyone in the Congress, not by the Obama administration. Yet his charges, that the military, using Navy Seals who are a part of Delta Force, has been using a death list and killing the people on it, and that the CIA, in violation of its own charter and of federal law, has been engaged in “activities” against “enemies of the state”, are of the greatest possible national importance.
How in the world can we not investigate these matters? How can we pretend that they do not exist?
So, please don’t tell me that the CIA is just a bunch of clowns, Keystone Kops too incompetent to handle murder and whatever else is deemed necessary to bring down a government. They’ve been doing it for nearly sixty years and the only President who ever tried to stop them was John Kennedy.
What kind of ‘patriotic’ blindness leads otherwise rational people to note as routine the murder of political leaders and wholesale corruption in other nations while ignoring the same ugliness in their own land? Do we really believe that we are better? That Americans would never do such things?
Do you think that electing Barack Obama is going to fix everything? It was Tom Jefferson, one of the most visionary of America’s creators, who warned us that “the price of liberty is eternal vigilance.” We have not taken care of that Bill of Rights stuff. We have not held the powerful, the wealthy, the hugely crooked to account. We are by our silence parties to the worst, complicit in the crimes of the CIA and the death squads.
This is a high and dangerous mountain Americans must climb, but what the hell did we think? That our accident of birth and post-WWII financial prosperity conferred on us special privileges? We can be free, or not, it’s our choice.
