Writing to NARA to Stop CIA Destruction of Records

Following a story at Unredacted, the blog for The National Security Archive, regarding the potential changes in the rules allowing destruction of historical CIA documents, I wrote the following letter. Today is the deadline to submit comments to request.schedule@nara.gov. I strongly recommend readers mail their comments in ASAP!

Margaret Hawkins
Acting Director, Records and Management Services
National Archives and Records Administration
8601 Adelphi Road
College Park, MD 20740-6001
Request.Schedule@nara.gov

Dear Ms. Hawkins:

I was alarmed to read that the National Archives had tentatively approved a CIA request to destroy a number of potentially important documents that are 30 years old or older, including classified information related to the Agency’s official actions abroad, investigative files from the offices of the Inspector General, Security, and Counterintelligence, and files relating to CIA assets (spies) that the CIA itself does not deem “significant.”

This action would amount to a destruction of history itself, as there is no guarantee that the government operations covered by these records exist anywhere else, even if the CIA maintains that it does. Historians have too often seen documents destroyed. It was as recent as the late 1990s that historian Sheldon Harris complained of government officials (in this case, Department of Defense officials) destroying government records on U.S. collaboration with Unit 731 Japanese war criminals after he and other historians and journalists had expressed interest in such documents. See his letter republished in the November 19, 1999 issue of Congressional Record (pp. S14542-S14543).

I've had my own experience with disappearing records. In 2012, I filed a FOIA on investigative files from the Naval Criminal Investigative Service on a Guantanamo detainee who died in custody in June 2009. I subsequently received notice that crucial computer records from the day the detainee had died (and the day after) had gone "missing" and were irretrievable as a result. While I cannot say with assurance they were deliberately destroyed, it was a very suspicious disappearance.

In this brief review, I'd note that the CIA itself has a history of destroying important documentation, from the bulk of the files pertaining to the MKULTRA program of the 1950s and 1960s, to the November 2005 destruction of videotapes of the interrogation and torture of detainees, which a court had ordered preserved.

This is an urgent matter, and the proposal to destroy historical records is contrary to the functioning of a democratic government and a strong civil society. I strongly request that NARA reconsider its pending approval of the CIA’s proposed schedule, N1- 263-13-1, until NARA can better assure the public that records of permanent historic value will not be allowed to be destroyed by the CIA.

In this matter, I am in accord with The National Security Archive, OpenTheGovernment, and other organizations, who ask that NARA pause the approval of CIA N1-263-13-1 until NARA is able to verify beyond a reasonable doubt to the public that: 1) the records set for destruction are in fact not historically valuable, as the CIA’s claims, and 2) The records and information that the CIA claims are captured elsewhere are in fact preserved. I also request that "Item 30-3a: Declassification Referral Files" be re-designated for preservation. We strongly believe that these files do have significant research value, as they provide an invaluable tool and a roadmap for researchers to identify documents that were once designated as too secret to disclose to the public, but will be subject to release at some point in the future. Executive Order 13526 states, “No information may remain classified indefinitely;” NARA must ensure safeguards so that no previously secret, historically valuable, information is improperly destroyed.

Sincerely,

Jeffrey Kaye, Ph.D.

Proof US Agencies Destroyed Evidence of Japan's WWII Medical War Crimes

The letter published below came from the November 19, 1999 Congressional Record (pp. S14542-S14543). Sheldon Harris, a historian at California State University, Northridge, wrote the letter, which alleged the destruction by various U.S. military agencies of records concerning Japanese war crimes during World War II. Harris had been investigating these crimes, as well as actions by the U.S. government to cover-up them up. In one instance, Harris claimed "sensitive" documents were destroyed at Dugway Proving Ground as "a direct result" of research he had initiated there.

Harris' letter was entered into the record by Senator Dianne Feinstein, who was speaking about the controversies at the time about the ongoing classification even 50 or more years after the fact of documents pertaining to Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan war crimes. In particular, the 1990s had seen a growing campaign to expose the activities of Japan's World War II biological warfare experiments and subsequent operational bacteriological and chemical warfare campaigns, which have collectively come to be known under the rubric of the campaign's most notorious brigade, Unit 731, led by Lt. Gen. Shiro Ishii.

The kick-off for the controversy was the publication in the Oct. 1981 Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists of "Japan's Biological Weapons: 1930-1945 - A Hidden Chapter in History," written by Robert Gomer, John W. Powell, and Bert V.A. Roling. Feinstein entered the entire article into the Congressional Record, along with another letter from historian Sheldon Harris, who had written a book on Unit 731 and the U.S. cover-up of their activities. According to Harris and Gomer/Powell/Roling, the U.S. had amnestied the Unit 731 scientists in order to get at the unethical data from human experiments on prisoners, data derived from intentional infliction of disease followed often enough by vivisection. The 731 survivors were incinerated or buried in mass graves.

Historians have documented the massive amount of destruction of records by the Japanese military, including many if not most of the records for Unit 731 and associated units. Professor Harris's letter references the U.S. destruction of records, and not the larger, and even more problematic destruction of records by the Japanese authorities.

The Japanese government denied any biological/chemical war crimes, while the U.S. slowly declassified some incriminating documents, but would not come out and say what the U.S. had done in relation to the Japanese doctors and scientists. Some of the Unit 731 personnel were tried in 1949 in a special war crimes trial by the Soviet Union. Much of what we know about Unit 731 and associated biological and chemical warfare divisions comes from this trial, which for years was derided in the West. (Google Books has republished a free ebook of the Soviet transcripts from the trial.)

In January 1999, President Bill Clinton, "in accordance with the Nazi War Crimes Disclosure Act (PL 105-246)... established the Nazi War Criminal Records Interagency Working Group (IWG)." But it wasn't until May 2000 that Congress, "as part of the Intelligence Authorization Act for 2001... extended the IWG's life to December 2004 through passage of the Japanese Imperial Government Disclosure Act, P. L. 106-567." The IWG's name was accordingly changed to the Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group. According to the IWG website, declassification of U. S. Government records related to imperial Japan's war crimes then became an official part of the IWG's mission.

The IWG ended its declassification mission in March 2007 (extended from an original 2004 ending date). It subsequently published a final report to Congress in September 2007. Some resources have been placed online for researchers, primarily Select Documents on Japanese War Crimes and Japanese Biological Warfare, 1934-2006.

While over 100,000 previously unclassified documents related to Imperial Japan's biological warfare program were reportedly released via IWG's efforts, no further discussion or elaboration took place regarding Professor Harris's documentation of the destruction of records held by different U.S. military agencies.

The following is the text of Professor Harris's letter, which can be found online as part of the Congressional Record, or also here. It can also be accessed here.

GRANADA HILLS, CA,
October 7, 1999

Hon. SENATOR DIANNE FEINSTEIN,
Hart Senate Office Building, Washington, DC. 

DEAR SENATOR FEINSTEIN: Several Asian American activists organizations in California, and organizations representing former Prisoners of War and Internees of the Japanese Imperial Army, have indicated to me that you are proposing to introduce legislation into the United States Senate that calls for full disclosure by the United States Government of records it possesses concerning war crimes committed by members of the Japanese Imperial Army. I endorse such legislation enthusiastically. 

My support for the full disclosure of American held records relating to the Japanese Imperial Army’s wartime crimes against humanity is both personal and professional. I am aware of the terrible suffering members of the Imperial Japanese Army imposed upon innocent Asians, prisoners of war of various nationalists and civilian internees of Allied nations. These inhumane acts were condoned, if not ordered, by the highest authorities in both the civilian and military branches of the Japanese government. As a consequence, millions of persons were killed, maimed, tortured, or experienced acts of violence that included human experiments relating to biological and chemical warfare research. Many of these actions meet the definition of "war crimes" under both the Potsdam Declaration and the various Nuremberg War Crimes trials held in the post-war period. 

I am the author of "Factories of Death, Japanese Biological Warfare, 1932–45, and the American Cover-up" (Routlege: London and New York; hard cover edition 1994; paperback printings, 1995, 1997, 1998, 1999). [Note: a revised edition was published in 2002 - ed.] I discovered in the course of my research for this book, and scholarly articles that I published on the subject of Japanese biological and chemical warfare preparations, that members of the Japanese Imperial Army Medical Corps committed heinous war crimes. These included involuntary laboratory tests of various pathogens on humans—Chinese, Korean, other Asian nationalities, and Allied prisoners of war, including Americans. Barbarous acts encompassed live vivisections, amputations of body parts (frequently without the use of anesthesia), frost bite exposure to temperatures of 40–50 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, injection of horse blood and other animal blood into humans, as well as other horrific experiments. When a test was completed, the human experimented was "sacrificed", the euphemism used by Japanese scientists as a substitute term for "killed." 

In my capacity as an academic Historian, I can testify to the difficulty researchers have in unearthing documents and personal testimony concerning these war crimes. I, and other researchers, have been denied access to military archives in Japan. These archives cover activities by the Imperial Japanese Army that occurred more than 50 years ago. The documents in question cannot conceivably contain information that would be considered of importance to "National Security" today. The various governments in Japan for the past half century have kept these archives firmly closed. The fear is that the information contained in the archives will embarrass previous governments. 

Here in the United States, despite the Freedom of Information Act, some archives remain closed to investigators. At best, the archivists in charge, or the Freedom of Information Officer at the archive in question, select what documents they will allow to become public. This is an unconscionable act of arrogance and a betrayal of the trust they have been given by the Congress and the President of the United States. Moreover, ‘‘sensitive’’ documents—as defined by archivists and FOIA officers—are at the moment being destroyed. Thus, historians and concerned citizens are being denied factual evidence that can shed some light on the terrible atrocities committed by Japanese militarists in the past. 

Three examples of this wanton destruction should be sufficiently illustrative of the dangers that exist, and should reinforce the obvious necessity for prompt passage of legislation you propose to introduce into the Congress: 

1. In 1991, the Librarian at Dugway Proving Grounds, Dugway, Utah, denied me access to the archives at the facility. It was only through the intervention of then U.S. Representative Wayne Owens, Dem., Utah, that I was given permission to visit the facility. I was not shown all the holdings relating to Japanese medical experiments, but the little I was permitted to examine revealed a great deal of information about medical war crimes. Sometimes after my visit, a person with intimate knowledge of Dugway’s operations, informed me that "sensitive" documents were destroyed there as a direct result of my research in their library. 

2. I conducted much of my American research at Fort Detrick in Frederick, Md. The Public Information Officer there was extremely helpful to me. Two weeks ago I telephoned Detrick, was informed that the PIO had retired last May. I spoke with the new PIO, who told me that Detrick no longer would discuss past research activities, but would disclose information only on current projects. Later that day I telephoned the retired PIO at his home. He informed me that upon retiring he was told to ‘‘get rid of that stuff’’, meaning incriminating documents relating to Japanese medical war crimes. Detrick no longer is a viable research center for historians. 

3. Within the past 2 weeks, I was informed that the Pentagon, for ‘‘space reasons’’, decided to rid itself of all biological warfare documents in its holdings prior to 1949. The date is important, because all war crimes trials against accused Japanese war criminals were terminated by 1949. Thus, current Pentagon materials could not implicate alleged Japanese war criminals. Fortunately, a private research facility in Washington volunteered to retrieve the documents in question. This research facility now holds the documents, is currently cataloguing them (estimated completion time, at least twelve months), and is guarding the documents under ‘‘tight security.’’ 

Your proposed legislation must be acted upon promptly. Many of the victims of Japanese war crimes are elderly. Some of the victims pass away daily. Their suffering should receive recognition and some compensation. Moreover, History is being cheated. As documents disappear, the story of war crimes committed in the War In The Pacific becomes increasingly difficult to describe. The end result will be a distorted picture of reality. As an Historian, I cannot accept this inevitability without vigorous protest. 

Please excuse the length of this letter. However, I do hope that some of the arguments I made in comments above will be of some assistance to you as you press for passage of the proposed legislation. I will be happy to be of any additional assistance to you, should you wish to call upon me for further information or documentation. 

Sincerely yours,
SHELDON H. HARRIS,
Professor of History emeritus,
California State University, Northridge

In a March 30, 2007 Memorandum for the "Director, US Army Records Management and Declassification Agency" on the matter of "Japanese War Crimes - Record Search at Fort Detrick, Maryland", William H. Thresher, Chief of Staff at US Army Medical Command, referenced the Harris charges of destruction of records at Fort Detrick. Thresher was responding to a request from the Headquarters, Department of the Army (HQDA) "for information concerning records of interest to the Nazi/Japanese War Crimes Interagency Working Group (IWG)."

It is worth noting that this memorandum was written even as the IWG had just finished its declassification project.

Thresher wrote, "In early 2007, the USAMRIID [US Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases] performed a thorough search for any remaining responsive records, including records regarding Unit 731, and found no records." The search included "the Commander and other senior personnel."

Thresher then turned to allegations by Professor Sheldon Harris concerning possible destruction of records at Fort Detrick. He reviewed the controversy:

Professor Harris, in his letter, dated 7 October 1999, stated that the recently-retired Public Information Officer at Fort Detrick (Mr. Norman Covert) told Professor Harris that upon retiring he was told to get rid of documents relating to Japanese war crimes. 

The USAMRMC [US Army Medical Research and Materiel Command] is unaware of any authority at Fort Detrick or the USAMRMC requesting destruction of any responsive original records, or of copies of Fort Detrick or USAMRMC documents not previously provided to Dugway or NARA.

Professor Harris died on August 31, 2002. To my knowledge, this is the first time anyone has written about his 1999 letter to Senator Feinstein detailing his charges about the destruction of records by US military officials. If it were up to the powers that be, this would be an example of government censorship lost in the whirlwind of moving events. But it seems an episode worth reviving, if nothing else as a documentation of an important episode in the history of exposing U.S. and Japanese biological warfare history.

A few years back, Norman Covert confirmed to this author his contention that his commanding officer at Ft. Detrick was the superior officer who told him to destroy the weapons.

And there the controversy stands to this day.

Forbidden Book: Douglas Valentine's "The Phoenix Program: America's Use of Terror in Vietnam"

Article originally posted at FDL/The Dissenter

On June 10, Open Roads publishers announced a new "Forbidden Bookshelf" series. Curated by New York University Professor Mark Crispin Miller, "Forbidden Bookshelf" aims to "fill in the blanks of America’s repressed history by resurrecting books that focused on issues and events that are too often left in the dark."

One of the first books published in the series is Douglas Valentine's invaluable, in-depth history of one of America's most egregious counterinsurgency, torture and assassination programs, as described in his 1990 book The Phoenix Program: America's Use of Terror in Vietnam.

The book is intricately and densely written, yet reads like a Rashomon-like detective story, as Valentine allows many of the actors involved speak for themselves. Never has such an in-depth look at a major CIA operation been written. You know who did what and when. The larger picture is not lost either, as, for instance, Valentine refers to earlier counter-terror programs that influenced Phoenix, such as the UK's counterinsurgency-terror program in Malaysia after World War II.

An encyclopedic attention to detail is Valentine's forte, as those will know who have read his two-volume history on the rise of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics and the Drug Enforcement Agency.

The Phoenix Program itself was created by the CIA as a way to coordinate numerous counterinsurgency programs during the Vietnam war, using methods of blanket surveillance, kidnapping and extrajudicial detention, interrogation and torture, and the paramilitarization of the police. The goal, beyond gathering of intelligence, was to eliminate -- via murder, mass use of informants, and terror -- what the U.S. called the "Viet Cong Infrastructure" (VCI), especially the top and middle levels of VC leadership.

Instead, Phoenix sank under the weight of institutional corruption and interagency competition, not to mention Washington's demand to produce results -- even if there were no results to produce. Phoenix itself grew out of the CIA's theory of "Contre Coup," or "counter-terror." The idea was the U.S. would match the terror used by opponent forces, but do it even better.

As Valentine wrote in a May 2001 article: "The object of Contre Coup was to identify and terrorize each and every individual VCI and his/her family, friends and fellow villagers. To this end the CIA in 1964 launched a massive intelligence operation called the Provincial Interrogation Center Program [PICs].... Staffed by members of the brutal [South Vietnamese] Special Police, who ran extensive informant networks, and advised by CIA officers, the purpose of the PICs was to identify, through the systematic 'interrogation' (read torture) of VCI suspects, the membership of the VCI at every level of its organization...."

As the Vietnam War grew in intensity and the U.S. intervention neared half-a-million troops, the CIA tried to rationalize their anti-terror campaign, uniting their counter-insurgency, police, and intelligence aims, while working closely with their fractious South Vietnamese partners.

What followed was murder and torture and graft and corruption on a grand scale. Untold thousands died and were tortured. The figures for those killed in the "counter-terror" program range from the CIA's admitted 20,000 to over 40,000.

A vast number of those killed had no connection with the VC at all. Valentine explains in his book, "most Vietnamese jailed under Phoenix were anonymous pawns whose only value was the small bribe their families offered for their release." The bribes didn't help thousands, as Phoenix managers imposed quotas as high as 1,800 "neutralizations" per month.

Phoenix and Torture

The PICs became an integral part of Phoenix, and torture was standard operating procedure, while CIA "advisers" stood by. Later, CIA personnel argued they had tried to teach their South Vietnamese partners more effective kinds of interrogation, but in practice, they often were present during torture sessions, and countenanced much of what went on. Indeed, CIA's Support Services Branch was in charge of training police Special Branch officers in interrogation methods.

Valentine describes the torture in the PICs: "rape, gang rape, rape using eels, snakes or hard objects, and rape followed by murder; electrical shock ('the Bell Telephone Hour')," as well as suspension in air, beatings with rubber hoses and whips, "use of police dogs to maul prisoners,"and more. But as the first director of the PIC program in Vietnam, John Patrick Muldoon, told Valentine, "You can't have an American there all the time watching these things."

The situation will sound familiar to those who have followed the actions of U.S. and allied forces in Iraq and Afghanistan who routinely turned over prisoners for torture to local authorities, while shadowy U.S. agents lurked in the background of the foreign torture chambers. (A direct report on such actions in Iraq can be seen in Peter Maass's video report, Searching for Steele. More recent revelations in a new FOIA of the CIA's interrogation manual from the 1960s shows such interactions with foreign intelligence and police services during interrogation and torture was something the CIA thought and planned about a great deal.)

When the CIA was in control of their own captives, they used the kinds of "touchless" torture they had perfected and described in their KUBARK interrogation manual. Valentine describes the torture of high-level North Vietnamese officer Nyguyen Van Tai, who was kept in a specially-built prison cell, kept in isolation and constant surveillance by hidden cameras, in a room painted "snow-white," all the while exposed to frigid air conditioning. The solitary confinement continued over four years without Van Tai ever admitting who he was.

"Colby's imprimatur"

In her August 2007 New Yorker article on the CIA black sites, Jane Mayer noted the interest of the CIA in the Phoenix Program as a model for the U.S. war in Afghanistan.

"A Pentagon-contract study found that, between 1970 and 1971, ninety-seven per cent of the Vietcong targeted by the Phoenix Program were of negligible importance," Mayer wrote. "But, after September 11th, some CIA officials viewed the program as a useful model."

While as a work of history The Phoenix Program is one of the most important books ever written on the CIA and the military, on the birth of US "counter-terror" policy, and government sponsored torture and assassination programs, its relevancy to post-9/11 history is self-evident. Anyone trying to understand the chaos and crimes committed by US and associated forces in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars must know this book.

There's a good reason national security historian and author John Prados has called Phoenix a "must read." Heavily researched over a number of years, more than any other book I know of about the period (with Nick Turse's book, Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War in Vietnam, a close second), Valentine's book relied on over 200 interviews with participants, including top CIA and special forces personnel. How the author obtained such access, and what happened as a result is a story in itself.

Valentine described the story in an email exchange with The Dissenter:

"I began work on The Phoenix Program in the summer of 1984," Valentine wrote. "I approached the subject from two angles. First, I made a direct approach to William Colby, the former Director of the CIA and the individual most closely associated with Phoenix, based on his defense of the program before several Congressional committees. Colby agreed to help and referred me to several CIA officers who played prominent roles in Phoenix. These former, and in some cases current, agents spoke openly to me, simply because I carried Colby’s imprimatur.

"Colby generated access lasted into 1987, when I started to notice doors closing and people avoiding me. I’d always known it would happen sooner than later, and I’d pretty much made the rounds, so it didn’t bother me too much. I’d hustled the CIA, I’d gotten inside its walls and rummaged around, and now the CIA was going to exact its revenge. That’s just how it works. If you fuck with he bull, you get the horns. Everyone knows that.

"I also got asked by CIA officer Bob Wall to join the CIA before the door slammed shut altogether.

"But I wasn’t ready to quit, and I wanted to back the CIA off a bit, so I filed a Privacy Act request, and in 1992 I got some results, thanks to the ACLU and a sympathetic judge in the federal district in Springfield, Massachusetts."

"It may cause damage"

More of the story is documented in John Prados' book, The Family Jewels:

"Elements at Langley became uncooperative after one retiree asked CIA lawyers, in the summer of 1986, what things were safe to talk about. When a Publications Review Board lawyer checked to see whether Phoenix was off-limits (the Board had previously cleared Phoenix material in works by Colby himself and agency officer Ralph McGehee), he was advised to caution interviewees not to talk to Valentine....

"By April 1988 the Publications Review Board was advising clandestine service officers of a concern that Valentine’s 'forthcoming book will contain so much detailed information about Agency operations and officers that... it may cause damage,' and asking that senior management of the Directorate of Operations should have the entire matter brought to their attention. Spooks, including some in the ostensibly impartial Inspector General’s office, were ranging the halls telling each other that the author was bad news and hoping they might escape his attention. Valentine eventually discovered this stonewalling due to the reticence of CIA veterans—and the materials quoted here emerged in the course of legal discovery in the lawsuit Douglas Valentine brought against the Central Intelligence Agency."

Valentine has posted online some of the legal documents from his lawsuit against the CIA. His papers collected in the writing of the book are held by the National Security Archives, and available to researchers. Many of his taped interviews, including interviews with William Colby and other senior Phoenix personnel, can be heard online (thanks Cryptocomb.org).

What Phoenix Wrought

While a good knowledge of the Phoenix Program in necessary to understand how U.S. counterinsurgency acts in reality in countries around the globe, in a new introduction for the Open Roads edition of the book, Valentine writes about the corrupting influence of Phoenix upon democratic processes domestically.

Valentine speaks of the "insidious" spread of Phoenix methods in the United States for the purpose of "the political control of its citizens through terrorism, on behalf of the rich military-industrial-political elite who rule our society."

"Indeed, America's security forces were always aware of the domestic applications of the Phoenix," Valentine writes, "and the program has not only come to define modern American warfare, it is the model for our internal 'homeland security' apparatus as well. It is with the Phoenix program that we find the genesis of the paramilitarization of American police forces in their role as adjuncts to military and political security forces engaged in population control and suppression of dissent."

For Valentine, who makes a compelling case, the building of Guantanamo, the use of black sites and torture, the provision -- even as late as 2013 -- for the indefinite detention of Americans and other "war on terror" prisoners, "was easy to predict," if you knew about Phoenix.

I am grateful to Doug Valentine and Mark Crispin Miller for giving The Phoenix Program a new publishing life, to help educate a new generation, which faces a fight against forces of state repression every bit as difficult and important as any faced in this country's history.

Other books released as part of Open Road Media's "Forbidden Bookshelf" series include Christopher Simpson's landmark history, Blowback: America’s Recruitment of Nazis and Its Destructive Impact on Our Domestic and Foreign Policy; The Search for an Abortionist: The Classic Study of How American Women Coped with Unwanted Pregnancy Before Roe v. Wade by Nancy Howell Lee, Interference: How Organized Crime Influences Professional Football by Dan E. Moldea; and The Lords of Creation: The History of America’s 1 Percent by Frederick Lewis Allen. More titles are promised in the near future.

Book Review: Doug Valentine's The Strength of the Pack

The Strength of the Pack: The Personalities, Politics and Espionage Intrigues that Shaped the DEA is a book about the corruption of not just an agency, but of an entire state apparatus. Douglas Valentine, whose copiously detailed history of The Phoenix Program (1990) provided the definitive book on that CIA-South Vietnam torture-assassination program, has turned his attention to the way the CIA and its backers suborned the anti-drug war for their own purposes.

He took on the task of describing the creation and evolution of the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), which as the years went by, became subordinated politically to the CIA's overseas covert operational apparatus. In the end, DEA agents found themselves going after some drug traffickers, while protecting others, particularly those of interest to or supported by the US government for its own purposes. In the meantime, there was also a lot of incidental personal corruption, with millions of dollars there for the taking for those looking to skim some cream off the heady concoction of government covert business and the immense profits of illegal drug trafficking.

Taking advice from Andy Tartaglino, an old Federal Bureau of Narcotics (FBN) man, whose investigation into corruption at the FBN helped bring about the demise of that agency in the late 1960s, Valentine began his investigation into DEA corruption by first exploring the early history of that agency's predecessors, the FBN and the Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs (BNDD). The equally impressive result of his researches into this earlier history can be found in the 2006 fascinating introductory volume to Pack, The Strength of the Wolf: The Secret History of America's War on Drugs.

The Strength of the Pack begins where Wolf left off, with the merger of the old FBN with the Bureau of Drug Abuse Control into the BNDD, and later, the transformation of the latter during the second Nixon administration into the DEA. Along the way, we meet a heterogeneous collection of sincere drug agents and careerist apparatchiks, Corsican gangsters, Italian Mafia, old OSS men, foreign guerillas and tribal chieftains, corrupt national leaders, MKULTRA operatives, and many, many more. The history takes us from the years of Johnson's Great Society through Vietnam, the French Connection, the ugly Nixon years, Watergate, supporting the opium-running muhajadeen (to counter the Soviets in Afghanistan), all the way to the build-up to the war in Iraq. (As Valentine points out, a key U.S. adviser to the Iraqi Interior Ministry after the U.S. invasion was Steve Casteel, a former high-level DEA agent.)

Doug Valentine is a meticulous researcher, and the book is accordingly well footnoted, and includes photos of key individuals, and some, though not an overwhelming amount, of reproduced documentation. The book is an intense, though entertaining read, as Valentine knows how to carry the reader right into the heart of the unfolding operations. Much of his information, as with The Phoenix Program, comes from interviews with key participants, and many will be the future historians beholden to Valentine for capturing this kind of testimony before it was forever lost.

Valentine is no supposedly "objective' historian, but understands that history is always written from some point of view. It's clear he is outraged at the corruption and hypocrisy of the drug "wars," not to mention sickened by those killed, disappeared, tortured, etc., so that the intelligence agencies -- primarily the CIA -- will not be disturbed in their skullduggery, which often as not is in the service of some of the most corrupt and criminal individuals on the planet.

This is most important because, as Valentine documents, following other authors (whom he generously cites) like Alfred McCoy and Gary Webb, the history of the drug wars and the agencies that presumably fight them is really a history of the subordination of those agencies for political ends. The money and the political leverage that comes from these "wars" is used to bankroll the CIA's covert wars and interventions. Indeed, by the end of the period Valentine documents, he indicates that nearly every overseas DEA agent works in one way or another for the CIA (while at home, the management of DEA was taken over by the FBI). The cost of all this to the American public is immense, both in terms of billions of dollars, but also in terms of attacks on personal liberties, as the counterinsurgency tactics employed abroad are turned increasingly back upon citizens at home.

This is an essential book, and the reader will want to keep it, along with Strength of the Wolf, as a reference work in an area of contemporary history that is solely lacking reference works. In sum, The Strength of the Pack is a seminal work on the history of federal drug law, the creation and transformation of the drug enforcement agencies, and their interpenetration with U.S. imperialist policy abroad, from the days of the Vietnam War through the current narco-terrorism "wars."

Originally posted as an Amazon review

"Some men wish evil and accomplish it"

Crush out the fly with your thumb and wipe your hand,
You cannot crush the leaden, creaking machine....

Some men wish evil and accomplish it
But most men, when they work in that machine,
Just let it happen somewhere in the wheels.
The fault is no decisive, villainous knife
But the dull saw that is the routine mind.

Why, if a man lay dying on their desk
They'd do their best to help him, friend or foe,
But this is merely a respectfully
Submitted paper, properly endorsed
To be sent on and on, and gather blood.

-- from Stephen Vincent Binet's long poem, John Brown's Body

In the portion of his modern epic quoted here, Binet is writing about the POW prisons of the U.S. Civil War, known for their butchery and their violence:

For all prisoners and captives now,
For the dark legion,
The Andersonvillers, the Castle Thunder men,
The men who froze at Camp Morton and came from the dungeons
With blood burst out on their faces.
The men who died at Salisbury and Belle Isle,
Elmira, St. Louis, Camp Douglas -- the Libby tunnellers --
The men in the fetid air.

Binet is scornful that any accountability can occur, especially inside the insanity of war:

The sun shines, the wind goes by,
The prisoners and captives lie
In a cell without an eye....

The band blares, the bugles snort,
They lose the fort or take the fort,
Someone writes a wise report.

Someone's name is victory.
The prisoners and captives lie
Too long dead before they die.

And yet change does happen... how does it happen?

There is no sudden casting off of a chain,
Only a slow thought working its way through the ground,
A slow root growing, touching a hundred soils,
A thousand minds -- no blossom or flower yet.

It takes a long time to bring a thought into act
And when it blossoms at last, the gardeners wonder...

Bill Moyer on "The Secret Government"

PBS, 1987

I doubt it would even be aired today.

"The history of our secret government.... 'National Security' was invented in 1947...."

A truly remarkable documentary and fascinating viewing. I'm proud to present it here.

Cliche or Revolution?

From the founding document of the United States:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.

Unit 731: Biological Warfare & Human Medical Experimentation

The story of United States research into and use of biological weapons remains a huge blank spot in the known history of this country. There have been attempts to document this history, but much remains classified or has been destroyed. The use of biological weapons dovetails with U.S. research into drugs and mind control against prisoners, as the revelations about MKULTRA or the Edgewood Arsenal experiments make clear (see this fascinating story by Michael Ignatieff in the New York Times Magazine, April 2001).

This posting is the first in a series I hope to publish over time looking at the controversial question of U.S. use of biological weapons, and its links to MKULTRA and other covert CIA or military programs. It examines the origins of the U.S. program in biological weapons research, as it grew out of the ashes of the horrific program in the same, started by the Japanese Imperial government in the 1930s. It is best known by its bureaucratic moniker: Unit 731.

As I will explain further on, I intend to write more in the future about this subject. But first watch this fascinating documentary on a terrifying subject. We need to know about this.

Warning: the embedded videos below have some extremely disturbing footage.





The final three parts of the documentary on Unit 731 can be accessed by clicking on the proper links: Part Three, Part Four, Part Five.

Unit 731... was a covert biological and chemical warfare research and development unit of the Imperial Japanese Army that undertook lethal human experimentation during the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) and World War II. It was responsible for some of the most notorious war crimes carried out by Japanese personnel. Officially known by the Imperial Japanese Army as the Kempeitai Political Department and Epidemic Prevention Research Laboratory, it was initially set up under the Kempeitai military police of the Empire of Japan to develop weapons of mass destruction for potential use against Chinese, and possibly Soviet forces....

After Imperial Japan surrendered to the Allies in 1945, Douglas MacArthur became the Supreme Commander of the Allied Powers, rebuilding Japan during the Allied occupation. MacArthur secretly granted immunity to the physicians of Unit 731 in exchange for providing America with their research on biological warfare. The United States believed that the research data was valuable because the allies had never publicly conducted or condoned such experiments on humans due to moral and political revulsion. The United States also did not want other nations, particularly the Soviet Union, to acquire data on biological weapons, not to mention the military benefits of such research. [Emphasis added]

Japanese experiments in biological weapons utilized barbaric research, including the use of vivisection on human subjects, amputations, the use of human targets, radiation exposure, starvation, and the deliberate inoculation of diseases such as plague, anthrax, cholera and botulism. From a complex of approximately six square kilometers, and a number of satellite facilities, Unit 731 is thought to have produced almost a quarter million casualties. Captured by the Soviets, many of those involved in Unit 731 were put on trial as war criminals. But as noted above, some of the primary leaders surrendered to the U.S. and were protected in exchange for information on biological experimentation.

The link between U.S./Japanese collaboration on biological weaponry after World War II and charges of United States use of biological weapons in the Korean War (denied by the U.S.) is something I've covered before. Here's the conclusions of a researcher from Baylor University Medical Center, Stefan Riedel, MD, PhD, published in 2004 (numbers in parentheses are footnotes in the original -- please refer to linked article for the references to these footnotes):

During the years immediately after World War II, newspapers were filled with articles about disease outbreaks caused by foreign agents armed with biological weapons (2, 18). During the Korean War, the Soviet Union, China, and North Korea accused the USA of using agents of biological warfare against North Korea (1, 18). In later years the USA admitted that it had the capability of producing such weapons, although it denied having used them. However, the credibility of the USA was undermined by its failure to ratify the Geneva Protocol of 1925, by public acknowledgment of its own offensive biological warfare program, and by suspicions of collaboration with former Unit 731 scientists (1, 18).

In fact, the US program expanded during the Korean War (1950–1953) with the establishment of a new production facility in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. In addition, a defensive program was launched in 1953 with the objective of developing countermeasures, including vaccines, antisera, and therapeutic agents, to protect troops from possible biological attacks. By the late 1960s, the US military had developed a biological arsenal that included numerous biological pathogens, toxins, and fungal plant pathogens that could be directed against crops to induce crop failure and famine (1).

The U.S. cover-up of the atrocities of Unit 731, and the embrace of its top leadership in the name of anticommunism and military research rivals the scandals that exposed the post-World War II collaboration of Washington, D.C. with fleeing Nazi war criminals (see Operation Paperclip).

The reality behind our country's history is disturbing and horrifying. But if we do not come to terms with where we have been, we will not, even in an Obama-era, be able to go where we need to go -- to a world free of militarism, of imperial conquest-lust, of inequality and injustice and racism. The CIA famously has the words "the truth will set you free" written in the lobby of its headquarters in Langley. They distorted those words in an Orwellian ironic twist that decimates our language and our moral integrity. Still in the end, the truth will set us free, but first, we must reclaim it.

Fox Censors Story on Torture Death of Kim Soo-im

Charles J. Hanley, special correspondent for Associated Press (AP), has written a compelling, fascinating and sad tale of the execution of purported Korean "Mata Hari", Kim Soo-im, at the start of the Korean War. He linked her torture and death to the recent revelations about the more than 100,000 murders of leftists or suspected leftists sympathizers in 1950 by the U.S.-allied (and some would say puppet) regime of South Korea.

This massive human rights crime was covered up by the United States for over fifty years, and it's unclear to what extent U.S. forces participated in the slaughter. We need to understand the history of lies and cover-up perpetuated by the Pentagon, State Department, and executive branch in general, not simply for history's sake, but because the aggressive U.S. militarist policy is accelerating beyond its Middle Eastern goals, and aiming itself at Russia. Placing missiles less than 200 miles from St. Petersburg -- US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski signed the deal today -- the U.S. flirts with a Third World War. Such a war would be a disaster of epic proportions, if anyone were left alive afterwards to judge the scope of its destruction.

Does the U.S. government tell the truth, particularly when it comes to war? Here's one story, with some notice of differential press coverage. It mostly follows the details as laid out in Hanley's AP story.

Kim's Story

Wonil Kim, Kim's son by former U.S. Colonel John Baird, has been trying to find out the truth about his mother's death, and the charges of spying for North Korea that led to her death. But recently declassified files, including those of a 1950 U.S. military investigation into the charges of spying by Soon-im, revealed it was known soon after her trial (if not even then) that the charges had no basis. Col. Baird, from whom Kim supposedly stole secrets, had no access to the disputed military information. Her confession had been elicited through waterboarding torture, and perhaps by electric shock and other barbaric physical means.

But like the deaths of many tens of thousands of others in cold blood by U.S. ally South Korea, the truth was hidden from the world. Important aspects of what occurred in Korea over 50 years ago remain unknown. As the censorship work of Fox News demonstrates, if they could, major players in the media would keep the reality of what happened hidden, caged in an ideological prison, unsafe for general distribution, the better to protect the image and behavior of the U.S. from both domestic and international condemnation.

Kim's story begins in 1941, when the glamorous and educated Soon-im married Lee Gang-kook, a German-educated Seoul leftist. Lee ended up on the "Central People's Committee, a broad nationalist coalition that sought to take over Korea from a defeated Japan in September 1945." The Japanese had occupied Korea in a brutal fashion since 1910. In Korea, this period is referred to as the Japanese Forcible Occupation Period.

After Japan was defeated in World War II, the U.S. occupied the southern portion of Korea, and the Soviets occupied the northern area. The dividing line was set at the 38th parallel. According to the AP article, in its full version published by Newsweek (emphasis added):

Cho [Myung-hwa, a film director planning a film on Lee's life,] pointed out a little-known fact: In 1946, a year after the U.S. Army occupied southern Korea at World War II's end, a U.S. Embassy poll found that 77 percent of southerners wanted a socialist or communist future.

Instead, the U.S. military government kept many of Japan's right-wing Korean collaborators in power, and the U.S. commander, Lt. Gen. John R. Hodge, vowed to "stamp out" the communists.

In the version of the story posted by Fox News, the first of the two quoted paragraphs is omitted. This is a "little-known" fact that Fox, and many in this country, would like to keep as obscure as possible. Fox News made one other redaction in AP's story, but I'll get to that in a minute.

After the U.S. occupational forces withdrew in 1949, Kim's former lover, Gang-kook, became a leader in the north, while Kim herself worked for her new lover, Col. Baird, assisting him in his work advising the national police of the new South Korean government. Kim also had a child by Baird, and he set up a house for her and the child, often spending his nights there with her.

Confession by Torture

But in March 1950, as arrests of thousands of leftists or suspected sympathizers in South Korea began in earnest under the right-wing, U.S. backed government of President Syngman Rhee, Kim was arrested. The North Korean invasion was still some three months away. The most serious charge against Soo-im was espionage, which carried the death penalty. Kim was supposed to have given U.S. military information to her former lover Gang-kook. There were assorted other charges, of keeping guns, of stealing government vehicles. There never was any material evidence, nor any eyewitnesses, to back up any of the charges.

"It was witch-hunting," said historian Jung Byung-joon, who has studied the case. "The South Korean police and prosecutors hated her because she was the lover of Lee Gang-kook, and then of Col. Baird, and nobody could touch her. They waited for their chance."

The South Korean prosecutors used torture to obtain a confession. By the third day of the trial, Kim broke down.

Col. William H.S. Wright, head of the Korea advisory group, had testified that her confession was probably forced through "out and out torture," probably near-drowning, or waterboarding, as it's now known.

"The water cure is a very common method," Wright said. "Electric shock and the use of pliers is frequent." [emphasis added]

A Korean source backs this up. In a 2005 Seoul TV report on Kim Soo-im, longtime government propagandist Oh Jae-ho, a staunch anticommunist, said he learned from a police official that the defendant had to be carried into the courtroom to confess on the final day.

For some reason, the Fox News version of the story did not include the middle paragraph quoted above. Was it the claim of the regularity by which a U.S. ally used waterboarding torture that Fox sought to hide? Or was it the use of other barbaric techniques? The use of pliers?

The confession sealed Kim's fate. She was found guilty by the South Korean military court, and executed. A top-secret inquiry by the U.S. military, initiated only weeks after the verdict, found Kim Soo-im innocent of the charges. Her file "was stamped 'case closed.'"

A government recommendation for a court martial for Col. Baird was ignored. The entire affair entered the realm of purported history, another bit of propagandistic lore, meant to display the perfidy of the communists, and the rightness of U.S. intervention and war.

Baird never spoke out to defend his lover, the mother of his son. The U.S. government never released its exculpatory findings, even as her case was used for propagandistic purposes over the years. One teleplay from the 50s said to depict Kim "as Asia's Mata Hari," was introduced by host Ronald Reagan. Cornonet magazine labeled her "The Korean Seductress Who Betrayed America."

As for Lee Gang-kook, an Army intelligence document links him to the CIA's "JACK" program (Joint Activities Commission, Korea). Lee was executed in the North after the war, labeled an American spy. One wonders if the story against Lee weren't concocted by the CIA, in part to build up the credentials of their own agent in Pyongyang. We shall likely never know.

After This, What Redemption?

Thanks to the valiant efforts of Kim's son, who only wanted to know the truth about his mother, Kim's story is being heard again. But in the wild roar that is the rush of 24-hour news, the clamoring of the blogosphere, and the distractions of video, gaming, films, and music, her story will sink back into the anonymity of old historical fact, like a stone dropped forever into the river Lethe.

And yet, poised on the edge of a new "Cold War, and the blood not dry yet from the U.S. invasion and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, with its own hundreds of thousands dead, and millions of forgotten refugees... and yet, the story of Kim Soo-im has more relevance than ever. The use of torture by a U.S. ally, the cover-up of mass killings and judicial injustice, the censorship of what "foreigners" really think and feel, these lessons must be internalized by the body politic.

A terrible, final war approaches: a nuclear war. Make no mistake about it. If the U.S. keeps up its present direction of provocation and aggression abroad, and secrecy and lies and censorship at home, the convergence of the two will make war inevitable. And this time, missiles will fly, and civilization as we know it will end. The word "hope," cheapened into campaign slogan cant, will be banned, or worse, forgotten.

Only an educated populace, following leaders who are strongly anti-militarist, and recognizing the dangers that unbridled capitalism, imperialism, and nationalism represent for the future of mankind, will be able to take the necessary steps to turn the giant ship of history around, and steer it towards safer waters.

Diderot's "Apostrophe to the Insurgents," 1782

The "insurgents" in question were the "founding fathers" of our era, the men and women who rose up against royalist tyranny and sought to make the ideals of the Enlightenment a true and living thing, the soul of a new country. That country today looks nothing like the land of Washington, Jefferson, and Franklin. Diderot's dream of a revolutionary America, fighting "unequal distribution of wealth, extravagance, indolence, and corruption" and protecting human liberty, this dream is over.

"After centuries of oppression, may the revolution which has just taken place across the sea, by offering to all the inhabitants of Europe asylum against fanaticism and tyranny, teach those who govern men about the legitimate use of their authority! May those courageous Americans, who preferred to see their wives assaulted, their children butchered, their homes destroyed, their fields ravaged, their towns burned, to spill their blood and to die, rather than lose even a tiny portion of their liberty, prevent the enormous growth and the unequal distribution of wealth, extravagance, indolence, and corruption, and guarantee the maintenance of their liberty and the duration of their government. May they defer (at least for several centuries), the judgment pronounced against all the things of this world, the judgment which condemned them to have their birth, their period of strength, their decrepitude, and their end.

"Adversity employs great talents; prosperity renders them useless and carries the inept, the corrupted wealthy and the wicked to the top. May they bear in mind that virtue often contains the seeds of tyranny. May they bear in mind that it is neither gold nor even a multitude of arms that sustains a state, but its morals. May each of them keep in his house, in a corner of his field, next to his workbench, next to his plow, his gun, his sword and his bayonet. May they all be soldiers. May they bear in mind that in circumstances where deliberation is possible, the advice of old men is good, but that in moments of crisis youth is generally better informed than its elders."

A Recommendation: "Torture Amnesia -- Shame on America"

Truong Son Traveler has written one of the best blog essays on the history of the torture issue in the United States, and I highly recommend readers of this blog take some time to read it. Titled Torture Amnesia -- Shame on America, it's written by someone who saw torture used first hand in Vietnam. The essay begins with the memory of that horrible encounter:

There are some things one never forgets. I'll never forget my brief encounter with torture 40 years ago. Our patrol engaged some VC hidden in a tree-line and a firefight ensued. The tree-line held a small hamlet. Predictably the village people fled in our direction. They fled because they knew their village would most likely be shelled, strafed or bombed. It was.

Our Viet counterparts detained a young lady they suspected of being a VC, a nurse they claimed. We brought her back to our dilapidated compound where they bound her, stripped off her shirt and attached wires to her nipples and proceed to use a crank operated electrical device to shock her. Needless to say it was thoroughly disgusting. Through it all she refused to talk. I admired her courage. I don't know where they sent her but I hope she survived.

July 4: What do we celebrate? (a list)

The following started out as a comment in Meteor Blades's excellent posting [at Daily Kos] retailing Frederick Douglass's famous 1852 July 4 speech castigating America for slavery.

I've added some links to make what follows meatier. (And I mostly link to collections of original documents, not secondary sources). I wasn't originally going to write anything for today. But why shouldn't we know the truth? This diary is dedicated to Scooter Libby.

And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. -- John 8:32.

If, per Samuel Johnson, patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, then July 4th is one of the most evil days on our calendar.

Of course, we remember July 4th because of the ringing declaration of human rights in Jefferson's famous document.

But the reality is so mind-numbingly depressing, that I find this is a good day to hide my head in shame, and do penance for the "greatness of America".

Not meant to be definitive, here is my July 4 List of America's "Accomplishments":

*Native American genocide

*Breaking of treaties with Native Americans

*Slavery

*Returning runaway in slave territories to slavery, per order of the Supreme Court (Dred Scott case)

*Legal racial segregation (Jim Crow)

*Land grabbing wars against neighboring countries

*Seizing countries overseas (Philippines, Hawaii, Cuba)

*Joining the senseless War to End All Wars, killing tens of thousands of U.S. soldier-citizens for nothing

*Fighting unionization, killing strikers

*Using the atomic bomb on civilians, killing 100,000s

*Incendiary bombing raids on civilians, killing 100,000s (Dresden, Tokyo)

*Building a giant nuclear arsenal threatening the world with total destruction

*Ordering the killing of fleeing civilians in Korean conflict

*Assassination programs during the Southeast Asian conflicts, again, killing tens of thousands

*Putting forth a war on trumpted up charges of a fake attack (Gulf of Tonkin)

*Using chemical weapons to defoliate massive amounts of countryside, and kill untold thousands, and cause untold numbers of birth defects

*Use of torture against Vietnamese

*Training of torture to be used against Latin Americans (Project X)

*Overturning the elected government of Iran

*Overturning the elected government of Guatemala

*Overturning the elected government of Chile

*Intervening covertly in the elections of France and Italy

*Importing Nazi war criminals to work on weapons programs and covert operations, such as Operation Paperclip

*Assassinations planned against foreign leaders (Castro, and likely Patrice Lumumba)

*Invasion of a sovereign nation (Bay of Pigs)

*Secret bombings of countries we were not at war with and without Congressional notification, approval or oversight, killing untold thousands and destroying the viability of the government (Cambodia)

*Making domestic political parties illegal and blacklisting thousands (McCarthy Red Scare and outlawing of the Communist Party USA)

*Domestic spying on political and church groups, by spy and military agencies
*Illegal wiretapping of U.S. citizens

*Blackmailing U.S. civil rights leaders

*Arming religious fanatics who stoned women and kill schoolteachers that try to teach girls (Afghanistan)

*Arming guerilla groups to overthrow governments the U.S. opposes (Nicaragua)

*Supporting countries that are despotic and use torture (Egypt, Morocco, the Greece of the colonels, the Argentina of the junta, etc.)

*Invasion of a sovereign nation based on lies and trumped up charges (Iraq)

*Use of torture, secret renditions, and the construction of a secret prison network (Iraq and throughout the Middle East, Asia, and East Europe)

*The use of "caging" and other techniques to illegally decertify thousands of American citizens from the voting rolls

*100,000s civilians killed in war started on false pretenses (Iraq)

*Women and children kidnapped and held hostage in secret locations, as part of so-called "war on terror"

and on and on...

(Thanks to Turkana for the graphic!)