Korean Job Discussion Forums

[Gopher]

This is offered to Hypnotist:

Take the case of U.S. involvement in the Chilean armed forces' violent overthrow of the Allende regime and Augusto Pinochet's subsequent brutal dictatorship:

On the one hand, early on, first in Senate hearings, and then in the press, between, say the very early 1970s and perhaps as late as the late 1970s, U.S. officials like Lt. Col. John P. Ryan, attached to the naval mission in Valparaiso, or former DCI Richard M. Helms, not to mention high-ranking officials like Kissinger and Nixon himself, unabashedly lied about U.S. complicity in this event.

They lied to the Senate and they lied in the press. They did not downplay U.S. involvement; they flatly stated that there was no U.S. involvement.

Then the so-called Watergate scandal broke, soon followed by "the year of intelligence" in 1975. The Senate and the House checked executive authority after decades of the imperial presidency in the context of the Cold War. Nixon's govt fell; the CIA was castigated and gutted.

Helms not only lost his job, but was convicted of lying to Congress. William E. Colby lost his job as DCI, too. Ford, Rockefeller, and Kissinger were annoyed with the amount of documents and information he was volunteering to the Senate commissions. Kissinger mocked Colby's Catholicism, joking that when he went up to the Hill, it was as if he were going to confession. They fired Colby. (That's when they appointed H.W. Bush DCI, a career bureaucrat and politician, and not a spy, to settle things down at CIA.)

This data was public, and it exposed the lies.

Many were already alienated by their govt for its mendacity with respect to Vietnam. Now there was openly acknowledged mendacity with respect to the Chilean coup. It was no longer in dispute.

Still, on the other hand, many writers and critics didn't stop with this. They kept looking for more lies, for more smoking guns.

They have consistently enhanced facts and overstated U.S. complicity in the Chilean coup for their own partisan and oftentimes, anti-U.S., agendas. Their "evidence" is mostly innuendo and, unfortunately, they, too, lie.

The earliest example came just after the coup, where, from hiding, Communist Deputy (and later, presidential candidate) Gladys Marin, alleged the following:

"The U.S. Air Force gave the Chilean Air Force the rockets to bomb la Moneda on 11 September [1973]...perhaps it was the U.S. acrobatic pilots [that is, the U.S.A.F. Thunderbirds] who bombed the government palace during the coup...the participation of the expert U.S. acrobatic pilots in the bombing of the palace is confirmed by the fact that none of the rockets missed the target. It was a job done by professionals. The precision of the attack was extraordinary." [cited in Davis's memoirs, 350.]

What? The Chilean Air Force [FACH] is so incompetent that it can't hit a large stationary target where there is no enemy air or antiaircraft in sight?

Besides this absurdity, of course, she would need some sort of direct evidence that has never surfaced to sustain this wild allegation.

It wasn't left alone, however, and Seymour Hersh picked up her allegation, adding more of his own, and printed them in the New York Times.

As late as 2003, human rights activist Peter Kornbluh [see some of his work at thirdworldtraveler.com] drafted an account based on newly declassified dox, but not new information, that basically blamed the U.S. govt for each and every thing that occurred in Chile. It was as if Pinochet, Contreras, the DINA, and the Navy and Air Force intel services had done nothing or didn't even exist. Just ask former Assistant Secretary of State William D. Rogers, who responded to Kornbluh's The Pinochet File in a heated debate in Foreign Affairs in 2004:

"There is not one word in Kornbluh's chapter on Allende's time in office about his disastrous economic policies, his attack on Chile's democratic institutions, or the wave of popular resentment that swept the Chilean military to power. The critics see only the American text, not the Chilean context."

Foreign Affairs' Latin American editor Kenneth Maxwell, who had been caught up in Kornbluh's book as part of the partisan-oriented "case against Kissinger" more than as a balanced historical reconstruction admitted as much in his reply:

"On Kornbluh's side, what is lacking in the forensic approach (and is a weakness of much writing on U.S. diplomatic history) [emphasis is mine] is location in time and space. We see only the U.S. side of a story that is at least two-sided, if not multifaceted."

This year, 2005, Cambridge University's Jonathan Haslam, through a very anti-American and pro-Communist British press, Verso, published The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende's Chile, partly in response to the issues Rogers and Maxwell raised with Kornbluh's indictment-style history.

Haslam admits that much of Allende's woes were self-inflicted, and he even cites the former Soviet ambassador, who said that Moscow always understood that Washington was very much involved in the coup, but was not by any means the main reason for it.

But Haslam falls back on the old strategy of enhancing facts throughout his text, and these enhancements all lead to the erroneous conclusion that Washington pulled all of the strings and made everything happen, and with malicious and evil intent on top of that.

For example, concerning Patria y Libertad, a right-wing group formed by a Chilean atty who wanted to encourage a military coup, Haslam alleges that "PyL had been set up by the CIA on 11 September 1970" and his account references CIA's command and control over Patria y Libertad's activities between then and the coup, three years later.

This is absurd. Haslam's evidence for this claim is the Church Committee's staff report. But the Church Committee's staff report says that CIA made contact with an already existing Patria y Libertad in October 1970, passing it a total of approx. $50K between then and early 1971, and then breaking contact with the organization once and for all because it was too extremist and outside of the Agency's mission parameters. We should not so casually gloss over the vast difference between the verbs "to support" and "to create" or "to direct." [see the staff report online at state.gov]

So where, then, is Haslam getting his information?

And if CIA were so powerful, how did Allende get elected in the first place? Why couldn't CIA succeed in organizing the Cuban exile politicians in Miami ten years earlier, but could somehow organize and direct Chilean oppositionists so far away?

It is this kind of systematic, anti-U.S.-derived factual enhancement in the literature and in the press, particularly from publishing houses in Britain and Australia, that make some contributions to "the bunker mentality" in the U.S. and among some Americans. It is not only with respect to this Chilean example, but applies in almost any discussion on U.S. foreign policy.

Back to Chile: U.S. officials covered up and lied about their involvement in the Chilean coup. But that was over thirty years ago. Since then, the data is mostly on the table, even though some remains hidden, particularly with respect to data possibly contained in Cuban and Chilean archives and military centers which remain closed. And this data makes it clear that the U.S. was all over this coup, as were other actors including the Soviet Union, Cuba, the East Germans, and the British, the Brazilians, not to mention the Chilean actors, who were for and against this coup, and who played the most decisive part in bringing it about.

This early mendacity, however, does not justify further mendacity on the part of the extreme left and anti-American foreign critics who simply want to harm the U.S. and its image by perpetuating a U.S.-centric, non-local version of events, a version that blames the U.S. for each and every ill in the world.

If people were to back away from this chronic anti-American posture, then it might make many in the U.S. emerge from the bunker and engage in a professional and responsible dialog for a change. For there are valid criticisms and there are serious problems in U.S. foreign policy that need to be addressed.

[TheUrbanMyth]

[hypnotist]

I'm afraid I'm not overly familiar with Chilean history (although the claim that the CIA never talked to Patria y Libertad again after 1971 is a new one on me - the Church report mentions the end of funding in that year, but that funds could have been 'routed' to them in other ways - the ring of "Sinn Fein / IRA" is sounding in my ears), so I'll have to take your word for a lot of things. And yet...

Yes, this was thirty years ago. That's really no time at all. I know America is quite a young nation, but in the UK especially there is a rich tradition of historical research - books are released saying more radical things about events of 300 years ago, never mind 30.

Is this proof of Anti-american bias? The full title of the book is "The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende's Chile: A Case of Assisted Suicide". From the reviews I've read, it seems to cover quite well the (in)action of Cuba and the Soviet Union in Chile as well as the CIA's acts. Do some factual errors really offer proof of deep anti-American bias? I can't tell you if the book is really anti-American or not. I can tell you that when I see phrases like through a very anti-American and pro-Communist British press alarm bells start to ring. The problem is, of course, that my left-wing is your pinko Commie. My raving right-wing bigot is your Compassionate Conservative.

And finally... once the US establishment is caught lying once about a subject, the likelihood of any subsequent 'clarifications' being accepted 100% without question is very, very low. This kind of revisionist history comes about, in part, because the US establishment has repeatedly shown that it cannot be trusted. We've seen it all over again over WP in Iraq. When nobody will deal in the facts, a lot of highly partisan stuff starts to emerge.

[Gopher]

Thanks for the response.

It's pretty well-established that CIA broke contact with PyL after 1971 but not with the Christian Democrats or the National Party, and, being Chileans, they did whatever they wanted with the Agency's money once the money was passed to them, including funding the truckers' strikes and also PyL and other groups like the Roland Matus Brigade.

Haslam enhances the facts, even cites anonymous sources (permitted in journalism but not in professional historiography, so I can't explain how he gets away with this) to claim that the U.S. govt orchestrated the entire event.

It's not really the fact that the U.S. played an enabling role in the coup (and other coups as well) and has made malicious errors over the past that offend me. After all, covert action is at least as old as the Old Testament or Sun Tzu or Classical Greece and Persia. It's the partisan-nature of the debate, the lack of professionalism, the indictment-style historiography, and the bitterness of the criticism. These histories become more about what the U.S. govt did to country X, rather than about what happend in country X.

The U.S. govt, and as far as I can tell, every other single govt in the history of the world, lies.

Singling the U.S. govt out for this behavior and feigning a particularly loud form of outrage, as if it's never been done before, is simply outrageous to me, and transparent.

It is particularly offensive when many of the govts, such as Cuba or Chile, entirely lack declassification procedures, and indeed, refuse to publish any dox, in the Chilean case, from the Allende regime. It's just too hypocritical to use U.S. dox against the U.S. but refuse to declassify your own dox. What do they have to hide? Their own involvement in their own problems, of course.

So we should keep a wary eye on our governments and our leaders, no matter when or where we live. The U.S. is no better or worse than anyone else in this respect. But it is far from being the Great Satan many make it out to be; and even the Presidents' powers are severely limited in the real world. Yet these limitations are often ignored by hostile critics who paint the White House as omnipresent and all-powerful.

[hypnotist]

Mmm. I can't easily counter what you say about Haslam, so let me change tack.

I will certainly admit that there are books targetting the US. My real issue is whether the US really is singled out.

There are books enough criticising the Governments of virtually every nation on earth. I mean, take a look at Pinochet in Piccadilly or Unpeople: Britain��s Secret Human Rights Abuses or even Web of Deceit. Britain's Real Role in the World (which actually takes aim at both the US and the UK). At the same time there are many, many books promoting the US 'official' line. I find Kissinger extremely offensive, but I'm glad his books are published. Could the fact that a lot of anti-US books are published by foreign publishers have anything to do with the reluctance of US publishers to touch them, rather than any belligerence on the part of the nations which ultimately do publish them?

Ultimately a lot of foreigners get the impression - probably unfairly, but possibly not completely unfairly - that the US and its citizens usually unswervingly believe they are in the right on any international issue (even if the citizens disagree with the government...) - and are very vocal in informing the RoW of it. Whether intentionally or not, the US does come across as extremely righteous on the international stage - far more often than I think many Americans realise. And then, when America is seen to be doing wrong, the accusations of hypocrisy come thick and fast.

US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice has repeated assurances that the US would never condone torture.

Cheney told his audience the United States doesn't engage in torture, these participants added, even though he said the administration needed an exemption from any legislation banning "cruel, inhuman or degrading" treatment in case the president decided one was necessary to prevent a terrorist attack.

Those are exactly the kind of weasel-words which lead to widespread speculation that the CIA has torture camps all over the world.

America doesn't put itself forward on the world stage as just another country, no better or worse than anyone else. And if it tries to hold itself up to higher standards than others, it can hardly complain when it gets attacked for not doing so, and worse - lying about it.

America will never run... And we will always be grateful that liberty has found such brave defenders. - GWB

Eternally.

[Gopher]

[hypnotist]

[Gopher]

I think your post is sensitive and clear enough that there's little I could disagree with on the substance (maybe a detail or two, but this would be too trivial to mention). I esp. like your distinctions between what is and what appears to be. I am in agreement with most of what you say here.

I'll just clarify that it was the German Imperial General Staff that instigated the First World War, for national glory, etc. Others jumped on the bandwagon, like Nicholas, but the Germans wanted this war.

It isn't right to fault "Germany" for this.

On Hitchens, his facts were pretty bad and rushed in his anti-Kissinger book. (On substance, I agree that it is necessary to counter Kissinger's books on himself, which are, of course, a special pleading to shape how history is interpreted. I just don't like indictment-style historiography. I can show how Kissinger erred, sometimes maliciously and incompetently so, without getting upset, indeed, emotional in my narrative.)

On Menchu, the Nobel Committee affirmed its award, even after the revelations. They clarified it was a peace prize and not a literature award.

Also, some historians, like Richard Price, and particularly many ethnohistorians who work with pre-Contact Native American peoples and cultures, have begun adding things into the historical record that weren't really there, speculating that they were probably there. And this is touchy but not rejected in the professional community. The Nobel Committee rationalized that Menchu's book might be able to be a part of this tradition. I would prefer to see an explanation of this in a foreword to the book, which, however, still claims to be an honest autobiography...

Nice talking to you, as usual. Off to Christmas parties this weekend. Que te vaya bien.

[Gopher]