Who are the No. 1 War Criminals?

For Edwin van Wijk

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The Invisible Government

The early sixties were tumultuous years for the usa. First jfk and the cia directed mercenaries to invade Cuba. When it failed jfk sought cooperation from the Mafia to have Fidel Castro removed from the scene. The summit with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna was a flop. The Kremlin promptly erected the Berlin wall. Next followed the Cuban missile crisis, with an eyeball to eyeball confrontation between the Kremlin and the White House. The Soviets withdrew the missiles, but Kennedy by mutual agreement promised never to attack Cuba again. However the us has continued ever since to strangle this small island 150 miles from the coast of Florida by an inhuman, totally illegal economic blockade, which to begin with flies into the face of the most elementary principles of basic human rights.

Then in the early sixties serious thought was given in Washington to start an all out ground war in Vietnam to prevent Ho Chi-minh from taking the South. All these dramatic events reached a climax with the assassination of the President himself on November 22, 1963. jfk was nevertheless seen by most people as a hero. Nobody however knew at the time of the many shady deals and outright criminal decisions, he and his White House team had taken, during close to three years in power.

It was for instance to remain unknown to the public, that the President had used a mistress on a mission to the Chicago underworld to arrange for the Cuban leader's early death. By today's standards this one planned murder of a foreign head of state would have landed John Kennedy in the dock together with Slobodan Milosevic at the War Crimes Tribunal in The Hague. That is to say if the same standards were observed for us and Yugoslav leaders.

Since the Declaration of Independence America presented itself as the most freeloving and democratic of nations symbolized by the statue of the famous lady at the entrance to Manhattan. Today at the start of the 21st century the United States of America has become the sole Rogue Super Power in the world. How did this come about? Until World War II Washington remained largely focussed on itself. There were occasional forays into problem areas south of the Rio Grande. There was the rescue mission in World War I to assist Europe remaining free from German domination. Traditionally Congress avoided to play a prominent role onto the world stage. In 1941, for instance, the us was still represented in Jakarta, Indonesia by merely a consul-general to assist possible American tourists. In 1958 Dwight D. Eisenhower launched an amateurish cia coup in this fourth largest country in the world, to topple Sukarno. Why?

Because the Indonesian President was considered by the Washington regime of the day too leftist for his own good. Therefore America took it upon herself to remove

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him. Indonesians, however looked upon Sukarno as the father of the nation, since he had begun in his student days during the twenties the long march to freedom from several centuries of Dutch colonialism. Eisenhower was not successful. Some traitors could indeed be found and bribed to set up a rival government on the island of Sumatra, financed and armed by the cia, but the Indonesian Army remained loyal to Sukarno. The us intervention ended in failure. Seven years later, a second cia try would bring Sukarno down indeed. The us had by then learned to behave as a full fledged Rogue Power, fighting wars, overthrowing legal governments Washington did not like, assassinating foreign leaders, invading sovereign states by open or covert warfare, as if there were no international treaties or legal conventions to abide by, as if the Charter of the United Nations was never signed by Harry S. Truman on behalf of all Americans.

The accidental transformation from minor power to number one in the world ready to intervene anywhere at any time evolved as the direct outcome of World War II. When Hitler overran Europe, a massive flight of brains and capital from the old to the new world occurred. In order to make an allied victory over the Axis powers possible the us was forced to replace German I.G. Farben and Krupp with a war industry of its own. This was one reason for the rise to power of the notorious military-industrial complex. The other, of course, was the start of the Cold War. These developments laid a vital cornerstone fore what was to become The Invisible Government.

In 1964, a year after Dallas, David Wise (The New York Herald Tribune) and Thomas Ross (The Chicago Tribune) co-authored The Invisible Government¹. After following a course in Diplomacy at ‘Nijenrode Castle’ in the Netherlands (1946-1948), I joined classes in International Relations at Yale College (1948-l950). Professor Arnold Wolfers was Dean of the Department and Master of Pierson College, where I lived. The cia had been established in 1947 to protect humanity from Communism, at least that interpretation was given by the spooks to the international us spy network. At Yale little attention was given to what seemed a perfectly normal and routine affair. Most specialists like Wolfers never expected the cia to grow into an intelligence behemoth that was to become uncontrollable for either the Congress or the White House.

Prior to leaving the presidency in late 1960, general Eisenhower voiced a solemn warning. He went on record fearing that the military industrial complex was becoming a state within the state. Ike's alarm bell was duly registered by some, but most people went on with their business unaware of the urgency of the matter. The general knew his Administration was preparing a cia invasion of neighbouring Cuba. He also knew, perhaps having learned from the 1958 cia debacle in Indonesia, that attacking Fidel Castro without a United Nations Security Council

1 David Wise, Thomas Ross, The Invisible Government, Random House, New-York.

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mandate amounted to violating the Charter of the United Nations. Somehow, he failed to make this clear to his successor, who scored his first cataclysm on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs. jfk never wholly recovered from that cia calamity. Castro made him look like a fool. jfk followed up by doubling his efforts to get the Cuban leader killed.

Investigative reporters Wise and Ross must have picked up Ike's warning, because their 1964 book fitted his alarming message like a glove. ‘There are two governments in the United States today,’ said the first line in their book. ‘One is visible. The other is invisible.’ The second paragraph dealt with the fact that the first Administration is the one reported in the media and on television. The second is ‘the interlocking, hidden machinery that carries out the policies of the United States in the Cold War.’ The writers explained that one should not think in terms of ‘a formal body’ as a second functioning government. They described the invisibles, as ‘a loose, amorphous grouping of individuals and agencies drawn from many parts of the visible government.’ Neither were they referring to the cia exclusively. They described the intelligence community in 1964 consisting off: the National Security Council, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, Army Intelligence, Navy Intelligence, Air Force Intelligence, the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research, the Atomic Energy Commission and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Wise and Ross spoke prophetic words when they identified the existence of a shadow government in Washington shaping the lives of some 190 million Americans. In 2001, we know with hindsight how the us invisible government has killed, maimed, bombed, used chemical warfare against peasants in Southeast Asia, mined the waters around Nicaragua to prevent Soviet ships from bringing in aid, led a manhunt in Bolivia to track down Che Guevara like an animal.

This criminal behaviour sprang from the mad post-war American obsession with Marxism-Leninism. The 1945 Yankee cloak and dagger boys were convinced that anything was permitted in their crusade against Communism. They were the true and self-appointed defenders of the American fatherland and, if need be, humanity on the whole. In Europe, we identify zealots like these as neo-Nazis. No approval of Congress to act in the national interest was needed. To hell with the United Nations, the Geneva Convention on War Crimes, and whatever soft-headed peaceniks were saying. Hence, of course it was quite normal in the minds of the anti-Communist crusaders to send Castro poisoned cigars, or Patrice Lumumba in the Congo poisoned tooth-paste, as long as the bastards were going to die. After all, they, the invisibles, knew best what had to be done to make the world safe from the Commies.

The Burmese Secretary General of the United Nations, U Thant, assured me, that the zeal with which

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Americans were slitting throats in Vietnam reminded him of the Middle Ages. A time, when Christians travelled on horseback to Constantinople to slit the throats of Muslims in the name of Jesus Christ.² Fascism is characterized by centralized power, by controlling all state affairs, including foreign policy, advocating aggressive nationalism, allowing no opposition or criticism, and advocating a strong military industrial complex. In 1922 Mussolini established fascism in Italy, which next spread to Germany. The United-States developed after World War II a soft brand of the Mussolini variety. Outwardly it might have looked to the world, that the White House and the President exerted perhaps too much power for their own good, but still it was taken for granted, that the us Congress was up to its task and regularly intervene when lawless vigilante behavior of the intelligence services got out of hand.

In reality, it turned out that time after time the invisibles initiated illegal and murderous actions worldwide without asking anybody's permission, including the White House, let alone Congress. The Tonkin Gulf incident during the Vietnam war is a case in point. Virtually everybody produced half truths in their respective memoirs about what had really happened. Most recently, Richard H. Shultz, professor of lnternational Politics at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, published The Secret War Against Hanoi, Kennedy's and Johnson's use of spies, saboteurs, and covert warriors in North Vietnam³. Shultz relays how on July 30, 1964 us warships shelled Hon Me and Hon Nieu in the north, thus provoking Hanoi to retaliate. They attacked the USS Maddox on August 4, 1964. This incident, provoked by the us side, set the stage - as it was planned by the invisibles all along - for the escalation of the war against Hanoi.

‘However,’ wrote professor Shultz, ‘the incident did not result in the actual decision to escalate. The Johnson Administration had already determined it was necessary. The incident was the vehicle through which the president was able to act on what had already been decided.’ In other words, us intelligence first attacked Hanoi territory to instigate a reaction, which promptly came. Next the Pentagon cried ‘foul’ and had Congress adopt the notorious Tonkin Gulf Resolution opening the gates up to the us Air Force to start bombing the open cities of Hanoi and Haiphong. That was 1964. By the time Bill Clinton launched cruise-missiles into Sudan or Afghanistan, to try diplomacy first was a notion that had long ago disappeared from the brains that were taking decisions at the White House.

Wise and Ross concluded their 1964 remarkably fore-sighted analysis of what was really happening in America with observations like, ‘The primary concern of the men who drafted the Declaration of Independence was the consent of the governed. By the mid-twentieth century, under the pressures of the Cold War, the primary concern of the nation's leaders had become the survival of the

2 Willem Oltmans, On Growth, The Crisis of Exploding Population and Resource Depletion, Putnam & Sons, New-York, 1974, p.p. 1-7.

3 Richard H. Shulz, The Secret War Against Hanoi, Kennedy's and Johnson's use of spies, saboteurs, and covert warriors in North Vietnam, Harper Collins Publishers, New-York, 1999.

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governed’. The invisible government emerged as an instrument designed to insure national survival. ‘But because it was hidden, because it operated outside of the normal Constitutional checks and balances, it posed a potential threat to the very system it was designed to protect.’⁴

Former President Harry Truman who in 1947 had signed the National Security Act, which gave birth to the cia, was in 1963 sufficiently alarmed that he sounded a warning, ‘We have grown up as a nation, respected for our free institutions and for our ability to maintain a free and open society. There is something about the way the cia has been functioning that is casting a shadow over our historic position and I feel that we need to correct it.’⁵ Some Kennedy buffs quoted this Truman text pointing to the fact, that he had sounded his warning four weeks after the jfk assassination, which could signal his suspicion, that indeed the Dallas murder had been set up by the intelligence services. The Dallas ambush, they felt, had been carried out with precision and sophistication, and only the brains of kids would accept the official explanation that the President was killed by a lone ex Marine from a window at the Dallas Book Depository. Apart from the fact, that the Zapruder film showed quite clearly that jfk was hit from opposite sides.

I do not think, that anyone expects Bush junior, Cheney or Rumsfeld to come up with a text like Eisenhower's in 1960, warning for the dangers surrouding the military-industrial complex, because the trio themselves are closely linked to the invisibles. Nor does anybody expects a warning anymore, as Truman voiced in 1963. The United-States is actually run in 2001 A to Z by an Invisible Government. The democratic election in 2000 became an embarrassing yoke visible to the entire world. But the true significance of that drama will only become clear during the next few decades. The mad scheme about a protective shield against incoming missiles, is already a stark reminder of more nonsense to come. The minds that run the current us Administration were of course programmed in the era of the Cold War. The current president's men are obviously incapable of adapting to new realities as they exist in the 21^st century, which the President demonstrates, especially when left on his own without the benefit of a prompter, he then produces incoherent blabber. Mexican writer, Carlos Fuentes, called Bush II during a recent press conference in Guatemala City, ‘an ignorant lunatic’. Even members of het us cabinet complain publicly, that they are not consulted and don't know what is going on. The younger Bush runs the White House, and thus the United States - and the world - like a Politburo. Quo vadis America?

4 David Wise, Thomas Ross, The Invisible Government, Random House, New-York, p.p. 348.

5 Washington Post, December 22, 1963.