Postscript:
In the spring of 1995 one can find reassuring articles in such mainstream liberal publications as Rolling Stone which speak of the radical restructuring of the US intelligence agencies and the possibilities for the elimination of the CIA. Those who have followed closely the history of previous congressional "reform" attempts know that what is publicly discussed amd recommended has little to do with whatever actually happens. Multi-billion dollar public institutions often find ways of reproducing their agendas in other forms, and in the case of the CIA, obscuring the reality of existing affairs and future planned activities is its strongest forte. This is one of the reasons why other more savvy observers contend that in discussing its openness to reorganization in changing times, the CIA is only exercising its new role of serving as a public scapegoat and diversion for activities that have already been safely relegated to the Defense Intelligence Agency , the FBI, and the several other branches of the national security state. Large areas of covert operations are thus further shielded from public knowledge and scrutiny. Scandals like the Aldrich Ames affair, with government secrets being sold to the Russians by double agents, in effect function to re-associate the CIA with its mythical Cold War image of legitimate international espionage, and thus displace our attention from the sordid, reprehensible tactics of other covert activities. Whatever steps are taken towards revamping the CIA in the post-Cold War era, it can be safely assumed they will be in the direction of protecting and perpetuating the billions of dollars of federal money that is received and spent by all of these "security" agencies and the millions more in lucrative quasi-private offshoot enterprises including weapons, drugs, and token private sector "consultant" positions in private industry that accrue to many of its principals, retired or unretired. Critics from both left and right, those speaking outside the sanitized bandwidth of corporate media and its narrow range of political coverage, quickly have raised a not unlogical question after the Oklahoma City bombing: Cui bono ? Clearly it will not be the "patriot" militia groups who are currently being targeted, rightfully or wrongfully, for blame. On the contrary, it will be the even more strengthened government surveillance and enforcement agencies, those who have exercised the very excessive government force which has helped to generate these populist groups in reaction, who stand to benefit the most from this act of violence. Once again the cycle of deterrence begets the cycle of violence. This is the order of historical record, and not the reverse.

This presentation is primarily concerned with the difficulties in researching, reporting, and indeed even publicly discussing certain forms of violence that are virtually ignored or unrecognized by the general public and invariably unacknowleged by those institutions who may directly or indirectly sponsor them. A central concern is to underscore as well as understand the continual neglect of this area of pathological and intolerable behavior by those in the academic community and the mainstream newsmedia who should be analyzing and reporting on some of the most unconscionable forms of violence occurring today in human civilization. If the tone herein should seem at times somewhat polemical for academic discourse, I can only remind you that the violence of which I speak, something that indirectly affects all of us, is ruthlessly polemical and deserves a far more polemical response than I can possibly convey here. If much of the violence to which I refer has a widespread though little-known history worldwide, nowhere has knowledge of its perpetration been as successfully "subjugated"---repressed, denied, or covered up as in the United States. This is perhaps largely because the U.S. often has played a crucial role in it, and to have that role fully exposed at home would have made it intolerable to a considerable number of persons and possibly would have jeopardized the shrouded government funding that makes it possible. It would seem to me that the close attention of all of us surely is demanded when we are forced to realize that the United States since WW II arguably has been the world's largest exporter of calculated, pre-manufactured violence, in particular the violence, --- direct, indirect, and peripheral---of so-called "covert operations" designed by agents and of the American military and intelligence organizations. I understand that there are also a considerable number of people who would insist on holding to the official sanitized explanation of these violent actions as the "support of world wide democracy" or the backing of "freedom fighters," or the "necessary price of defeating communist subversion" and other bogus ideological rationalizations that have been offered after untimely exposures. But those to which public reference has already been made are in the least secret categories of covert operations, those of third-world interventions, and the greater portion of the still submerged iceberg is perhaps years away from total exposure, if ever.

Yet regardless of how they are interpreted, it is hard to deny that the violent techniques of these operations have been in fact one of the foremost American commodities sold to the rest of the world. But we do know now that they frequently include interrogation by torture and maiming as well as military and police "death squads" whose methods terrorize the civilian public and wreak incalculable "collateral" damage. Furthermore, the United States has routinely offered free training and instruction manuals along with this technology to anyone we have convinced to buy it-- often the most brutal and repressive authoritarian military regimes in Latin America, Africa, and the Far East. What I speak of here is above and beyond: (1) overt American military actions in such places as Grenada, Panama, Libya, and Iraq, which have resulted in excessive and controversial civilian deaths; and (2) the incalculable suffering and death that constantly results from the even less- regulated American position as the number one vendor of weapons in the billowing international arms market. In fact, the above charges of the US role as exporter of violence can be made by referring to merely those American "sponsored" activities that are never fully acknowledged or fully denied, those which are veiled under the secrecy of "classified" information, unavailable to the public or to the oversight of congressional review. Because this type of often violent and illegal activity is specifically designed to have its origins obscured through the practice of "plausible deniability," "disinformation" campaigns, hired agents provocateurs, and other evasive methods, we should understand that the category includes (but is not limited to) the planning and training of others to do what the sponsor wants done precisely in order to have the blame placed elsewhere for its often quite heinous actions. I will first address the relatively well-known genre of covert operations conducted in another country in order to subvert, alter, or control the political destiny of that country. Then I will direct attention to some emerging revelations and further suspicions about some far more secret and arguably more sinister covert operations, including the category "psy-ops"(psychological operations) carried out within the US on unwitting American citizens. Ultimately, my intention is to induce other scholars to inquire into the originary motivations of such barbaric conduct that has been institutionalized into policy unfitting for any society calling its self a democracy. It is perhaps in the gaps and fissures of the unspoken policy that we might find a way to cure its sociopathic malady.

If one is not already familiar with at least some of that to which I refer, I would hope a forum dedicated to the study of violence is an appropriate occasion to begin to consider its virtually unregulated existence. In fact, one might say that the creation and existence of government sanctioned, but still virtually secret, unmonitored covert operations is the primary successful model for the advocates of government "de-regulation." But in the eyes of those who think government regulations can serve a positive and necessary function, this is perhaps the most ominous example of the disastrous effects of un-regulated "private" enterprise that is unaccountable to public scrutiny and full democratic oversight. I would suggest that it is precisely this latter unregulated dimension which offers a relatively "free reign" that has made the choice of covert actions so appealing to the type of masculinist, reactionary, and often racist personality whose manhood is proven by the ability to freely exert his will in situations where he does not have the direct restraints of laws and regulations to "hold him back." In that sense, their continued existence represents the fulfillment of the neo-conservative militarist dream that needs an enemy against which to define a stable, boundaried identity. (One might consider the popular appeal in the stances of Rambo, Reagan, and Oliver North here.) Furthermore, the frequent and natural alliances of the intelligence agencies with organized crime as well as their employment of both common criminals and convicted war-criminals serves to confirm theunavoidable "outlaw" dimension to their activities. But in more straight-forward ethical judgment, there is clearly an element of cowardice in doing things behind people's backs, concealing one's dirtywork, torturing helpless prisoners, and conducting potentially lethal experiments on unwitting victims. This judgment should apply to the upper echelon, Ivy-educated directors as well as to the field operators. Perhaps one of the closest analogues that informs this type of behavior can be found in the Christian witch hunts and executions of the 16th and 17th centuries, a pursuit also motivated by a religious zeal in the self- righteous vanquishing of an "evil" Other. A great deal of this organized violence still remains among the numerous chapters of 20th century history that have been successfully rewritten before they were ever recorded in the official archives, rewritten before the events had ever been publicly reported. As a result, even attempts to discuss openly certain forms of this covert political violence, either in the news media, in congressional investigations, or within academic discourse are usually met with either fierce resistance, fierce denial, or absolute indifference, as if it were so far removed from our daily reality as to be beyond our concern.

But this is only, we should note, if the blame is to fall on American agents. On the other hand, any allegations of similar activities by agents of the designated 'enemy of the moment' are seized upon with full-scale attack with coverage that has often been replete with falsifications and disinformation demanded and provided by the American intelligence apparatus behind the scenes. Few outsiders seem to be aware of the fact that this highly secret regulation and manipulation of media coverage of important events is one of the primary activities of the American intelligence both here and abroad. (Anyone who doubts this can check such investigative studies as Solomon and Lee's Unbiased Sources.: A Guide to Detecting Bias in the News Media.) The fact that so few American citizens are aware of such possibilities renders acts of manipulation that much easier to accomplish. Part of the net result of this is that, much like a primitive individual human psyche incapable of regarding its own capacity for evil-doing, we as a people have continued for decades to project the worst of what we do as a nation upon various demonized Others : the convenient godless, soul-less beast Americans have made of the Communist world, the "Hun" from the steppes, the "Gook," the "Chink", or the "Yellow Menace" from the Orient, and the Latin American "radical-leftist guerillas."The sad truth about this is that, more often than not, these so-called communists, subversives, and other direct menaces to the American way of life, have been merely poor peasants and indigenous peoples who were simply trying to protect their lands and livelihoods which happened to fall in the path of global political or economic developments.

More recently one cannot fail to observe the concerted effort to transfer much of this same militarist hysteria onto the vague menace of "international terrorists." But even communists and terrorists have only been stages on an unending production cycle of fear and paranoia that includes "drugs," "crime," and a now a host of invisible toxic and viral threats. Or as Brian Massumi, condensing the work of French theorists like Baudrillard, Deleuze, Guattari, and Virilio, has contended, we need to describe our present psyco-cultural circumstances in terms of the the late-capitalist state warfare, where we (selves/subjects/ bodies) are engaged in constant physical and mental deterrence: "The cold war in foreign policy has mutated into a state of generalized deterrence against an enemy without qualities. An unspecified enemy threatens to rise up at any time at any point in social or geographic space. From the welfare state to the warfare state: a permanent state of emergency against a multifarious threat as much in us as outside."

One need not be a political scientist or a semiotician to understand how the creation of hollow signifiers to stand as scapegoating targets for amorphous, vaguely defined 'enemies' of the public has served the historical function of demagoguery in support of militarist prerogatives. But at least as important as the underlying political and ideological motivations which perpetuate this form of scapegoating, of the re-production of new enemies, are the financial gains at stake. All corners of the vast "military/ industrial / intelligence / media complex" benefit enormously from the creation, demonizing, and planned liquidation of yet another (real or ficticious) menace to the country's welfare. Sometimes these efforts are aimed only at providing a justification for the continued funding of a government budget line. Yet all of this contributes to what Massumi has called "The Politics of Everyday Fear." In a collection of essays of the same title, he suggests that we have reached the point in our present circumstances where "Fear is not fundamentally an emotion. It is the objectivity of the subjective under late capitalism. ... Fear is the direct perception of the contemporary condition of possibility of being-human." Absolutely essential to the current American political process of formulaic scapegoating and fear-mongering is the omnipresent rhetoric of "national security, " "national defense," and like phrases. The political marketing of fear and its corrective "security" has slipped in uncontested as just one more product in the broader development of the creation, commodification, and marketing of psychological modes, topical identities, a host of related and 'necessary' merchandise, and finally the postmodern advancement of merely marketing the signs or the soundbites of all of these. Indeed, the "security" strategy has functioned incredibly well for several decades, not only as a multi-purpose military/espionage spending justification, but as a smokescreen to any proper democratic scrutiny of the off-record sustenance of brutal authoritarian regimes around the globe and the wide array of illegal covert operations referred to above. The problem remains, in effect, the lack of public surveillance over the huge institution that perhaps grew out of an arrogant, aristocratic cult of surveillance., but has since mutated into an arrogant, cynical, paranoid, self-serving, megalomaniacal, but highly profitable, imperialist cult of global control.

There are, fortunately, a few living drop-outs from this cult. The first ex-CIA operative to attempt to mount a serious international exposure of one branch of the "political police" apparatus was Philip Agee. After great struggles to get his first book published, Agee later joined the staff of the fledgling Covert Action Information Bulletin in attempting to expose the cover of various US agents around the world. Before this endeavor was stopped by legislation making it a crime, Agee wrote with great hope: "More and more CIA people can now be held personally accountable for what they and the Agency as an institution do, for the real harm they cause to people. Their military coups, torture chambers, and terrorism cause untold pain, and their backing of multinational corporations and local elites helps push millions to the edge of starvation and often beyond. They are the Gestapo and SS of our time, and as in the Nuremberg Trials and the war in Vietnam, they cannot shed their individual responsibility simply because they were following a superior's orders." Another former agent who has joined the fight against his former employer is former CIA director of the Angola task force and veteran of covert operations in Vietnam and Zaire, John Stockwell. He has cogently described another aspect of the utility of perpetuating an unstable, threatening world. Noting how, following the escalating investment in military "defense" spending since the early 1980's, the US has plummeted in international rankings for levels of health, education, and other social services, he then describes how this decline of the American quality of life is still useful to the National Security State:

To sell these sacrifices to the American people, the world must be hostile and dangerous....Enemies are necessary for the wheels of the US military machine to turn. If the world were peaceful, we would never put up with this kind of ruinous expenditure on arms at the cost of our own lives. This is where the thousands of CIA destabilizations begin to make a macabre kind of economic sense. They function to kill people who never were our real enemies--that's not the problem--but to leave behind for each one of the dead, perhaps five loved ones who are now traumatically conditioned to violence and hostility toward the United States. This insures that the world will continue to be a violent place, populated with contras and Cuban exiles and the armies in Southeast Asia, justifying the endless, profitable production of arms to "defend" ourselves in such a violent world. In the population at large, it has long been the case that most Americans prefer not to know about what is disturbingly and often disgracefully counter to received wisdom about their country's benign conduct. On the public relations level of government and law enforcement agencies, public denials have been simply automatic: "The such-and-such Bureau/Agency/Department does not engage in illegal activities." Yet as a recent study of the U.S. post-WWII anti-communist "rollback" policy has made convincingly clear, one branch of the government does not hesitate to lie to another or to the public when its own "private" activities may be jeopardized: "Following the coup which installed General Augosto Pinochet's military dictatorship, Richard Helms, CIA director during the Chilean operation, denied in sworn testimony that the CIA had tried to overthrow Allende (the ousted legally elected, social democratic President). Helms was later indicted for perjury and plead no-contest." Now when there is more attention to the extreme degree of mistrust of "Big Government" on the American right, we can wonder if perhaps the long-standing critiques of government abuse by the marginalized left will also receive some re-evaluation. However, it should be made clear from the outset that the majority of criticism of clandestine government wrong-doing through covert operations is not at all in the same register as the high profile clamor of the current neo-conservative "anti-government" movement. On the contrary , most of this critique is carried out under the sign of citizen outrage at the abuses of government power and position by individuals who disdain the democratic processes of oversight and majority rule. Critical investigations of the unregulated "government within" are encountered primarily on non-commercial public radio stations and in independent publications not answerable to major corporate sponsors. They are seldom treated on mainstream corporate news reports. We may then recall the relevance of Foucault's notion of subjugated knowledge. In his thesis a given form of public knowledge is labeled as subjugated when it is driven underground or edited out by the limitations and censorship imposed by the reigning beliefs of the dominant cultural discourse. In the case of violent intervention into the affairs of other countries, our long history of patriotic myopia has sheltered the American public from many of the worst actions that have been committed in its name and paid for with its tax dollars. In the most "unspeakable" domestic incidents (those committed within the U.S.) that we shall touch upon here involving institutional complicity, it is this double aspect of abjection (or revulsion) coupled with a transgression of the acceptable bounds of civil debate that has helped to create a virtual aura of taboo around public discussion. Yet the force of the collectively repressed reaction lives on, in both the growing army of "underground" (or at least marginalized) researchers who try to "expose the cover-up" and in the fierce compensatory defense under the name of patriotic ideals which are invoked as untarnished at the moment of their accelerating disappearance. Occasionally, however, news of some particularly revealing incident does manage to find its way into primetime coverage, albeit with limited and momentary results. Allow me to update my original presentation here to show how an actual example works. In the late spring of 1995, major American daily newspapers reported on further revelations of American involvement with the worst forms of human rights abuse in Honduras during the early 1980's, the period of the Reagan administration's intense pre-occupation with finding a formidable enemy threat in nearby Central America. Using the Freedom of Information act to obtain information twelve years after the fact, the Baltimore Sun reported that: The CIA and State Department collaborated with a secret Honduras military unit known as Battalion 316 in the 1980's, even though US officials knew the battalion was kidnapping, torturing and executing its own people, a 14-month investigation has confirmed.....US officials deliberately misled Congress and the public about the battalion's abuses. ...Beginning in 1981, The United States secretly provided funds for Argentine counterinsurgency experts to train forces in Honduras. By that time, Argentina was notorious for its own 'Dirty War,' which had left at least 10,000 dead or "disappeared" in the 1970s. Argentine and CIA instructors worked side by side training Battalion 316 members...The unit's torturers used shock and suffocation devices in interrogations. Prisoners often were kept naked and, when no longer useful, killed and buried in unmarked graves. ... One who survived, Gloria Esperanza Reyes...said electric wires were attached to her breasts and vagina... Jose Barrera, a former battalion torturer interviewed in Toronto recalled . . "They always asked to be killed,' he said. "Torture is worse than death."

We should also recall that similar and worse covert operations involving torture and death squads often have been closer to the norm rather than the exception in Guatemala, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and other nearby countries during the last few decades of American preoccupation with local efforts at self-determination. As in the Honduran example, as in Brazil and elsewhere, the victims were not only the members of peasant movements for land reforms but university students and professors whose crime was merely for speaking out against injustices. In dozens of other countries across the globe the surveillance, search and destroy, and interrogation methods had often been taught to military and police officers either trained in the US or trained locally by US government personnel. And despite denials to the contrary, there are many examples of direct American involvement in torture, as for instance, the case of the notorious Ohio police chief, Dan Mitrione. Mitrione had been given special training in interrogation techniques by the FBI in order to train South American police in the broader fight against "subversives" and other threats against law and order. He ended up with such a notorious record as a torturer in Uruguay that he was eventually kidnapped by some of the groups he tortured, the Tupamara Indians, and killed. Why would this happen? Perhaps because other American "police advisors," if not Mitrione himself, had been connected to many far more grisly acts, including some in nearby Brazil where disfigured women "sympathizers" whose mouths and noses had been cut away to in order to present a deterrent "example" to the local populace should they think of associating with certain "rebel" political factions. There is no shortage of documentation on direct American involvement in atrocious practices exported to other countries, it is just that few of the 'good citizens' of the US really want to hear about it.

There have been, of course, periodic attempts by Congress to investigate the illegal covert actions of the CIA abroad, less so the military's several intelligence agencies, or the FBI in domestic affairs. And there have been formal investigations into all the major American assassinations. Some of these have been opened and closed and then reopened, but all to little avail. In fact, attempts to regulate more strictly the affairs of the various intelligence agencies have usually resulted in their strengthening and re-entrenchment. It is not that ample information about illegal covert actions has never been revealed. There have been more than enough former agents, those who evidently finally reached their personal limits of moral repulsion at what they saw or in what they participated, who have joined efforts with other critics and analysts to try to expose some of what has been officially denied or hidden. Yet beyond whatever veils of deliberate secrecy may exist, there is something of a mass public denial in the United States of actions and events that are both morally reprehensible and counter to traditional democratic mythology about what can occur "...in this country." Presumption of the moral high ground has always been the initial response for Americans, whether in the denial of obvious facts by the public or in the cover-up by officials of institutionally sanctioned violence and atrocities. One need only look at the initial U.S.government reports circulated about the military invasions of Grenada, Panama, and Iraq in recent years and compare the civilian casualty figures with those found later by independent observers to see the degree of distortion of facts in what can sometimes only be called the cover-up of carnage. Examples of such falsification can also be found in the responses to charges of law-enforcement brutality as well as in the always- obscured activities of the country's intelligence agencies, whether they are operating in so-called "low-intensity" conflicts in distant parts of the globe, or engaging in destabilization tactics in the internal politics of our closest friends or foes.

Ironically, the most successfully concealed covert actions have been in our own back yard, so to speak, where only the most skeptical have been able to believe that our own domestic political system is anything other than the orderly democratic process it has always been claimed to be. While it is not my purpose to review the violent history of American political assassinations --which have almost always been reported as not born of larger political maneuvers but simply the work of "lone nuts"-- clearly the sheer number of these in the latter half of the twentieth century should vitiate the claims of the official "lone-nut" or deranged individual conclusions that have been officially recorded. It is worth noting that one of the reasons many important voices of the "serious Left" have always avoided any discussion of the controversies surrounding assassinations is their fear of placing emphasis on individual crimes rather than on the more relevant factor of systemic corruption. In actuality, the one does not preclude the existence of the other. But it is just as likely that this "respectable" position is often a disguised fear of association with subjects already tainted with the tar-brush of "irrational conspiracy theory." In this respect, the fear of being branded a "conspiratorialist,"of being associated with "conspiracy theory" has functioned as a far more effective deterrent against left opposition than the previously used threat of being colored by association with the pink or red hues of communist "sympathizers". Thus, the greater part of the dedicated old guard left (and this includes most of the "New Left" generation of the 60s and 70s) generally keeps to the safer and intellectually respectable focus on the flaws of the greater Capitalist "system," leaving the dirty work of investigating specific assassinations and other suspected here- and-now cover-ups to either the foolhardy few, or more often to the appropriately "irrational" voices of the far right conspiracy theorists. Those who do conduct research into the history of assassinations and political scandals know this form of deterrence is not incidental good luck, but a long-proven effective strategy by those on the inside of the dominant power structure with something to hide.

The task of the researcher who wants to look behind the possible layers of cover-up in any given political event becomes then somewhat like that of the deconstructive reader, or that of any other contemporary critical method. It is one of reading and rereading texts, isolating the fragments of texts within texts, of sorting out the interwoven narrative strands, connecting the overt surfaces to sub textual registers, looking for unspoken traces leading to unconscious governing master-narratives...of searching out unrecognized presumptions of truth flowing from the official government text, to the journalistic text, to the scholarly text, to the daily public text and deciding what is to be trusted and who is speaking and who is being spoken by the discourse of their profession. In effect, it amounts to inventing a new form of suspicion for an age of media transparency.

Yet we also must notice that along with the increase of virulent rhetoric in scapegoating others coming from what was once considered the far-right, but which now appears to occupy the political center, there are ever-more numerous American citizens who not only condone but apparently revel in the application of violence to various others they count as less than human. In the dangerous calculus of identity politics, revelations of brutality towards third-world citizens or towards domestic racial and sexual minorities are not at all unwelcome to some Americans. Anyone who doubts the ascension of this neo-fascist trend need only tune in to a few episodes of TV's live "Cops" shows which more often than not feature several highly armed white policemen tracking down and beating into submission a single black or brown skinned male all to the apparent approval and enjoyment of the television audience. The elements of racism and voyeuristic sadism are unavoidable in these programs. The reference to historical fascism and its tradition of aestheticizins violence is also appropriate and unavoidable, I think, when we analyze the present tolerance and acceptance of bloodshed. At times this seems to approach the metaphysical sense of violence as regenerative , In his two volume study of masculinist pathologies, Male Fantasies, Klaus Theweleit also addresses the purgative aspect that blood and violence appeared to hold for the Nazi "soldier males" in the Third Reich. We might also recallthe Italian futurist Marinetti's early writings on the glory of the red gore and flowering bomb-bursts in warfare when we observe the American ease in initiating military interventions. Some historians contend that the belief in regenerative violence has always been an element of the American "frontier" psyche. In as much as the increase of violence in the United States today is directly or indirectly a product of the dominant political climate of far-rightist reactionary currents, we can easily see how it is a process that fuels itself on the violent sacrifice of scapegoats. We might then question the frontier allure various Third World adventurism has held for those covert action escapades that have been so popular in the histories of post-WWII U.S.Intelligence operations. We might then consider another remark about historical fascism singled out by Deleuze and Guattari in their work on capitalism and schizophrenia. They cite here the following statement from the French (and incidentally self-styled Christian theorist Paul Virilio, someone who writes much about our cultural immersion in the values of the now fully naturalized and self perpetuating "War Machine.") : "...in fascism, the State is far less totalitarian than suicidal. There is in fascism a realized nihilism."

I would then ask us to reconsider the "no-future" course of current American political power and its devotion to its primary clients, the major American or multinational conglomerates who are apparently unwilling or unable to stop their near-sighted addiction to short term profits regardless of its effects in devouring their own environment. It is not difficult to argue that the economic engines of late-capitalist consumer societies are unmistakably nihilistic in their policies. But are not the reactionary political climate in which they currently thrive and the mostly elder white males who still dominate it also in some sense clearly suicidal ? How can institutions and their directors who routinely calculate the expendibility of other life forms, of their own workers, their own environment, and even of their own future--as for instance the American timber, chemical , and nuclear industries would appear to do--be also considered anything but suicidal? And how can their hired guns in the so-called intelligence agencies and the American military who function to clear the way for capital investment and resource-extraction in Third World countries be anything other than nihilistic when native populations are decimated and American and other soldiers are sacrificed for the sake of corporate profits ?

It was once easy to see this whole complex scenario as a twentieth century form of the Christian crusades. For where multinationals go and where the CIA and its counterparts go, they have almost always been preceded or succeeded by some form of Christian evangelists or missionaries who work with the former hand in hand and quite gladly. United in their religious campaign to oust the Devil as human Other in his modern garments of communism or socialism, they all have preached the gospel of free-enterprise and aggressive individualism against the collective will to group survival of the native populations and their local cultures. Of course it would now appear that the whole syndrome is far more cynical than even that comforting meta-narrative. And far more often than not these peoples' struggles as rebel insurgents had little to do with communism or outside Marxist instigators and a lot more to do with local economic survival and protection of their lands. But to be branded as an infidel in a religious war--now the preferred term of choice is terrorist radical or leftist revolutionary-- is to face high odds of sudden death. Add to this the growing class of former military officers who have become private global arms profiteers, and we begin to see the self-reproducing inflation-proof industry of war and violence that has developed . Hundreds of thousands of Central American peasants have died in these circumstances in the last few decades, and many more across Africa, to give just a few examples. Former CIA agents who have gone public with their criticisms of the agency estimate that since its inception in the late 1940s, the CIA alone is responsible for probably somewhere between six and ten million deaths worldwide. This is truly a holocaust figure that bears comparison with another ideological holocaust of the 1940's out of which this second pogram has somehow grown. How can we say the US does not export death as an irresistible commodity? Perhaps it might be helpful to repeat a remark by Frederic Jameson which also applies here: "...violence springs from counterrevolution first and foremost, indeed the most effective form of counterrevolution lies precisely in this transmission of violence to the revolutionary process itself." Nothing exemplifies the twisted logic of the current American National Security State than this historical record of initiating the deaths of millions of persons, and then defending their actions in the name of the necessity of "...saving them from Communism."

However, there is another sinister but not unrelated form of domestic American political violence to which I finally want to direct your attention briefly . It is something that will probably never be seen on television except within the confines of a far more innocent narrative form, or at least an interpretation to which we have become accustomed. By this point in the 1990s the American public is to a certain degree already inured to the impact of random civil murders, even mass murders of ordinary citizens. This form of violence is what is usually referred to in media reports as "random" or "senseless" or "lone nut" violence," or sometimes it is attributed to "cult" violence or "gang" violence. Against this widely accepted public reading of mere "...individual cases " of madness or ruthlessness--which are taken to be at most simply indications of an "...increasingly violent society"--we are obliged to examine how certain incidents of this genre are now claimed by some researchers of being directly or indirectly planned events; more precisely, events traceable to various institutions--political factions or ideological interest groups, as well as various law enforcement, military, intelligence, or organizations who have learned the uses of civil terror which has functioned so well in other countries.

One of the first lay researchers to start asking these questions was Mae Brussel, a California woman who some thirty years ago initiated an audio research format on non-commercial radio that has been the stimulus for a number of other investigators today. Brussel put together a rather compelling case detailing a complicit and protective relationship by law enforcement and government personnel with the Manson Family leading up to and after its connection to the infamous Tate murders. But still more important was her thorough analysis of how completely and calculatingly this event was used to assassinate the public reputation of the sixties youth movement. Charles Manson as she reminds us, was never either a hippie or a member of the "love and peace" generation, nor was he even at the scene of the crime. Yet this event and his personal image were successfully used by the conservative power structure at that time to strike a decisive blow against the credibility of this blossoming movement with its ideas of a positive and hopeful "counter-culture." The media overload on the so-called "Manson family murders" helped to re-install an era of public fear, mistrust, paranoia and disenchantment, the very cultural tone that at least momentarily had been challenged by the hopeful credos of sixties youth. Also seen in a new light now is Mae Brussel's complex thesis linking the so-called "radical leftist " SLA (bank robbers and kidnappers of Pattie Hearst, the notorious Symbionese Liberation Army ) to the background training of some its members by government intelligence circles. Brussel's research is interesting both for and as cultural studies for several reasons, the most pertinent of which is an implicit attention to how any conclusive notion of "truth" is increasingly problematized in postmodern media cultures. With her tenacious, meticulous approach she recognized how the public sphere, even the social contract itself, is eroded in contemporary Western democracies by the "surplus of information" continually generated by the multiple, often conflicting layers of media input. Or more precisely, she recognized how these circumstances are exploited by various players competing for political and economic power, and how a surplus of narrative explanations for any given event ultimately leads to public indifference.

However, the most shocking and disturbing area of Brussel's investigative work was her contention that at least some of the spate of never solved serial murders occurring in California during the late sixties (the "Zodiac Killer," the "Hillside Slayer,"and others which she collectively called "the California violences") were traceable to covert programs in political destabilization. Here she uncovered a series of links with "mind control" experiments originally carried out by the military and the CIA in the attempt to develop effectively programmable assassins. She, and others more recently, have claimed that various cults, satanic and otherwise, have been used by intelligence operations to hide further their most violent and illegal covert actions. Although there is a long documented account of the CIA's MKULTRA program in various forms of mind control experimentation dating back to 1959, the whole subject has remained in the eyes of the public and the media as almost something of a laughable subject, the stuff of sci-fi movies. However, after new revelations beginning with an updated re-issue of Walter Bowart's groundbreaking 1978 investigation, Operation Mind Control , the subject is at the forefront of questions asked by many researchers after every "unexplainable" assassination attempt, apparently motiveless mass murders ascribed to the "deranged individual" thesis, and even in some of the recent abortion clinic slayings. Brussel was one of the first to suggest that at least some of the unsolved murders may be an example of intelligence agency "psy-ops" (Psychological Operations) modeled on the proven "Strategy of Tension" campaigns successfully employed elsewhere in the world where the common, element has been the creation of public fear and paranoia, or a calculated disenchantment with an ascendant cultural or ideological symbol that can be associated to the crime. To the extent that any of these current investigations may prove critical past events in recent American history to be counter to the officially accepted versions, some striking parallels begin to emerge following known patterns of foreign intervention by American intelligence operatives. In both cases one can find the creation of social unrest and political destabilization achieved through terrorist tactics calculated to discredit certain political sectors, and a predictable subsequent push towards the right with renewed calls for law and order, more police power, more prisons, and more surveillance. In all cases, there is an accelerated political crackdown on dissidents and opposition from the left, always immediately at the moment of their rising political power. While this kind of activity has long been discussed in Europe, it is still met with disbelief in the U.S. French social theorist Jean Baudrillard has posed the obvious question in relation to what has long been known in the Italian example: "Is any given bombing in Italy the work of extreme leftists or of extreme right-wing provocation, or staged by centrists to bring every terrorist extreme into disrepute and to shore up its own failing power, or again, is it a police-inspired scenario in order to appeal to public security."

To the above forms of high-profile random murders and domestic terrorism, some researchers claim we must now add the more subtle but increasingly familiar form of "suiciding," in particular the alleged suicides of well-known and controversial figures.To name but a few deaths which were at first were in no way associated with the possibility of political assassinations are the recent "suicides" of the 1960's left activist Abbie Hoffman, the former head of the German Green Party, Petra Kelly; the independent journalist Danny Casalero who was about to break a case involving high-level scandals implicating the U.S. Justice Department; or any of the numerous witnesses or knowledgeable parties in the 1963 JFK assassination investigation who suddenly died before they had a chance to testify or who died within one year after the crime; or even any number of "despondent" political officials who had been indicted for illegal affairs involving even more powerful officials above them. A clear message of deterrence could be read into each of these examples. But much of the renewed attention comes from a greater awareness of actual development programs for just such techniques by the CIA. Mae Brussel again was one of the first to investigate the use of fast-acting cancers, for instance developed under the umbrella of experimental research for bilogical warfare weapon.

It is not my purpose here today, however, to try to prove or disprove any of the rather startling "allegations" that can only be mentioned in passing here. I do want to emphasize again that it is precisely because of the current state of surplus information and surplus explanations for any given event in postmodern media societies that almost nothing can ever be one hundred per cent proven or disproven, or shown to be convincingly true or untrue to everyone. The assassinations of the Kennedys, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X stand as perpetual reminders of this state of affairs in the late capitalist media state. Overwhelming proof can be either legally denied or provided by a variety of procedures including disinformation and plausible deniability , and the advantage always rests with those with the greatest capacity to buy media time, lawyers, or if necessary, perhaps judges or other government officials. The use of the afore-mentioned "media assets" is also relevant here when a given spin may be needed on particularly alarming news. There have long been literally hundreds of major media journalists who have been on the payroll of the intelligence agenices for just these purposes, probably of the military as well, and this does not include those professional writers and journalists who were never anything but specialized agents in the first place. The ownership of CIA proprietary businesses is well known, but publishing houses (such as Praeger in New York) less so than airline companies. Solomon and Lee's work inUnbiased Sources provides a startling look at just who is on the boards of which news corporation---such as former CIA Director William Casey as a major stockholder of CapCities, owner of the ABC television network. Perhaps we might begin to understand why some writers have begun to label the United States an "oligarchical cryptocracy."

If suspicion of the highest levels of power and finance in the US is at an all-time high in the populace, and is something shared by both right and left, we should begin to notice that much of what both sides are worried about are the same circumstances, which vary only in their widely different interpretations. Chief among fears is the notion of a "New World Order" vocalized by George Bush at the time of the Persian Gulf War. While many on the left see this as a gesture towards the institutionalization of an interlocking gridof economic fiefdoms dominated by a few transnational corporate giants with the US military playing the role of hired global police force, the far-right has imagined this scenario as an attempt by the United Nations and other hostile national governments to secretly take control of the US government and rule the American mainland. Both theses speak to the palpable decline of the US as a sovereign economic power and the visible decay of the American standard of living.

It is unfortunate but unavoidable that the analysis of this subject in the American example first must be discussed against the backdrop of several decades of writings identifying with a rightist, often reactionary Christian perspective which imagines the existence of an international conspiracy behind any communist sympathies or socialist position, or the existence of a "global banking cabal" behind international finances, or "liberal media" manipulations behind all manner of unexplained events, and the precitable claims of an organized "Jewish deception" behind all of the above. This ultra-conservative tradition, which still exist, perhaps stronger than ever, has served to mark off a broad range of subjects that have given a bad reputation to anything that can be conveniently painted with the label "conspiracy theory." Without understanding the historical public set thus created and how it now functions as another method of deterrence in the current American political setting, we cannot understand the difficulty of the efforts of a different group of investigators who generally tend to identify with a left or "progressive" political perspective (or who may in some cases try to disclaim allegiance with any conventional political label). By trying to show that much of what has been called conspiracy is more accurately understood as simply the calculated policies of various powerful institutions, these more recent researchers have been trying to wrest away an area of intellectually respectable political investigation and cultural analysis from the taint of "irrational" rightist conspiracies and from the resultant instant condemnations of an older "serious left" mentality. The new breed of researchers holds in common the initial premise that criminal and covert political manipulations are made eminently possible by an easily manipuable public, a polity that is overly conditioned by mainstream news media tendencies. Their work tends to confirm a remark by John Marks, author of the first book on the history of the CIA's mind control experiments, that "Many of yesterday's conspiracy theories are today's political realities."

Finally I want to give a brief summary of a classic example of US intervention abroad for the purpose of destabilizing democratic political process and undermine the electoral appeal of the left. Nowhere has this been so fully documented and later confirmed in government files than in the Operation Gladio scandal which shook the political foundations of Italy a few years ago. Italians began to have confirmed at last long standing suspicions that their whole post-WWII political history --one that had been rocked by waves of terrorist bombings and civil unrest ---had been manipulated by schemes devised and organized by US intelligence services operating in conjunction with remaining fascist loyalists in the Italian power structure, along with the Mafia and secret masonic-type lodges of the far-right. The latter was referred to in shorthand as the P2 or Propagnda Due structure. It was the recipient of millions of dollars in US funds. A key element of their combined "strategy of tension" was to create random terror (such as allegedly the officially unsolved Bologna train station bombing in 1980 which killed 85 people) and then to attempt to have the blame placed on leftist political organizations. The rationale, as usual, was to discredit and weaken the electoral strength of the very popular Italian Communist Party. The strategy worked very well for at least a few decades to keep the centrist Christian Democartic Party in power until the whole scheme begain to unravel in a series of scandals and revelations. This has led ultimately to the thoroughly disillusioned anti-government vote that recently ushered into power the media magnate Silvio Berlusconi and his neo-fascist coalition.

The final point to which we inevitably are led here is to consider seriously the logical conclusion drawn by those who study the various histories mentioned above. And that is, if the U.S. intelligence services, including the Defense Intelligence Agency of the Pentagon as well as the CIA, can successfully intervene and destabilize the political climate and the democratic process in other countries around the globe in the name of a perverse dedication to American "security" and corporate business interests, interests for whom any left-leaning political group is seen as interference, how can we not conclude that different versions of the same manipulation schemes probably also have occurred here? And how dramatically might these strategies have altered dramatically the domestic political climate? In conclusion, it may be also said that this grey area of "incredible" speculations and unprovable "truths" exemplifies the floating state of factuality in postmodern media societies victimized by both a surplus of "information" and the opportunities for criminal abuse and corruption these circumstances provide. Therefore, contrary to various theoretical pronouncements of the end of a modernist "hermeneutics of suspicion," supposedly invalidated by the new transparent surfaces of postmodern media reality, the continued existence of covert political operations demands a renewed but more vigilent critical hermeneutic of constant suspicion of that which is offered as explanation on the distorted surfaces of our superficial media reality. If anything, our political experience in postmodernity teaches us that the Real, now more than ever, is nothing more than a hegemonic cultural contruction of the dominant power of the moment.

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