Wars
of the Laptop Bombers
Today's
Stories
February 23,
2005
Alexander Cockburn
Hunter
S. Thompson and Gonzo
February 22,
2005
Kirkpatrick
Sale
Imperial
Entropy: the Collapse of the American Empire
February 21,
2005
Hunter S. Thompson
"He
Was A Crook"
John Ross
Mexico:
the Pentagon's Proxy Army in Iraq
Ward Churchill
What Did I Really Say? Why Did
I Say It?
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
Military Recruiting on Channel One: Geometry 101, Brought to
You by the US Navy
David Swanson
Fighting for a Living Wage, State by State
Dave Lindorff
All the News That's Fit to Fake
Stew Albert
Fear and Loathing: HST
Michael Neumann
Strategies
in Palestine: a Shrinking Pie in the Sky
February 19
/ 20, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Back
to Salem: Paul Shanley and the Return of "Recovered Memory"
Kathleen Christison
Struggling
for Justice in Palestine
Ted Honderich
On Being Persona Non Grata
Gary Leupp
Self-Hating Gays: Welcome to the White House & Welcome to
Commit Suicide
Don Santina
Reparations for the Blues
Jennifer Roesch
John Negroponte: Dirty Warrior
Scott Richard
Lyons
Ward
Churchill and the Identity Police
Chris Clarke
Ward Churchill and Liberal Outrage
George Beres
Censorship in the Land of Wayne Morse: Gagging W. Churchill in
Oregon
Harry Browne
The Belfast Heist: the Plot Unravels
Manuel García,
Jr.
Who Killed Rafik Hariri?
Mark Scaramella
Lessons from the Hidden Afghan War
Michael Donnelly
Whatever Happened to John Edwards?
John Pilger
First, They Attack the Past
Norman Madarasz
Death Wish for Reform in Brazil?
Surendra Devkota
The Monarchy in Nepal
Deborah Rich
How Anti-GMO Ballot Measures May Miss the Mark
Fred Gardner
When Dr. Tod Met Merle Haggard
CounterPunch
News Service
About King Mswati: Political Developments in Swaziland
Richard Oxman
CounterPunching Arthur Miller
Poets' Basement
Albert, Giebel, Tripp, Engel and Orkin
February 18,
2005
Ben Moxham
In
East Timor, the Nightmare Continues
Dave Lindorff
The
Scum Also Rises: the Bloody Career of John Negroponte
Larry Birns
Negroponte: a Resume of Death Squads, Deceptions and Bribery
Gregory Elich
N, Korea's Phantom Nukes and the US's Subversion of Diplomacy
Samuel Logan / John Meyers
The Future of Colombia's Paramilitary Death Squads
Nicole Colson
Shock and Awe on Civil Liberties: From Lynne Stewart to Ward
Churchill
Suzan Mazur
Whose National Security Are We Talking About?
Mickey Z.
"One
Man Has Stopped Killing"
February 17,
2005
Joshua Frank
Hogtying
of the Deaniacs
Paul Craig
Roberts
Bush's
Willing Sychophants: the Conservative Media
Robert Fisk
Under
the Shadow of Death in Lebanon
Christopher
Brauchli
Where
Time Stands Still: Kinsey and Darwin in Cobb County, GA
Dr. Teresa
Whitehurst
Military
Recruitment TV: Why Send Them to College, When Your Kid Can be
Cannon Fodder?
Alison Weir
Russia, Israel and Media Omissions
Ahrar Ahmad
A Review of Shahid Alam's "Is There an Islamic Problem?"
Saul Landau
An
Interview with Cuban VP Ricardo Alarcon: "The US Tramples
the Laws It Wrote"
Website of the Day
Petition to Support Ward Churchill
February 16,
2005
Robert Fisk
Lebanon:
a Battlefield for the Wars of Others
Kevin Zeese
Creating a Real Ownership Society: Share the Wealth; Protect
Retirement
Gary Leupp
Meanwhile, in Nepal...
Ron Jacobs
Why the Iranian Opposition Should Not Trust the Bush Administration
Jessica Leight
Oil-Flush Chavez Begins to Strut His Stuff
Greg Moses
Houston, You've Got a Problem: Documenting Voting Irregularities
in Texas
Mark Engler
The Last Porto Alegre
Jack McCarthy
Where's the Outrage About Pat? Buchanan Does a Churchill
Bill Christison
US
Foreign Policy Dangerously Slanted Toward Israel
Website of the Day
The
World is Melting: a Photo Survey by Gary Braasch
February 15,
2005
CounterPunch
News Service
Dean
a "Safe" Moderate, Says NYT Citing CounterPunch
Robert Fisk
The
Killing of Mr. Lebanon
Uri Avnery
"Sharm-al-Sheikh,
We Have Come Back Again"
Stan Cox
Fighting Big Pharma in Little Digwal
Mickey Z.
Radio
Active North of the Border: an Interview with Chris Cook
Dave Zirin
Bashing Bush: Jose Canseco Comes Clean
Nadia Martinez
Ending
World Poverty? Opening at the World Bank, Apply Now
Lila Rajiva
"Little Eichmanns" and the 'Harijan': the Danger of
Magical Thinking in Politics
Paul Craig
Roberts
The
American Job Sell Out
February 14,
2005
Robert Jensen
Ward
Churchill: Right to Speak Out; Right About 9/11
Brian Cloughley
Kuwait's Freedom, Bush-style
Patrick Cockburn
Outcome
of the Iraqi Elections: Shortages, Corruption, Guerrilla War
Gary Leupp
Post-election Iraq: What Next?
Michael Donnelly
Sacred Nature: Just Another Commodity?
Dave Lindorff
When Bush Came to My Neighborhood
Elaine Cassel
The
Lynne Stewart Verdict
February 12
/ 13, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Ward
Churchill's Genes
Saul Landau
Alarcon
Speaks: an Interview with the Vice President of Cuba
Paul Craig
Roberts
Nothing
to Fear But Bush Himself
Patrick Cockburn
Two Years After the Fall of Saddam, the Resistance Controls All
Major Roads into Baghdad
John Feffer
Bush
v. N. Korea: Round Two
Mickey Z.
Right to Remain Silent; Duty to Speak
Kurt Nimmo
Viva la Cucaracha!
Fred Gardner
Waiting for Raich
Dave Zirin
Fighting the New Republic(ans)
John Chuckman
Hiroshima, Mon Amour
Ben Tripp
A Leftist on the Bush Payroll
Carol Norris
"Buddy, Can You Spare a Dwarf?"
Robert Fisk
No Middle East Peace Without Justice
Frank / Chowkwanyun
Muzzled Activist in an Age of Terror: the Case of Sherman Austin
Mike Whitney
Condi's Euro Tour
Deborah Frisch
A Psychologist's Defense of Ward Churchill
Niranjan Ramakrishnan
Reading Khomeini in Colorado
Christine TenBarge
What's So Special About Ward?
Ron Jacobs
Curtis Mayfield's Train to Jordan
Dr. Susan Block
Chemistry of Love: a Valentine's Greeting
Poets' Basement
Louise, Smith-Ferri, Ford and Albert
Website of the Weekend
Free Sherman
February 11,
20055
Manuel Garcia,
Jr
The
Eight Percent War
Kurt Nimmo
Ann
Coulter's Racism: Where's Geronimo When You Really Need
Him?
Dave Lindorff
Guckert
or Gannon? The Perfect Plant; He Fit Right In
Larry Birns
War is Peace; Slavery is Freedom: Democracy According to Elliott
Abrams
Bill Quigley
Twenty Questions: a Social Justice Quiz
Tom Barry
Bush's State of Delusion
Jennifer Van
Bergen
Lynne
Stewart's Conviction Hurts Us All
February 10,
2005
Dave Lindorff
What
Academic Freedom?
Christopher Brauchli
The Love of Slaughter: From Rwanda to Iraq
Patrick Cockburn
In Baghdad, It's Easy to Get Killed
Nicole Colson
Have the Democrats Surrendered on Abortion Rights?
Suzan Mazur
More
on the Assassination of Lumumba from Mr. Garsin of Kinshasha
Michael Donnelly
Salvaging an Opposition
Mike Stark
Driving Ossie Davis: "Give Them a Little Truth, a Little
Hope"
Greg Moses
Taking
Jesus Back from the Hijackers
Website of
the Day
The Missionary Positions
February 9,
2005
Jeffrey St.
Clair
Duck
and Cover Redux: Bunker Busters and City Levellers
Mickey Z.
What Ward Churchill Didn't Say
John Ross
Hecho
en Mexico: the Iraqi Election
Tom Barry
Ambassador of Lies: Elliott Abrams, the Neocon's Neocon
Conn Hallinan
The
Coup in Nepal: Nursing the Pinion
Patrick Cockburn
Sistani's Vision for Iraq: Cricket is Fine, But Chess is "Absolutely
Forbidden"
Steen Sohn
Danish PM Says It's OK for Israel to Violate UN Resolutions
Tim Wise
Reflections on Empire and Uppity Indians
Website of
the Day
Support Antiwar.com
February 8,
2005
Patrick Cockburn
Shia/Kurd
Coalition to Dominate New Iraqi Govt.: "It's an Electoral
Pact, Not a Party"
Brian Cloughley
Out
of the Mouths of Generals: "It's Fun to Shoot Some People"
Steve Breyman
Against the Selfishness of the "Ownership Society"
Harry Browne
"Don't
Get on that Plane!": Soldiers Seek Asylum in Ireland
Doug Giebel
"We Love Free Speech in America": the People, the President
and Ward Churchill
Nate Collins
The Censorship of Ward Churchill and Dancehall Reggae: It's the
Same Beast
Dave Lindorff
It's Time for a Labor-Oriented Newspaper
David Smith-Ferri
Sanctions and the Health Crisis in Iraq
February 7,
2005
Paul Craig
Roberts
Bush's
War on Jobs
Carolyn Baker
The New McCarthyism on Campus: Churchill and the Attack on Higher
Ed
Joshua Frank
Marc Cooper's Hit List: First Mumia; Now Ward Churchill
Mickey Z.
Warning: More Hate Speech from W. Churchill
Patrick Cockburn
The
Kidnapping Gangs of Iraq
Mike Whitney
Tom Friedman: Scribe for New Age Imperialism
Stacie Jonas
Pinochet: Fit to be Tried
Dave Zirin
A Miserable Super Sunday: Clinton, Bush and the FBI
Tariq Ali
Imperial
Delusions
February 5
/ 6, 2005
Alexander Cockburn
Ward
Churchill and the Mad Dogs
Kurt Nimmo
A Ward Churchill Kind of Day
Joshua Frank
Liberals Trash Ward Churchill
P. Sainath
Mumbai's Man-Made Tsunami
Patrick Cockburn
Sistani's Triumph; Allawi's Bust
Laura Carlsen
Bush, Rice and Latin America
Dave Lindorff
How the NYT Killed the Bush Bulge Story
Pamela Olson
West Bank Story
Behzad Yaghmaian
The Future of Sudanese Refugees in the West
Saul Landau / Farrah Hassen
A Threatened UN in King George's Court
Roger Burbach
World Social Forum: a Tale of Two Presidents
Robert Fisk
History by Laptop
David Swanson
James Forman and the Liberal-Labor Syndrome
Justin E.H. Smith
Gay Marriage: a Report from Canada
Cacie Hart
The "State" of the Union: More War and a Ban on Love
Ron Jacobs
Chairman Bob Avakian: a Revolutionary Life
Mickey Z.
Viewing America from the Outside
Ben Tripp
Republican Heroes: a New Breed of Good Guy
Ben Sonnenberg
France at the End of the Devil's Decade: Renoir's Rules of the
Game
Poets' Basement
Smith-Ferri, Davies, Collins, & Albert
Website of
the Weekend
John Trudell: How to Earn a 17,000 Page FBI File
February 4,
2005
Brian Cloughley
The
Army Symphonist: "Sometimes the Only Way to Change the Behavior
of Someone Like That is to Kill Them"
Bill Christison
Election
Parallels: Vietnam, 1967; Iraq, 2005
Elaine Cassel
Did Zoloft Make Him Do It?
Jacob Levich
Chomsky and the Draft
Kanak Mani Dixit
Return of the Royalists in Nepal
Ron Jacobs
The
Downward Spiral in Iraq
February 3,
2005
Ward Churchill
On
the Injustice of Getting Smeared: a Campaign of Fabrications
and Gross Distortions
Sharon Smith
Resisting
Soldiers Need Our Support
Mickey Z.
Leslie
Gelb Asks Iraq: Who's Your Daddy?
Mike Whitney
President of Alienation: a Desperate State of the Union
Jenna Orkin
9/11 the Sequel: the Toxic State of Lower Manhattan
Saul Landau
Elections Won't Prevent Civil War in Iraq
Yitzhak Laor
Strange is the Silence
Dave Lindorff
The
Assault on Social Security: a New Campaign of Lies
February 2,
2005
David Domke
/ Kevin Coe
Bush's
Brand of Christianity
Noam Chomsky
Iraq
After the Elections
M. Shahid Alam
O'Reilly's
Fatwah on "Un-American" Professors: FoxNews Puts Me
in Its Crosshairs
Richard Oxman
Ringing in 1984 with Ward Churchill and Derrick Jensen
Joshua Frank
The Suckering of Howard Dean
Dave Lindorff
A History Lesson from the NYT
Nina Hartley
Feminists for Porn
Website of the Day
War is a Racket
February 1,
2005
Joshua L. Dratel
The
Torture Memos
Patrick Cockburn
New Doubts About Allawi
Robert Fisk
"The Only Decent Food We Get is at Funerals"
Uri Avnery
The Stalemate
Col. Dan Smith
"W" Stands for Withdrawal
Alison Weir
Making America as "Secure" as Israel
Alan Farago
Heaven and Hell in the Everglades
Ray Hanania
Low Voter Turnout of Iraqi Expatriates: Less Than 10% of Qualified
Voters
Paul Craig
Roberts
American
Police State
Website of the Day
Statisticians Refute Official Rationale for Exit Poll Errors
December 22,
2004
James Petras
An
Open Letter to Saramago: Nobel Laureate Suffers from a Bizarre
Historical Amnesia
Omar Barghouti
The Case for Boycotting Israel
Patrick Cockburn / Jeremy Redmond
They Were Waiting on Chicken Tenders When the Rounds Hit
Harry Browne
Northern Ireland: No Postcards from the Edge
Richard Oxman
On the Seventh Column
Kathleen Christison
Imagining
Palestine
Website of the Day
FBI Torture Memos
December 21,
2004
Greg Moses
The
New Zeus on the Block: Unplugging Al-Manar TV
Dave Lindorff
Losing
It in America: Bunker of the Skittish
Chad Nagle
The View from Donetsk
Dragon Pierces
Truth*
Concrete
Colossus vs. the River Dragon: Dislocation and Three Gorges Dam
Patrick Cockburn
"Things Always Get Worse"
Seth DeLong
Aiding Oppression in Haiti
Ahmad Faruqui
Pakistan and the 9/11 Commission's Report
Paul Craig
Roberts
America
Locked Up: a System of Injustice
Hot Stories
Alexander Cockburn
Behold,
the Head of a Neo-Con!
Subcomandante
Marcos
The
Death Train of the WTO
Norman Finkelstein
Hitchens
as Model Apostate
Steve Niva
Israel's
Assassination Policy: the Trigger for Suicide Bombings?
Dardagan,
Slobodo and Williams
CounterPunch Exclusive:
20,000 Wounded Iraqi Civilians
Steve
J.B.
Prison Bitch
Sheldon
Rampton and John Stauber
True Lies: the Use of Propaganda
in the Iraq War
Wendell
Berry
Small Destructions Add Up
CounterPunch
Wire
WMD: Who Said What When
Cindy
Corrie
A Mother's Day Talk: the Daughter
I Can't Hear From
Gore Vidal
The
Erosion of the American Dream
Francis Boyle
Impeach
Bush: A Draft Resolution
Click
Here for More Stories.
|
February 23, 2005
What the CIA's Nazi Files Can Tell Us About Iraq
The
Poisoned Well
By
WERTHER*
"The past is not dead.
In fact, it's not even past."
--William Faulkner
Since the attacks of 11 September 2001,
the American public has endured an astounding avalanche of official
lies, half truths, pseudo-events [1] and sheer balderdash that
will surely enter the Guinness Book of Records. Among
the most persistent and infuriating lies of government, to those
who have imbibed their knowledge of the past from the crystalline
springs of Gibbon and von Ranke, is the misleading historical
analogy. Its purpose is twofold: to relativize whatever current
disaster the governing class has waltzed the hapless populace
into; and to kill any usable past. The technique also has the
added benefit of making government placemen sound learned
at least in the estimation of an audience which gains its knowledge
of the world through Fox News and other State media.
Iraq is a fruitful field for detecting such historical fables.
It was during the summer of 2003, as it first became evident
that the natives of Mesopotamia were less than entirely enthusiastic
about their liberation, that the American apparat swung
into action with historical comparisons between Iraq and the
occupation of Germany.
Then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice took to the hustings
to tell the Veterans of Foreign Wars, in her characteristic school-marmish
fashion, that occupied Iraq was no more of a problem than occupied
Nazi Germany and look what a rousing success that turned
out to be: "There is an understandable tendency to look
back on America's experience in postwar Germany and see only
the successes, but as some of you here today surely remember,
the road we traveled was very difficult. 1945 through 1947 was
an especially challenging period. Germany was not immediately
stable or prosperous. SS officers-called 'werewolves'-engaged
in sabotage and attacked both coalition forces and those locals
cooperating with them-much like today's Baathist and Fedayeen
remnants." [2]
Whereupon the irrepressible Secretary Rumsfeld immediately chimed
in with his own historical tour d'horizon: "One group
of those dead-enders was known as 'werewolves.' They and other
Nazi regime remnants targeted Allied soldiers, and they targeted
Germans who cooperated with the Allied forces. Mayors were assassinated
including the American-appointed mayor of Aachen, the first major
German city to be liberated. Children as young as 10 were used
as snipers, radio broadcasts, and leaflets warned Germans not
to collaborate with the Allies. They plotted sabotage of factories,
power plants, rail lines. They blew up police stations and government
buildings, and they destroyed stocks of art and antiques that
were stored by the Berlin Museum. Does this sound familiar?"
[3]
Frankfurt
Was Not Fallujah
One wonders which community
college-educated speech writer activated the larynxes of our
senior government officials. As history, this was bunk, although
it sounded plausible to the half-educated mind. American forces
took Aachen in October 1944 well before the largest battle
ever fought by the U.S. Army, the Battle of the Bulge, and fully
six months before the 8 May 1945 "end of major conflict"
in the European Theater. The assassination of Aachen's mayor
and the capers of the Werewolves were distinctly small beer,
because they occurred in the midst of the bloodiest land battles
in world history. The Werewolves, Rumsfeld's proto-Baathists,
only existed as a viable force as an adjunct to a still-functioning
German government holding territory between the Rhine and the
Oder-Neisse; a government that could put, even at that late date,
8 million men into the field. At the time, 4th Generation Warfare
operations were distinctly subsidiary to conventional military
campaigns. [4]
Once hostilities ended, the situation was otherwise than described
by Professor Doktor Rice and Kriegsminister Rumsfeld.
Compared to the 1,484 dead and 10,487 wounded in Iraq, the few
post-VE Day GI homicides principally occurred from black market
deals gone wrong or quarrels over a Fräulein. The
dynamic of post-war Western Germany, where the population was
uniformly terrified of a vengeful Red Army and accordingly seeking
protection of the Amis, is a dynamic absent from present-day
Iraq.
There are, however, profound lessons to be derived from the occupation
of Germany and its integration into the post-World War II American
world system. Principal among the institutions which America
absorbed into its national security state was German Intelligence,
specifically the Gehlen Organization.
A Viper
Enters the Nest
The story of General Reinhard
Gehlen has been endlessly rehashed in books, articles, History
Channel reprises, and Gehlen's own self-serving memoirs, so we
do not intend to recapitulate the full historical record. But
this precis will suffice for our purposes:
During mid- and late World War II, Gehlen was head of Foreign
Armies East, a Wehrmacht organization tasked with gaining
order-of-battle estimations of the Red Army. As the self-flattering
retrospectives would have it, Foreign Armies East's estimations
were more accurate than those of the ever-optimistic Hitler and
his sycophantic retinue. Consequently, Gehlen's favor fell as
the Russian steamroller inexorably crunched towards the Reich.
By early 1945, Gehlen and his associates saw the inevitable,
and, having no desire to join their Führer on a Wagnerian
funeral pyre, resolved to make a deal with the Western allies.
They microfilmed choice extracts from their files and buried
them in containers somewhere in the Alps.
At war's end, Gehlen surrendered to the Americans and made a
startling proposition. He would provide the Americans with what
they lacked: intelligence about their erstwhile ally, the Soviet
Union. To newly-minted intelligence officers from Topeka and
Paducah, this sounded like an arresting offer. By August 1945,
the Americans were sufficiently intrigued to fly Gehlen, in the
uniform of a U.S. Army general, to Washington in General Walter
Bedell Smith's transport aircraft. He met with such "present
at the creation" panjandrums as Allen Dulles and William
Donavan.
The outlines of the deal are these: Gehlen would transfer his
organization and its information into the American intelligence
network. As indubitable anticommunists, their zeal to serve their
new masters was self-evident. All Gehlen demanded in return was
the following:
o Gehlen must have complete
control over his organization's activities;
o He retained the right to approve U.S. liaison officers to the
Organization;
o The Organization would only be used against the USSR and its
client states;
o The Organization would become the official intelligence agency
of a future West German state;
o The Organization would never be required to do anything Gehlen
considered against German interests. [5]
As the reader can surely guess,
the American authorities snapped at the bait like a starving
barracuda. And the rest is history: Since the Gehlen Organization's
sole claim to legitimacy was its purported knowledge of the Soviet
Union, the Red Army perforce became 20 feet tall.
Threat Inflation:
A German Import?
Elementary knowledge of human psychology suggests that once the
United States Government ceased to be terrified by the Soviet
military, the Organization would no longer have a privileged
and well-paid function; its flunkies would accordingly be obliged
to scratch a living through honest toil. That alternative being
abhorrent, the U.S. Government received and disseminated the
most baroque exaggerations of Soviet power only a few years
after the European USSR had been nearly leveled, with up to 27
million military and civilian deaths. Despite the fundamental
weakness of the post-war Soviet Union (which Stalin attempted
to conceal) Congress and the America public obtained a steady
diet of scare stories:
o In 1948, U.S. intelligence
purported to believe the Red Army could mobilize "320 line
divisions" in 30 days. This at a time when millions of Soviets
were living in holes in the soil of Western Russia, there being
nothing better to house them.
o The same year, the Secretary of the Navy told Congress that
Soviet submarine were "sighted off our coasts"
although the Office of Naval intelligence could offer no evidence
of such sub sightings. Its own estimates said that the Soviet
Navy would be unable to mount continuing, overseas operations
until 1957.
o Air Force Secretary Stuart Symington claimed in Congressional
hearings that the Soviet Air Force was superior to that of the
U.S.
o The military governor of Germany in 1948, General Lucius Clay,
wrote a letter that conveniently found its way to Congress, stating
that it was his "feeling" that the Soviets were planning
war. [6]
Where did these estimates come
from? Did the Gehlen Organization, which was essentially the
executive agent of U.S. intelligence in Eastern Europe, have
anything to do with it? The CIA's reticence, right up to February
of this year, to declassify its files regarding interaction with
Nazi personages is telling. [7]
The historical rehashes belabor the obvious: not only did the
Gehlen Organization have a motive to exaggerate the Soviet threat,
but the potential interest of war crimes courts in its members
made them prime candidates for KGB blackmail. And, predictably,
the Gehlen Organization was thoroughly penetrated by Soviet intelligence,
to the detriment of both American intelligence operations and
the German government whose chancellor, Willy Brandt, fell
in a spy scandal.
So far, so bad. Conventional history has correctly perceived
the corrupted intelligence provided by the Gehlen Organization
during the cold war. But it does not answer the question, why
did the Americans tumble so readily in 1945 when they had abundant
adverse information available to them about the effectiveness
of German Intelligence?
Dulles and
Other Dullards
In 1945, when Walter Bedell Smith, Alan Dulles, and their coat
holders fell for Gehlen's pitch, they were in possession of a
priceless insight into the spying abilities of their wartime
foe the Ultra secret.
Beginning in 1940, the British were able to read the ciphers
transmitted by what the Germans believed to be their unbreakable
Enigma code machine. Intermittently at first, the British (with
their American allies looking over their shoulder) succeeded
with increasing speed and accuracy to crack first the sloppy
Luftwaffe code, then the Army's, and finally the Kriegsmarine's.
The allies not only knew what the Germans knew and planned, but
perhaps more critically what they did not know about allied
operations.
And in fact, strategic intelligence about the allies was a blank
spot for Germany. Tactically and operationally very proficient
(perhaps the best in the world), the Germans were amateurish
in divining what B.H. Liddel Hart would have called what was
happening "on the other side of the hill." What else
would explain the fact that MI 5 turned or executed every single
agent the Germans attempted to insert into Britain? What else
would explain the Germans' falling for the elementary ruse of
the fake "Army Group Patton" in the buildup to D-Day?
What else would explain the Germans' horrendous failure at Kursk,
in contrast to the Russians' accurate divination of the Wehrmacht's
plans to attack the Kursk salient?
Given their access to this information, why did the American
authorities nevertheless assume that Reinhard Gehlen had something
valuable to offer them at extortionate terms? Foreign Armies
East may have been more or less accurate in providing rough order-of-battle
estimates of Red Army strength, as long as there was a copious
supply of Red Army POWs, but why did the Americans assume, against
all evidence, that Gehlen had the slightest clue about strategic
matters: what Stalin was planning, the general thrust of Soviet
policy?
Ordinary human experience suggests that the wish was father to
the thought: American intelligence believed because it wanted
to believe. Far from being righteous and wise pillars of the
American Century, Allen Dulles and his comperes were merely corrupt
and incompetent scions of rich establishment families; in Dulles's
case, he elbowed his way into intelligence work in order to provide
hot tips to his investment banking friends.
Dulles's post-World War II partiality towards Nazi war criminals
was essentially a continuation of his pre-war activities as a
partner of Sullivan and Cromwell, a firm which facilitated transnational
business agreements with the German cartels. Dulles's performance
in the Bay of Pigs invasion does not suggest a penetrating strategic
mind. His primitive thinking more likely went along the following
lines: If Meyer Lansky could replace Castro as the ruler of Cuba
it would signify a victory for private investment, just as Gehlen
or Alfred Krupp was preferable to some German Social Democrat
who had spent the war in Buchenwald.
Chalabi:
Bastard Child of Gehlen?
But the U.S. Government's gullibility, and culpability in these
matters, does not end with its danse macabre with National
Socialism. From the abortive invasion of Cuba, through Dallas,
Watergate, Iran-Contra, to the present imbecility of economic
sanctions, Cuban "exiles" have distorted and debilitated
American politics for more than four decades. All our knowledge
of Cuba is what "exiles" comfortably ensconced in Coral
Gables want us to think, just as our appreciation of the USSR
was distorted by exiles from the Greater Germany Project. Exiles
like General Gehlen.
Does this begin to sound familiar? Why is everything we are supposed
to know about "the Greater Middle East" funneled through
a foreign power? Do Ahmed Chalabi's alarming pronouncements about
Iraq's weapons of mass destruction circa 2003 sound oddly
similar to Reinhard Gehlen's ominous estimation of Soviet capabilities
circa 1948? Will we soon hear alarming news of Iran's nuclear
capabilities from Iranian exile organizations like the Mujahedeen
e Kalq?
Gehlen's malignant ghost is laughing.
* Werther is the pen name of a Northern Virginia-based
defense analyst.
[1] The concept of the pseudo-event, i.e., a contrived incident
intended to be disseminated for propaganda purposes through the
mass media, was fully delineated more than four decades ago:
The Image: A Guide to Pseudo Events in America, by Daniel
J. Boorstin, 1961, Atheneum.
[2] "Condi's
Phony History," by Daniel Benjamin, Slate, 29
August 2003.
[3} Ibid.
[4] Werther Report:
4GW and the Riddles of Culture.
[5] The Yankee and Cowboy War, by Carl Oglesby, Sheed
Andrews and McMeel, 1976.
[6] Examples of early post-war threat inflation are found in
Harry
S. Truman and the War Scare of 1948, by Frank Kofsky, Palgrave
Macmillan, 1995.
[7] "Congress,
CIA Resolve Dispute Over Nazi Files," Voice of America,
9 February 2005
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