{"id":266,"date":"2005-07-08T23:28:58","date_gmt":"2005-07-09T04:28:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=266"},"modified":"2010-12-05T22:16:01","modified_gmt":"2010-12-06T03:16:01","slug":"war-powers-war-lies-part-6-war-off-the-books","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/?p=266","title":{"rendered":"War Powers, War Lies: Part 6: War Off the Books"},"content":{"rendered":"
The Big Picture Home Page<\/a>\u00a0| Previous Big Picture Column<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0 Next Big Picture Column<\/a>\u00a0<\/address>\n
War Powers Page<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Previous War Powers Column<\/a> |\u00a0Next War Powers Column<\/a>\u00a0<\/address>\n

War Powers, War Lies: A Series<\/h2>\n

Part 6: War Off the Books<\/h2>\n

\u00a0Published in the Maryland Daily Record July 8, 2005<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The chefs who cooked the Enron books well understood the principle: to make something disappear (a $1.2 billion-dollar loss, just to choose a wild example), have it occur off the books, on someone else\u2019s balance sheet.\u00a0 This approach works equally well if you want to make a war disappear.\u00a0 Say you\u2019re the President of a well-known North American country and don\u2019t want to have to take the hit for bombing or assassinating or overthrowing someone, or committing genocide or scorched-earth ecological destruction.\u00a0 Do you let some fusty constitutional technicality about the power to declare war belonging to your Congress or some high-minded but impractical international law requiring open declarations of war before the commencement of hostilities get in your way?\u00a0 Please, that is so 18th<\/sup> Century!<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 No, for at least the last half-century the American way to skin this particular cat has been twofold: train homegrown warriors whose activities we can deny, and sponsor foreign warriors whose activities we can disavow.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 When it comes to our own forces, we\u2019re talking about covert<\/em>, not merely clandestine<\/em> activity.\u00a0 The distinction: Clandestine activity may be hidden, but it is employed against openly acknowledged adversaries; covert is where we\u2019ve never admitted to the world we\u2019re treating someone as an adversary at all.\u00a0 See 50 U.S.C. \u00a7 413b(e)<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Obviously it\u2019s tough to employ conventional armies and navies both directly and covertly at one and the same time; all those personnel and all that hardware tend to attract notice, and so it is seldom done.\u00a0 (One exception: the 1970 bombing of Cambodia, carried out by conventional forces, that is, Air Force B-52s, was covert, at least as to Cambodia with which we were not theoretically at war, though it was merely clandestine as to North Vietnam, an acknowledged enemy whose supply lines we were trying to hit.)<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Special forces (Deltas, SEALs, Green Berets, Rangers and the like) and shadowy warriors attached to the CIA Directorate of Operations actually can do the covert thing in the field.\u00a0 That said, these forces seldom engage in warfare that is simultaneously direct and covert.\u00a0 They have a lot of overt and clandestine missions<\/a>;\u00a0 light-infantry shock troop operations, establishing beachheads behind enemy lines until the heavier forces arrive, a la Rangers; underwater demolition like the SEALs; precision shooting to kill the hostage-taker but not the hostage, like Deltas, and clandestine guerilla operations.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But the same skills can be and have been used to perpetrate covert warfare.\u00a0 The Iranians know.\u00a0 In 1954 militarized elements of the CIA directly carried out attacks that helped return the Shah to power, and after the Shah\u2019s overthrow, in the late 1980s SEALs reportedly continually covertly boarded, mined and sank Iranian craft that threatened the oil commerce in the Persian Gulf.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And the Special Operations Command (which since 1987 has run most Defense Department special forces) makes no bones about its capabilities this way.\u00a0 In its 2003-04 \u201cPosture Statement\u201d the Command proclaims: \u201cSpecial operations are operations conducted in hostile, denied, or politically sensitive environments to achieve military, diplomatic, informational, and\/or economic objectives…. These operations often require covert … capabilities.\u201d[1]\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The special forces usually don\u2019t go it alone, however, and the public record discloses few instances in which special forces were later revealed to have served as covert armies waging their own wars.\u00a0 Instead they tend to act as a force multiplier, teaming up with local insurgencies which can be trained, supplied, and often directed, but disavowed.\u00a0 Perhaps the most notorious instances were the CIA paramilitaries\u2019 equipping and training of the Cuban exiles in 1961 to conduct the Bay of Pigs invasion (which there was a game though futile attempt to keep covert), and the CIA\u2019s heavy role in covertly equipping and training the anti-Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the early 1990s.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The CIA\u2019s role in Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation of the 1980s was exhaustively detailed in Steve Coll\u2019s 2004 book Ghost Wars<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 Taking to heart the Hebrew proverb that my enemy\u2019s enemy is my friend, the CIA decided that it should team up with Pakistani and Saudi intelligence in supporting Pashtun Muslim fundamentalists in their attacks on the Soviet occupiers.\u00a0 We supplied Stinger missiles, money, and knowhow, and eventually the Soviets withdrew, leaving their puppet Najibullah in place for a while.\u00a0 During that interim, CIA and the State Department staged a tug-of-war over whether we should be continuing to support the fundamentalists, by now known as the Taliban, or should throw our support to more secular warlords.\u00a0 This was in the face of the increasingly hostile face shown the U.S. by the fundamentalists, and in particular by Osama bin Laden, who by then had emerged as one of their principal financiers and an organizer of international support.\u00a0 It was in the face, too, of the increasingly obvious entanglement of the Taliban with international terrorists who were using Afghanistan as a training ground.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The CIA won.\u00a0 The covert warriors of CIA held their noses and kept telling themselves \u2013 until it was far too late \u2013 that at least the Taliban were an improvement on the Soviets and on the old traditional warlords.\u00a0 Certainly they were an improvement from the point of view of Unocal, which worked hand-in-glove with the secret U.S. policymakers in hopes of building a natural gas pipeline through Taliban-controlled areas of Afghanistan.\u00a0 Driven originally by our interest in defeating the Soviets and later by our desire to stay in the good graces of Pakistan and Unocal, we felt privileged to weigh in semi-secretly against the civil and religious freedoms of all Afghans.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As the latter instance revealed, the people our special warriors get into bed with may not be very savory.\u00a0 In Douglas Walker\u2019s 1994 book The Commandos<\/a><\/em>, there is a detailed account of the annual Green Beret training exercise known as Robin Sage, which among other things specifically prepares Green Berets to work with local guerillas who may be larcenous, murderous, dishonest, and thoroughly untrainable in respect of observing human rights.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But the lion\u2019s share of the covert warfare is conducted not by making war, directly or indirectly, on other countries.\u00a0 Instead, our Special Forces, the CIA paramilitaries, and thoroughly conventional U.S. forces, train and supervise wars by foreign governments upon their own citizens.\u00a0 That is where the real action lies.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The marquee institution for fostering this kind of warfare used to be known as the School of the Americas.\u00a0 In 2001, to douse the political firestorm around the School, it was renamed the Western Hemisphere Institute of Security Cooperation.\u00a0 It still has the same mission, the same faculty, the same kind of student body, and an only superficially redesigned curriculum.\u00a0 So let\u2019s just call it SOA.\u00a0 You can read all about it in Lesley Gill\u2019s 2004 book, The School of the Americas<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 At SOA, the elite military and police forces of friendly Central and South American countries come to learn military techniques, military leadership, and how to fight their special sort of war.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 As Gill points out, for SOA and its students, there\u2019s always a war on.\u00a0 From the time of the founding of what became SOA in 1947 until the early 1990s, the official enemy was communism, thought to threaten our southern neighbors.\u00a0 Even before the rise of Casto and the triumph in Nicaragua of the Sandinistas, Washington had concluded that without constant intervention, the Western hemisphere would end up transformed into a series of Soviet client states.\u00a0 The U.S. was not opposed to this outcome merely on the basis of ideology; we also had significant business interests to protect.\u00a0 A notorious example was the interest of United Fruit, in whose honor the CIA staged a coup in Guatemala in 1954<\/a> against a popularly-elected government that was involved in expropriating United Fruit\u2019s plantations.\u00a0 That government was falsely proclaimed by the Dulles brothers, who respectively ran the CIA and State Departments, as communist.\u00a0 The coup which brought it down was falsely presented as having been entirely an internal matter, instead of completely bought and paid for by the CIA (and United Fruit).\u00a0 Later on, the enemy in our Latin American proxy wars became drug interests.\u00a0 (Although not, ironically, in our underground wars in Pakistan and Afghanistan, where the drug interests were frequently sponsored by us.)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 From the start, however, the Latin militaries and their U.S. sponsors had other targets as well \u2013 and not just in guerilla insurgencies suspected of Communist leanings.\u00a0 As Gill writes: \u201cCommunist subversion became defined as anything that challenged the status quo, and broad sectors of the population \u2013 students, activists, trade unionists, peasant organizers, and religious catechists \u2013 came under suspicion.\u201d[2] Which explains why, to choose two instances among hundreds, two graduates of the SOA were involved in the murder of Archbishop Oscar Romero, and perhaps as many as 18 SOA alums<\/a> were in on the 1989 murder of six Jesuit priests, their housekeeper and her daughter in El Salvador.\u00a0 But it went beyond mere conventional left\/right politics.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Less well-known here than our own country\u2019s race problems are the racial issues underlying the whole structure of Latin American society and in particular the class structure within its militaries. Frequent atrocities committed by Latin American militaries, generally under the guidance of SOA graduates, can only be explained as a war against indigenous Native American populations.\u00a0 Sometimes this is as blatant as the 1980 massacre of the entire Salvadorian Indian village of El Mozote (approximately 800 people) by soldiers; 10 of 12 of the leaders were SOA graduates.\u00a0 Sometimes it is more subtle, as in the drug wars in the Putamayo region of Bolivia, where, as Lesley Gill describes, in the last six years massacres and herbicide fumigation have driven indigenous farmers from large areas and left the survivors destitute.\u00a0 The massacres are carried out by paramilitaries closely associated with the Bolivian army, and the unit commanders in the Army are working closely with U.S. advisers sent direct from the SOA.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The SOA and affiliated training programs quite explicitly pursue the objective of building close ties among Latin American militaries, and of coordinating them under U.S. leadership \u2013 a leadership that understands full well that if the armies involved are not fighting each other (and they generally do not), the only possible adversaries left for the trainees are the citizens of those very countries from whose armies and police the trainees are sent.\u00a0 To that end, the SOA curriculum includes interrogation techniques which theoretically no longer include torture \u2013 but certainly used to.\u00a0 The SOA was greatly embarrassed when only partially redacted versions of the manuals were made public in 1996, and they were found to contain directions for torture, assassination, and blackmail.\u00a0 While those manuals are no longer used at SOA, it is rumored that the training in these dark arts has simply been shifted to other, less public locations.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 How could this happen?\u00a0 Certainly nowhere did the U.S. Congress or public decide to wage war on indigenous peoples, intellectuals, unionists, and clergy to our south, any more than we ever resolved to aid religious fanatics who would impose the burqa on all female Afghans and deny them educations, and any more than we publicly decided to be of material assistance in the development of Al Qaeda.\u00a0 Yet this is exactly what our wars off the books have done.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The trouble lies in what Lesley Gill calls a culture of impunity.\u00a0 The reason we conduct both covert wars and proxy wars is that we want not to be accountable for them, either to our enemies or to our own citizenry.\u00a0 We train and direct militaries like the South American militaries, which have their own preexisting culture of impunity \u2013 almost total lack of accountability no matter what breaches of constitutions, human rights or social order they perpetrate, and the game goes on.\u00a0 These militaries may commit atrocities in their own name.\u00a0 For instance, SOA graduates include such luminaries as Manuel Noriega (Panamanian kleptocrat and drug dealer), Leopoldo Galtieri (architect of the Argentinian dirty wars), Roberto D\u2019Aubuisson (who ordered the murder of Archbishop Romero), and Hugo Banzer (brutal Bolivian dictator).\u00a0 But they are just as likely to carry out the game through their own proxies, paramilitaries and killing squads that provide their own level of deniability and impunity.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Once we start sponsoring such people, we are deluding ourselves if we think they can be controlled.\u00a0 We sponsor not only the Latin militaries or Pakistani intelligence or the Taliban but also the people they work with \u2013 the kind of people who would rape and murder nuns \u2013 or crash jetliners into the World Trade Center.\u00a0 They may be off the books, but they are also off the reservation.\u00a0 And since we do not officially sponsor them, we cannot hold them accountable.\u00a0 Of course, in theory, we cannot be held accountable, either.\u00a0 We have impunity.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Except that maybe our own impunity is wearing off.\u00a0 That was the point Osama bin Laden made repeatedly, for instance in an interview with Al Jazeera in October 2001: \u201cWe treat others like they treat us.<\/a>\u00a0 Those who kill our women and our innocent, we kill their women and innocent, until they stop from doing so.\u201d\u00a0 We can of course disagree with bin Laden on the specifics of U.S. policy that reportedly enrage him, and note that they do not seem to relate much to innocent victims of our policies, nor does bin Laden seem to have been personally a victim of the killing of \u201cwomen and innocent.\u201d\u00a0 His invocation of such offenses may in that sense be opportunistic.\u00a0 But we can hardly dispute this specific point: that all over the world \u201cwomen and innocent\u201d have<\/em> died in our off the books wars.\u00a0 9\/11 was surely mostly payback for other things, but there is every likelihood it included payback for our Enronized wars as well.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And make no mistake: the El Mozote massacre of 800 Indians with U.S.-made weapons perpetrated by troops led by U.S.-trained officers[3] cannot have felt much different to the Indians from the way 9\/11 felt to us.\u00a0 The wholesale destruction of Putamayo cannot have felt much different.\u00a0 And when we create these grievances, we cannot count on our geographic isolation or our personal innocence or our military strength to protect us any more. In our newly interconnected world, revenge no longer requires an army.\u00a0 And even setting revanchism aside, it is hard to justify, from any strategic calculus, making ourselves hated gratuitously.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 And gratuitous is the word.\u00a0 Our record in waging war off the books is one of almost universal failure.\u00a0 Where are the successes?\u00a0 The Bay of Pigs?\u00a0 The drug wars?\u00a0 Iran-Contra?\u00a0 In truth, these adventures almost always end badly.\u00a0 All we end up doing is playing ball with people who commit atrocities, en route to precipitating some kind of U.S. policy failure.\u00a0 Most of the time, therefore, no serious case can be made that the ends end up justifying the kind of means under discussion here.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 There is, to be sure, an argument that we have had successes.\u00a0 Apart from Cuba, Communism has never established itself in Latin American; could that not be partly the result of our proxies\u2019 overthrowing legitimately elected but leftist governments in Guatemala (1953), in Guyana (1964), and in Chile (1973), and waging Argentinian dirty war in the 70s and 80s and manning the Salvadorian death squads in the 80s\u00a0 among their many other accomplishments? There are multiple refutations: the historical record does not credibly make the overthrown governments out to be Communist, and the kind of governments we tried to prevent were exemplified in one that prevailed despite us, the Sandinistas of Nicaragua, who certainly never became a vector of the Communist virus.\u00a0 Most of all, we now know that our critique of Communism was utterly correct: it did<\/em> destroy prosperity when it stamped out market economies, and it did<\/em> perpetrate such violations of human rights, in short it did<\/em> contain such contradictions that it was bound to fall on its own. So even if Communism had spread, we can now see, it would have died just as it did in the old Soviet Union.\u00a0 The near-disappearance of the Communist threat in our hemisphere is no evidence of the success of our Enronized warmaking, just of what was going to happen anyway.\u00a0 But in struggling to prevent what was never destined to come to pass anyway, we squandered our resources and our moral standards.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Could it be, therefore, that the secrecy and the lies are themselves the problem?\u00a0 That if we engaged in no wars except the wars we openly waged ourselves, and submitted those wars to open debate before beginning them, we would end up doing far less harm both to ourselves and others?\u00a0 The Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, known as the Church Committee issued reports in 1975 and 1976.\u00a0 The Committee well articulated the problem: \u201cIn its consideration of covert action, the Committee was struck by the basic tension–if not incompatibility–of covert operations and the demands of a constitutional system. Secrecy is essential to covert operations; secrecy can, however, become a source of power, a barrier to serious policy debate within the government, and a means of circumventing the established checks and procedures of government. The Committee found that secrecy and compartmentation contributed to a temptation on the part of the Executive to resort to covert operations in order to avoid bureaucratic, congressional, and public debate.\u201d\u00a0 A result of the Church Committee was the creation of Senate and House Committees to oversee all covert activity, and the institution of a regime of secret court orders for certain activities.[4]\u00a0 This was a reasonable compromise, although there has been at least one notable failure of the Executive to abide by it: Iran Contra, i.e. the movement of profits from illegal sales of arms to Iran into the pockets of the Nicaraguan Contras, a right-wing paramilitary Congress had specifically directed the Reagan administration not to fund.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 But all the Church Committee\u2019s work accomplished, in any case, was a compromise. Covert consultation with Congress is not consultation with the American people.\u00a0 And we can draw almost no consolation from it, because it does not address the problem the Church Committee put its finger on: it runs contrary to the checks and balances of our constitutional system, blocks serious debate, and becomes a vehicle, as a direct result, for the Executive doing things it knows would not pass muster were a debate to be held.\u00a0 Our Enronized wars have repeatedly put us on the side of torturers, rapists, murderers, kleptocrats, and totalitarian thugs.\u00a0 They have made a mockery of the very ideals we claim to be submitting as a model for the world.\u00a0 And they have reaped no gains or small gains for us.\u00a0 And the small gains, like the driving of the Soviets from Afghanistan, have only set the stage for catastrophically worse impacts upon U.S. interests.\u00a0 And when we ask why so many in the world hate us, we need to eschew inane comments like we are hated for our freedoms, and look at more obvious reasons, including the killing of women and innocents in our Enronized wars.<\/p>\n

\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 War off the books has been a failure, morally and practically.\u00a0 As a nation, we need to reexamine fundamentally whether we should ever, under any circumstances, allow it at all.\u00a0<\/p>\n

[1]. \u00a0This statement is no longer posted, as it was when the piece was written.\u00a0 It\u2019s current (as of 2010) successor is to be found here<\/a>.\u00a0 While it does not use the same language, the same message is apparent.<\/p>\n

[2].\u00a0 Gill at 73.<\/p>\n

[3].\u00a0 E. Alterman, When Presidents Lie<\/a><\/em> (2004), as Page 259.<\/p>\n

[4].\u00a0 See also PL 95-511.<\/p>\n

Copyright (c) Jack L. B. Gohn<\/p>\n

The Big Picture Home Page<\/a>\u00a0| Previous Big Picture Column<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0 Next Big Picture Column<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n

War Powers Page<\/a>\u00a0|\u00a0Previous War Powers Column<\/a> |\u00a0Next War Powers Column<\/a>\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

To make something disappear, have it occur off the books, on someone else\u2019s balance sheet. This approach works equally well if you want to make a war disappear. Use Special Ops forces, or foreign proxies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[580,571,585,626,586,410,576,614,609,570,584,618,569,630,632,633,577,567,568,583,619,573,578,623,596,627,616,409,566,604,588,575,608,629,625,628,612,615,622,601,620,592,407,357,605,594,611,589,621,582,404,617,613,624,598,55,631,606,590,599,574,634,579,603,572,581,587,591,593,597,602,607,595,600,610],"class_list":["post-266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-bigpicture","tag-580","tag-571","tag-afghanistan","tag-al-jazeera","tag-anti-soviet-forces","tag-argentina","tag-army-rangers","tag-atrocities","tag-avery-dulles","tag-b-52s","tag-bay-of-pigs","tag-bolivia","tag-bombing-of-cambodia","tag-chile","tag-church-committee","tag-church-committee-report","tag-cia","tag-clandestine-activity","tag-covert-activity","tag-cuban-exiles","tag-culture-of-impunity","tag-delta-force","tag-directorate-of-operations","tag-dirty-wars","tag-douglas-walker","tag-drug-wars","tag-el-mozote","tag-el-salvador","tag-enron","tag-fidel-castro","tag-ghost-wars","tag-green-berets","tag-guatemala","tag-guyana","tag-hugo-banzer","tag-iran-contra","tag-jesuit-priests","tag-latin-american-militaries","tag-leopoldo-galtieri","tag-lesley-gill","tag-manuel-noriega","tag-najibullah","tag-native-americans","tag-navy-seals","tag-nicarague","tag-osama-bin-laden","tag-oscar-romero","tag-pakistani-intelligence","tag-panama","tag-posture-statement","tag-president-ronald-reagan","tag-putamayo","tag-racism","tag-roberto-daubuisson","tag-robin-sage","tag-ronald-reagan","tag-salvadorian-death-squads","tag-sandinistas","tag-saudi-intelligence","tag-school-of-the-americas","tag-seals","tag-senate-select-committee-to-study-governmental-operations-with-respect-to-intelligence","tag-shah-of-iran","tag-soa","tag-special-forces","tag-special-operations-command","tag-steve-coll","tag-stinger-missles","tag-taliban","tag-the-commandos","tag-the-school-of-the-americas","tag-united-fruit","tag-unocal","tag-western-hemisphere-institute-of-security-cooperation","tag-william-foster-dulles"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=266"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1598,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/266\/revisions\/1598"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thebigpictureandthecloseup.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}