COMMENT
Comment The Guatemala Lesson The only surprise is the surprise. In late March, it came out that the CIA had a paid agent in Guatemala who was responsible for the 1990 torture and brutal slaying of...
...Federal Judge Eugene Nickerson didn't mince any words when he struck down the policy as unconstitutional...
...they're just not sure how rich.' —from an article in The Wall Street Journal on April 7 entitled, 'Business Is Big Beneficiary as "Contract" Is Completed' the environment are taking a back seat to private interests and profit...
...Look at how they've chosen to pay for these tax cuts to the rich...
...But it is an important first step.' —Matthew Coles, director of the ACLU's notional Lesbian and Gay Rights Project, and one of the attorneys for the plaintiffs in the case Judge Nickerson decided...
...Clinton's first impulse is to compromise...
...In El Salvador and Guatemala and elsewhere around the globe, the "criminal element" is the CIA itself...
...Once a decade, when the American public finally hears about the atrocities that are committed with our tax dollars and in our name, everyone in Washington claims to be shocked, shocked, shocked...
...Happy Earth Day The Republicans are stepping up their war on the environment...
...They may spend millions of dollars in P.R...
...Riddle: How do you tell a good Kurd from a bad Kurd...
...Veto, veto, veto—that should be Clinton's motto...
...William Safire, the apologist's apologist, defended the CIA for winning the Cold War...
...Come on, fellows, get on with it...
...And the current policy isn't making their lives any easier...
...They interrogated me and burned my back with cigarettes III times, and they raped me numerous times...
...Here we have an agency that overthrew the democratically elected Guatemalan government of Jacobo Arbenz in 1954 because a U.S...
...it would abandon an attempt to regulate runoff from cities and farms...
...They take care of their own...
...The CIA is a scandal...
...Weren't we supposed to protect them from being massacred by some aggressor nation...
...Even in •this Guatemala case, the CIA did not act alone...
...The State Department knows it...
...They would allow many businesses to double their tax write-offs...
...Turkey is waging all-out war against the Kurds, and it has invaded northern Iraq to do it...
...Veto the Republican bill on welfare—it's a disgrace—the single most brazen assault on the poor to pass the House in four decades...
...But, in a telling move, they chose not to allow this credit to poor families...
...Lesbians and gays in the military have suffered enough...
...C q m m e n 'Business struck it rich during the 100 days...
...The word out of Washington is that Clinton's hoping the Senate softens the worst of the Republican measures so that he'll be able grudgingly to sign on...
...The United States much prefers a stable, if brutal, ally to an independence movement...
...Last year, the United States gave Turkey $525 million in economic and military aid, making it the third largest recipient of U.S...
...Veto the Republican crime bill—it is an all-out attack on the Fourth and Eighth Amendments that protect against unlawful searches and seizures and cruel and unusual punishment...
...and it would give much greater weight to the costs companies must pay to control the pollution they themselves create...
...Bring on the Veto Bring on the veto...
...The CIA, according to The New York Times, funneled $5- to $7 million annually in military aid to Guatemala at a time when no such money was supposed to be going there...
...It would redefine wetlands and by so doing severely limit the amount of acreage that is protected...
...Here we have an agency that admittedly misled Congress about the DeVine case and now pleads that it doesn't have all the information it needs to explain what happened...
...Don't ask, don't tell" suits them just fine, thank you...
...i ut getting rid of the CIA is not enough...
...Sweet irony there— the United States had imposed a no-fly zone in northern Iraq to protect the Kurds from Saddam Hussein, but it lifted the ban so that Turkey could go in and assault the Kurds with U.S...
...And here we have an agency that is still paying Guatemalan military officers to this day—despite all the revelations that have come out, and despite Secretary of State Warren Christopher's statement that the payments had ended, a statement he was forced to retract...
...There was shock during the Church Hearings in the 1970s about the CIA's role in Vietnam and Chile...
...They were the ones most angry at Newt Gingrich for suggesting the Republicans should abandon "don't ask, don't tell" and return to the absolute ban of old...
...They would reduce the capital-gains tax for businesses and individuals...
...The CIA knows it...
...Senator Bob Kerrey, Democrat from Nebraska, was quick to comfort the American public, saying on the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour that we need the CIA if we are to project power and defend our interests around the world...
...But no...
...This discrimination is illegal and unjust...
...Slash and Burn The hypocrisy of the Republican agenda is too much to take...
...And no one does anything about it...
...ties to Alpirez...
...He understood what lesbian and gay activists have been saying all along, that the policy was designed to cater to the bigots in uniform...
...Why have a Democratic President so he can ratify a Republican program...
...And he didn't buy the government's claim that the policy was needed to protect morale...
...These lobbyists are no longer lurking in the halls and cloakrooms...
...Hitler taught the world what could happen when the government began to target people not for what they had done but because of their status," he wrote...
...The House Republicans have already taken away $17 billion of current spending that was earmarked for the poor—basic things like school lunches, food stamps, home-heating subsidies, and lead-paint removal...
...Congress knows it...
...But watch their lobbying campaign, not their advertising campaign, and you'll know what they—and the Republicans—are up to...
...And they'd give a $500-a-child tax credit to families earning as much as $200,000 a year...
...The Pentagon knows it...
...The only people who like the policy are the high-ranking officers, who can carry out the old witch-hunts under new cover...
...They claim they want to balance the budget, and then they propose tax breaks that will tilt the budget over on its side...
...He already signed the unfunded-mandate bill, which gives states an out if they don't want to enforce regulations on business...
...Here we have an agency that since the 1960s has been hand-in-glove with the hemisphere's most notorious human-rights abusers, as Allan Nairn ably documents in the April 17 issue of The Nation...
...No wonder: they've taken over the sausage factory...
...Ortiz suspects a U.S...
...The House recently approved a package of tax cuts that will drain $630 billion from the budget in the next ten years...
...Good Kurd, Bad Kurd Weren't we supposed to be defending the Kurds in Iraq...
...Veto any Republican legislation to curb affirmative action, which has done more than almost any law in the last century to improve the social and economic standing of women and minorities...
...If we don't get rid of it now, in another ten years or so we'll hear of another case of CIA torture and assassination, accompanied by another round of shock, shock, shock...
...The latest assault is on the Clean Water Act...
...But the guests on his show reassured him that there were good Kurds and bad Kurds, and that Turkey was attacking only the bad Kurds...
...When the House was curtailing the ability of citizens to seek punitive damages from companies or doctors that harmed them, the American Medical Association and the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers of America were at the ready, getting their favorite clauses inserted into the bills which shield them from liability...
...It is the presumption that the United States has a right to intervene in other countries that lies at the root of the problem...
...In the last fifteen years alone, the Guatemalan military has massacred more than 100,000 peasants and Indians, and has tortured thousands more...
...This was, and is, standard operating procedure...
...Since the Republicans took over, public health and 'This is only the first step...
...Everybody is covering up for everybody else," says Carole DeVine, Michael's widow...
...But you've got to hand it to the Republicans...
...You'd have thought the Clinton Administration would have tossed in the towel by now...
...campaigns around Earth Day, trying to make us believe they're all environmentalists now...
...Congress," he said, "may not enact discriminatory legislation because it desires to insulate heterosexual service members from statements that might excite their prejudices...
...It takes a nifty touch to pull off this trick—to give the store away to the rich and then to blame the mess on the poor...
...And the CIA did it again in the early 1990s, after the Bush Administration had cut off military aid because of the murder of the American innkeeper, Michael DeVine...
...national security...
...And so the United States has given the green light to the crushing of the Kurds...
...But this was not the work of one overzealous agent or one rogue operation...
...Army may also have been involved, and they were busy with their shredders as soon as Torricelli went public with the allegations about U.S...
...Much as they holler about the need for a balanced budget, Republicans are more interested in helping their fat-cat friends...
...Wasn't that one reason we went to war against Saddam Hussein—because he was attacking the Kurds in his country...
...Up to now, the prevailing standard has been, properly, about public health and environmental protection...
...Give it up...
...It shields officials from responsibility, it diverts attention away from the CIA's systematic pattern of human-rights abuses, and it thereby deflects criticism against the entire agency...
...When the House was trashing environmental legislation, the chemical companies, the agribusiness companies, the mining companies, the paper companies, and the big developers worked shoulder to shoulder with the Republican legislators, making sure that their exemptions made it into the bill so that they could pollute with impunity...
...But look who's attacking the Kurds now...
...Gingrich is hardly the lone defender of the status quo...
...And there are many in Washington who don't even want the issues discussed in public...
...now there's shock that the CIA's been involved in these Guatemalan murders...
...It's still clinging to the policy, and it's preparing to appeal...
...To a level almost unprecedented in this century, business lobbyists are directly involved in writing the laws that cover their practices...
...But now they're taking the frontal assault: they're rewriting the laws entirely...
...The CIA did this in the 1980s, as Nairn reported way back in 1986 in The Progressive...
...They just railroaded the clauses right through...
...If that wasn't bad enough, they lowered me into an open pit that was filled with human bodies.' —Sister Dianna Ortiz, an Ursuline nun from Grants, New Mexico, recounting her capture in November 1989 by the Guatemalan military...
...it's one of our NATO allies...
...official connected with the American Embassy was involved with her torture...
...Republicans would abolish the alternative minimum tax for corporations—an out-and-out bonanza for business...
...Here we have an agency that paid Alpirez—another illustrious graduate of the U.S...
...But it doesn't suit the Constitution...
...It was bad enough when they gummed up the regulatory process, making it virtually impossible to enforce the laws on the books...
...They may actually prefer a budget that is not balanced, because then they can always raise the bugaboo of deficits to justify their slashing of aid to the poor...
...jet bombers...
...One of the grossest sights in Congress these days is the crowd of lobbyists dipping their hands into the legislative process...
...The United States never cared about the Kurds— they've always just been pawns in our power games, convenient to wheel out and convenient to abandon...
...Representative Robert Torricelli of New Jersey, who disclosed these facts, said "the agency is simply out of control and contains what can only be called a criminal element...
...When the bills passed the House, the Republican leadership claimed victory, but the people who were really beaming were the business lobbyists in the back...
...And his political judgment is to tack rightward, so he's inclined to go along with much of what the Republicans are doing...
...These payments continued during the Clinton Administration...
...A whole hell of a lot of good that'll do us...
...At that time, no one owned up that Guatemalan colonel Julio Roberto Alpirez, implicated in the death, was on the CIA payroll...
...School of the Americas— $44,000 in 1992, even after it had learned about his involvement in the murder of Michael DeVine...
...The United States is not prepared to abandon either presumption...
...The Republicans were so sleazy about this process that they didn't even allow input from the Environmental Protection Agency, which will have to implement the legislation...
...The National Security Agency and the U.S...
...There's an old saying that compares the making of legislation with the making of sausage: you don't want to examine the process too closely or you'll lose your appetite...
...Veto the Republican revision of the legal system, which will serve only to protect corporations that injure or kill consumers because of defective or poisonous products...
...And he did so with a particularly specious claim: "the alternative outcome—Soviet-Cuban hegemony up to our Mexican border—would have been far worse for democracy and human rights...
...Let's get rid of it...
...It is the presumption that any left-wing movement abroad is somehow a threat to the United States and must be eradicated at all costs that allows the United States to involve itself with torturers in the first place...
...In late March, it came out that the CIA had a paid agent in Guatemala who was responsible for the 1990 torture and brutal slaying of an American innkeeper (his head was nearly sawed off by a machete) and for the 1992 torture and murder of the husband of Jennifer Har-bury, an American citizen...
...They would give breaks to rich individuals who want to take advantage of individual retirement accounts...
...Veto the Republican bill on federal regulations— it'll set back environmental, occupational, and consumer protections by twenty-five years...
...These are the facts...
...they're seated at the drafting table, drawing up the bills and churning out exemption after exemption, giveaway after giveaway...
...That's what the CIA does...
...And he's likely to sign many more planks of the Republican contract...
...That's a four-letter word we'd like to hear out of Clinton's mouth a lot these next few months...
...But even these devastating cuts will not nearly compensate for the giveaways the Republicans are lavishing on the rich...
...The President knows it...
...prohibitions on aid to Guatemala...
...If that's what our foreign aid is going for, maybe Jesse Helms is right for once...
...The corporations don't care about clean air, or clean water, or pristine forests...
...In the last year since the policy took effect, the military discharged 507 people for homosexuality, roughly the same number as in the previous year under the old ban...
...Unlock the Doors Iow much longer are we going to have to put up with the foolishness of the Clinton Administration's "don't ask, don't tell" policy on gays in the military...
...But don't count on it...
...A House subcommittee has already voted by an overwhelming margin to poke huge holes in the Act...
...As in previous disclosures, the expression of shock serves a number of purposes...
...This blatant hypocrisy finally moved Robin MacNeil of MacNeil/Lehrer to the point of indignation—a destination he rarely gets to...
...But the Guatemalan case demonstrates in almost crystalline terms why the CIA should be abolished once and for all...
...Here we have an agency that has repeatedly violated U.S...
...Answer: If a bomb lands on a Kurd, that's a bad Kurd...
...there was shock in the 1980s when it was revealed that the CIA had Salvadoran death-squad members on its payroll...
...It's not bad old Saddam Hussein...
...That's why Torricelli has come under fire from Newt Gingrich, who wants to boot him off the House Intelligence Committee for disclosing CIA complicity in the Guatemalan murders...
...banana company, United Fruit, was worried about its plantations...
...Tell that to Jennifer Harbury, Carole DeVine, and the hundreds of thousands of people who died brutally at the hands of the Guatemalan and Salvadoran military in the name of U.S...
...The CIA organized the death squads in these countries, financed them, equipped them, trained them, and consulted with them on individual cases of torture and assassination...
...There will be deeper cuts yet to come...
...Sausage, Anyone...
Vol. 59 • May 1995 • No. 5
