America's Human Rights Violators Free to Roam, Write Books, Do Lectures — While Guatamala's Face Trial

Today you have Donald Trump and Ted Cruz competing over how horrible America's torture will be if they get elected - That's because generations of American human rights violators have gone free after they instituted their own programs of assassination, kidnapping and torture.

Top Row, From Left: Byron Diaz, Pablo Mérida, César Morales, Manuel Garcia, and Carlos  López - all recently arrested in Guatemala for human rights violations dating as far back as the 1970's and 80's, including mass murder and torture. Bottom Row, From Left: John Negroponte, James Steele, Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, George H. Bush - just a few of the Americans involved in human rights violations in Latin America (including Guatemala) and present-day depredations, and all of whom are walking around free with no fear of prosecution.—Ronald David Jackson

18 Former Guatemalan Military Officers Arrested for Crimes Against Humanity

By Annie Bird
Guatemalan authorities have arrested at least 18 high-ranking Guatemalan military officers yesterday on charges of crimes against humanity and forced disappearance, according to local press reports.

The arrests include retired generals Benedicto Lucas Garcia, head of the military under his now-deceased brother and former dictator Romeo Lucas Garcia, and Manuel Antonio Callejas y Callejas, long known for his high-level positions during the dirty war and his concurrent management of organized crime networks.

The crimes with which they are charged were part of operations conducted from a military base in the department of Coban between 1981 and 1988, including acts that formed part of the Maya Achi genocide. Exhumations at the base in 2012 recovered remains from over 550 victims–a fraction of the tens of thousands of killings the military is believed to have conducted in Alta and Baja Verapaz from that base but an important step in gathering evidence.

Arrests are ongoing. In a press conference Jan. 6, prosecutors declined to provide specific information regarding pending warrants. Journalists suggested that as many as 25 warrants exist. Initial hearings are expected to begin this Friday. There is no possibility of release pending trial on these charges.

These prosecutions are the result of over 20 years of efforts by the victims, coupled with hard-fought gains in cleaning up corruption in the justice system promoted by human rights and judicial reform activists. ADIVIMA, the association of Maya Achi genocide victims, is a co-complainant in the prosecution, along with the national victims associations, the Association of Relatives of the Detained/Disappeeared in Guatemala (FAMDEGUA) and the Mutual Support Group (GAM).

Unearthing Crimes of the Past and Present

The retired general who was in charge of the Coban base during much of the violence, Ricardo Mendez Ruiz, would undoubtedly have been among those arrested today had he not died on January 1, 2016. Mendez Ruiz maintained a high profile in Guatemala over the past several years due to the activities of his son of the same name. The younger Ricardo Mendez Ruiz is director of the Foundation Against Terrorism, which has promoted malicious legal complaints against those pursuing justice for the crimes committed during Guatemala’s dirty war–a form of political persecution backed by influential retired military officers.

[...]

Concern for the safety of those pursuing justice in Guatemala is heightened as the incoming president, Jimmy Morales, a founder of the National Convergence Front (FCN) party, is set to take office on January 14. Guatemala’s last elected president, Otto Perez Molina, was forced to resign in September 2015 to face corruption charges, and his party, the Partido Patriota (PP), partially collapsed in the scandal. Analysts described the FCN as the Plan B for the political networks that formerly backed the PP. The FCN and PP are both dominated by retired military officers.

The newly elected congress convened its first session yesterday. On the first day of the lawmakers four-year term, Congress was asked by prosecutors to impeach the newly elect FCN congressman and former military officer, Edgar Justino Ovalle Maldonado, so he can face charges of crimes against humanity and forced disappearance.

Concerns over the safety of justice advocates have heightened since the arrests. The former military men arrested today have close ties to Guatemala’s organized crime networks. Criminal groups in complicity with politicians operate regionally in Central America’s “Northern Triangle” of Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, and are largely responsible for some of the highest murder rates in the world.

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The True Miracle of Óscar Romero: Archbishop Assassinated by US-Backed Death Squad Remembered

Banner in San Salvador. Credit: Claudia Horwitz.
All rights reserved.

By Claudia Horwitz
Our delegation gathered at 7 o’clock on a Saturday morning for a prayer circle in San Salvador. We had traveled from Latin, Central and North America, drawn by the life, death and message of Archbishop Óscar Romero. This group of 30 people had come with hundreds of thousands of others for Romero’s beatification at the end of May, 2015, the third step on the path to sainthood in the Catholic Church.

After the opening prayer, people were invited to share some words with the rest of the group. Many had grown up in El Salvador and had left during the massacres and disappearances of the country’s civil war from the late 1970s through the early 1990s. Most have lost loved ones, including parents, siblings and friends. Some were involved in the sanctuary movement in the USA, a network of congregations that provided safe harbor for those escaping from El Salvador and other parts of Central America. All are committed to the struggle for liberation.

I was invited to El Salvador in my capacity as Interim Director of the Rothko Chapel, an ecumenical space for contemplation and human rights work in Houston, Texas that houses 14 monumental canvasses by Mark Rothko. My companions include my 15 year-old goddaughter, my co-worker, and Sissy Farenthold, an older activist who has made a dozen trips to the country to monitor elections, support the mothers of the disappeared, witness the peace accords of 1992, and support Romero’s legacy. The Chapel itself has a long history of support for Central America and gives the Oscar Romero Award every two years to recognize organizations and individuals who—at great risk to themselves—have denounced violations of human rights.

Everywhere we go there are palpable signs of people's love for the Archbishop. The history of violence and loss in the country is pervasive, but so too is the universal connection to Romero’s spirit and his work. Just as most El Salvadorans have experienced the loss and trauma of war, so they have first-hand accounts of his presence. Romero served someone’s first communion, performed their baptism, or ensured that spaces controlled by the church were places of protection that kept people alive.

In a country of five million people, the degrees of separation must be measured in fractions. People have come back for the beatification because Romero—already a saint in the eyes of many—represents the best of humanity. “I believe in reconciliation and in forgiveness; without forgiveness there is no reconciliation,” says Gloria, whose sister was killed by the death squads when she was a high school student.

Jose Artiga, our delegation leader and head of The SHARE Foundation, shares his own story with us. In June of 1980 (three months after Romero was assassinated) a death squad came to his town with five names on a list including his. He stayed close to the university for protection, and by that afternoon had left the country for the United States. Now Jose works tirelessly to bring peace and prosperity to the nation, but that work faces new challenges. As Jose puts it, both then and now in El Salvador, “the killing is never random; it is precise.”

The war in El Salvador has left many legacies, including loss of life and hope, and the normalization of violence. Gang-related killings are common, and the country has one of the highest rates of intentional homicide in the world: 41 out of every 100,000 citizens compared to 4.7 in the USA.

The United States has played an important role in these patterns of violence, from arming regimes in the 1980s to pressing for an end to the death squads in the early 1990s to the recent decision by El Salvador’s business community to hire Rudy Giuliani, the ex-Mayor of New York, to advise them on how to respond to gang violence. The legacy of secrecy also lives on: the Archbishop of San Salvador has closed the archives of the archdiocese so no one has access to the information it contains.

Perhaps ironically, Romero was not a lifelong revolutionary. For much of his vocation he was a conservative priest, in many ways more focused on Church doctrine than on social issues. But his outlook and actions began to shift as he experienced more of peoples' struggles for economic and physical survival, and witnessed the disappearances of so many. Arguably, the most transformative moment in his life was the murder of his friend and fellow priest, Father Rutilio Grande, in 1977. While organizing farmers, Grande became an outspoken critic of the government.

After his death, Romero cancelled all masses in his archdiocese and instead celebrated “Misa Unica” (‘one mass’) at the Cathedral of San Salvador. Over 100,000 people and 150 priests attended. From this point onwards, Romero’s pastoral work was reoriented towards the “preferential option for the poor,” one of the central teachings of liberation theology.

A clear threat to the country’s oligarchy and to the patriarchy of the church, Romero was assassinated on March 24, 1980 in his home church at the Hospital of the Divine Providence. Although no one was ever prosecuted for his murder, it is widely believed that the killers were part of a right-wing death squad led by Roberto D’Aubuisson, a military intelligence officer.

From our hotel, we make the short trek to the Savior of the World Plaza in San Salvador for the beatification ceremony and mass. As we walk, the streets fill up with more and more people all heading in the same direction. Some have come in large groups with banners, some with their families. There are posters and trinkets and bottles of water for sale. We get closer and the crowd thickens. Everyone is full of joy.

We’ve been given passes to a special seating area, but to get there we have to press through the ever-growing crowd. “Passa, passa” people shout as they surround us, creating a small aisle through which we can squeeze. There is much generosity and only a few looks of confusion. At one point someone pulls me past two elderly nuns into the reserved seating area, and it’s all I can do to follow them rather than yanking off my pass and giving it to one of the nuns instead.

The beatification is beautiful though surreal. A parade of dignitaries from El Salvador, Rome, and all over Central America have come to pay homage to a man who was given little support from the Catholic church when he needed it the most. Now, there is hope that the beatification might bring the church in Latin America to life more fully, and that Romero’s legacy will be universalized in the region. Materials and relics from his life and work will be sent to parishes throughout Central America. His memory will be exalted, but in what form and to what purpose?

Political history is filled with people who were oppressed or vilified or murdered, ending up decades later on a postage stamp or a billboard. But throughout the weekend we hear, time and again, how the spirit of Romero lives on in each one of us. At mass at the San Salvador Cathedral the day after the beatification, the Archbishop of Panama bellows merrily in Spanish, “Romero the Beatified no long belongs to El Salvador; he belongs to the world.”

One of the most important stops during our visit is the parish of San Antonio in Soyapango, an area with high levels of gang activity. The church here serves a vital function in the community. Young people gather there to create their own media. A group of mothers run their own bakery and make a kind of cornbread desert that makes my mouth water. We’ve raised a small sum of money to support their work, and there’s a possibility of creating a longer-term sister-to sister relationship with them.

At the Monseñor Óscar Arnulfo Romero International Airport outside San Salvador we walk to Gate 10 to see a mural that was dedicated to the Archbishop in 2010 by the country’s then-President, Mauricio Funes, marking the first time his legacy was embraced in a public forum. Someone tells us that a nun at Gate 5 has a once-bloody handkerchief that Romero had with him when he was killed, and that it’s helped to heal her cancer.

We can’t help but seek her out. She’s called Anna Maria, and she’s generous with the precious piece of cloth, allowing us to touch it and showing us where “Oscar” is embroidered. One of my traveling companions muses about the power of faith and belief.

Who knows whether the handkerchief has any powers? The real point is that Romero's life has continued long after his death: he has become an even more potent icon of transforming love, the kind of love that’s required to bring about social and economic justice. And that is certainly a miracle of its own.

Reprinted with permission from openDemocracy.

Former Officer in Chilean Dictator Augusto Pinochet's Brutal Regime Taught at Pentagon — Investigated for Torture and Murder

'His hiring undermines our moral authority on both human rights and in the war on terror,' says former intelligence officer

Julio Jaime Garcia Covarrubias.

By Nadia Prupis
A former member of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet's brutal regime taught at the Pentagon's top university for 13 years, despite repeated complaints from his colleagues about his past as a torturer and murderer of political dissidents in the South American nation.

Jaime Garcia Covarrubias is charged in Santiago with leading the executions of seven people in 1973 following a U.S.-backed coup, allegations which the U.S. State and Defense Departments were aware of when they renewed his visa and allowed him to keep teaching at the National Defense University's William J. Perry Center for Hemispheric Defense Studies, according to a McClatchy investigation.

"His hiring undermines our moral authority on both human rights and in the war on terror," Chris Simmons, a former Defense Intelligence Agency and Army intelligence officer who specializes in Latin America, told McClatchy. "If he is in fact guilty of what he is accused of, he is a terrorist. Then who are we to tell othe.r countries how they should be fighting terrorism?"

At Firedoglake, investigative journalist Kevin Gosztola writes:

Attention to Covarrubias' employment at the National Defense University (NDU) comes just after State Department spokesperson Jen Psaki maintained during a press briefing the US has a "long-standing policy" to not support coups. She suggested the U.S. "does not support political transitions by nonconstitutional means." They must be "peaceful and legal."

Garcia Covarrubias has been in Chile since January 2014, after an investigative judge ordered him to return to his home country for the duration of the inquiry into his role in the 1973 killings and the extent of his involvement in the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (DINA) spy agency.

Chilean 70's torture survivor seeks justice

McClatchy continues:

The center’s officials who hired and renewed Garcia Covarrubias' contracts say he was a highly qualified professor and minimize the allegations against him.

"We made inquiries with people in the region, in Chile and so forth, and were never given anything negative about Jaime," said Margaret Daly Hayes, the center’s first director. "He was vetted by the U.S. government, by the (U.S.) Embassy. They obviously didn't have anything either or he wouldn't have been hired."

One of Garcia Covarrubias's alleged former victims described undergoing gruesome ordeals at his hands, including sexual torture and electric shocks to eyelids and other sensitive parts of the body. He was reportedly known to have a "penchant for horsewhips and perversity."

Garcia Covarrubias downplayed his involvement in the Pinochet regime to international press after the Chilean military disclosed a list of over 1,000 former members of the secret police, which included his name. However, as McClatchy explains:

The DINA link matters.

...The killings and other assassinations outside Chile were attributed to DINA. The Nixon administration’s support of a regime that relied on rampant torture helped galvanize the human rights movement in the United States.

Even as the allegations against Garcia Covarrubias came to light and other professors at the center raised concerns over his hiring, U.S. officials rallied behind him. Martin Edwin Andersen, the school's then-communications director, was reprimanded and eventually pushed out by senior staff after questioning his continued employment there.

"It's shameful that at a time the U.S. prestige as a democracy is under attack, that the National Defense University could be playing footsie with a former state terrorism agent," Andersen said.

Reprinted with permission from Common Dreams.

Jeb Bush Hires The Same Squad of Killers, False Flaggers, and Coverup Artists That Surrounded Reagan and George Bush

This cast of characters were hands-on in a wide variety of skullduggery: Involvement in the failed U.S.-sponsored invasion of Cuba and the JFK assassination (Porter Goss), assisted in mass murder by right-wing death squads in Latin America (John Negroponte), helped with the invasion of Iraq by pushing the myth of  Saddam Hussein's "weapons of mass destruction" and helped precipitate 9/11's "New Pearl Harbor" (Paul Wolfowitz and Stephen Hadley), the cover-up of the US Navy shoot down of TWA Flight 800 and torture of Afghan prisoners (Michael Chertoff), helped with George Bush's fake "terror alerts" (Tom Ridge), and more.

Top Row: Tom Ridge, Michael Chertoff, Porter Goss. Bottom Row: Michael Hayden, John Negroponte, Paul
Wolfowitz, Stephen Hadley.

By Igor Volsky
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush (R) will deliver a speech on Wednesday that seeks to distance his foreign policy views from the previous two Bush presidents, saying, according to early excerpts, that while he admires his presidential family members, “I am my own man.”

“[M]y views are shaped by my own thinking and own experiences,” Bush will say as he lays out a vision that calls for increased military spending in order to project strength and encourage peace worldwide.

“Having a military that is equal to any threat is not only essential for the commander in chief … it also makes it less likely that we will need to put our men and women in uniform in harm’s way,” he will say. “Because I believe, fundamentally, that weakness invites war … and strength encourages peace.”

The remarks come just days after Bush brushed aside questions about his view of President George W. Bush’s wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and as the Florida governor and presumptive GOP frontrunner works to define himself in the early days of the 2016 campaign.

Yet Jeb Bush’s efforts to distance himself from his brother’s foreign policy may only be skin deep.

According to Reuters’ Steve Holland, Bush has tapped a “diverse” roster of former George W. Bush and George H. W. Bush officials to advise his burgeoning campaign on foreign policy, including key architects of the 2002 invasion of Iraq.

The list of advisers provided to Reuters by a campaign aide includes Paul Wolfowitz and Stephen Hadley, as well as former George W. Bush Homeland Security Secretaries Tom Ridge and Michael Chertoff, and Bush adviser Meghan O’Sullivan.

Wolfowitz, who served as Deputy Secretary of Defense in the George W. Bush administration, began advocating an attack on Iraq shortly after the Sep. 11 attacks, established “what amounted to a separate government” to push for war and invited journalists to secret meetings in order to lay out the foundation for his plans. Wolfowitz established the Office of Special Plans in the Pentagon that ignored the conclusions of the intelligence community and fed policy makers and the media discredited claims of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction.

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CIA ‘Torture’ Practices Started Long Before 9/11 Attacks — Torture Was Used Decades Before 9/11

The idea that U.S. torture began in response to the 9/11 attacks is just another super myth perpetuated by American politicians and America's mainstream media. In fact, torture by the CIA and U.S. soldiers was in widespread use in Vietnam, and American "specialists" trained the armies of Latin America's dictatorships in methods of torture during the notorious "Dirty Wars" in the Reagan Era.—Ronald David Jackson

U.S. soldiers "water boarding" a prisoner in Vietnam.

By Jeff Stein
“The CIA,” according to the Senate Intelligence Committee, had “historical experience using coercive forms of interrogation.” Indeed, it had plenty, said the committee’s report released Tuesday: about 50 years’ worth. Deep in the committee’s 500-page summary of a still-classified 6,700-page report on the agency’s use of “enhanced interrogation techniques” after 9/11 there is a brief reference to KUBARK, the code name for a 1963 instruction manual on interrogation, which was used on subjects ranging from suspected Soviet double agents to Latin American dissidents and guerrillas.

The techniques will sound familiar to anybody who has followed the raging debate over interrogation techniques adopted by the CIA to break Al-Qaeda suspects in secret prisons around the world. When the going got tough, the CIA got rough.

RELATED STORY: Torture By The United States Has NOT Stopped - The US Has Simply
'Outsourced' Torture — This Video Proves It

The 1963 KUBARK manual included the “principal coercive techniques of interrogation: arrest, detention, deprivation of sensory stimuli through solitary confinement or similar methods, threats and fear, debility, pain, heightened suggestibility and hypnosis, narcosis and induced regression,” the committee wrote.

Many such methods were used on a Cold War-era Soviet defector whom a few CIA officials suspected of being a double agent. They came to light in a congressional investigation over 25 years ago. “In 1978, [CIA Director] Stansfield Turner asked former CIA officer John Limond Hart to investigate the CIA interrogation of Soviet KGB officer Yuri Nosenko using the KUBARK methods—to include sensory deprivation techniques and forced standing,” the committee reported.

Hart found the methods repugnant, he told a congressional committee investigating the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. “It has never fallen to my lot to be involved with any experience as unpleasant, in every possible way as...the investigation of this [Nosenko] case and...the necessity of lecturing upon it and testifying,” Hart told the committee. “To me, it is an abomination, and I am happy to say that it is not in my memory typical of what my colleagues and I did in the agency during the time I was connected with it.”

But the CIA reached for KUBARK when U.S.-backed Latin American military regimes were faced with human rights protests, left-wing subversion and armed insurgencies. “Just five years” after Hart expressed his dismay about torture on Capitol Hill, “in 1983 a CIA officer incorporated significant portions of the KUBARK manual into the Human Resource Exploitation (HRE) Training Manual, which the same officer used to provide interrogation training in Latin America in the early 1980s,” the Intelligence Committee report said. The new HRE manual was also “used to provide interrogation training to” a party whose name was censored in the committee’s report but was almost certainly the Nicaraguan Contras, a rebel group the CIA created to overthrow the Marxist revolutionary government in Managua.

[...]

The CIA’s Vietnam interrogation centers, jointly run in most cases with its South Vietnamese counterparts, were chiefly designed to extract information from captured Communist guerrillas, spies and suspected underground political agents, in order to launch attacks. Sometimes, however, a confession was used to then parade an apostate through South Vietnamese-controlled neighborhoods, like a trophy.

And prisoner abuse, including torture in so-called “tiger cages,” was common, according to many witnesses and other sources over the years. In 1969, the Army filed murder charges against the commander of the Green Berets in Vietnam and seven of his men after they used hallucinogenic drugs on a suspected double agent and killed him after he failed to confess. The charges were eventually dropped after a fierce lobbying campaign by then-CIA director Richard Helms, who feared a trial would expose abuses under the agency’s secret Phoenix assassination program.

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Is America's 'Deep State' Prepping Armed White Militias for Use as Death Squads Against Minorities and White Progressives?

The US Government Destroyed the Black Panthers

During the late sixties and early seventies, Black Panthers brandished weapons publicly. State legislatures responded
by banning the public display of guns and the U.S. government launched a nation-wide attack on the Black Panthers
which included mass infiltration, violent raids on Panther meeting places, assassinations, and imprisonment of Panther leaders through the use of agent provocateurs, frame-ups and trumped up charges. The Black Panther Party was
eventually destroyed.

_____________________

The U.S. Government Destroyed the Symbionese Liberation Army

On May 17, 1974, police caught up with the notorious kidnappers of Patty Hearst, heiress of the Hearst media empire.
The Symbionese Liberation Army, as they called themselves, was a small group of leftists, both black and white, who carried out killings and bank robberies to fund their "revolution." Patty Hearst "joined" the organization, and the core
group of the organization was eventually tracked down by law enforcement and trapped in a small house in Compton,
CA. It was perhaps the first time law enforcement applied the "corner them and burn them alive" tactic. Six members
of the organization were killed, Patty Hearst was not among them. Other members went underground. Patty Hearst eventually surfaced, spent some time in jail and went back to the life of an heiress. The Symbionese Liberation Army
was destroyed.

_____________________

The U.S. Government Destroyed the MOVE Organization

On May 13, 1985, the MOVE organization was attacked by law enforcement at the home they called their base in Philadelphia, PA. Their crime was playing loud music and using bullhorns to scream out their political message. The
organization was mostly black but had white members and advocated a "back to nature" philosophy.  The organization
has been labeled a cult. Again, the "corner them and burn them alive" tactic was applied by law enforcement. A bomb
was dropped on the home from a helicopter and it started a fire. Members were shot at when they tried to leave the
burning building. By the time it was all over, a few members survived but 11 adults and children were shot dead and or
burned alive. Law enforcement decided to punish the entire community by allowing the fire to spread to 60 nearby
homes. No attempt was made to put out the fire. The MOVE organization was destroyed.

_____________________

The U.S. Government Destroyed the Branch Davidians

The so-called "Branch Davidians" were based in Waco, TX.  It was considered a splinter group of the The Seventh
Day Adventists and was led by David Koresh. Based on reports of child sex abuse and illegal firearms, the ATF
(Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives) attempted to raid the organization's compound in Waco and
was met with a barrage of gunfire. The raid failed and a 51-day siege of the compound and its members ensued.
Members of the organization (which included men, women, and children of various ethnic groups and races) were
subjected to 24-hours of loud music, tear gas, water cannon, etc. Instead of simply waiting them out, law enforcement
(which included the FBI) decided to apply the "burn them all alive" tactic again. A total of 76 men, women, and
children were killed and there were reports of members who tried to escape being shot at by law enforcement. The
organization was destroyed.

_____________________

The U.S. Government Used 'Militias' to Destroy Leftists Organizations and Peasant-Based Social Movements Throughout South America

Starting in the late 1970's the U.S. government organized so-called "death squads" (which they called militias)
throughout South America. These militias were used against radical leftists, peasant social movements,and
innocent civilians who were considered "possibly disloyal." These mass murder operations were greatly expanded
during the Reagan Administration and came to known as "The Dirty Wars." The South American dictators and their
US-based operators pretended that the "militias" were "independent" and "privately organized" and were therefore
"out of their control." Tens of thousands of activists were murdered including an untold number of innocent civilians.
An estimated 35,000 were killed in El Salvador alone.

_____________________

Armed White Supremacist "Militias" in the United States Threaten Government
and Local Police Yet Go Untouched by Law Enforcement.

Why?

America's "Militias" are armed to the teeth and backed by a wide range of new laws that say they can go almost
anywhere (bars, church, department stores, on the street, etc.) while brandishing their guns publicly. Why are right-wing
organizations (fronted by Republican politicians) pushing "walk around with assault rifles" and "stand your ground"
laws? Why are armed white supremacist organizations allowed to flourish untouched? Where are the agent provocateurs, assassinations, set-ups, and armed raids that organizations like the Black Panthers, SLA, MOVE, and the Branch
Davidians were subject to? As we speak, the FBI and local police are engaged in mass infiltration of Islamic American
organizations and nation-wide entrapment operations against Muslim Americans - but armed and violent white
supremacists are untouched?  What is America's "Deep State" preparing for?

Images compiled by RDJ, captions by RDJ.

_____________________

The White Right’s Impunity


By Glen Ford, Black Agenda Report

If a thousand armed Blacks had gathered in one place, pointing rifles at federal officers, and two of them later cold-bloodedly assassinated policemen, the federal response would touch every Black neighborhood in America. But the armed white Right gets a pass. Racists are resources to those in power. “The national security state’s legitimacy is based on (white) mass fear and loathing of the Other.”

The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) keeps a running tab of armed rightwing domestic “plots and conspiracies” since April, 1995, when Timothy McVeigh and his associates blew up the federal building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. The attack soiled the reputations of grassroots fascists throughout the American “heartland” and prompted the U.S. Justice Department to announce formation of a “special unit” to, ostensibly, track and disrupt rightwing militants. Over the next several years, the feds busted a number of individuals involved in armed operations. Press coverage revealed that the racist “underground” functions largely in plain view, and that government operatives are all but a permanent presence in their ranks (just as FBI informant Gary Rowe was in the Ku Klux Klan car – and maybe on the trigger – when civil rights volunteer Viola Liuzzo was murdered on an Alabama highway in 1965). The whole pretense came to a halt on the morning of September 11, 2001, when the last scheduled meeting of the Justice Department unit was cancelled, for obvious reasons.

RELATED STORY: KKK Building 'Paramilitary Force' With Help of Returning US Troops — 'To Retake’ U.S. in 'Coming Race War'

In 2009, Department of Homeland Security analyst Darryl Johnson wrote a report urging his superiors to pay more attention to “rightwing extremism.” At the time, DHS assigned eight people to track “non-Islamic” domestic extremism. Johnson thought the job required 12 people. Instead, his unit was dismantled by Obama’s newly-appointed DHS secretary Janet Napolitano, with only one analyst remaining, according to Salon.com.

RELATED STORY: Shoot Obama, We Now Have the Authority - Says Christian American
Patriots Militia Leader

The unit was ‘revived’ just two weeks ago, part of Attorney General Eric Holder’s flurry of cosmetic Obama legacy-building initiatives. Holder’s announcement was vaguely worded, so as not to create a firestorm on the Right. The unit would go after “'lone wolf'-style actors aimed to harm our nation,'' and would focus on anti-government plots and racist violence. Days later, husband and wife Jerad and Amanda Miller, who earlier this year had been among an army of fascists gathered in defense of racist rancher Cliven Bundy, shot two Las Vegas cops in the head and killed a bystander at a Wal-Mart. After declaring, “This is the start of a revolution,” they committed suicide.

“The FBI’s war has always been against Blacks, radicals, and now Muslims.”

Southern Poverty Law Center senior fellow Mark Potok told Democracy Now! he thinks “the movement is at least a bit on fire at the moment” – meaning, the armed, racist Right is on a roll. In thousands of churches, barber shops and hair salons, African Americans wonder aloud if the Black President and his Black top law enforcement officer are going to crack down on the neo-Klan uprising.

RELATED STORY: KKK Leader Says He Has ‘Invisible Empire’ of Sympathetic Public
Officials - Yeah, They're Called Republicans

The answer, of course, is No, not a chance. The FBI’s war has always been against Blacks, radicals, and now Muslims – ideally, Black Muslims. The national security state’s legitimacy is based on (white) mass fear and loathing of the Other, in whose pursuit all civil liberties are extraneous. Such dark energies are not conjured out of thin air, but mined from the deep reservoirs of America’s racial history. Hate sits like a thermal resource to be tapped and redirected at the whim of those in power. The U.S. national security state needs the ferocious hatreds of the Bundys and Millers – and the McVeighs – to sustain a planetary War-Against-All, a war that, on its own premises, must end with annihilation of the Other.

RELATED STORY: How the Right-Wing Echo Chamber Helped Spawn the Las Vegas
White Supremacist Shooters

Who do you think is manning Obama’s Killer Elite Special Ops legions in Asia and Africa? What kind of domestic law and order troops will be necessary to contain a largely Black and brown America to which the rulers offer absolutely nothing, but who must be made the scapegoats for social collapse?

That’s why the FBI puts a bounty on the head of sister Assata Shakur, living peacefully in Cuba, while allowing white racists to point high-powered rifles at the heads of federal officers in rural Nevada. Two of those fascists later put bullets in the brains of policemen in Las Vegas, but there will be no general crackdown on the Millers’ comrades in arms, no assassinations of Cliven Bundys in their sleep, no great Gulag of lifetime solitary confinement for white militiamen.

The Empire needs them. It always has.

 Reprinted with permission from Black Agenda Report.

Brazilian Colonel Found Dead A Month After Confessing to Torture

Colonel Paulo Malhães giving his deposition at the Brazilian National Truth Commission
in March 2014. (Photo by Marcelo Oliveira / ASCOM – CNV)

By Fernanda Canofre, Translated by Fernanda Canofre
At the end of March, retired Colonel Paulo Malhães arrived at the building of the Brazilian National Truth Commission (CNV) sitting in a wheelchair and wearing sunglasses. He was about to begin one of the most powerful depositions to be heard so far on the country’s period of dictatorship, which endured from March 31, 1964 to March 15, 1985.

Just one month later, on April 25, 2014, the confessed torturer and killer was found dead. According to information released by the police, Malhães was held hostage by three men alongside his wife and an employee at his home in Nova Iguaçu, Rio de Janeiro.

The police are considering the theories of destroying files, vengeance and armed robbery – since the robbers made off with the colonel’s personal gun collection – as probable motives for the crime. The coroner's report pointed to death by natural causes. The family has already confirmed that Malhães, 76, suffered from a cardiac condition. The colonel's wife and his employee were left alive.

Still, the CNV asked that the federal police join in the investigation of the case.

Confess, but never regret
According to information published by Carta Capital magazine , during “private depositions” Malhães had testified that he feared for his life. The colonel refused to provide names of government agents who worked with him during the military regime, claiming that “he could not let slip the names because he would be putting his life at risk”.

At the depositions given to Sao Paulo’s State Truth Commission and to the National Truth Commission, Malhães confessed and described the practice of torture, murder and the disposal of bodies – which included removing dental arches and mutilating bodies to make identification more difficult. Last February, he took responsibility for the disappearance of the body of state deputy Rubens Paiva [en], a well-known case from the dictatorship era, but shortly after took back his testimony.

When asked how many people he had killed, the colonel coldly replied, “As many as were necessary”. Since the beginning of the CNV's mission in 2012, Malhães was the fifth agent to testify in front of a public audience, the second one to admit the recurrent practice of torture and the first one to confess his part in such crimes.

He never admitted regret. On the contrary, as soon as the hearing session began, he declared:

As I do with everything in life, I gave the very best of myself to this job. […] I fulfilled my duty. I don’t regret it.

‘Taking justice into your own hands’
Malhães’ death forced Brazil to see its dictatorship as an age that, perhaps, hasn't ended. It also gave rise to a debate about the criminals of the recent past who never faced punishment. The Amnesty Law, still in effect in the country, does not allow torturers to be brought to trial.

Blogger and activist Douglas Belchior – best know as Negro Belchior – said he felt sorry for the torturer’s death, recalling the wave of popular justice that spread throughout Brazilian cities at the beginning of 2014:

Was it a settling of accounts undertaken by resistance groups related to the dictatorship? Was it revenge by a torture victim's family and friends? I don’t believe so. It is more reasonable to imagine that it is an action with the sole intention of intimidating possible whistleblowers of the future on the atrocities committed by official forces of the state during the years of repression.

But I want to talk here about the message that stays: the idea of taking justice into your own hands. Murders, torture, disappearances and lynching, more frequent each time and trivialized, beginning with police actions, of which we aren't lacking examples. And that now are promoted by the “people”.

The fascist discourse makes itself stronger: “It is the absence of law! The criminal does whatever he wants to do and the population feels unprotected. The tendency is to take justice into your own hands”.

Reprinted with permission from Global Voices.