Exploring the Shadows of America’s Security State. By Alfred W. McCoy
The drug traffic that supplied heroin for
the U.S. troops fighting in South Vietnam was not exclusively
the work of criminals. Once the opium left tribal poppy fields in Laos, the
traffic required official complicity at every level. The helicopters of Air
America, the airline the CIA then ran, carried raw opium out of the villages of
its hill-tribe allies. The commander of the Royal Lao Army, a close American
collaborator, operated the world’s largest heroin lab..
In the wake of the 2001 terrorist attacks, Washington pursued its elusive enemies across the landscapes of Asia and Africa, thanks in part to a massive expansion of its intelligence infrastructure, particularly of the emerging technologies for digital surveillance, agile drones, and biometric identification. In 2010, almost a decade into this secret war with its voracious appetite for information, the Washington Post reported that the national security state had swelled into a “fourth branch” of the federal government -- with 854,000 vetted officials, 263 security organizations, and over 3,000 intelligence units, issuing 50,000 special reports every year. Though stunning, these statistics only skimmed the visible surface of what had become history’s largest and most lethal clandestine apparatus. According to classified documents that Edward Snowden leaked in 2013, the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies alone had 107,035 employees and a combined “black budget” of $52.6 billion, the equivalent of 10% percent of the vast defense budget.
By sweeping the skies
and probing the worldwide web’s undersea cables, the National Security Agency
(NSA) could surgically penetrate the confidential communications of just
about any leader on the planet, while simultaneously
sweeping up billions of ordinary messages. For its classified
missions, the CIA had access to the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command,
with 69,000 elite troops (Rangers, SEALs, Air Commandos)
and their agile arsenal. In addition to this formidable paramilitary capacity,
the CIA operated 30 Predator and Reaper drones responsible for more than 3,000 deaths in Pakistan and
Yemen.
While Americans
practiced a collective form of duck and cover as the Department of Homeland
Security’s colored alerts pulsed nervously from yellow to red,
few paused to ask the hard question: Was all this security really directed
solely at enemies beyond our borders? After half a century of domestic security
abuses -- from the “red scare” of the 1920s through the FBI’s illegal
harassment of antiwar protesters in the 1960s and 1970s -- could we really be
confident that there wasn’t a hidden cost to all these secret measures right
here at home? Maybe, just maybe, all this security wasn’t really so benign when
it came to us. From my own personal
experience over the past half-century, and my family’s history over three
generations, I’ve found out in the most personal way possible that there’s a
real cost to entrusting our civil liberties to the discretion of secret
agencies. Let me share just a few of my own “war” stories to explain how I’ve
been forced to keep learning and relearning this uncomfortable lesson the hard
way.
On
the Heroin Trail: After finishing
college in the late 1960s, I decided to pursue a Ph.D. in Japanese history and
was pleasantly surprised when Yale Graduate School admitted me with a full
fellowship. But the Ivy League in those days was no ivory tower. During my
first year at Yale, the Justice Department indicted Black Panther leader Bobby
Seale for a local murder and the May Day protests that filled the New Haven
green also shut the campus for a week. Almost simultaneously, President Nixon
ordered the invasion of Cambodia and student protests closed hundreds of
campuses across America for the rest of the semester.
In the midst of all
this tumult, the focus of my studies shifted from Japan to Southeast Asia, and
from the past to the war in Vietnam. Yes, that war. So what did I do about the
draft? … read more:
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/176321/tomgram%3A_alfred_mccoy%2C_the_cia_and_me/#more
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